This blog is about honesty.

It's about giving advice and taking advice.

It's about baring things to you and hoping you'll bare something back.

It's about everything that I love and trying to find a path to it.

It's about the harp because it survived Hurricane Katrina when it shouldn't have, because playing the harp was the dream I had when I was seven and my parents made happen, and because every time I take that instrument against my body and make music come from its strings I feel like I am singing. And I can't sing. But when I play the harp I feel beauty coming from my body like breath.

This blog is about mermaids. Mermaids play the harp. Can't you see?

This blog is anti-bullshit.

It's the words that I want to say and am afraid to say but still say because meaningful things are embarrassing.

This blog is about what I love: travel, harp, surfing, mermaids, and helping people.

This blog is about what I hate: Long bus rides, replacing harp strings, lugging my surfboard on subways, painting my body gold, not helping people because they'll take advantage of you.

See? There is love and hate in everything. Finding the center is what this blog is about.

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I'm from New Orleans, a slow southern city where the music is jazz and the food is French and the trees are large, drooping ancient oaks.

Beneath those old oaks is where I first started writing, penning stories as I leaned back against the gnarled bark of those behemoths, imagining their tales and stories and wisdom could seep into me.

I still do this sometimes. I still am enchanted by those muses.

I was an overachiever in high school because I loved it. I loved learning, I loved my teachers, I loved my community.

And I got to my ivy league school and hated it.  I hated the snobbery,  I hated the fact that if I died in my dorm room no one would know for days. This happened to a girl my freshman year of college. She passed away in her sleep and wasn't discovered until five days later when an RA opened the door to a dead body.

But if you ask my if I liked college, I will say yes because I got to do so much, because I had some amazing experiences, because I now know that happiness is not the top school and the top job and the billions of dollars, it's relationships. And I feel so lucky to have learned that when I was twenty.

Since I graduated, I've taught surfing, worked in PR, waitressed, DJed, and got a job writing about jobs.

Every single boss I've ever had has called me Mermaid.

I'm trying to weave travel and writing and photography and mediation and harp and a thousands different passions into one life.

Currently, I help businesses make impact by using this big, beautiful sea of possibility called the internet.

How about you?

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Other places you can find me:

Facebook.com/MermaidChronicles (Photography)

LinkedIn.com/in/LaurenMcCabe1 (Work loveliness)

Twitter.com/MermaidTales (With pictures of sun-filled prayer flags at 16,000 ft)