Love is My Muse

‘Love is like a beautiful flower which I may not touch, but whose fragrance makes the garden a place of delight just the same.’ ~ Helen Keller

                     Daisies 48" x 36"

I've been musing about love...

What is love?

Love is the heart of creation.

Love is a flower blossoming into its fullest expression. It is the act of becoming.

Love energy feels at once peaceful... and joyous anticipation.

A plant is in love when it is nurtured by the sun, the wind, and the rain...

Love feels alive and thriving.

When I feel in love, I am in the energy of becoming my greatest expression...

I'm letting love lead me.

Love is my muse.

Meeting inspiration.

The only way to be creative is to create.

Being creative requires inspiration, but you can’t always wait to be inspired. It doesn’t always come to you... Sometimes you have to go to it. You just have to put pen to paper or paint brush to canvas and create.

'When inspiration doesn't come, I go halfway to meet it.’ ~ Sigmund Freud

When I’m too much in my head I need to move my body, so I go for a walk. Walking clears my mind.

I let go of the puzzle I’m trying too hard to solve... I just walk it out.

I like to wander as I wonder... And somehow just by walking, the pieces all come together. 

‘My work is inspired by two things: the external world and the internal world. A good day is when they meet on canvas.’ ~ Bonnie Mandoe

Sometimes I am inspired to paint, and other times I paint to be inspired. I let my desire to create lead the way, and then I meet inspiration around every corner...

What do you do to meet inspiration?

If I were a painting...

If I were a painting, what would I be?

What is the essence of Me?...

My essence is a beautiful, blissful love energy that radiates out from my heart, warming me like a pink blanket.

My essence is a deep red, velvety rose...

It is sky blue and dreamy...  a feather floating in the wind.

It is an emerald green forest... full of magic and faerie tales... adventurous, courageous, fun and playful.

My essence is like a wild garden... rich with ideas, creativity and colour.

If I were a painting, what would I be?

I would be a wild garden of red roses...

If You were a painting , what would You would be?

The most important thing...

This weekend it’s Thanksgiving here in Canada, and where I live there is just so much to be grateful for!

If I made a list of everything I could think of it would be very long indeed. It includes my wonderful family, many like-minded friends, my health, the place I live and play, my studio, the wind, the ocean, sunny October days...

And then I was thinking...

All of these ‘things’ come and go. Relationships change, families evolve, children grow and live their own lives, careers change, sunny October days become rainy November days...

What am I most grateful for?

When life inevitably changes and I feel overwhelmed, sad or in a place of just ‘not knowing’ I say to myself, “Well, I always have Me.” I am so grateful for that connection I have. It always brings me back to a feeling of ‘Home’ and presence. Of just Be-ing. I'm my own best friend.

When I feel like throwing my arms up in the air and saying, “I give up!” It’s also nice to be able to say, “Well, I’m just going to paint.” Then I let everything else go...

That’s the most important thing.

Peace, Love, Beauty.

              ♥

intuition and creativity

Creation is a spiritual process. Everything first begins in the unseen world before it comes into Being.

Intuition is the female energy of spirit. It is a knowing sense of what is possible.

Creativity is the male energy of spirit. It is the outward action; the doing or making of something.

When we take inspired action then we are in the divine flow of energy. Life becomes magical and exciting!

A couple of months ago I had a thought, an idea, of a new studio space. I played with this idea for awhile... imagining the possibility of it. One day I had a sudden inspiration to act on it! And I did - right away! I immediately made a phone call and started the ball rolling...

Now I'm watching my creation coming into being. My studio is almost ready! Just a little more male energy and it will be ready for me to move in...

Inspired by a Wall

At this time of year I want to draw inward while the outside world seems to be in a flurry of activity. I need to be quiet and still. So easy it would be to just stay in bed and sleep...

As Christmas draws to a close, everything seems to slow down momentarily. How wonderful to have no agenda! I'm quite content to just lie in bed and stare at the wall...

Looking up to where the wall meets the ceiling, I let my eyes follow the lines and shapes created by the light and shadows. My mind begins to wander into little daydreams and stories... 

Hmmn... I see deserts and pyramids....

I do get excited about shapes! I reach for my camera and capture the image.

It feels good to stop and do nothing sometimes.

And you just never know when you might be inspired by a wall...

Being an Open Channel

In Julia Cameron's book 'The Right to Write' she says, "In a sense, our creativity is none of our business. It is a given, not something to be aspired to. It is a natural function of the soul." One of her tools in the book is what she calls guided writing or "channeled writing". We need to step aside and let the "Great Creator" work through us. It's about setting paintbrush to canvas, or pen to paper, and becoming an open channel to the flow of creativity.

So how do we do that? How do we tap into that flow? You can start by simply writing down every idea that comes into your head. I keep a journal at my bedside so I can write down my thoughts as they come to me. This is where I write my morning pages. I also keep an idea book with me always. I never know when an idea will strike. Sometimes I have to pull over in my car to write something down. (I use traffic jams to my advantage!).

Elizabeth Gilbert, author of 'Eat, Pray, Love', gave a great TED talk on how we can nurture our creativity. She said in ancient Greece and Rome people believed that creativity was this divine spirit that came to human beings from some distant and unknowable source. I love how she describes American Ruth Stone's experience of "writing" a poem - she would feel and hear a poem coming at her from over the landscape and would "run like hell" from the fields where she was working, to get to her house so she could write it down before it rumbled on past her like a thunderstorm...

So keep an idea book beside you and when you suddenly find yourself wide awake from some brilliant idea that came to you in a dream, you can capture it onto the page. And when you are at a red light or stuck in traffic, you can use it to your advantage... Ideas have a way of disappearing as fast as they come. Once you begin to write everything down, you'll be amazed at how the ideas begin to flow. It opens the channel.

To quote Julia Cameron again, "Writing is about getting something down, not about thinking something up."