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Endings:
my holiday, the month of February, wearing summer clothes, shlepping in flip flops, sun ripened fruit, long held beliefs about who I am.
Beginnings:
wearing warmer clothing, a fun art class, happy cuddles with Molly, daffodils and cherry blossoms (I hope!), hugs from friends and family, discovering what it means to live as “a monk in the market place”.
Tomorrow, we leave the warmth and sunshine…
From the tip of every branch,
Like a fat purple fig
a wonderful future
beckoned and winked
Sylvia Plath
…another Journal page…not great colour as the background is actually yellow but I’m just “mucking about” and having a lot of fun with these pages!
I really love this quote by Sylvia Plath. It’s actually just a small portion of the whole quote which is from her novel “The Bell Jar”. Unfortunately Plath suffered from depression and ultimately committed suicide. This is the whole quote:
I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet. ~Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, Chapter 7.
I can understand that feeling of not knowing what to choose, becoming paralyzed by indecision and being fearful that your choice might be the wrong one. Thankfully I’ve worked my way past that now but I remember at one time, having twelve different splotches of paint colours on my living room wall for almost six months…agonizing over the choice! It was a huge area that needed painting and I kept thinking “what if I hate it once it’s done”! I was finally reminded by someone that I’m not Picasso and I wasn’t painting a masterpiece…it was just walls and paint…which put it into perspective for me and I was able to make my choice easily after that!
It’s about knowing that we can trust our own innate inner wisdom and thankfully there are very few area’s in life where we can’t change our minds!
Today I’m wishing for all of you, many choices,...all of which, lead to a joyful life!
Huichol bead ring
smelling: right now…sea air, but on Wednesday it was orange blossoms. I stood under an orange tree and inhaled deeply, over and over again. Pure bliss! The essential oil for orange blossom is called neroli…in case you’re wondering what heaven smells like.
seeing: palm fronds waving in the wind, Mr I. tapping his toe as he listens to his iphone. Birds fliting from tree to tree, my feet propped up on a pillow with my computer on my lap. An orange, red, green, gold and black beaded ring that I bought this week from an Huichol indian woman. Very funky and I love it!
Huichol Indian children...doing what all kids love to do with a hammock
tasting: sugar coated almonds…I know, I know, what am I thinking?…I bought them at the market on Monday. The “nut man” boils them in sugar in a pot at his stall until it thickens and turns to candy. Yummmmmm.
hearing: birds fighting over a prime roosting spot, people laughing, very rapid Spanish being spoken and Mexican music floating on the breezes from the little tienda (corner store) across the road.
feeling: thirsty, from the sugared almonds and sore and a bit stiff from a massage I had this afternoon. I’m also feeling a good kind of tired, from walking for miles today under the hot Mexican sun.
Have a beautiful weekend my friends!
The time is flying by much too quickly. I try not to grasp and hold on greedily to the moments but rather appreciate them and release them for the next one to come sliding in. I sometimes wonder if photography isn’t about trying to hold on to the moments…caught frozen in time…but in reality, are gone.
my morning cuppa
I read an interesting piece of information recently…the healthiest and happiest people are those that feel grateful for the blessings they have in their lives rather than focusing on what’s not working. I knew that, but someone has actually done a study on it, so that makes it official!
frigate birds waiting for the fishermen
Did you also know that the average person has over 60,000 thoughts per day and over 80% of them are negative? That in itself is a sobering thought!
evening soccer game on the beach
I’m sure that it’s easier to have happy thoughts in the sunshine than it is in the dark and grey gloominess of a northern winter.
chaos….fly with it!
…and something from my art journal/sketchbook. I wasn’t happy with the way this page was going and decided to take advantage of that…to work with it, rather than fight it. (a good reminder for life as well as art!)
And today, my wish is that your days are easily filled with positive and happy thoughts…at least 50,000 of them!
Another journal page…mixed media
Thinking Valentines…thinking “heartful” and “heartfelt”…and what that means for me.
I’ve been musing about self love (a lot). It’s becoming more and more important for us to learn to love ourselves…completely and without reservations, just as we are. We all judge ourselves, both physically and emotionally and often with a frequency that makes it seem like normal behaviour.
It’s just not OK to do this to ourselves anymore…not even in the privacy of our own thoughts!
We all know how it goes; we aren’t thin enough, we aren’t young enough, we aren’t smart enough, we aren’t lovable enough and on it goes. We believe that if we were somehow different…more than what we are…the world would love us more, things would be so much better and we would feel safer.
If I can just say one thing about this, it would be…”we don’t get to be mean to ourselves anymore”.
It’s too important.
There’s too much at stake; our health, our relationships, our peace of mind…it all hinges on self love and self worth. We need to start small but start somewhere, with something. We all have something that we judge ourselves harshly about. Do we even recognize when we’re being “mean” to ourselves?
A big one for me as it is for most women, has been “aging”. It was a HUGE step for me to let my hair go naturally grey last year and to actually be good with this evidence of me getting older. It was also a huge step for me to love myself as a single woman, when I was divorced. Huge. It took a long time to get there, but I did (and then promptly fell in love and got married!). We all have something(s) that we think would be impossible for anyone else to love because we can't love it ourselves.
I don’t get to be mean to myself anymore…how about writing that on a piece of paper and sticking it up on the mirror? You couldn’t get a better Valentine from anyone!
(Can you tell that this is something I feel passionate about? ;)
My wish for us all is that we will gift ourselves with a kind and gentle love today...and everyday...
ps…my friend Char at Ramblins, wrote a beautiful love letter to herself today…stop by and read it. What a perfect Valentine she's given herself!
Whatever you are doing, love yourself for doing it.
Whatever you are feeling, love yourself for feeling it.
~Thaddeus Golas
Some thoughts that bubbled up while working in my sketchbook…hmmm…could it be connected to thoughts of keeping warm here in chilly Mexico for the past several days? (watercolour and pen)
You are as amazing as you let yourself be.
Let me repeat that.
You are as amazing as you let yourself be!
~Elizabeth Alraune
How amazing are we willing to let ourselves be today? Let’s be full tilt, 100% boldly amazing! Could you let yourself do that? (Can I?) Amazing blessings to you, dear friends,
…come fly away!
We were up early…really, really early. It was theoretically, just a half night’s sleep when the alarm went off at 3:45 am.
It was dark and cold but thankfully, not snowy….and visions of stepping off a plane into sunshine and warm temperatures in just 12 hours made it all worth while.
By the time we passed Mt. St. Helen in Washington state, the sun was well up and we had a magnificent view of the crater. You’ll remember I’m sure, that Mt. St. Helen is a live volcano and erupted in May, 1980. I was living over 400 miles away at the time and even at that distance, there was a layer of ash covering everything.
Although I do a fair amount of flying, I don’t enjoy it…especially the take-off and landing part…but I love being up high in the sky…really high, where I’m able to get a completely different perspective of the planet. Views like this help me remember that in my day to day life, I actually have a very small and limited perspective of the world and that the world doesn’t revolve around me (shock, gasp!) and my small part in it. Not that I think our individual lives are insignificant, not at all. What I do find is that I can forget to see the big picture and am often tempted to take myself much too seriously.
Views like this one help me to remember that it’s a big, big world and my “mountain” is usually not much more than a small molehill.
Those are very philosophical and coherent thoughts for 6:30 in the morning! I don’t usually make that much sense until at least 9 o’clock. You can tell by the smiles, that we were happy….beyond happy really. We're both susceptible to SAD...seasonal affective disorder...and the one sure cure that we've found for that is sunshine. A serious lack of sleep, combined with an ecstatic glee that we were escaping a month of dreary west coast winter weather, put us more in the range of “giddy” and giddy can end up crashing and burning fairly quickly.
To avoid the crash and burn phase (don’t even think those words while you’re on an airplane!) we decided to settle down and get some work done. Mr I pulled out some important business that needed his immediate attention.
Those of you with iphones may know about Talking Carl…it’s a seriously funny app…and great entertainment for kids, grandkids (and big kids too). Carl mimics your own voice and repeats everything you say in a squeaky, high pitched and yes, annoying voice. He also yells at you if you poke him and laughs if you tickle him. (You have to be there.)
I pulled out my sketch book and doodled. Drawing hundreds of circles was a very zen activity and I couldn’t believe how quickly the time went.
We were soon flying over fields in northern Mexico and landing in PV…as the locals call Puerto Vallarta. Six of us climbed into a van to head north and an hour later we were at our destination.
And now when I go for a walk, I'm seeing these beautiful expression of sunshine…
and I’m also doing a lot of this very important activity.
OK, I have to confess…that pedicure was left over from my Hawaii trip in November. All that was left was a little bit on the tip of each big toe, so I updated it today and even shaved my legs! It’s not just a walk in the park here in the sunshine…it requires a lot of upkeep and the older I get, the more upkeep seems to be required!
And just so you won’t feel too bad about the whole sunshine thing, especially if you’re living in an area that’s been beaten and battered recently by Mother Nature, you’ll be cheered to know that it’s unseasonably cold here too. The temperature last night dipped down to 11 C (51F) and although it did go up to 21C (69F) during the day, the wind coming in off the ocean was decidedly chilly.
It was a fleece day in Guayabitos today.
