A Doozy

These are some of my wintery deccies, I've been playing in normal and uv light...I've also come up against my very limited html understanding and the three column code loaded to my blogger page...it's all gone more than a bit screwy.

Anyone who could rescue me from having to start again from scratch yet help me end up with a lovely functional the column set up that looks the same on everyone's computer gets a free picture or two!

In between whiles I send Huge hugs, Big Kisses and best wishes for the New Year to everyone, I've a feeling 2009 is going to be a doozy...if 2008 was the year of change I feel 2009 could be the one of astonishment...don't ask me why...just a feeling...I wish you an astonishing 09!

Gifts

When you give something part of you is open, momentarily letting glimpses of your soul shine through, opening those aspects into communication and healing with the soul of those that open up to receive.

Something wonderful clicked in me yesterday, as I wrote my morning pages I became aware that everyone on the planet has a dream. Even if that dream is just to make it to the next moment, find food or water, survive the next punch, pass through pain or just sit down and rest. Internally, awareness taking stock of the moment we are in and beginning to hope for the next moment....and for a few moments I saw the planet from that perspective...a planet of hope energy in all it's different flavours. Saw it's completeness, how everything conceived is included in this very moment, the ups, downs, good, bad, ecstasy, hopes, peace and desperation.

I feel that somewhere, someone is holding part of this whole for you and for me. This is my belief, my understanding of existence...that if something exists, it has to exist...Therefore, if there is something that you know exists, and you are not being it, then someone else is being it. So these moments for me, as well as moments of sheer awe and the most tender joy at seeing a 'whole' moment, are also always ones of deep gratitude. Gratitude for life and existence, and deep gratitude that in this moment I am neither perpetrator or victim of anything I could not bear to be; and gratitude for all those brave enough to be living wild and beautiful dreams so that we can see them and aspire to them even before we are ready to be them ourselves.

Loving to be reminded just how much of a gift life continuously is.

And This is the start of my thank you for this year blogs, This thanks going to Halcyon Pink..for among other amazing things the video above.

Winter Branches

I can't believe this picture was taken just hours before everyone became ill! They're still ill! Though this evening finally is an improvement on the last couple of days, there's even hope I might get a nights sleep!

Here are the atrociously lit, taken with my phone, want to do it now, photos of my last three winter picture, they actually make up one A2 picture, so that'll show you how off the lighting is, the middle one is the truest to what I see on my wall. If the light is good enough tomorrow I'm hoping to put up a new panoramic at the top of the page, with all my deccies for Christmas.

Big Kiss

Saying Hi!

I'm actually stopped in my tracks tonight...finally there is nothing practical I can do...everybody is ill and they have picked a separate room each to hide in, so I can't clean, sort, decorate or paint!

I'm also a little nervous to go to bed with everybody so spread out I'm not sure I'll hear them if they need me.

At least that brings me finally to here, for myself. The TAW has opened up huge things for me, and I'm constantly busy at the moment...either with my own thinking/writing/clearing or community creative tasks such as facepainting, crown making or snowflake glittering with local children at groups.

This year for the first in a few I've really found Christmas and all it's preparation and decorations a wonderfully enjoyable distraction from the ever deepening cold and greyness of the shortening days. By the time it's all finished and packed away we'll be headed in the direction of Spring at the beginning of a New Year

I'm usually busy racing to complete things before my next Birthday but for the last couple of years have been really ill January through March...So we'll see. I'm trying to take a bit better care of myself through these weeks in the hope it'll pay off then.

I've been celebrating winter in my pictures, a couple of which are here today and a couple more I promise I'll post in the next few days, I have a ceiling full of snowflakes too!

The pics are play and experimentation, but I'm liking the way they are going...everything has irredescent pastel in, which historically I've found annoying in some way...too much...but this time I'm loving the fact that when I sit in different seats I see different pictures.

I hope your lead up to Christmas is going well.

Big Kiss

Tiredness

The warm dry smell of tiredness
Invading in waves
My conscious awareness
Stripping energy and sapping strength
melting resistance, befuddling my brain
Tiredness
Tired and dry and lonely in the noise
Needing softness and support
Longing to stop all other forces
To drop the socks
The shirts
The plates
Longing to meet all arguments
With the gaze of non-recognition
And just sleep.

Ten Years Younger

It's a beginning

I woke up this morning feeling happy (and it was finally my lay-in Yay!) but as I lay there something else gradually began to dawn on me...I felt like myself, only ten years ago!

That's actually a little odder than it sounds.

You know how sometimes a smell sends you back for a second, or finding a childhood toy can bring a hint to you of how you used to feel inside when you played with it...it was very like that, only incredibly solid. As if I just woke up in my old house, completely me, could tell you which clothes I had in my wardrobe, what toiletries were in the bathroom, everything. Solid. It didn't fade out either, I just lay there feeling strangely and wonderfully me, but a different me. Most odd.


It was only once I was up and interacting with the kids that I suddenly realised the sensation had gone, and that, just like when you've had a whiff of a smell from your past, I could no longer feel in my body what it felt like at all.


It brought to mind all the people that I've heard say that they don't change on the inside, that the body changes but we feel the same internally, still feel twenty five at sixty five...well not me! I feel quite quite different, and I didn't know it until this morning.

Okay, that peculiar insight into my mind aside...the other good things today are this Halcyon Pink Belief Buffet video:

The fact that I have run out of things to send to the charity shop.

The Wonderful Creative Goddess Course I am about to enroll in and invite a friend to, hosted by the Ever Loving Leonie.
(I say here: enrol! enrol! Grab such a lovely opportunity to shine and embrace and play...and there's extra squashiness in the form of delightful giftiness if you do it before December 1st)

And the fact that I finally began to lay colour on paper today... after a few weeks of clearing, the doodling has begun again.

Time to paint

It's so lovely to keep waking up in a good mood :) It doesn't last perfectly all day, but it's in the background most of the time and it's lovely.

I'm beginning to see the end of the mass clear-out of the house...really nearly might as well have moved!

It's been a longer process than I'd have guessed...and I still have more to go, which is how I'd like it...I want to stay with the 'it's passed, move it out' energy for a while, even as an on going process from now, so nothing needs to be perfect and finished anytime soon.

I'm still working on week six of the TAW...Behind as ever! It's quite a biggy to call into awareness one's concept of God (which for me is Existence, Universe, All That Is) in relation to any one particular thing...and evidently calling into awareness my beliefs/feelings/concept of money is another one!

Abundance to me is the flow through me in any form, inward or outward all well and good...unless it's that one bit too much attention that one of the kids want, or money...then suddenly I am exploring the concept of lack!

All interesting...at least I feel I'm approaching the moment I can ask for the answer to this one...hopefully I shall be heading in to week seven before Saturday...

...and even better than that, I hope I'm going to put paint onto paper before the end of today!!!!!

Pilgrimage

One of the times I shaved my hair

Okay, right at this moment I'm tired...hungry and tired, so this is going to be woefully short for a first blog in TEN days!!!

But I wanted to stop by and say Hi! I'm not quite irretrievably buried under the mountain of 'stuff' I am clearing from my house, but my day to day life is!

I am glad to say that this is what I've been waiting for since the beginning of 2008 and I'm so relieved it has arrived...I had such a deep sense of this healing and changing occurring this year and for a minute there I lost faith.

I'm waking up happy and deeply grateful in the mornings, looking around my house, realising that I've no idea how this will all end up (though it's gradually becoming clearer) and just putting one thing in a bag after the other!

Lilly Rose blogged the other day about her Aha! moment about making unhealthy choices primarily because they are the ones she knows and is comfortable with. I find it so hard to break out of that.

I remember one healer I worked with asking what my life would be like without a particular problem I had and I realised I had no idea. I couldn't even begin to imagine that life, I had never lived it! I felt it was like asking a baby in the womb to imagine the outside world...not possible.

For me these changes had to become a pilgrimage, a journey I have to take on faith, following the quietest threads inside myself into the unknown and through the unknown. I have actually shaved my head as a mark for these pilgrimages before...painted my nails orange, dyed my hair orange, carried a wand, carried a journal, worn a toe ring...these have all been marks and touchstones for these journeys of change toward the unknown...my sign of commitment and somehow the physical link to the unseen thread I am following. This time I am wearing dark kohl around my eyes! some days less, most days lots!

It's a bit like putting a new painting you have fallen in love with in your house, it doesn't fit but you love it, so gradually everything around it changes to accommodate it.

Lol!! That was longer than I anticipated!!

I send you a Big Kiss and hope to be at least looking down the other side of the mountain by the tine I get back.

Transition!!!!

I'm having such an amazing time!

The sun is shining today, the air is clear and very crisp and I'm sat with my huge back door open letting int he November sun and chilly temperature (with a full sari wrapped around my shoulders and my ear muffs on!)

I don't get to the blogging stage a lot at the moment, but it's all for good reasons. Some days I've been terribly low but only with facing the demons I'm ousting so it's all good in the long run.

My house is still a mess!!!! but it's a good progressing mess and I'm learning to go with the flow, there's years of stagnation and accumulation to wade through and rinse away...if it takes me a month it's a minuscule fraction of the years it's been building.

I took some time a few days ago to look through other TAW blogs and remembered that I'd fancied doing the Soul Coaching that Pen is doing, thinking damn, missed it, went to take a peak only to find the house clearing majorly on the agenda there as well! I'm happy about that.

Clearing the house strangely seemed the first step to me to enable me to clear my body...not quite got an intellectual grasp on that, but it's working...feeling less out-of-control and that I can choose now to eat as I want...

And the transition from week four to five is finally coming to a close! I had read on to week five, but had not felt finished with week four so had put my tasks on hold (my clear an item from your wardrobe/closet, and list a thing you haven't changed, turned into mammoth tasks!) today I finally wrote my letter from my eighty year old self, Grandmother Julia! and it goes like this:


Look forward to it! Enjoy it, Love it, and it is all yours for the keeping. Every moment experienced is a gift of a thousand memories and connections. Your life is beautiful and you are as beautiful as life; See it, seize it, dance it , kiss it, embrace it. Write it and paint it the deepest colours and move with an open body into it's joyous, exuberant adventures; Sex and laughter, dreaming and dancing, dressing and helping, healing and moving. Hold it and witness it, everything within you is possible.
Grandmother Julia

Bigger

I realise
In that moment
I can't recall
The nature of falsities
Usually occupying
My mind

The Peace is bigger
The Love is deeper
So much so
All else
Is a pinprick
In the universe
I see those shadows
Melt faster
Than I can focus on them

Not missed

So opposite
To the chasm left
When I can't focus
On this Love and Peace
For all the false dreams
I am holding.

Ino and Gaara Picture story!

MF Designer

Ino and Gaara wanted to go to the Anime Expo 2008 at London's Excel

So after executing a weeks worth of costume-jutsu, everyone met at Bank on the DLR

Headed to a cafe, where cake was eaten, Guy-liner applied, and pins stuck into Ino's head

Next stop the Expo for moody pictures

And friend making!

Budding artists were at work

Finally, There was the journey home

And someone to squeeze!

For IBTB of the TAW!

This is just a little post about a little box...it's a couple of inches across and I made it when I was pregnant and trying to get used to not working...it's my half hour activities box. If I can't make up my mind what to do I pick a scroll and have to do what it says, be it a chore or a pleasure...certainly makes you think clearly whether there's something you want to do!

Peek-a-Boo!

How am I supposed to concentrate? It's hard work being grumpy and trying to have 'issues' when this one keeps popping up with a grin on his face!

Love, love, love.

Digging out some of the bits of me I struggle to love at the moment...everything tumbles in together for me, creativity, sexuality, flow of life and Spirit...and somewhere in the middle of all these drives is a big fat mean and grumpy policeman squashing it all down saying no! no! no!

Seriously wishing today that he would just bugger off and let me be the bohemian polyamorous pagan I am underneath. I'm remembering that I have a very old dictionary somewhere, where the meanings of words like licentious, lascivious and perverse all have quite lovely juicy definitions, rather than the pejorative ones that they have nowadays...perhaps if my policeman could just be a bit more Zen and a lot less disapproving, read the old dictionaries rich in diverse explanation rather than moral judgement...

Though somewhere in this I am learning. This may not be the age of artists leaving the towns and cities to return to the influences and timings of nature, living together in physical communities, but communities are happening on-line...and somewhere in this a sensation a hope is growing in me. That these on-line explorations and encouragements to be creative are very much about life, not about escaping from it or filling empty spaces within it, but about learning to change it; re-equipping more and more people to be creative, full stop, in their nature of living...colouring outside the lines, creating richness and diversity and a more Zen set of internal policeman.

Yep, I'd come out of hiding for that!

This just sends me!

I love Sia, I love listening to her, but the chance to see Sia perform live is one I recommend you grab with both hands...I spent half the night with goosebumps in a very warm room! This is called Day Too Soon and it's one of my faves, shows off Sia sense of fun and her amazing voice. Enjoy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmMjOOhgwso

Reading way too much!

I can't do this no reading thing!!!!!

It's as much part of me as breathing and moving and sleeping! I am managing to curb my behaviour slowly if what I am doing is immersing myself in other's work instead of my own creativity...and I've allowed myself to read and work with some of my own material.

I've started and finished this A2 pencil portrait of a friend in the day or two before she had her baby....and it's the first portrait I've ever done where I wasn't allowed to put a face in!

I find I am so busy and feeling overwhelmed by the amount I have to do...and that I am being rescued form this and other sensations by the Daily Morning Pages from The Artists Way...

Each time I begin to write the complaint 'I have so much to do!!!' it is instantly translated into the wonderfulness of 'having so much to do'! So much choice, life is so full of amazing things to do! My life is full of things I love to do!

My other joyous writing discovery is ruminating over words I've shuddered to hear ringing in my head from school reports...Lazy..bone idle...and discovered through writing them down how much I LOVE THESE WORDS!

LAZY

BONE IDLE

LAZY BONES

I even wrote a life story for Dame Lazy Bones and loved every aspect of her life!
All the sayings with bones in keep popping up, feel it in my bones, get to the bones of it, bad to the bone, work your fingers to the bone! Loving it all at the moment!

I am lazy! If I can see a short cut I generally take it, if I can cut back to the bones of the matter I will. It's me and life here who need to haggle over what is necessary, never had much time for the middle guys!

Dame lazy bones wears ridiculously deeply frilly clothes and a huge hat BTW, I guess she has time for all that nonsense because her bed isn't made.

Lucy in The Sky

I have to follow that last one with some of my mum's amazing sky piccies

Painting Sky

Sitting underneath The Painting Sky
Where creation
Has opened up its heart
In all its brilliance

"God has left the back door open,
my mother always said to me"

My mother says to me.

Wingspan

I see his wingspan stretch
The light embraces him
The clearest breeze
Caresses his head
His movement stirs within

Leaves me haunted

A singing from the sky
Peaceful breath
A promise bringing
Of flying in the light

No Reading!!!???

Okay, I'm here as promised..it's late in the day here in the UK, but hopefully I can get this posted to all three blogs before time is called.

I think this is going to be somewhat of a ramble...you are forewarned.

Starting with not reading....I haven't, started that is, working with the logic that allowing ourselves two weeks for each week is to make the process more achievable rather than less...I did set myself the challenge of completing ten days no reading though...tomorrow is Friday... so another M,T,W,T,F,S & Sunday will make ten? er no, it makes eight! Okay I'm aiming at eight then.

I AM TERRIFIED OF NOT READING FOR EIGHT DAYS!

How am I supposed to do this? Crap. I get it, I want to do it...My work will benefit, my backside will benefit, I will ring my mum!...I just don't know if I have the focus. I am trying to step into this Etsy thing, even if I only allow the minimum reading to allow for set-up, what a place to try not to browse!
And I've been off-line so much in the last few weeks I feel out of touch already...and guilty(!!??) for not keeping up with others as well as myself! I'm enjoying the sense of friendship and community, and we do this by reading each others blogs and comments and e-mails! Hmmm...actually I can make international calls for free, perhaps this would have been a good time to exchange some phone numbers! too late now, no-one will read this!Lol!

Okay reading rant finished.

My two year old boy fell in love with a baby doll today...nearly all his little friends have baby brothers and sisters this year, another two in the last three months and another on the way...I think he's feeling broody! We left the shop with a doll that suckles and coos and giggles and babbles and only cries if you take it's bottle and lay it down (and then only for 30 secs) it has a motorised face and 'breathes' when it sleeps...He has been in heaven all day looking after this baby and it's been astounding to watch. he had to put the baby to bed next to his cot, just before his own nap (and again at bedtime tonight)telling me I must shush and not wake the baby...and then when he woke up all I could hear through the monitor was "I love oo" "I love oo".

I'll try to get a picture tomorrow.

Okay, enough rambling!

I'm hoping to post about a pinhole artist Paul Debois in the next few days...I'd like to do a little interview with him (as if my list of creative 'must do's were not long enough yet this week!...still I shan't be reading, or net browsing, or watching T.V. so I should have plenty of time! )
(and yes I'll ring you too mum!)

Big kiss

I've been gone tooooo long!

Life has been changing, and I'm amazed at the speed things hurtle once they get going!

I'm hugely happy to say that Julia Cameron's The Artists Way has been stupendously helpful for me!...I now face two weeks (well it'll be ten days) of no reading...No idea how Ill pull that one off, but it's already interesting to try...and I have been writing and clearing so much!
It has rather thrown my life into a jumble, but I'm kinda content just to find what finally settles into place.

I think the fact that we are on the slopes toward mid-winter will have an effect though. In making room for the Christmas process, both on the supply and demand sides, I hope there will still be room to allow the flow that will carry me through the beginning of next year.

I don't want to lose this amazing feeling of connection again, I've been here before in the bliss of the deepening and opening...Perhaps, as this time I understand even more dearly the value of this authenticity and it's vulnerability in the throes of life, I shall be able to hold to this clarity to keep calm in the centre of any storms that well up. !!Wish me luck!! I shall add that the resource of the TAW blog and community has been wonderful for this process and who knows...perhaps we may find support for each other that lasts well into our creative lives.

Been photo playing (as you'll tell from this blog), portraiting (unable to show here) and am 90% commited to the Etsy shop idea...In addition to my three morning pages his morning I worked out the numerology for the name SisterJulia's Etsy Shop and it came back the same 28/10 pattern as my date of birth...that's nudged me a bit more to going for it!

Okay. I only planned a tiny blog to say Hi! and promise to blog again, huh! I'm promising to blog again tomorrow and back to more regularly from now...I've had my breather, so for now I send you

A Big Kiss!!!

Lovely Iris

Pirate Girl by Iris...I love the blues in this

Things are shifting constantly for me at the moment....result...I've turned my house upside down! Massive re-organise and clear-out...obviously because I wasn't quite busy enough!

Hopefully, before too long this will mean my decks are clear and I can get back to drawing and blogging a little more easily!I had a lovely and very productive weekend...one of the joys of which was receiving the picture below from Iris, The Giveaway Tree winner!

I know Iris from lj, where she has always been a kind and generous supporter offering encouraging comments to many artisits at play and work...She also creates lovely mixed media paintings such as the ones here today, and is currently studying on Suziblu's Petite Dolls course.

I've had a blast messaging back and forth with Iris since she won, and I asked her permission to share a couple of quotes with you...these are my faves!

"Ooh wow that's so awesome!! Thank you sooo much! Heh I'm surprised, I never win anything usually!"

"I got it today!!! OMG it's masssive! I thought it was A4. Such a nice surprise! I've put it up on the mantelpiece. I also just LOVE those little cards you included. I've stuck a bunch of them upright at the back of my keyboard so my eye keeps catching the cheerful colours & phrases while I'm working."

"I'm so excited to have more art here, I've been talking to my boyfriend about it all evening. I wanna surround myself with art. I don't care if I have no room to sit anymore, it'll be worth it! "

I know exactly how she feels!

Big kisses from me.

Way Busy!

What a difference a camera can make!

I am sooooo busy!
Life is so full!
How did this happen?
I feel awash in a sea of my own creation...Julia Cameron...hmmm. On top of already being so busy it's a challenge to blog at all, I took some of my pictures to mum and toddler group yesterday and already have an (experimental) commission, and am considering stocking an Etsy shop for christmas shoppers.



At least I've made it back here for a quick blog, and I posted Iris her chosen picture and managed to check in on fellow tailcastions yesterday as well!



I've stayed in on my night off tonight to help catch up with my things to do list, but I'm out tomorrow afternoon,Friday afternoon and Friday night and next Wednesday we're off to see Sia again.



Think I've finished the pic below of Lilith...it was the concluding message from the journey. Compared to the original sketch it's kind of meandered in areas...I still have it up and am talking with it, so we shall see.