I bought my first cat for 99¢ at Maxwell Street Days when I was six.

 My family knew I wanted a cat. I’d been told that when “so-and-so’s” cat had kittens, I’d get one. I waited — f-o-r-e-v-e-r.

When I saw “Butterball” at the street fair, I  knew she was mine. 

It takes time for cats to have kittens and more time for kittens to be weaned. Time means nothing to a six-year-old.  

Time is Elastic.

Sometimes it “races,” other times, it “drags on.”   

The way you spend your time determines its elasticity. Maybe you experienced both dragging and speeding time this year. 

Life is still shifting, and there’s a lot to consider.

My first “Balancing Act” was painted in 2014 (clearly, this is an on-going quest.)

 While we coped with life under social lockdown, changes took place within and around us.

 As I begin to face the outside world again, I’m not sure I’m ready.

Are you ready?

How do you want to move forward in your life and career?
(Notice, life before career!)

What do you want it to look like? How do you want to feel?

What did you realize this past year that you didn’t know before?

Life is in constant flux. We’re constantly recalibrating and balancing.

Even when we’re standing still, balance keeps the ever-moving molecules of our body working in unison. Fortunately, our body keeps track of that.

It’s up to us to consciously balance the rest of life.

We now have the opportunity to consciously balance ourselves, our interactions with others, and our planet.

I’m not interested in moving in crazy circles just because I can. I’m looking for a better way to live, not a crazier one.

Let’s focus on what it is that we do want to create and move toward that.

Let’s notice results and base next actions upon desired results.

Copy. Paste. Repeat.

When I was fresh out of college, a man I worked with scrawled a poem on a cocktail napkin and left it for me to find. It read:

Angels are looking
For new skies to fly in
A virgin space for wingspread
It is your head.
God waits to be born.

I imagined myself in love with this man whose name I can’t quite recall. Fortunately, it was unrequited; he had issues I didn’t know how to handle.

Every once in a while the poem pops into my head and I smile. I still love it and all of the possibilities it represents.

Each day dawns ripe with possibility, which ones will we grasp? Which call will we answer? What new way of living, of seeing the world will we embrace?

Or will we continue down the same habitual path we're currently walking?

It may not always seem as though we have options. We have tried and true ways of doing things — and these ways work.

We can find new ways of looking at the world, new eyes through which to see it — if we try.

Habits streamline life and help us take care of business in a timely manner. Yet taken to the extreme, they can become ruts, making escape difficult.

When redundancy becomes a way of life, we’re in the “dead zone”.

Our souls crave the mystery of the unknown. That’s where our creative spirit thrives.

Challenges and obstacles are opportunities for growth. The balance beam of a life worth living spans the gap between routine and adventure.

Let's take an inventory of our habits. Which habits serve us and which ones are keeping us a bit too safe?

Are your habits moving you closer to the life you want to live or not? You get to decide!

“Our self-image and our habits tend to go together. Change one and you will automatically change the other.” ~ Dr. Maxwell Maltz

Last year I met a new “character” in my dreams. She’s pretty remarkable and unforgettable; she has six eyes. I never gave her a name; she's an image of me.

She populates two three-dimensional watercolor pyramids and a few small paintings, most notably, “Breaking Through the Glass Ceiling”.

Postcards of this image are available, send SASE: PO Box 61707, Honolulu, HI 96839-1707

A few months later I saw another image in a dream, this time of an onion with six eyes. Onions are a ubiquitous food in the world, so this image leads me to believe that we all have six eyes.

This is the first of many more onions in the book I'm creating.

Peeling an onion reveals more of the onion, sort of an internal archeological evolutionary “dig” into our psyche.

Shortly after the six-eyed onion appeared to me, I received an email, seemingly out of the blue, from SARK. She invited me to attend a webinar about a Succulent Wild Business Incubator Program she was starting.

My energy was on high-alert after the webinar so I signed up for the nine-month program.

The weeks leading up to the first in-person retreat filled me with anxiety. I knew I was about to begin a new important leg of my journey through life.

I was scared.

What if I couldn’t do it? What if I couldn’t live up to my potential? What if I failed?

I took all of my anxieties to watercolor paper and created “Eyes of Awareness”.

The painting calmed me down and gave me hope. My anxieties were no match for what was to come.

All of my energies would be joyfully, gleefully released when I allowed myself to move forward rather than stay stuck in fear.

At the first SARK retreat in Key West, we were introduced to SARK’s tool, “Inner Wise Self Love Letters”. Essentially we all have an Inner Wise Self and she/he is always with us.

Many of us have known about this inner wisdom and call it by different names. No matter what you call it, feeling its loving presence is a gift.

I credit my Inner Wise Self with giving me all of the imagery in this post.

I’m delighted to have a new, more direct way of dialoguing with her as a result of working with the SARK team (Susan Ariel Rainbow Kennedy, Dr. Scott Mills, and Suzanne Evans). Mahalo nui loa!

But Wait! There’s more to come.

I’ll share it with you soon. Stay tuned for “My Inner Wise Self and Me, Part 2”.

Why go on a retreat at all?

I go for renewal and to learn something new. I go expecting to be stretched and expanded so I can become more of who I really am.

It’s not improvement I seek; it’s more along the lines of shining a light into the corners of darkness that fill my mind from time to time.

Very much like Spring Cleaning, this is a time to refresh and reboot my internal operating system.

I’m going in for an upgrade!

Whether you work for another, you’re self-employed, or are retired, retreats are an invaluable way to invest in yourself and your life.

I’ve always been a “seeker of meaning”.

I went on a Vision Quest in Death Valley in the 90s. I spent three days and nights alone with no food, just water and a lean-to I had to build myself.

There were 10–12 others from all walks of life on that trip — a police chief from Ohio, a former nun from CA, a woman in her 70s, and a young man in his 20s.

I learned a lot about myself and about others on that trip.

My backpack was heavy. In addition to my sleeping bag, bedroll, tarp, rope, and knife, I had clothing, books, pencils, sketchbook, and three gallons of water to last me the three days.

On my first night alone in the desert, I was hungry and a little cold. Up until then the only days I’d ever “fasted” where when I had the flu — those days don’t count. I’d brought along three butterscotch candies just in case I got “too hungry” (how I thought three candies would help is beyond me!).

I came really close to eating them that first night as I tossed and turned on the desert floor. I was a little “panicky” until I realized this was a coyote moment for me.

Coyote is the Trickster in many Native American cultures. He was trying to trick me into giving up on myself, taunting me with hunger pangs and fears of losing my strength.

Once I realized my fears were my "coyote", I had a few sips of water and fell asleep. Temptation was gone and I proved to myself that I could last three days with just water out in the desert.

Another food-related insight came when I realized that if I were at home, I’d eat a sandwich rather than go for a walk, or draw, or read, or journal. That’s when I became aware that food can be used to distract us from the things we really want to do with our time.

On the third hot desert day, as I sat journaling in the “buff”, I heard a strange noise. It made no sense to me. I couldn’t place it, I had no idea what it was — until three fighter jets streaked across the sky right above me.

It was then I realized how distant I’d felt;
yet how close I still was to the world at large.

After our three days alone in the desert, all of the “questers” reconvened at base camp to share our experiences. Listening to everyone’s stories and telling my own, I realized that no matter who we are, what we do, or what we look like, we have more in common with one another than we have differences.

My paintings always give me hints about what's happening in my life. This tree caught my attention when at the beach last Sunday. She's just begun. she's reaching tall with exuberance.

That was my first retreat; I’ve gone on several more since then. Each one is different and each one fuels me in different ways.

I expect this retreat will fill me up in new ways. I’m a little nervous as I pack. There might be a coyote moment ahead, and I expect to be stretched in new ways and to learn something new about my abilities. I’m going to reconfigure the path I’ve been on these past 17 years.

This beginning painting explores my angst going into this retreat. Sure I'm a tad anxious entering the unknown. It'll be fun to see these paintings completed AFTER the retreat!

Please stay tuned for an update in the weeks ahead.