Athena Dreams Design

Desire to Inspire

Christine Mason Miller's book Desire to Inspire is going to be released very very soon, and I honestly don't think I could be more honoured and happy to be a contributor (amongst so many amazing and wonderful contributors) to her book.

Visit her blog today for 60 seconds with moi on the topic of becoming ourselves, leave a comment and get entered to win a give away on Christine's blog.

And then stop by Amazon, and pre-order your copy of the book, it's going to be an amazing addition to your library, truly. Stories, quotes, anecdotes, exercises to support your journey toward your own vision of a meaningful, mindful life, from 20 different women who are all on their own personal mindful journeys. Sharing our experiences with each other is a beautiful thing, and this book will be 20X beautiful.

Going Out into the Morning, to Sing

 

I worried a lot. Will the garden grow, will the rivers
flow in the right direction, will the earth turn
as it was taught, and if not, how shall
I correct it?

Was I right, was I wrong, will I be forgiven,
can I do better?

Will I ever be able to sing, even the sparrows
can do it and I am, well,
hopeless.

Is my eyesight fading or am I just imagining it,
am I going to get rheumatism,
lockjaw, dementia?

Finally I saw that worrying had come to nothing.
And gave it up. And took my old body
and went out into the morning,
and sang.

I Worried by Mary Oliver

21 Weeks In

• I had an impromptu conversation with a client/friend today: he came over to pick up something I had designed for him, and when I asked him how he was he said "too much to do". Is this not the resounding cry going around the world? Too much! Everything is out there and we want to say Yes, Yes and Yes. And then it's too much. Say No, to one thing this week. Dare you.

• I cozied up a little closer to my "real" and authentic writing voice this past weekend. It felt like me in the words. I could almost see myself standing amongst the letters.

• Rain happened yesterday. In very late May. It was kind of a dreamy day. Sweaters back on. Socks. Big gray clouds and more water from the sky before the rain season ends.

• I really and truly GOT that when I am feeling irritated, it's because I've taken on too much and a) things are out of balance or b) I was handed more than I signed up for and need to speak up, speak up, speak up. I mean, I really really got it. Whew. That's such a relief, after all these years.

• And have you checked out all the books that are coming out all over the place the past few months?
  
  • Carmen Torbus' The Artist Unique
  • Sarah Ahearn Bellemare's Painted Pages
  • Misty Mawn's Unfurling
  • Jenn Lee's The Right Brain Business Plan
  • Lisa Occhipinti's The Repurposed Library
  • Mary Beth Shaw's Flavor for Mixed Media
  • Darlene McElroy's Surface Treatment Workshop
  • Did I forget anything/anyone?

• My cat is in love with my husband's pheremones. Right at this moment she has thrown herself onto his sweaty backpack and is rolling all over it rubbing her face on it. She's wrapped both of her front legs through the shoulder straps, and is rolling, rolling, rolling. She makes me laugh SO hard when she does this.

• If I could feel as comfortable with my canvases in that messy ugly stage as I seem to do with the state of our house (messy all the time) I might be much more prolific.

• Oh, and I finally accepted my invitation to Pinterest, and everyone, it's lovely. Not a time suck (at least not so far) just moments here and there over the course of the week, to mark the things that I am in love with, and that I want to remember for later.

• Something I learned this week: you really can take metaphor too far.

• Peonies, even when long past their beauty date, smell so very lovely, and hold a totally different kind of beauty.

The Threads that Connect

Interwoven threads. 
Connecting lines.
Strength in a fragile fabric.
Patterns.
Repetition.
A balance of open and closed. 

All of these things (and probably so much more) make up what lace is all about. A fragile, beautiful, fabric that has a tensile strength. I have some lace that my grandmother gave me years and years ago, that someone in the family made many many years before, and also some that she had made. She called it tatting, and the word still makes me smile. And just what does all this talk of lace have to do with anything you might be thinking?

Well, we have quite a few boxes in the garage that remain unpacked almost 9 months after we moved in, and this weekend I spent some time opening a couple of them; under the premise that if we haven't missed or needed anything in those boxes, we should probably toss the stuff or give it away. 

I made it as far as the second box I opened. I found the lace and just below the ziploc bags of lace, I found packages of letters that my grandfather had written to me over the years after I had moved away from New England. The letters spanned the years of my adventuresome 20-something travels and living overseas and my 30 something years of settling in the bay area. He talked about his life in New Hampshire with his dog, and sent me cartoons clipped from The New Yorker and The Wall Street Journal, told stories on my mum and uncle, siblings and cousins, and mused about what was happening in my life, what was happening in the world - politically and otherwise - and commenting on the stories I was sending to him. 

I spent about 3 hours sitting on the cold concrete floor in the garage, reading through letters and running my fingers over the lace. I never opened another box. Old lace and letters. Not something that I might need, and clearly not things that I have missed or thought about over the last 9 months, but isn't that kind of how the threads of a life weave together and complete themselves? We are aware of what is being built and yet living the moments as they come, we miss so much of what is being created until we have that moment to step back and, yes, look back and see all the connections and threads that weave through our lives. All the beauty, the fragility and the strength.  

Visit Flickr artists who created the work above at these links:1. Lace of Dew, 2. Lace and Legs, 3. Lace detail, 4. Lace Fluffy Ruffle Gloves, 5. White Crocheted Lace Choker, 6. lace and tassels, 7. lace leaves, 8. lace snow, 9. Lace Trim, 10.vintage lace, 11. Lace Tree, 12. "Amulet on Lace Doily" Acrylic Painting, 13.flickr.com/photos/98048196@N00/2521316048/, 14. antique white taffeta and lace reconstructed skirt, 15. lace by the yard, 16. Lace & Light

 

December Views .:. Day 21 Solstice

Half-Light

Short days of winter now, and the sunlight neglects my garden.
This afternoon I pulled out last summer's tomato vines,
frostbitten and slimy to the touch.
Dead stems broken off at the soil
too frozen for the roots to be moved.

I remembered when my mother explained
that from the shortest day 
onward to spring
the light would stay longer and longer.
My brother and I would stand out in the snow
silent by the back door
aching toes 
and wait for dusk to fall,
record the time in a book
we called Secret.

It was February before we noticed a longer day
and by April
we had forgotten the vigil.

Now I stand
in the dusk again, and recall how
if we had not kept watch that winter

the darkness might never have lifted.

-Liz Kalloch

Give and Give . . .

   The Garden

Late green day.
 Here's happiness with its edge of frost.
Winter's in.

The sky thins out.
 The world tightens, like a walnut.
I can count most things.

The plum trees are taut on their hill,
the mornings bitten off, like a twig.
The earth will give and give.

-Nina Bogin

mary anne radmacher .:. Lovely Mention-ables

My first introduction to mary anne radmacher was a card sent to me by a friend, maybe 10 years ago now. I found myself looking for more of her cards to keep, to give and to have in my card drawer, just in case. 

Her writing pulled me in, making me think about all the possibilities out there in the world for me and for everyone else; her words created a sing-song melody in my head when I read them, and the message I took from her words (whether it was her intention or not) was that we all need to show up (in a big way) and be willing to go all in on our own lives. 

A few years later, I started working as freelance designer for a stationery and journal publisher, and I "met" mary anne all over again, this time through her words and her artwork. An amazing collaborative experience ensued, and continues still. Through the years that I've worked with her we'd never met in person, not until this summer. Her words, her paintings, her ideas and enthusiasm for life, her willingness to always laugh, her drive for living a creative life, for encouraging and inspiring so many other writers and artists, and continuing the journey of being all in on her own life - these are some of the things I so admire about her.

And did I mention the books? The books . . .  I have given her first book to many, many friends since it first came out, and continue to take it off the shelf and open randomly to read:

There are many reasons you lean forward on any given day. They are all perfect metaphors for this book. When you're trying to see something better, you lean toward it. When you are listening to someone and can barely hear, you lean in. When the really exciting part of a basketball game comes, you lean forward in your seat. When you're trying to catch, to see, to listen to the best bits—you lean forward.

Lean forward in to your life . . . catch the best bits and the finest wind. Just tip your feathers in flight a wee bit and see how dramatically that small lean can change your life.

-mary anne radmacher, from the introduction to Lean Forward into Your Life

Please take a moment to visit mary anne at her website, check out her books here, and her posters and other products here. Please stay tuned on Monday for an interview with the artist herself as well as a give-away offer on one of her journals! And meanwhile Live Boldly, Laugh Loudly and Love Truly!

More Thoughts on Time from Someone Wiser than I

This week I have been revisiting a favourite book - Crossing the Unknown Sea: Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity by David Whyte. His thoughts about time, work and creativity in this book are a beautiful melody sung with a pitch perfect tenor voice (in my mind), and they sum up beautifully my thoughts this week about time. Time to create, time to do the things that need to be done in this life, and time to experience the spaciousness of how we can experience the time of our lives...

Our relationship to time has become corrupted exactly because we allow ourselves very little experience of the timeless. We speak continually of saving time, but time in its richness is most often lost to us when we are busy without relief . . . We speak of stealing time as if it no longer belonged to us. We speak of needing time as if it wasn't around us already in every moment. We want to make time for ourselves as if it were in our power to do so. Time is the conversation with absence and visitation, the frontier between ourselves and those we love; the hours become ripe with happening only when we are attentive, patient and present. 

-David Whyte, from Crossing the Unknown Sea

Attention

Patience

Presence

Could it be that these are the ingredients for living a life filled with a spaciousness, a connection, a depth, a breadth and an appreciation for all the time we truly have? 

Could it be that revelling in any brief moments of stillness - rather than filling every moment to the brim with movement, sound and colour - could it be that the stillness might bring us back to feeling that the days are as long and timeless as those dreamy summer afternoons of being a child. A child with a whole day in front of him or her, and no plans but to play?

Note to Self: Add some Stillness to the Time Budget and see what might happen.

Don't Walk .:. Sometimes a Good Sign

This morning, in the midst of accomplishing a hiddledy-piggledy list of: 

• things that must be done 
• places that must be visited 
• items that must be delivered.

I was stopped at a crosswalk looking at the red flashing Don't Walk imperative, and wishing I had stepped up to the curb a few seconds earlier so that I might have had time to run for it.  And then I stopped, collected my thoughts, told myself to settle down, that I still had time to accomplish all my musts, and then I looked around the intersection. 

Cars. Bicycles. Pedestrians across the street from me also waiting to cross. The sun shining, a perfect breeze blowing down from the mountain. And to my left, sitting at the same light that I was standing at, a creamy coloured 21st century VW bug, with a bright orange and gold flower resting in the Bug's flower cup.

It made me smile. A big uncontrollable smile, full of teeth with lips stretched wide. I smiled at the driver, and she nodded at me with a little grin.

And then I looked again at the driver, and thought: I know her. Looked again, thinking maybe it was an old friend, and realised it was Anne Lamott. 

You see, I have been re-reading her book Bird by Bird this past week. Reading again all the notes and marks I have made inside the book during previous read-throughs, and laughing out loud (with her) and delving ever more deeply into her writing, her ideas, and thinking about my own writing, my own art. 

This read through I have been circling back and then back again to her chapter on Perfectionism. It is a chapter I have made copious notes in before. For me, it is a chapter that has volumes to teach.

. . . Perfectionism is a mean, frozen form of idealism, while messes are the artist's true friend. What people somehow (inadvertently I'm sure) forget to mention when we were children was that we need to make messes in order to find out who we are and why we are here—and, by extension, what we're supposed to be writing [creating]. -Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird [my parentheses]

I tell you this story because I think we all have those little moments, unexpected and yet small little sparks that turn an otherwise lackluster, dreary, or even just regular old day into something that has an edge of magical serendipity to it.  The difficult part is recognizing that moment of kismet, that millisecond of magic that can change your whole outlook. Recognising the signs that are meant for us is the trick, and in this case Don't Walk has never looked so fortuitously good to me.

And so, that moment at the crosswalk has made me want to begin the weekend differently. Friday is usually clean up day: put things away, neaten up the piles, decide if I really need all those supplies out on my painting table. I have made a huge mess in my studio this afternoon and I am not cleaning it up. Not today, nor tomorrow, not even the next day. 

This weekend has been deemed the Weekend of Making Messes. I am daring myself not to pick up even one little piece of paper, not to put one book away on the shelf. I am daring myself to look more clearly at all the things I want to be doing/creating with my life. And for you reading: I wish you too, a weekend of happy, creative, discovery-filled soul-lifting mess. 

Oh, and the pile of laundry on the bedroom floor that has begun to growl at me when I walk past, I'm planning to ignore that too . . .