sometimes I wonder what I am doing.

"Doubt is a pain too lonely to know that faith is his twin brother." --Kahlil Gibran

one way to figure it out a bit

Do you remember your dreams?
Do you try?
I heard the other day that if we listen and work on writing them down when we wake up, the messenger will know we are listening, and make sure to show up more and more.
and maybe make the message more clear.
Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung, two of my heroes, believed archetypal characters connected to the larger human truth come to us in dreams, with messages.
What are these folks telling you?
Are you listening?

"Divine chaos is a course corrector, a way of bringing down the systems that distraction built in order that they can be replaced with systems or structures designed with conscious thought." --Caroline Myss

art every day

"Keep showing up for your side of the job and give genius a chance to do its part." --Elizabeth Gilbert

feeling the heaviness. . . .

This morning in the NYTimes, a photo of a Japanese father dressed in his 15 year old son's clothes at his graduation in Sendai, holding his photo; the son is missing in the tsunami.
Then the story of the four American journalists kidnapped in Libya and how they were beaten and taunted by the out-of-control military.
and in my studio, my dear dog violently tears apart his little stuffed hedgehog, ripping out the stuffing, acting out the hunting instinct which kept his ancestors alive.
Last night as I shared deviled eggs with friends, I mentioned my gratitude to the chickens, and we all realized the act of eating an animal or its egg is not one of total pacifism.
Suffering.
Disease.
Poverty.
War.
It all just seems so much sometimes.
and I don't want to forget that.
To become numb.
To just focus so much on the joy, and the transmutation of pain into joy, that I ever forget the very true and very real suffering in the world.
and how some give their lives for others.

“Heartsick, heartbroken —
To know love is to know pain.
What could be more common?
Even so, each broken heart is so singular
That with it we probe the divine.”
--Rumi

vision

"A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world." --Oscar Wilde

[note - I found this Mary Oliver quote seemingly carved and printed, I am not sure who created it, if anyone knows, can you let me know so I can credit the artist? thanks.]

the beauty of flowers

Welcome Ostara!
In this new garden, delights pop up and surprise me every day.
What a treasure I have inherited, a flower-filled landscape, with water, rocks, wood, and soil working together to make beautiful greenness, and spots of bright color to attract the bees.
How blessed we are.



"The world is full of magical things, patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper."
--Bertrand Russell

compassion + action

The notion that we dream our reality into being is really taking off in our culture now.
I know there are terrible events which are shaking us up, but those events are also pulling us together and making us know we are all part of the whole of life here.
Thinking about Japan and people suffering, thinking about brave individuals who right now are risking their personal safety to bring those broken nuclear reactors back to a safe place, thinking about all the homeless, stressed, struggling people, I know it can sound almost insensitive to say our thoughts create reality.
I try to be compassionate, but also aware of how to bring joy even into the worst of situations.
Some of us are called to be in the trenches of misery helping those others, and some of us spend our life force creating the beauty that sustains us all - there is room for many different reactions to pain and suffering.
Healing ourselves is the first step to healing the world.

"Here's what I say: In the New Earth we're creating, we will ridicule the cult of doom and gloom, embrace the cause of zoom and boom. We will laugh at the stupidity of evil and hate, we will summon the brilliance to praise and create."
-Rob Brezsny, "Pronoia"

first flowers

"A very small degree of hope is sufficient to cause the birth of love." --Stendhal

dreaming of something. . . .

"The castle-building habit, the day-dreaming habit - how it grows! what a luxury it becomes; how we fly to its enchantments at every idle moment, how we revel in them, steep our souls in them, intoxicate ourselves with their beguiling fantasies - oh, yes, and how soon and how easily our dream-life and our material life become so intermingled and so fused together that we can't quite tell which is which, anymore." --Mark Twain

adventure

"Using the conscious mind is simple. That's what it is there for. Accessing the deeper levels is the real adventure and where great art begins to take form. It is like the journey to the center of the earth." --Jeffrey Hessing

Passion

"It's a curse. Yes, it's a flame. It owns you. It has possession over you. You are not the master of yourself. You are consumed by this thing." --Henry Miller

"It is better to believe than to disbelieve; in so doing, you bring everything to the realm of possibility." --Albert Einstein

why do we make art?

"I usually work in a direction until I know how to do it, then I stop. At the time that I am bored or understand — I use those words interchangeably — another appetite has formed. A lot of people try to think up ideas. I’m not one. I’d rather accept the irresistible possibilities of what I can’t ignore." --Robert Rauschenberg

making magic

Yesterday, while on the phone with my (brilliant) daughter, I picked up a green pen and some graph paper, and dooooodled.
You know you do it, too!
and then, I liked the little scrap so much, I thought it needed to be played around with more:

So I scanned it, repeated it, layered it, rotated and repeated it some more, and VOILA - a mandala-type graph/doodle collage, ready to be glued into my journal and played with more, OR used for a collage background.
Photoshop is nothing short of miraculous, and I think we forget how powerful the artistic tools we have are today. Loving playing around like this (and I do LOVE it) has made my art take a whole new direction.

DOODLES = ART, who woulda thunk?!

"Where there is great love, there are always great miracles." --Mother Teresa

new life

The patches of yellow and purple crocuses are the first adventurous flowers to pop up in our back yard, even though snow will come and bury them, I love that they are the first.
Sun blazes down today, so I am out on a walk, then to dig some dirt and start some new seeds.
Garden Bliss.

"Something opens our wings. Something makes boredom and hurt disappear. Someone fills the cup in front of us: We taste only sacredness." --Rumi

magic owls

Been working on some new pieces for the gallery - magic owls.
Here is one, I will end up printing it out and collaging it into the journal with words and doodles, but in the meantime I just felt like sharing the image here:

"I have always been delighted at the prospect of a new day, a fresh try, one more start, with perhaps a bit of magic waiting somewhere behind the morning..." --Joseph Priestley