Feeling the Love

Today, I want to say thank you.

Thank you to everyone who voted for my photo (the one decorating this post) in the Etsy Challenge last week, making me the winner in the photography category. (Now I'm up for weekly grand champion! Go over and vote, if you've got a minute.)

Thank you to Aevan who featured my fairy photo in her blog on Monday!

Thank you to all those who feature my photos in their treasuries on Etsy. I've been on the front page of Etsy three times in the last week and it just warms my heart that people are finding out about my shop because of the kindness of others. I am grateful to Etsy for coming up with such a fabulous means of promotion within the site.

Thank you to Ken & Charlotte of Paper Street for featuring me in their newsletter last week.

Thanks to my fellow POE members for featuring me twice on the blog in the last couple of weeks.

Thanks to Tara of Combustion Glassworks for creating the Sonoma Artisan Faire...I feel so blessed to have the opportunity to be part of what promises to be a dynamic show!

And finally, thanks to everyone who is stopping by this blog, cheering me on, and encouraging me not to give up on my dreams. You are all in my heart.

Gratitude

Last night I met with a group I started on campus called EarthSpeaks. We meet to talk about nature, the Earth, the environment. We meditate, do consciousness exercises, and even dabble in a little art.

I was feeling incredibly frazzled and stretched thin and I wasn't sure I could even make it to the group. I'm glad I went.

First, we walked the labyrinth fellow students created out of rocks on the south side of campus. It was meditative and relaxing for all of us to do this. It was my first time walking a labyrinth, but the experience was calming and restorative and I know I'll be back to the labyrinth much more often now.

Once inside, we created gratitude circles. I passed out pieces of construction paper, and we took crayons and markers and drew a circle. Inside, we wrote or drew what we were grateful for. Afterward, we shared our creations.

My heart was so full after hearing what everyone in the group is grateful for. So many of us were grateful for the people in our lives, both those close to us and those who help make our lives easier, like the people who work at the grocery store or the farmers who raise our food.

I put a lot of people into my circle...my friends and family, the people at school, the people who work at the stores I frequent, the musicians who have made a difference in my life.

I do this exercise every once in a while, especially when I am stressed out, to remind myself of all the blessings surrounding me each day. Sometimes it's as simple as being grateful for my eyes and legs and heart. Other times I am grateful for the air and the sky.

Try making your own circle. See what shows up in there. I find that I can never cram everything I'm grateful for into the circle I create, and I always end up leaving something or someone out. It goes to show just how much there is to be thankful for in life.

Balance

With the equinox on Monday, I've been thinking a lot about balance. How to balance work, art, school, time online, and time for me. It always makes me think of those performers who twirl a bunch of plates on sticks at one time. Keeping all of the parts of me going at once can be a beautiful art...or it can be a disaster.

At the moment, I am falling a bit more on the disaster side.

I have this incredible striving/perfectionism in me that keeps me working on a project so long that I become unproductive because I'm so damn tired. Yet, I want to tweak this and that and type just one more sentence or format just one more picture before I finish.

Or, I sit down to paint and collage, and before I know it my whole afternoon has flown by and I didn't pay the bills or take the car in for an oil change. (It's easy to let those mundane tasks fall by the wayside.)

It is a life-long practice, I think, to work toward balance. To give myself time to just do nothing and truly unwind (which is hard for me), to practice my art, to meditate, to network and create community, to see friends, to go to work, to be in nature, and to get things done around the house...whew! It's overwhelming just typing it all.

I realize I'm probably trying too hard. Striving too much. If I can just let go and let it all unfold as it wants to, it would all flow smoothly. Maybe I won't pay the bills just yet, or scrub the bathtub, or put away the pile of books on the floor. Maybe I can just allow it all to be. And allow that to be okay.

Inspiration: A Way With Words

Right now I am hugely inspired by the writer Linda Hogan. I first read her writing in a fabulous collection of writings called Road of Her Own. Then I picked up her book Woman Who Watches Over the World. I read it cover to cover...well, I devoured it, actually. After that book I read Dwellings and The Sweet Breathing of Plants, which Hogan co-edited. I felt like I was thirsty for writing just like this, writing that is honest, writing that celebrates nature, writing that examines the meat of life.

Here's a sampling from The Woman Who Watches Over the World:

"The shore is a place of endings and beginnings, of constant movement and change. In the ocean's fathomless depths is the roughness that takes mountains down into grains of sand, the dead into nothing, or almost so. The ocean swallows a beach one year and returns it another.

And so we sat, Georgianna and I. On the skin of the water, infant fish float in the clear sheltering sacs of their eggs, an eye visible, a curved fin, spine, the beating hearts we humans share, afloat, moving into these bodies like shells taken up by hermit crabs, the very precious being of all our bodies."

Hogan is a Chickasaw poet and she weaves Native American stories and history into her writing. She has been nominated for a Pulitzer, she's won an American Book Award, and her list of accolades goes on. But really, all those awards aren't important. What is important is how her turns of phrase inspire me to paint, to photograph, to share the beauty and the pain of the world in my own way.

This is why I must remember that days of filling the well are important. The last few days I've been tied to the computer, networking and applying to various fairs and festivals. And I feel dragged down. Completely the opposite of what I feel when I read Hogan's work, or stand outside and let the breeze tickle my skin.

Finding that balance between work and art, marketing and painting, networking and engaging with the outside world: that's the ultimate challenge, isn't it?

Anyway, today I'm taking time out for inspiration. I'm sitting down with Starhawk's The Earth Path, I'm going to meditate, listen to music, and get outside for a walk. The really important stuff.

Shine Your Light

“No one lights a lamp in order to hide it behind the door: the purpose of light is to create more light, to open people’s eyes, to reveal the marvels of the world.” -- Paulo Coelho, from The Witch of Portobello

This is why I've decided to delve back into the art world in a big way. Because I cannot keep my light hidden or obscured any longer. What good does that do? When I squash my light, it festers and creates problems. It doesn't want to be kept away from the world. If I instead allow it that delicious purple light to shine, it inspires others to shine their own special lights, and that creates more and more light!

I remember hearing Maya Angelou speak five years ago in Denver. She sang "This Little Light of Mine" and it was incredibly inspiring. I wanted to stand up, right there, and shout and sing about all the things I wanted to do. I wanted everyone to know! And why was I so inspired? Because there she was, letting her light shine!

What keeps our lights hidden? Criticism, jealousy, people who tell us "art doesn't make money," or "be realistic," or "only truly talented people can do what you want to do." I've decided that's all hooey. I know for sure that if we allow our inner light to shine and we use that light and put it into whatever work we want to do, we can create more than we can even imagine.

Leaping...

A week ago I took a leap and applied for an arts fair in Sonoma. And I am thrilled to say that I was accepted! This will be my first arts fair and I am nervous and excited. It definitely helps me feel like a "real" artist!

The funny thing is, doing arts & crafts fairs is a tradition in my family. My aunt and grandmother did crafts fairs all during the time I was growing up, and my aunt continues to do them. I come from a family of talented artists...it took me a long time to accept my place in that lineage.

I will be selling my photographs and mixed media collages, and I'll be sharing a booth with my talented friend Megan. Here are the details:

Sonoma Valley Holiday Artisan Faire
Sunday, November 23
Noon to 5:30 p.m.

Sonoma Veterans Memorial Hall
126 First Street West
Sonoma, CA

Dipping My Toe in the Water

This is me, bravely putting myself and my words back out into the world. I am honestly scared. I don't know what will happen. And for me, someone who struggles with going with the flow instead of having to know how every moment will unfold, this not-knowing is difficult.

I've taken a two-year hiatus from blogging (with a few fits and starts) for many reasons

1. wrist pain
2. feeling like a failure
3. comparing myself to others in an unhealthy way
4. needing time to really find myself
5. needing to discover that the way to art for me is through nature and spirit

When I started out on this crazy creative adventure five years ago, I had no way of knowing where it would take me. All I knew was I wanted to write children's books. Eventually, as I nourished my inner artist, the adventure led to photography and art.

I spent each day writing, making wonderful, artsy online friends, dabbling in art, and exploring the world around me. I created an online portfolio for my photos. I helped edit an online journal. I submitted a manuscript, it was accepted, and a year-and-a-half later it became a book. It seemed like everything was working out.

But, four months after my book came out, it disappeared from the world: I had to cancel my contract with the publisher because of abysmal communication and deception.

I was devastated. I didn't want to show my face anymore. I blogged for a while, trying to put on a brave face, trying to act like this didn't completely tear me down. It did. And I couldn't seem to make anything work after that. Eventually, a year later, I quit blogging and disappeared from the community I had cherished.

The experience with the book taught me a lot. I found out that I can do many things I didn't realize I could do. I learned that standing up for myself is an important way to take care of myself. I learned that even though the book isn't around anymore, I am still a published author. I tend to avoid calling myself that, but friends and family won't let me forget that I accomplished something big.

There was a shadow side to the situation too. And though the shadow lessons are much ickier, they are often even more valuable.

Intense feelings of failure caused me to go underground. I did not want anything to do with writing or children's books. I really felt like it was all over. How could I continue when the one thing I had built up as the thing that would launch my career had dissolved?

I continued to take pictures, which probably saved my inner artist. But I stopped believing that I could ever truly call myself a writer or an artist. Instead, I lived vicariously through the artistic friends I had made. I cheered them on, mostly in my own head, because talking or emailing with them made me acknowledging my lack of art and writing.

Eventually, I lost touch with, or drifted away from, the amazing community I had become a part of. I regret this now. I stayed in the shadows, lurking on blogs and projecting all of my hopes onto the artists I had bonded with. I felt jealous at times that they were experiencing such success. And I started to feel anger. Why was it happening for them and not for me? I didn't realize at the time that this jealousy and anger stemmed from my deliberate squashing of my own artist self. They were doing nothing more than being their amazing, sparkling selves. I was the one with a problem; I was the one who had pulled a thick, deceptive veil over my eyes.

Part of this murky mess was my fear of failing again. I kept myself very small, so that I would not get noticed. That way, if I did fail, not as many people would know about it. (As an aside, I now realize that the whole mess with the book was not a failure. But, boy, my mind sure wanted me to believe it at the time, and it hindered me for a long time. In fact, I still cannot bring myself to think about writing in any serious way.)

Some bit of me still wanted to try being in the art world, though. I had a couple photography shows at a local tea bar. I sell my photography on Etsy. But I didn't want to launch myself out there in any big way for fear of feeling the sting of disappointment again.

That all changed over the last two months. I had a life-changing dream. After much time spent contemplating it and the synchronicities that occurred after I had the dream, I realized I had to let my artist out again. But this time, I had to let her out with the intention not to come from a place of ego, but from a deeper, more spiritual place within. I knew this would help in two ways: it would allow my light to truly shine, and it would help keep me from comparing myself to all the other amazing and talented artists out there so I could instead honor my process.

If I can come from a spiritual place, I can see that there is room for all of us, that the more artists the better, because the world desperately needs artists.

In addition, I discovered that my connection with nature, in conjunction with my intuition, is going to be the path to my creativity. I have already begun working with this and it is completely enlivening. It feels amazing to have this clarity.

And so, here I am, writing this post. Laying it all out there. I hope to share this leg of my journey with honesty and humility and with the intention that this sharing will come from my heart, not my head. I am so grateful that second chances exist.