Between the last day of August and September there is a blank page:
a note in the margin
a daisy
and the ticket
for a turning point. ~ Silvia T
Gregorio Catarino posted this on his X account this morning. How thought provoking! We are about to enter the final third of the year. Where’s your ticket to your turning point going to take you?
Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.
Here is the question of the day from 3000 Questions About Me:
“It happens all the time. Superstars get overlooked. The passersby rush past the musical genius playing on the sidewalk. The future bestseller sits at the bottom of a slush pile. Groundbreaking work is met with skepticism or ignored. It all presents an opportunity for the intuitive and aware. Be on the look-out for the good stuff. Be the one who sees it, senses it, lives it.” – Holiday Mathis
Whenever I’m in a quandary about what to write about on the blog, I go to Holiday Mathis’ daily horoscopes. She typically writes something profound (such as above) before she even gets to the individual astrological signs. Some of the best music that I have ever heard, some of the best artwork which I have ever seen, and some of the best words I have ever read, have come from obscure places such as street corners, graffiti walls and out-of-print books that I picked up at a garage sale.
When we were away last week, sitting in a swanky hotel, two extremely stylish women decked out in pricy, designer gear from head to toe, were gushing to me about a ring that I was wearing on my right hand. I had two rings on, one expensive, beautiful 14K gold ring bedazzled with diamonds and the other one, a hammered brass ring, holding a broken shell, that I had purchased from an artsy street fair in a local town a couple of years ago. I asked the regal looking women which ring they were inquiring about, and it was the street fair ring. They wanted to know the maker, and unfortunately, I had no idea. The artist had not put a maker’s mark on it. I do love the ring though. It is truly one-of-a-kind. It is special.
I love to support the underdog, especially in the arts. If someone’s creative work touches me, I do everything that I can to support it, whether that means a purchase, a compliment, a nice tip, a referral/promo, etc. It takes courage to put one’s creations out into the public. To do this opens a creator up to criticism, to ridicule, to rejection and creating takes a lot of time to do, without the likelihood of great reward in return for their time and effort. This is why I believe that we miss out on so much of what the world and all of its individual creators could offer to us. We often respect and worship all of the wrong people/places/stuff. We get a lot of copycats and a lot of same old/same old. And thus, we don’t get inspired to be more creative and imaginative, ourselves.
Go to Etsy and look up something you like, say perhaps, “turtles.” You won’t believe the offerings that you will find, in every kind of art form, at truly reasonable prices. Go to local hole-in-the-wall restaurants that aren’t chains. You might taste flavors like you have never experienced before in any kind of restaurant. Pause and listen to that saxophonist on the corner. Many famous stars today, including Justin Bieber, were originally street performers. And if you find a creator that really impresses you, support them, any way that you can. It means so much to them. And honestly, it means so much to the world.
Even if you don’t like astrology, go to Holiday Mathis’ website and just read her opening paragraph every day. In my opinion, she’s a writer and a thinker and a wise woman who deserves a whole lot more attention. She’s a star among those who write about the stars. And also, allow yourself to put your own creations “out there”. If nothing else, this will help you to appreciate, even more so, the bravery, the vulnerability, and the imaginative effort and sacrificial time, the creators whom you admire, have in spades, by the offerings which they give to all of us. Creators give us an intimate piece of themselves.
(It is my belief that WE are the vehicles of creations for our Creator. Do not withhold your gifts, and also, bring attention to other creators’ gifts. The world will be a much better place for it.)
Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.
Here is the question of the day from 3000 Questions About Me:
I got back to art class yesterday, after a few weeks off for Christmas break. It was great to be back. I painted the little guy above as sort of a “warm up”. I thought that I would share him with you. He makes me smile.
The best part of getting older is coming to the proven realization that the end product of anything truly doesn’t matter. The real joy always comes in the doing, in the process, in the flow. Yes, a successfully grown family, business, career, marriage, homestead, project, craft etc. can give you a sense of satisfaction and pride and maybe even some accolades, but those feelings are such a small blip of feelings versus the myriad of feelings and experiences that go into the process of forming and building and creating and experiencing all of the works of your life. There’s peace in this realization. Your life is your main product. And it doesn’t end, until you end. And none of us really know what “when you end” means, if we are honest with ourselves. We all have beliefs and hopes, but none of us truly know the mysteries of what happens to us after we die. So, in the meantime, we are living our ongoing creative product – our lives. And this product is a collaboration with the entire world around us. Our main creative product, our individual life, has the support of the whole entire world which only benefits when our creative product brings more individuality and beauty and imagination and our own uniqueness that is unrepeatable, to the whole of it.
I’m a middle-age, empty nester who is attending art class for the fun of it. I’m not graded. My output doesn’t matter. It’s even okay if I don’t particularly enjoy my art class on any given day. If I spill some paint, so what? If I never frame my art, who cares? The joy is in the doing. The joy is in the exploring. The joy is in the accepting. The joy is in the gratefulness for the experience – every bit of it.
Your life is your only creative product. Everything else that you do is part of that product. Be joyful in “doing” your life. Explore. Accept the messiness and the so-called flaws of it all. Mostly, be grateful for having the experience of being able to create your one and only masterpiece, and also be utterly grateful for all of the wonderful beings who are co-creating with you. If our world isn’t a creative masterpiece of miracles, than what is?
Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.
Here is the question of the day from 3000 Questions About Me:
Last night my husband and I went to an art gallery to watch the performance of a Japanese painter. The painter calls herself an “ink performer” and she has performed her art in many countries all over the world. The painter had already painted an intricate, fearsome looking dragon, in black ink, on rice paper, mounted on a silk tapestry. Her performance was devoted to accenting this dragon, by dramatically painting it with dips and dabs and sometimes sword-like thrusts of bright metallic gold ink, while doing a traditional Japanese dance involving bells, drums, and all of the while wearing a large, lengthy, enveloping kimono (she was teeny), which she had also previously hand painted. This experience was fascinating and interesting and so completely out of my own frame of reference. The artist could not speak any English, and she had just arrived from Japan the day before. I imagine that while looking out into the gallery at a small sea of gaping Americans, that we, too, seemed completely out of her own frame of reference. And yet it was magical experience for all of us.
I learned the term “frame of reference” when I was in high school and I took a World Cultures class from a wholly devoted and passionate teacher. When learning about a country, my teacher would transform his entire classroom into the country that we were learning about, as best that he could. I distinctly remember when we studied Japan that he wore a kimono, bowed to us as we entered the classroom, performed tea ceremonies and he insisted that instead of Mr. Sloan, we were to call him Sloan-san. He would always emphasize that we were to remove judgment from our lives’ experiences as much as possible. He would remind us that it was just by happenstance (for instance my soul ended up in Caucasian female body, born in America, in 1970), that we entered into our own particular circumstances, and that is the same for everyone else in this world. What is normal and pedestrian for someone, is unusual and exotic to someone else, and this is mostly because we are each looking at life, through the lens of our own frames of reference.
Today’s world is more global and connected than ever. More people travel the world over than ever before. Computers have made it easy to access global websites and products and programs at the click of a button. But “frame of reference” isn’t just about other countries and their traditions. Travel around the United States, and you get all sorts of different “takes” on food, BBQ, music, dance styles, celebrations, etc. Go from your own city, just twenty miles out into the countryside and you will experience a whole different way of life, without even having to refill your gas tank.
Life is so much fuller and more interesting when you stop trying to live up to an image. Life is so much fuller and more intriguing when you let your curiosity and imagination move you past your rote habits and comfort zones. When you live up to an image of who you think you should be, or what you want people to think of you (hint: people don’t think about you much at all, except maybe occasionally, when they may be questioning what you are thinking about them), you start limiting your choices of where you go, and what you do, and what you experience, and who you have these experiences with, throughout your days. If “these people/places/experiences” don’t fit your image, you don’t try them out, and then your life starts to get extremely limited to singular views, and uniform, biased experiences. Your frame of reference gets really tight, like a camera’s aperture becoming almost closed, to the size of a pinhole. And when a lot of people start walking around with pinhole apertures, the world becomes a dangerous place. We live in a more globally mobile world than ever. We can’t limit our frames of reference. It could become our downfall.
Today, do something to broaden your own aperture. Order or make a food that you’ve never tried before. Go to a different neighborhood and check out their eclectic little shops. Instead of force-feeding your own strong opinions about politics or religion, earnestly question and listen to someone who sees things differently than you do, with the goal of trying to understand their point of view. Watch a foreign film. You get the gist. Do more of this type of thing in your life on a regular basis, and the world becomes a less scary and more fascinating place than you ever could have imagined. You start to fully appreciate that we are all just souls/life force made of the same stuff, which just happened to land in different bodies, in different families, in different neighborhoods, in different cultures and in different countries. When you really broaden your aperture, your frame of reference starts to open so wide-angled that you see the picture as all-in-one. You begin to see and to fully understand that we are all just tiny little specks of the One Big Thing.
“Your frame of reference is everything. It will determine the quality of your entire life. Nothing escapes its influence.” – Tom Bilyeu
Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.
The painting above is called “Mountains and Sea“. It hangs in the National Gallery of Art and it was created by Helen Frankenthaler, a famous American abstract expressionist painter. I started researching Helen Frankenthaler because I read one of her quotes, and it reverberated with me. Here is the quote:
“Every canvas is a journey all its own. There are no rules. Let the picture lead you where it must go.”
The word “canvas” can be replaced by so many other words in this quote and still make so much sense. “Life” works. “Season” works. “Relationship” works. “Vocation” works. I think this is an utterly divine quote.
Helen Frankenthaler also said this:
“I don’t resent being a female painter. I don’t exploit it. I paint.”
To give this quote context, Helen was born in 1928. She did most of her major works in the 1950s-1970s. During this time period, art was still dominated by male artists. Today, we seem obsessed with labels. We label everything, even by giving people labels that essentially mean “label-less”. I think the people who are arguing for and against categorizing people in certain ways, are missing the point. Labeling anything takes away the individual essence of anything. So if anything, we need less labels. The quirky cardinal who frequents my yard and likes to noisily bark at me to remind me to fill my feeder, gets severely limited in the way of his own special individuality when I call him “cardinal” or “red bird.” Of course, he doesn’t give a damn what I call him. He doesn’t “resent being a male red cardinal. He doesn’t exploit it. He flies.”
“What concerns me when I work, is not whether the picture is a landscape, or whether it’s pastoral, or whether somebody will see a sunset in it. What concerns me is – did I make a beautiful picture?” – Helen Frankenthaler
Sometimes friends or family will discuss one of my blog posts with me and they will say “thank you, they really need to hear “such and such message”, and sometimes that message which they supposedly got from my post is a message which is equally new to me, as well. And I am so delighted by this. I believe that really good art, whether it be paintings, or poetry, or dance, is a medium that brings people closer to their own inner selves. Really good art stirs people’s emotions and inner worlds and messages from their intuition like nothing else can do. Really good art makes us more open to exploring what is behind the hidden doors of our spirit. The only thing that I ever want people to get from my writing, is a feeling of understanding and more intimacy with their own souls.
“In relations with people, as in art, if you always stick to style, manners, and what will work, and you’re never caught off guard, then some beautiful experiences never happen.” – Helen Frankenthaler
With this quote, I believe Helen is saying to live and to create with a little imagination and fearlessness. Sometimes you have to change course, add some extra ingredients, don’t get stuck on the “tried and true”, in order to experience magic in your life. Is there anything as cheerful and interesting as a “pleasant surprise”? Or as Helen Frankenthaler says it plainly in this quote:
“I’d rather risk an ugly surprise than rely on things I know I can do.”
Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.
Good morning!! Happy Birthday to my second eldest baby, whose amazing curiosity and intellect and talent is only overshadowed by his huge, caring heart. I love you, G.
Friday is here!! It’s my favorite day of the week. I only discuss superfluous stuff on the blog on Fridays. We all need just one day of the week to just “Let it all be and just have some fun!” On Fridays, I mention one of my favorite things or songs or products or books or websites, etc. and I ask you to share your favorites in my Comments. (You guys tend to be a little stingy with your favorites. What gives? 😉 )
When I was in college, my sorority would hold a yearly event called Destination Unknown. I loved it. It was one of my favorite events of the year. We would all get into a travel bus and head out to an event, not knowing where we were going to end up. The social chairs were excellent at keeping the destinations top secret. My husband and I are going on a road trip, starting tomorrow. Completely against our typical Type-A style of going about things, we haven’t even made hotel arrangements. Where we end up landing, will be up to our divine intuitions (hopefully our intuitions will be in sync). I can’t wait for the adventure! Try to do a Destination Unknown sometime soon. (even if it is just for a day trip). Destination Unknowns actually tend to help you to get to know your own self, a whole lot better. The seat of your pants is stronger and more interesting than you ever thought to explore. Trust me on this.
My favorite, for this Friday morning, gave me the lovely image posted above. I follow Gregorio Catarino on Twitter, and he posts absolutely beautiful and fanciful artwork from all sorts of artists every single day. He makes my Twitter feed look like an Art Gallery. I highly recommend that you check him out. Interspersed with so much interesting, thought-provoking fodder and written brilliance that work as writing prompts for me, I also make sure that my Twitter feed has plenty of artwork and animal videos to keep me even, and mystified, and full of awe.
Have a wonderful holiday weekend, friends!!!
Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.
This was artwork posted on Twitter this morning. It struck me. I had to pause on it. I love it. Do you know what I do when I find artwork like this, when I am scrolling on Twitter? I print it out. I paste these pictures that wow me, into my journals, on my calendar, in various notebooks, so that in times that I just need the pick-me-up of visual candy that is just my taste, I have it right in front of me, to peruse and to enjoy. Artists are so generous to freely share their beautiful works. Sometimes I look for ways to buy or to support their work, whenever I can, because they make my world a more special place. Creative people make us look at the ordinary, in extraordinary ways. And oftentimes they do it for free. They do it because they love to do it and they are compelled to do it because they are deeply connected to their truest selves. And that’s why we feel so moved by their creations. It comes from an otherworldly, eternal place which we sometimes forget about its existence. Artists are the reminders of the beauty surrounding us, and the beauty within us.
And Think Smarter posted this great reminder on Twitter:
We are taking our youngest child of four to college on Friday, as she opted to start in the summer for a lot of good reasons. My emotions this week are Hurricane Mama. But I keep reminding myself that is because I have experienced so much love, and so much pride, and a load of growth, and constant wonder raising this family whom I love more than life itself.
What Think Smarter didn’t say, in this particular post, is that “The price of safety and comfort, is banality, and dullness, and having to live with the “what ifs” and the “I wonders.” Always live fully. Always live life to the fullest. It’s worth the risks and the losses. It is.
Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.
This is Water’s Soul, an eighty foot sculpture unveiled in Jersey City, NJ back in October. She was designed by the artist, Jaume Plensa. When you look from a distance she appears to be shushing New York City.
It has been suggested that the sculpture is not just telling New York to quiet down, but more a message to all of us to remember to relax, quiet down and stop being in such a flurry of activity all of the time. I love the visual of a mothering spirit telling us to find our calm.
Here are some more wisdoms that I found as I explored shops and towns that are new to me: (Wisdoms are all around us if we are looking for them.)
It is so true, isn’t it? We all recognize style, but to describe it, is a very difficult thing to do. Style is just so innate, intrinsic and unique to each individual soul.
And my dear friend was at a Van Gogh exhibit yesterday and texted this:
It’s true! Beauty and wisdom abound. This world is a wondrous place. If we listen to Water’s Soul and we find our calm, we are more likely to notice the beauty and wisdom in everything. Have a wondrous weekend, friends! Find the beauty and the wisdom within and in the external! Soak it in.
Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.
