Reflection

It's a busy month, December, with craft shows to get ready for, making, wrapping, and mailing gifts, increased sales on Etsy, and all those holiday get-togethers.

I just spent about 6 days in bed, punctuated with a one day sitting at an art show I HAD to attend. Sales were good, and comments were so positive and encouraging, that I'm glad I did it, even if it meant a few extra days recuperating after. One thing I am learning as I get older, that it is the right thing to take good care of myself, even if that means saying "I can't" to some things I wish I could do. We tend to take care of everyone else so much that we lost sight of taking good care of ourselves. I recently initiated with a Crones Group, 8 fabulous women who celebrated being older, being in a wiser phase of our lives, letting go of the time of caring for others to focus on building our own visions and personal wisdom.

I am coming out of 25 years of raising kids, and it is a wonderful gift to be able to put my work and my health first. Journaling will be a part of this, even though my journaling takes a bit of a back burner to my December obligations, I am looking forward to some real solid journaling time to start the New Year.

I also teach a workshop in February, so I am looking forward to sharing some of those pages and techniques here. Hope you have a blessed Solstice, Yule, Christmas, Kwanzaa, etc. (or that you already had a blessed Hannakuh.) The time of darkness leading us into the New Year is a blessed time for reflection.

Your journal is there to help you with this.

"The upheaval of our world and the upheaval in consciousness is one and the same. Everything becomes relative and therefore doubtful. And while man, hesitant and questioning, contemplates... his spirit yearns for an answer that will allay the turmoil of doubt and uncertainty." --Carl Gustav Jung

go today in wisdom

"This poetry. I never know what I'm going to say. I don't plan it. When I'm outside the saying of it, I get very quiet and rarely speak at all."  --Rumi

move towards love

moving forward

I had some dear friends over last night, and one had very interesting things to say about moving art into the world. I have a studio full of work, art journals, prints, cards, paintings, jewelry, etc. I need to exchange some of the items for money. and I have been a bit stuck how that happens.

Some really powerful advice she gave me:
1. Visualize it. Imagine exactly how it looks and what happens to turn your work into cash.
2. Go out and connect, do favors for others, and they will do favors for you. Sitting in your studio wishing the art would sell will certainly not sell it.
3. On line sharing only goes so far. Human connection is made with humans, not humans on machines. 4. You do need the marketing materials (I do have them) business cards, websites, social media, but then, you have to MOVE those things also. Have a constant flow of these things out into the world.

Isn't that advice awesome? She has used these ideas in her own freelance work, and has more work than she can do.

and I do have work in an Holiday gift show December 6 and 7, I'll post more here in the weeks to come.

"When we harness the forces of harmony, joy and love, we create success and good fortune with effortless ease." --Deepak Chopra

today . . .

"When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence."  --Ansel Adams

Generosity

I had a marvelous vacation at Hatteras, NC, a peninsula of ocean land 30 miles out in the Atlantic from the mainland.  Besides reading, gathering shells, sitting on the beach, a bit of yoga, and eating amazing seafood, I got to do a bit of nothing.
 It was glorious.
The fullness of life is there for us; happiness is a choice.

I am committed to using my thoughts to always create positive energy for myself and anyone I am in contact with.  Our thoughts affect the very small events in our day, which can shift our own attitude, shift others around us, and thus shift the world.
Why not choose joy?

Are you jealous of the ocean's generosity?
Why would you refuse to give this gift to anyone?
Fish don't hold the sacred liquid in cups.
They swim the huge fluid freedom.
-Rumi

What is your journal for?

Life is so complicated, there are so many choices and pressures. I sometimes am so overwhelmed with all those plans to make, lists to fulfill, dreams to realize. I am so convinced that working in my journal really does help me get where I need to go.

I can loosen up and just explore ideas.
I can write out dreams and goals.
I can mess around and fantasize about crazy possibilities.
I can just take a break from all the striving and have some fun.

Keeping a journal can and should be a tool for all theses ways of exploring what and who and where and why you are here on this planet. So much of life pushes us to fall into an expected pattern, to drive us to be mindless cogs in a wheel of civilization that makes us consume, work to pay, consume, work to pay.
All of it a bit mindlessly.

I want to have clear intention in my life. My journal really help me create this. Everyday.
Try it.

“The Universe doesn’t give you what you ask for with your thoughts - it gives you what you demand with your actions.” --Steve Maraboli

Waiting

Sometimes, my journal is about words.

 I have been in a long fallow period, waiting to hear about a job (I did not get it), waiting to see where my work will take me. It takes so much trust to know you can just be, and not be making and doing all the time, and that it is okay to be with the space, to not struggle or strive or despair . . . that sometimes the long spaces of life just need to happen. To know that the cup must become empty before it can be filled.

I worked on a series of collagy-watercolory owls last year, I had 12 that I liked enough to be a calender, and a publisher, through my rep, is looking at them. and as I wait for an answer, there are numerous other things to do, but somehow I am still in the waiting mode. I applied for a job, had an interview, waited, waited, waited to see how much my life might change. For my art's sake, it was better not to get this job. I will pick up the watercolors soon (next week!!!) but for now, I think the waiting has been okay.

A philosopher, Meno, once asked: "How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?" Sometimes the hidden and mysterious take patience to discover, and all the busyness we think we are supposed to constantly inhabit can result in missing a subtle quiet whisper of what is to come next. My journal is the place I can release the words of wondering, insecurity about what I am to do, lists of maybes and what-ifs and intentions. and once I've done this, done the day-dreaming (and night dreaming) and setting intentions and goals and planning paths, I can sit and see what happens next.

I am waiting.

"Certainly for artists of all stripes, the unknown, the idea or the form or the take that has not yet arrived, is what must be found. It is the job of an artist to open doors and invite in prophesies, the unknown, the unfamiliar, it's where their work comes from, although its arrival signals the beginning of the long disciplined process of making it their own." --Rebecca Solnit

done at our monthly journaling group

"Oh soul, you worry too much. You have seen your own strength. You have seen your own beauty. You have seen your golden wings. Of anything less, why do you worry? You are in truth the soul, of the soul, of the soul."
--Rumi

Finding new ideas

This journal page is from Guillermo del Toro's concept art for a movie. Lots of creatives think by drawing, and an art journal is the perfect place to do this. The biggest hurdle is often worrying what the page looks like. Make a bunch of messy pages, add some ugly drawings, and you will be much freer in your work. and after you've filled a bunch of sketchbooks, look back through them, scan some pages, and collage into another book.

Repeat.

Seriously fun, and this always helps me come up with new ideas.

"The creation of an art collage from the soul is an inner journey that allows your soul to speak to you. Your soul's voice can be heard through the images, feelings and insights that surface..." --Kathleen Carrillo

 "Rapid-collage prevents any elevating movement toward a fixed goal. To 'be nowhere' is to let oneself be." --Josh Goldberg

 "Collage is like a hall of mirrors. Every direction you look, you see something different and visually stimulating." --Nita Leland

 "Collage is the twentieth century's greatest innovation." --Robert Motherwell

some things I admire

a volcano (Nature's power), Frida, a circle of women, Mary Oliver

"I live in nature where everything is connected, circular. The seasons are circular. The planet is circular, and so is the travel of the planet around the sun ... The ancient people understood that our world is a circle... Do people live in circles today? No. They live in boxes." --Eustace Conway

regrets

"When one door closes, another opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us."
-Alexander Graham Bell

patience

A new moon teaches gradualness and deliberation,
and how one gives birth to oneself slowly.
Patience with small details makes perfect a large work, like the universe.
What nine months of attention does for an embryo
forty early mornings alone
will do for your gradually growing wholeness.
--Rumi

to make art is to be filled

What was said to the rose
that made it open
was said to me
here in my chest

What was told to the cypress
that made it strong and straight

What was whispered to the jasmine

So it is what it is
whatever made sugarcane sweet
whatever was said
to the inhabitants of the town of Chugill in Turkistan
that makes them so handsome

Whatever lets the pomegranate flower
blush like a human face
that is being said to me now

I blush
whatever put eloquence in language
that's happening here

The great warehouse doors open
I fill with gratitude
chewing a piece of sugarcane
in love with the one
to whom every "that" belongs

What was said to the rose
that made it open
was said to me
here in my chest.

RUMI

reverent owl

"The goal of life is rapture. Art is the way we experience it."   --Joseph Campbell

a new fun tool

For my birthday, I received a magnificent set of Derwent Inktense pencils from my Mother-in-law. They really are fun, you draw a simple pencil drawing, but then when you add water, and the colors just jump right out. Having fun tools really makes art easier to be happy with. I can scan this fish, print a bunch, then use it in a multi-fish collage in my journal. (Repeating fish makes sense, since they hang out in bunches, ya know?)

and also, noticing how very beautiful life is, it's fun to try to get those colors to be as lively as they are in real life. Livelier, perhaps.

"We began as mineral. We emerged into plant life, and into the animal state, and then into being human, and always we have forgotten our former states, except in early spring when we slightly recall being green again." --Rumi

Got Journalers' Block?

When stuck, do this:
1. put some color on a page
2. tear out some magazine images that attract you, glue them down here or there.
3. tear out some similarly colored images, and tear them into strips. glue randomly around the page as a border.
4. now write in large letters: FIFTY THINGS
5. list 50 things you love and are grateful for. Works every time.

"Do you think I know what I'm doing? That for one breath or half a breath I belong to myself? As much as a pen knows what it is writing It may be the satisfaction I need depends on my going away So that when I've gone and come back, I'll find it at home." --Rumi

dreaming/journaling

This is a collage done with various bits and pieces that were just hanging around my desk, an old envelope from Hong Kong, a sketch of an owl, some stamps, a translation page from a guidebook, some tissue paper, spray from an ink spray bottle. I printed out part of it for the cover of a little journal I am working on using dreams as part of my art practice.

I have been listening to Robert Moss talking about using our dreams to connect to the universal consciousness of the multiverse. He has written nine books on the subject, and really, all are wonderful. I have been writing down my dreams for years, but just for two years, I have been recording them in a dream journal. I believe his idea that our deeper Soul-self has messages to give us, and that it can use dreams to bring this information to us. Also that, in the multiverse, there are many realities that in dream-time can overlap and vibrate in an informational way.  Exploring this information and asking it to lead us toward a higher truth for ourselves is a very fun and magical path to follow.

For me, journaling also helps to unlock part of the puzzle of the soul's journey.  The words, the images, the strong feelings we get from certain collages help me to connect the dots, and I feel like I have discovered something deeper, it doesn't just feel like a pretty picture or interesting phrase.  Synchronicites can be found, and some sense of connection and revelation when I do work in my journal with my dreams.

It all seems connected - journaling, dreaming, shamanic work . . . . and how fun to open our minds and souls to finding the deeper/truer meaning all around us.

"The same thing happens when you realize that ordinary life is a dream, just a movie, just a play. You don't become more cautious, more timid, more reserved. You start jumping up and down and doing flips, precisely because it's all a dream, it's all pure Emptiness. You don't feel less, you feel more - because you can afford to. You are no longer afraid of dying, and therefore you are not afraid of living. You become radical and wild, intense and vivid, shocking and silly. You let it all come pouring through, because it's all your dream.

 Life then assumes its true intensity, its vivid luminosity, its radical effervescence."
 --Ken Wilber

Have you journaled today?

"If I do good, I feel good, if I do bad, I feel bad." --Abraham Lincoln

Synchronicities.

Standing in line, waiting to get on the Southwest flight that took me to Surtex in NYC, I chatted with a very cute gal, and the topic went to our work and why we were headed to the city. Little did I know she was also an artist, Linda Schneider, and was on her way to the city to teach a calligraphy class.

Later on the flight, I woke up to the adorable little Chinese boy next to me saying a lady wanted me to have this notepaper. Linda had calligraphed (is that a verb?) a little note with my name, and the words "dream art." I don't remember mentioning to her my deep interest in dreaming, but maybe she had a chance to check my website? It felt quite magical. The words were so beautifully lettered, that I immediately glued them in a the journal page I had started working in on the plane.

Thanks, Linda! What a synchronistic way to start my adventure in New York!
and her beautiful, flowing and very elegant work is HERE.

"Reason is like an officer when the king appears. The officer then loses his power and hides himself. Reason is the shadow cast by God; God is the sun." --Rumi