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It warms my soul to sit back and look at the whole year as a book telling a story of who I am, and how I am creating myself. 2017 marks a crossroads in my creative path where the currents of the Divine Muse took the reigns and steered me towards deeper expression through my visual art and writing. I was moved to begin weaving the stories of my ten vision quests into a book, which I'll continue to work on in 2018. Here are my Top 10 Highlights from 2017, may these inspire you to ponder what shaped your year. Learning about the Kintsugi Bowl Ceremony and making the bowls for my Wild Hearts Women's Group (to break and glue back together with gold paint in the fault lines) made my heart sing in 2017. Read a Poem about Kintsugi here A trip to New Mexico brought me the inspiration to write a short story titled "Coyote on the Fence". The scene wouldn't leave me alone until I wrote the story. Read the short essay here Two art classes with Ruth Armitage catapulted me into the realms of abstraction. Now I'm obsessed with painting rocks. Rocks under water, ...
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Another exquisite shrine building workshop on Saturday, December 9, 2017! What a joy to bring people together and act as a midwife to help them birth new beauty in the world. A group of five noodled, chose, cut, glued and placed for hours to create their unique pieces. Sometimes I wonder how I got so lucky to be doing this? I must have done something really good in a past life. And the world is a better place for their efforts! ...
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I realized I hadn't posted pics of the third shrine workshop we did back in October. Another amazing day of open-hearted creativity. More, more, more! We just can't get enough of these sweet temples of delight. We had a full house here in the Down to Earth Studio that day. Creativity vibes were floating in the air. The Muse was present and working Her magic ...
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Humans beings are inherently creative. It's true. Every time I teach a collage class I become more amazed at how students tear paper, dab paint and combine shapes and colors and create beauty where just minutes before there was nothing. Art is very personal. Each person takes what's in the heart and puts it out onto the canvas to express a longing or a knowing. Miraculous! And so fun to witness. I get to be the midwife who sets up the tools and instruments, encourages deep breathing and watches something be born from the Soul. Lucky me! ...
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It's great fun to create in ways that come easiest, not always comfortable to be challenged to do things differently. Every year my friend Linda and I take a class at the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology on the Oregon coast. This year we took a collage class with Margot Voorhies Thompson. My normal way of approaching a collage piece is to add paint and paper in layer after layer. Margot encouraged us to work in simple compositions, using fewer materials. These pieces are the result of working simply, with paper only. I met the challenge! ...
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Yesterday was another magical day of shrine making with seven Creative Souls in the Down to Earth Studio. Shrine makers worked intently on crafting every small detail, sometimes in silence, sometimes with laughter. The day just flew by as we were held in the flow; time seemed to stand still in that space. And, once again. the Down to Earth Studio was blessed with the grace of community creating together. Once they are finished shrines want to be witnessed and appreciated to fully work their magic. They can bring us peace and comfort and serve as reminders to slow down and focus on what is important in our lives—our hearts, and our souls. Here are photos of yesterday's little beauties. There are a hundred ways to kneel and kiss the ground (Thank you, Rumi). We can all do our own form of ground-kissing and kneeling. It really changes the world, don't you think? And when we spend more time kneeling and kissing, our big fat egos get softer, and our hearts get lighter. We become more soulful. And when we hug it's not our ribs and arms touching, but something more.Namaste' Dear Ones, GG ...
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Kintsugi is the 500 year old Japanese practice of recognizing beauty in broken things. Another name for it is the golden joinery. You may have heard of this before: broken things, like bowls, are mended back together and the cracks are painted with gold. While the general Western view of broken objects is that they have lost their value, practitioners of kintsugi believe that never-ending consumerism is not a spiritually rewarding experience. The kintsugi method conveys a philosophy not of replacement, but of awe, reverence, and restoration. The gold-filled cracks of a once broken item are a testament to its history. My Wild Hearts Women's Circle meets quarterly in Ashland, Oregon. We also participate in a vision quest ceremony together every year. We go way back with our friendship and story council. I had the privilege and honor of making small bowls so that we could participate in the kintsugi ceremony together. We witnessed each person breaking her bowl, one by one. Then we worked together to glue the pieces back into place, some easily, others more challenging. Our bowls ended up not good as new, but better than new. Ernest Hemingway said “The world breaks everyone and afterward many ...
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The Inner Fires of Unbreakable Will I just had breakfast with a dear friend and we shared a deep and meaningful conversation about life, death and, like almost every conversation we have these days, the political milieu in which we are living We laughed about Saturday Night Live skits and teared up at...read more ...
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