Hearts break without sound
Tears falling blinded by snow.
Seeds yearn for spring’s warmth.

Love never gives up.

Sometimes, we give up on love or believe it isn’t present, or that it doesn’t care to be with us.

Love is always present. Love is always caring for and with us.

We need to care for ourselves to know its power, to experience its majesty, to be free to Love.

I played with shape, colour and Washi Tape yesterday.

It was pure fun.

Sometimes, my “I am an adult and adults don’t do that…” belief (combined with my fear of making mistakes) makes me want to do things to fit in with the way I think others want me to be.

Sometimes, it gets in the way of my letting go of the limiting belief I must have all the answers for whatever is going on in the world around me. I do not have all the answers for anyone but myself. And, while at times I might think it would be easier if someone out there had all the answers for me, the beautiful truth is, my answers all live within my heart. To know my truth, to live my life for all I’m worth, I must be willing to dive deep into my heart and stand true and firm in my own light.

In Braving the Wilderness, Brene Brown writes,

“Stop walking through the world looking for confirmation that you don’t belong. You will always find it because you’ve made that your mission. Stop scouring people’s faces for evidence that you’re not enough. You will always find it because you’ve made that your goal. True belonging and self-worth are not goods; we don’t negotiate their value with the world. The truth about who we are lives in our hearts. Our call to courage is to protect our wild heart against constant evaluation, especially our own. No one belongs here more than you.”

I may or may not have been indulging in a little bit of self-evaluation recently and coming up short on my assessments of myself.

In playing through the angst yesterday, I let go of evaluating myself as falling short of others expectations and released my unloving habit of repeating what others tell me they think of me as my truth. I surrendered my search for confirmation I do not fit in and dove deep into my right to be myself in all that I am.

Yesterday I played and in my play I was reminded of my wild heart’s yearning to dance and laugh and sing and throw itself into the air with joyful abandon and fly on moonbeams of rainbow colours cascading into the open arms of Love.

In Love, all that is on my path is Love. The rest is just…. stuff. No judgment. No labelling. No making a list of defects. No calling myself out. It’s all just stuff.

And in falling into the open arms of Love, I felt my heart stir in wild anticipation of having room to breathe and grow its roots deeper into the creative essence at the core of my being me.

I played yesterday. It was pure delight imbued with the tender sweet bliss of divine surrender.

Namaste.

Years ago, a very dear friend shared a poem she’d written for her sister. “It reminds me of you,” she said, commenting on my tendency to be tenacious, to seldom give up and to keep growing, even in the midst of trauma and turmoil.

Her poem lead to the title of my book, “The Dandelion Spirit.” — It’s the true life fairytale of falling into love with a man I thought was Prince Charming only to awaken on the road to hell, dancing with the Prince of Darkness. By the end of that journey, I had given up on me, given up on my life and even given up on my life with my daughters. It took a big miracle (it included a blue and white police car) and then many, many every day miracles for me to grow out of that darkness to live the life of my dreams today. This beautiful life where I am totally in love with me, myself and I and everyone in my world. And btw, being in love with me, myself and I means loving that woman who got so lost on the road to hell, she deserted her daughters and wanted to end her own life every day.

But, back to dandelions…

I love dandelions. I think they get a bad rap.

Accused of being weeds. Torn out of the gound by their roots. Poisoned. Mowed over. Cemented over. And still, they grow. Up through the cracks. In wild places. In backyards. No matter what we do to them, dandelions persevere. Because, for the dandelion, there is only one thing to do. To fly free with the wind and plant themselves wherever they land.

Like Love.

No matter how hard we try to deny its presence, or ignore its call for us to let down our guard, step out from behind our walls, Love perseveres. In the darkness. In the light. At the edges of our sorrow, and in the depths of our grief, Love is always there, as radiant as sunshine hiding behind grey clouds.

And though we may yell and scream at it for stealing away the ones we love or for piercing our hearts in what feels like all the wrong places, Love never screams back. It simply keeps on flowing and calling us to fly free of the hurts and pains of life’s journey so that we can dance in the sunlight of our own radiance and be our own unique expression of Love.

May we all be like the dandelion and fly free on the wind’s of Love to dance on moonbeams and sunstreaks streaming in through the open windows of our heart.

Namaste.

One of the challenges/opportunities of the 30 Day Art Project is to create a piece within a specified timeframe. Now, I must clarify — the timeframe is arbitrary. But it is important.

I have a tendency to ‘overthink’ (ok it’s more than a ‘tendency’ it’s an affinity/habit). Overthinking in creative practice can lead to over-working a piece, burying its true message under layers and layers of ‘stuff’. It’s also highly possible overthinking in life can lead to over-everythinging which results in burying our hearts beneath all the stuff we layer on in the misguided belief ‘the stuff’ will protect us from getting hurt, feeling sad, knowing grief.

In this piece, I kept to the timeframe of 30 minutes.

It was hard.

I wanted to go back into the piece. To add, delete, change, rework it. But, at 30 minutes, I had to step away. To accept it was done.

And that’s where the real challenge presented itself. I didn’t want to share it. It’s not my best work. It’s not quite right. It’s not…. blah. blah. blah.

My critter/ego mind had a heyday with rationalizing why I should just scrap this piece entirely and start all over again. Or better yet, layer on top of it enough stuff so ‘the beautiful mess’ was hidden so that only what I wanted people to see would be revealed.

My inner voice of wise counsel whispered her wisdom lovingly into my heart, “It’s not about the quality of the piece,” she murmured. “It’s about committing to the process. About learning the art of letting go of ‘perfection’ to delve into the spirtual nature of your creation.”

I was surprised by her comment about ‘the spiritual nature of your creation.” How does creating in a timeframe open me up to that? I wondered. (Or perhaps it was the critter/ego mind expressing its skeptical nature.)

Which is when the truth opened itself up in the light of awareness.

Being present to the canvas (and life) is not a perfect process. It’s not even all that predictable a one. Being present to and with everything is about presence. My presence. Your presence. It’s about our willingness to be real, unadorned, unfiltered, actually present without all the accoutrements of life and our beliefs of who we are cluttering our minds with stories of how we ‘should’ be and how our lives should unfold.

And, it’s about honouring the presence of others, seeing the holy and sacred in one another and celebrating the goodness at the heart of our human essence.

In our presence, the holy nature of our divine essence is revealed through our vulnerability. Vulnerable, we are seen. We are known. We are beloved. In our vulnerability, we live in the joy of being beautifully, perfectly human, in all our holy imperfections, all our humanness, all our beautiful mess.

And that’s where we find ourselves falling into the arms of Love, always.

And that’s where Love catches us, always.

Namaste

I love creating backgrounds and then words to put with the background. What I’ve been noticing, however, is that I am treating my art as ‘precious’. I am worried that to actually paint/write the words onto the image might somehow destroy the image. So I hesitate.

Art-making, like life, is precious. It cannot be experienced or lived fully by being treated like it is ‘precious’. By hesitating at the edge of the field and holding back from stepping completely into the game of life.

Life must be lived in the center of its action, its messy, its hard places and rocky shores, its beautiful landscapes and stunning views that invite you to let go and fly free.

To experience life (and art-making) fully, you gotta take risks, get into the fray and duke it out with your anxieties, fears, hesitations, doubts and face, full-on, your desire to treat it as ‘precious’ when what it really is… is LIFE itself.

Namaste.