Tag: art

  • Fear into Love

    In a Card from a Sister Friend, she quoted Constantine Peter Cavafy

    "As you set out in search of Ithaka pray that your journey be long, full of adventures, full of awakenings.  Do not fear the monsters of old…you will not meet them in your travels if your thoughts are exhalted and remain high, if authentic passions stir your  mind, body, and spirit. You will not encounter fearful monsters if you do not carry them within your soul, if your soul doesn't see them up in front of you."  

    I love that we will not meet the monsters of old…the old lessons we learned are not recycled.  

    Lessons not learned grow bigger trying desperately to gain our attention, to bring into our awareness the things we are doing to hurt ourselves and others; to raise us from fear into Love.

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     The center of this quilt was from a wall hanging I had made my parents in the very early stages of my quilting.  It hung in their porch, and one winter while they were in Texas, the mice chewed the quilt fabric surrounding this saying.  I took it back and a few summers ago turned it back into a wallhanging for me. (our estrangement didn't bode for gift exchanges anymore)  

    What is so foretelling is the saying on this quilt.

    "May those who love us, Love us. And those that don't love us, May God turn their hearts. And if he doesn't turn their hearts, may he turn their ankles, so we will know them by their limping."   

    My mother had used a walking cane to hang this on the wall.  

    I am getting better at discerning love.

  • All of Life’s Realities.

    It is my 53rd Birthday, and I feel so young at heart yet wise beyond my years. I feel so wondrous in Spirit and the weight of a life's journey…Light but knowing the journey it took to get here.

    The Soul Lost quilt..

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    The "Soul Eclipse" was created in 2005.  When I felt like I was drowning in emotion and the only place I felt normal was in quilting. As you can see it came through on my quilt.  Merging emotions and the sliver of gold is my Soul trying to gain ground or a toe hold on 'normal'.  I seemed so small against the world of troubles…or the messes so large.

    And then I felt the urge to create a woman…

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    This was my first lady, emerging and in a dark shadow.  She is very small against the back drop of great patterns and designs and colors, she herself is small, yet crucial in the overall quilt.

    And then I felt like I wanted to do moving ladies….

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    The great Energy behind the ladies is still there, and the ladies are now moving and dancing.  The sisterhood of Ladies….who dance to the beat of their own drum, was something for me to aspire to.  I Loved my Lady.  I just didn't know that the Lady was me for many months of creating her. She was leading my way.

    She would tell me I was okay, long before I knew…and would express emotions that I had a hard time verbalizing or bringing into myself.  She got it…My Lady.

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    In November 2010, I made this Mitten Tree Quilt, and felt the weight of being a misfit, of no longer fitting into my family. It felt as heavy as the cloak the Lady is wearing. But, I was resigned to my life and accepted it with reverence.  I loved this quilt for it had so much truth and wisdom there…I was okay being me, even if I only fit on the Mitten Tree of Misfits.

    And then, I created my latest one this fall…

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    She is walking with definite knowing, and great direction, confident and very much okay with who she is, celebrating it even…not wearing it like a heavy garment.  Not only has she accepted her path, she is Perfectly Perfect being her…she wouldn't trade nothing for her journey now, as Dr. Maya Angelou says.  I M Perfect and it is impossible not to be….And I LoVe Being ME!

    A journey from imperfect to perfect, by accepting all of life's realities!

  • My Level of Creativity.

    “By Living a Life full of Art, we may achieve an artful life.”  Ellen J. Langer, who also said, “All it takes to become an Artist is to start doing Art.”

     

    As my daughter and I walked around and saw other people’s art, it inspired me to do my own. 

     

    I believe what we do inspires us and where we go and by how we spend our time, for if you don’t consciously attend to your inner passion, your passion will recede into a dormant state.

     

    It literally is true, what we focus on expands.

     

    I have felt the difference in the past few days of feeling the angst of making a point to many who feel it is pointless, in comparison to walking among fabulous art, inspiring fabrics and being immersed in shopping for the right accent for my daughter’s first apartment.

     

    The difference is vast.  One pulls you back into a vortex of manic expression and the other raises my level of creativity.

     

     

     

     

  • From the Cocoon!

    The Artist’s Way, while it is inspiring for Art, it is also bringing forth an artful self.  It is finding the dark spots where we lost the art of living, the art of being, the art of individuality, where we conformed into roles that are in direct competition to being a creation from self.

     

    A self that lives behind the roles.

     

    A self we set aside years ago for a variety of reasons.

     

    This is the self we will find if we continue on The Artist’s Way…the path leads to self.

     

    I have been disrobing from roles that made up most of who I was, and underneath was a girl who I didn’t know.  It is this girl who has been struggling to come alive, against the adverse conditioned mind.

     

    This conditioned mind puts fear, guilt and shame along my pathway, sprinkled with false claims of a gloomy future, IF I dare make a new choice, explore and discover a new way of living.

     

    I have been jousting with this mind for 6 ½ years now, seeing which one of us will win at each turn.  Even having the fight is a great improvement to the capitulations of the past, where I didn’t even to fight.

     

    Now I have two separated ideals/beliefs/thoughts and desires vying for the chance to live as me.

     

    I feel a huge percentage of me is now onboard with the self and just fragments and pieces of me are still tangled up with the mental mind. 

     

    The Artist’s Way is working to unhinge those parts as well as strengthen and ignite the ones already free!

     

    I feel a huge part of me is flowing with the energy from the field of Art and pure potential, unlocked from the constraints of the mind.

     

    Like a butterfly almost cleared from the cocoon!

  • She was Me

    I had the opportunity to be on web radio, but more importantly the pleasure of speaking with a kindred spirit about my journey, to feel the ease and flow of conversation minus the struggle of explaining.

     

    She got me…and I her.  We looked at life through the same lens…from the inside out. 

     

    Usually it seems I am the odd man out, I am seeing things from a unique angle compared to others in a room, but this time I felt her looking with me in total understanding.

     

    I was also able to see me in a broader way, to realize how far I have come, how my art has led the way, how intuitively I have walked forward and the distance I have traveled.

     

    I have been so intent on this step here that I didn’t see how far I walked, how much I have changed and how deep within I had gone, or even how I now appear.

     

    It is like working on a piece of art, but not stepping back from it…to remain close and perfecting each tiny stroke, not realizing what you have created.

     

    I knew that I had changed drastically, but I don’t believe I saw the beauty in the changes or even the wisdom. 

     

    And I was truly able to see the art in me.

     

    To see my transformation from patterns and dark colors and rigid lines to being the Lady of my quilts.

     

    I am the lady…I can see how we are merging, I am catching up to my lady.  The distance is not such a future dream and far away hope and desire, but that I am living her life today.

     

    I am free, I have self-expression, I am empowered, and passionate, I am truth, I am me.

     

    In the interview I saw my Lady speaking, and she was me.

     

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    Love her confidence and attitude…and I love that it is within me, has been…waiting for me to embrace it.

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    This is how my quilts hang in a quilt show…they never seemed to match.  The first time I seen this, I cried, for they fit in like me…not the same as the rest. 

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    I eventually was able to recognize that not fitting in was okay…but I still chuckle at

    how different my quilts appear next to others…just like me we are in a league of our own. 

  • When I am 80.

    My writing assignment was to write a letter from my eight-year-old self to my adult self, and I sat there blank.  I could not figure out what the little girl needed to tell me.

     

    So, I went and did my morning yoga session. And it came to me that if I look at her sitting within a family of dysfunction and her seeing her older self having escaped, that perhaps then there would be lots to say.

     

    My little self would look upon this adult woman and admire the strength it took for her to walk the walk needed to walk the walk to get her out of the situation of her childhood and to now be working on becoming more artful self.

     

    She at 8 could look upon me where I stand today and be so grateful that I was able to circle back and regain the ownership and awareness of her soul. 

     

    That I was able to traverse the wild churning waters of abuse and arrive seemingly unscathed and actually prospering as an adult woman, she would be amazed at my ability to withstand the truth and then to make new choices based upon it.

     

    She would be so grateful that I am no longer in abusive relationships or that I am still being victimized, that I have learned how to do self care, to speak for my self and have the strength to follow through.

     

    She would breath a sigh of relief to know that we survived and are now heading into an even brighter future, where I am honing my self-awareness with yoga and The Artist’s Way, that we are on the pathway of self-loving.

    At times I too find it hard to see the distance I traveled and the depth and breath of change that my life has withstood…I stand with my little girl in awe of where we have been and sit in gratitude we not only survived but also are thriving.

     

    What brings me the most peace is that I can look straight into my little girl’s eyes and feel proud and wise and strong, and not have to look away in shame and guilt.

     

    I feel so strongly confident that we are on the right path, and that when I am 80; I will look upon this 52-year-old self the same way.

     

    And in fact there is a writing assignment to write a letter from your 80-year-old self to your 50-year-old self.

     

    I found that much easier, for I was telling me what the Artist’s Way is teaching me, to be more artful, more daring, more wild in learning new things and experimenting, to go out and grasp all the delights the world has to offer, to change your routine, to add some spice and thrill, to toss in colorful experiences…

     

    I want to be at 80, what I am today, but more of it. 

     

    I want to look backwards at the next 30 years and be breathless at what I did!

     

    Each Artist’s date is adding to the list of things that will blow my mind as I look back when I am 80.

     

     

     

     

  • Wanting me to disappear.

    I found it interesting that my mother’s voice still echoes in my head, that it rings out loud and clear each and every time I veer off her well-beaten path, my fear of disappointing her screams louder than the thrill of doing what I love to do.

     

    These echoes have traveled with me a long long time, and they are laced with fear that freezes me in my tracks if I even begin to ponder doing things differently.

     

    This underlying system was created when I was very small, and the definition of self was built upon this very odd system, where my ‘goodness’ was mirrored when she was happy and my ‘badness’ when she wasn’t.

     

    It had nothing to do with what I wanted to do, but had everything to do with her.

     

    This track was laid down within me by how my mother reacted to life, and making her happy was my only goal, for her happiness meant her loving me. 

     

    It had nothing to do with the actual things I was doing, but the withdrawing of love dare I venture into a place that made her frown.

     

    I wonder if this is how all children learn about life, that we simply follow the smiles and steer away from all the frowns, that we never learn to steer by our own smiles, we learn to navigate through life by others happiness.

     

    Living in this backward system for 46 years, the last 6 have been spent learning how to live from my inner smiles and standing strong against their frowns.

     

    Learning that I am not responsible for other people’s faces, that it is not my job, has been a full time job, undoing the tracks from childhood, taking them down one piece at a time.

     

    I can see how people lose themselves while living with themselves, how they get pulled into the lives of others simply for happiness and love.

     

    What is so debilitating is that your life disappears while theirs seems to thrive.  And how is that love if you disappear?

     

    In order to be loved by my parents, I had to disappear.

     

    My needs had to disappear, my wants, my desires, my happiness, my joy, my love and my life.  I learned to disappear for love.

     

    As I walk forward learning how to love myself, her echoes come back to remind me of where else I let my self go, where I lost a part of me, where I buried myself and now where I can reclaim that piece.

     

    I didn’t know I buried her in so much responsibility. 

     

    I find now, when I feel so stuck, so angry without a choice, I am tugging on a piece of the old track, and it has nothing to do with what is going on today, but instead what I have learned a long time ago. 

     

    A voice from the past wanting me to disappear.

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    This quilt represents my inner wisdom and the young artist…. I am so happy that this one didn't sell!

     

  • Enter In

    Julia Cameron writes in The Artist’s Way, “I like to think of the mind as a room.  In that room, we keep all our usual ideas about life, God, what’s possible and what’s not.  The room has a door.  That door is ever so slightly ajar, and outside we can see a great deal of dazzling light.  Out there in the dazzling light are a lot of new ideas that we consider too far-out for us, and so we keep them out there. The ideas we are comfortable with are in the room with us. The other ideas are out, and we keep them out.”

     

    “In our ordinary, prerecovery life, when we would hear something weird or threatening, we’d just grab the doorknob and pull the door shut.  Fast.”

     

    “Inner work triggering outer change?  Ridiculous! (Slam the door.) God bother to help my own creative recovery? (Slam.)  Synchronicity supporting my artist with serendipitous coincidences? (Slam, slam, slam.)

     

    “Now that we are in creative recovery, there is another approach we need to try. To do this, we gently set aside our skepticism – for later us, if we need it – and when a weird idea or coincidence whizzes by, we gently nudge the door a little further open.”

     

    “Setting skepticism aside, even briefly, can make for very interesting explorations.  In creative recovery, it is not necessary that we change any of our beliefs.  It is necessary that we examine them.”

     

    “More than anything else, creative recovery is an exercise in open-mindedness.  Again, picture your mind as that room with the door slightly ajar. Nudging the door open a bit more is what makes for open-mindedness. Begin, this week, to consciously practice opening your mind.”      Julia

     

     

    Yesterday I was panicked due to my one-day weekend, and I was not open to letting the chores go and just using it as my play day as I had threatened to do.  I slammed the door on playing, staying with old habits of getting my jobs done first.

     

    I was crabby but doing the work.  Resenting that I couldn’t play.

     

    It is like being locked in a room to which you have the key, yet unable to actually use it to turn yourself free.

     

    There is an exchange I can’t see to agree with, messy house in exchange for playing!

     

    I want both.  And if I stay that course, I will continue exchanging playtime for work time, for as we all know there is always another job to be done.

     

    She is suggesting that we ‘use’ this excuse in order to keep our Artist from going to explore the wide-open world, that we have become comfortable in the cramped workspace.

     

    My grumpiness spread like a virus, or tried to, but most left me alone in my unhappiness. 

     

    My daughter took her playtime first, and later on in the fading daylight mowed the grass.  My resentment at her is that she has mastered the art of play over work time…and is doing what I can’t allow me to do. 

     

    I blame her for me being unable to exchange playing for a clean house. 

     

    As I sit with this thought, I used to get appreciation and attention for keeping my mother’s house in order…and the opposite may be true, wrath if I didn’t help.

     

    I recall many siblings not caring where I cared too much.

     

    When I thought I cared about a clean house, in fact I cared what my mother thought of me.

     

    Perhaps, this is the issue that needs to be examined. 
    ”I am better if I have a clean house, even if I am grumpy.”

     

    Who do I like better or who feels better inside?

     

    It seems my self-identity is wrapped up in what I do and how external things look. 

     

    How brave to let it all go and play…That is the challenge this week…being a child doing what she feels like, letting go of responsibilites that can wait.  The 'mother' in my head may want me to slam the door to fun, but I have to be strong enough to nudge it open and enter in.

     

  • Mine.

    As I was reading Chapter Two of The Artist’s Way book by Julia Cameron, I found similarities between finding your artist self and leaving toxic relationships.

     

    She is leading you forward suggesting ideas and things that will focus on self and in doing so you discover where you are standing and how you have been living and who has had their hands on the reigns of you.

     

    Unblocking the Artist is like opening the eyes of those in denial.

     

    Julia speaks of poisonous playmates and crazymakers and I see them as the dysfunctional family I was lost among where there was no space for my self.

     

    She makes reference between giving up toxic thinking as giving up drinking.  And those still enjoying the toxic beverages and the toxic mindset, will not be your cheerleaders and in fact will weaken your resolve.

     

    The Artist Self is the self that is untouched by other’s influences, but whose sense of being comes from within and is connected to the Universe. 

     

    She is looking at this process from the self outward, where I was looking at leaving the mess of dysfunction.

     

    I wasn’t trying to find an authentic artful self, but rather fleeing from the abusive family that I felt had stolen my self.

     

    And it had, a pattern maker or follower had replaced my own artistic creative self, I had no personal connection to the Universe, I was plugged into an extension cord. 

     

    My sense of self flowed not from the Universe; it came from my mother/father/brother/sister/friend/anyone but the Universe and me.

     

    When everything that was holding the definitions of me was shown to be very dysfunctional, I then seen my own dysfunctional self. 

     

    I saw what the extension cord was plugged into, and I unplugged them all.

     

    It was the unplugging them that freed me to be available to hear the Universe, to pay attention to my body, my feelings, my emotions, to connect me back to me.

     

    The definition of Universe is one song.

     

    I am now singing one song… mine.

     

     

     

  • Art

    The contrasts in life are incredible and their depths unimaginable, the reach between them are so they do not touch nor do they brush up against each other, two drastically different worlds, yet on the same planet living and breathing in the same time frame.

     

    I had a short Artist Date followed by a conversation reporting more abuse in the FALC’s congregation; more horror of insidious acts perpetrated against children by highly regarded church members.  Tales whose reflection echoes my parents…and a friend’s suicide explained 25 years after it happened.  Swinging from Art to Horror within minutes.

     

    The Artist within me, just moments before had feasted upon colors and fabulously soft textures, from the curly silken softness of alpaca wool to real silk spun by a worm and then dyed by Artist’s hands…my spirit was alive and alert to new things dreaming of how they can be used in an upcoming project…visions of color and me.  I then was plunged into the harsh stark reality of abuse and its long term affects, my Artist disappears and my abused self arises, listening to the details of evil.

     

    The contrast of embracing and working with my Artist self while healing from sexual abuse as well as unhinging myself from a brainwashed mind is equally on the far ends of the spectrum, yet closely related.

     

    It almost seems like my artist self was hijacked by abuse and that religion; so in order to become my most artful self, I have to fully understand from whence I came.

     

    The horror stories of childhood abuse, and how it affected the life afterwards is horrific, but equally is the ‘normal’ presentation of the perpetrators and their warm reception by the folks of the church, it seems more profound.

     

    I told my brother I had more respect for the Klu Klux Klan folks for their agenda was front and center.

     

    Whereas the hierarchy of the church sells an agenda of high morals and values, setting limits on the evils of the world and how their congregations are made to adhere to rules forbidding pretty harmless sins.

     

    Watching of Television, to watching a movie, to nail polish, hair coloring, yet while the circles of abuse grow ever widening, while more and more children are born into the centers of crime, this seems violently insane.

     

    Sexual predators sit on the board and behind the pulpit, and false evils are handed out, while behind the scenes, children face the repressed darkness, alone.

     

    The singing in the pews can never be loud enough or sweet enough to heal the children who have been raped repeatedly, whose brainwashed state leaves them helpless for alternatives, who some find release in suicide or drugs and alcohol.

     

    The face of the church that is presented to the public is like the white sheet the Klu Klux Klan hid behind…  We are all fooled that the sheet is the man/woman instead of what lies behind.

     

    What lies behind is the pile of sins, the unhealed wounds of their own childhood, the eroded brain from too much washing, the unreality of life…who needs the trappings of the church in order to hide.

     

    I have often wondered of the deep-rooted fear that many struggle with about leaving the church, and I may have figured it out.  It isn’t the fear of going to Hell that keeps them there, but the covering of the sheet.

     

    They are too afraid to stand alone outside of the pews of the church.

     

    They need the covering of religion offers.

     

    They need the pretty faces of singing voices.

     

    They need it all to cover up what lies beneath.

     

    And what lies beneath un-addressed is the monster that continues to rape children and do extremely horrific deeds.  And this sheet, they believe, has the magic to bless it all away, that they can literally hid behind its whiteness.

     

    Sadly, it is true.

     

    For no one speaks of the filth underneath, nor do they address it, and haul it into the court of the land.  There are a few lonely voices trying to speak of above the hymns they sing so loudly as to not hear the cries…

     

    I do not know what it will take before their sheets fall once and for all, when the children unite and yank them off, when this vicious insanity will stop. 

     

    I get so incensed with the idea that this is called a ‘church’.

     

    It is the devils playground where children’s lives are sacrificed, where pedophiles reign supreme, and the brainwashed walk their narrow path, unquestioning, unchallenging, and unseeing to their final destination Heaven, to afraid of Hell to stop.  Yet no one tells them they are in Hell.

     

    The swing from Art to the harsh reality of sexual abuse hidden behind the white church…shows the distance I traveled, the valley of death that I traversed to be able to stand and ponder, Art.

     

     

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    Art is the complete opposite of that Hell.
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    The soul recognizes its worth in the wonder of Art.