don't worry be happy

"We have an infinite number of reasons to be happy, and a serious responsibility not to be serious." --Maharishi Mahesh Yogi

meet me at the waterslide

"Here’s how I became myself: mess, failure, mistakes, disappointments, and extensive reading; limbo, indecision, setbacks, addiction, public embarrassment, and endless conversations with my best women friends; the loss of people without whom I could not live, the loss of pets that left me reeling, dizzying betrayals but much greater loyalty, and overall, choosing as my motto William Blake’s line that we are here to learn to endure the beams of love.
Oh, yeah, and whenever I could, for as long as I could, I threw away the scales and the sugar."
--Anne Lamott

my favorite journal

I was going through a pile of old journals, and this one is my favorite. It is the messiest, most creative pile of scraps I have ever dared to journal in. The signatures are all willynilly, stitched into an old jeans skirt, they don't line up, the pages are already dog-eared from not fitting in well, and there is no rhyme or reason to the dates or what I wrote.
YET, it somehow pleases me the most. In the middle of this journal is a mini-dream journal, a booklet where whenever I had a dream I remembered, I wrote it down and put it in. Looking back now, 6 months worth of dreams do tell me a story. Somehow this is the most intuitive journal I have done.
Teaching, sharing pages with a public, or even just THINKING of showing others the work really does change it a bit, and because I get comments when the work is beautiful, the subtle voice in my head says "You better make beautiful pages."
NO
beauty is not the goal of an art journal.
SO, here I share some un-beautiful pages of my very un-beautiful journal,
But it is the one I like the most.





"You already know what you need to know in order to make the dicey, spicey transition, Cancerian. Even more amazingly, you already have what you need. But for some reason, you don't trust what you know and don't believe you have what you need. So you're still in a fretful mode, hunting far and wide for the magic key that you think still eludes you. I'm here to persuade you to stop gazing longingly into the distance and stop assuming that help is far away. Look underfoot. Check with what's right in front of you." --Rob Breszny, Free Will Astrology

accepting what life brings

Princess Buttercup: "You mock my pain!"
Man in Black: "Life is pain, Highness! Anyone who says differently is selling something."
--From The Princess Bride

"It's not the load that breaks you down - its the way you carry it." --Lou Holtz

visiting an older journal

Random scrap papers sewn into an old jeans skirt as the cover.
Stitching.
Words.
Images.
bit of a map.
Why Not?

"You cannot govern the creative impulse; all you can do is eliminate obstacles and smooth the way for it." --Kimon Nicolaides

trying not to rush from A to B

"What does an education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch out of a free, meandering brook." --Henry David Thoreau

listening to the plants in my garden

"The natural world is a spiritual house
where the pillars are alive . . .
having the suggestion of infinite things . . .
describe the voyages of the body and soul." --Charles Baudelaire

transformation

"One of life's great bounties is its changeableness, which ensures that boredom will never last very long. You may underestimate the intensity of your longing for continual transformation, but the universe doesn't. That's why it provides you with the boundless entertainment of your ever-shifting story. That's why it is always revising the challenges it sends your way, providing your curious soul with a rich variety of unpredictable teachings." --Rob Brezsny, Pronoia

just some bits and pieces because I liked them.

"There's a story about bumblebees, physicists couldn't figure out how they did it, how they flew. ... They did it because nobody told them that they couldn't. And I come from a long line of bumblebees."
--Nikki M James, on winning a Tony for her part in the Book of Mormon

inspiration

What inspires you?
I love the idea that honoring a God or Goddess brings inspiration, like the way Hindus have a family altar, a special place for the leaving offerings for the house God/Goddess.
Intention, focus, and thought energy given to something noble and good can only help us.
Religion is a funny thing, around the world it gives community and structure and cultural belonging. My family origins are from Jewish and Christian backgrounds, and we go to a Unitarian Church, yet I connect deeply to Pagan beliefs that nature has Spirit and can teach us things.
I often find my brain not really trusting organized religion, yet Spirituality is a powerful part of my life.
Mostly, I find inspiration where I find it.
Flowers in the garden.
Lakshmi and Her connection to prosperity, power, and blessing.
The mountains with a sprinkling of snow.
Saints who gave up their safe lives to explore mysticism.
Beautiful stone circles erected 3500 years ago, to honor who knows what!
Crystals, or gems, or feathers, or bones or even antique textiles, that seem to hold some mystery.
It's all sacred, and I am grateful for so many rich ways of knowing what is beyond knowing.

"The final mystery is oneself... Who can calculate the orbit of his own soul." --Oscar Wilde

proud mamma. . . .

This is what my beautiful, talented, and sweet daughter painted for me for my birthday. Isn't it just wonderful?
I love you, Linds.

"Art is both the taking and giving of beauty; the turning out to the light the inner folds of the awareness of the spirit. It is the recreation on another plane of the realities of the world; the tragic and wonderful realities of earth and men, and of all the inter-relations of these." --Ansel Adams

today . . .

me and the bees, we are taking the time to smell the flowers.

“Ah, not to be cut off, not through the slightest partition shut out from the law of the stars. The inner~ what is it? If not intensified sky, hurled through with birds and deep with the winds of home coming.”
--Rilke

what gets your attention?

Six weeks ago today I had major surgery, and this morning, I finally went out on a nice hike with Simba and spouse. Ah, it felt so good to be out in the hills.
To make the body strong is so key in life, but sometimes we have no choice, and illness slows us down, stops us in our tracks even. And I am learning to value even this fallow time.
I had six weeks to regroup, recharge, read a lot, sleep tons, think about what I really need to focus on, and how to set up my days to achieve what I want.
I don't need coaching to know what my goals are -- to make my art and use it to share healing.
It took me a long time to know that clearly.
and maybe some illness.
The down time showed me so many things, and refocused me in a wonderful way. I don't think we choose illness, but when it comes, if we can listen to the message, we can emerge healthier and stronger and clearer in Spirit, and our bodies, hopefully also, learn how to heal and be healthier.
New patterns and new habits can be made, the chaff blows away.
I know that art heals.
I know that spending my life helping others see this is my calling.
and I might not have known that so clearly if I had not just spent 6 weeks unable to do anything but sleep and heal.
The lesson?
I am learning to accept whatever is IS what should be, do my best to stay on the path, allow Spirit to do Her work in whatever way She comes, to listen and know all shall be well.
Blessed Be.

"Throw your dreams into space like a kite, and you do not know what it will bring back, a new life, a new friend, a new love, a new country." --Anais Nin

Gratitude

Yesterday I turned 50 and it was a wonderful day.
Some Tour De France to watch on TV, Tattered Cover bookstore to wander around in and page through all the new visual journaling books, lunch with family at a teahouse, evening music in the park on blankets with a picnic dinner, chocolate and roses and books.
Gluten Free chocolate raspberry cake.
I an deeply blessed.

"The Maya say that energy is attracted to gratitude, courage, prayer, offering, and eloquence. Feeling gratitude for something indicates to Spirit that you'd like more of this kind of thing - the energy of that thing magnifies and grows."
--Jim Peters

Centering

“What can I say that I have not said before? So I’ll say it again. The leaf has a song in it. Stone is the face of patience. Inside the river there is an unfinishable story and you are somewhere in it and it will never end until all ends. Take your busy heart to the art museum and the chamber of commerce but take it also to the forest. The song you heard singing in the leaf when you were a child is singing still. I am of years lived, so far, seventy-four, and the leaf is singing still.”
--Mary Oliver

choosing JOY

Hello to the visitor from Canteleu, Haute-Normandie -- you were the 60,000th hit to this blog!!!!
thank you all so much for sharing my little corner of the internet.
and Happy Journaling!

"Go beyond what makes you comfortable. Open yourself to ideas, events, relationships that make you uncomfortable. Travel places where you know no one. Learn another language. Create art, even though you’re not an artist. Argue with people. Fall down. Get up. Read books, all sorts of books."
--Juan Williams of NPR during his commencement speech at Whitman College

Cosmic Yoga

"Yoga teaches us to cure what need not be endured and endure what cannot be cured."
--B.K.S. Iyengar