Health, Remend and Remeber!

This little post is just here for me
To commit and remind and remember to be
True to myself, honest and brave;
Stand up for my health
And my oddest of ways...
For there is the sweetness
Of succulent life
Full flowing Love
In it's Dancing Delight.

Two months!!!???

Two months already? I am lost somewhere in all this life!! I just worked out that I started this picture two months ago...so much for one a week!

Something big is coming up...no idea what yet, and impossible to imagine where to fit it, but I can feel it creeping up from inside me and edging in around me. I am feeling slightly un-nerved and gnaw-y. As ever there is only one thing to do, keep moving forward...slowly. So I'm off to move this picture foward too!

I ask for clarity.

I feel gratitude and Love for all reminders and illuminators.

I ask to keep my heart open even if my mind tries to panic.

I ask to remain in Love.

This is where I work...(sometimes!)

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.

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

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.

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!!!

Today! Today! Today!

Today I read the most perfect, appropriate, freeing line!

In a book called: Unreasonable Happiness, Satsang with Vartman.

Can I find it now? No! so for now I shall have to possibly paraphrase...or quote it perfectly, Who Knows?

It's just rearranging chairs on the Titanic.

It's just rearranging chairs on the Titanic. !!

There is so much I see people doing in life that has this feeling to it and I've always found it impossible to explain why I don't feel like joining in...and when I'm stuck and can't move this is the sensation to it, but naming it is so wonderful!

Who cares? The ship is sinking, rearrange if it makes you happy...or dive in, or go down with the ship...whatever...the ship is sinking anyway and somehow I've always been at peace with that bit...it was the constant discussion, thought and planning that goes into arranging the chairs that got to me.

Best line I ever read.

MESS!

I've been wasting time trying to create something to save time....I just have a headache instead...

There are aspects of my life that are consistently like being trapped in some strange (frustrating!) dream. The fact is that I have too much stuff, physically, mentally, virtually, emotionally...too much stuff.

I once spent a month repeating a daily meditation of creation...I had to imagine my own workspace and create a lotus in a different way every day in my mind for 15 minutes. I painted them, made them from paper, made them from glass, made them from fabric...even made them from heated polystyrene food trays...toward the end of the month I had a huge joyous sense of presence with me in my workshop, barely made my lotus and just danced ecstatically around in my mind.
At the end of the month I got to meet one of my guides...off I headed (in my mind) to my joy filled workshop, only to be stopped at the door and gently told that I no longer needed to keep trying to create beauty out of rubbish and dross.

I still fill my life with it though...anything and everything that I can create with, paint on, or is some sort of possible pretty ingredient...or base...or frame...or household article...

Off to keep trying to find some beautiful, efficient, freeing solutions.

Today

Life is overflowing with joy and with lessons...


Sometimes I am not sure if I turn to the lessons instead of accepting the joys on offer...

I wondered for a moment then if I avoid lessons in the name of joy and pleasure...but it instantly stuck me how impossible it is for that to be true.

It depends on what I choose to learn...

perhaps that is what I am being asked to think about carefully at this point...Something is about to give.

Remember

Everything you have done
amazes me
you've already taken steps
your heart sang to you
and as you follow
the tune whispering
in your chest
every step
will bring you closer
and closer to me

with gentle huge abandon
you have taught me
most beautiful truths
and my heart aches
from seeing your beauty

I love you

Sleepy

Life asks us constantly, in a million ways a minute, whether we want to open more, whether in this moment we are willing to change even slightly and grow through the process.

I'm just momentarily wondering whether the effort required to ignore / squash/ abandon/ deny/ not notice, is exactly equal to the effort required to allow / make the change.

Am I afraid to choose change for fear of becoming too fluid? Yeah that would make sense...

I used to do this on faith, this is where my faith lies, somewhere in the process of life, in surrendering to the fluid changes of existence.

In this moment the answer seems obvious, that in truth the effort required to not change is hugely greater than the effort required to surrender to change.

A million ways a minute...how wonderful would that be!