My Comfort zone has vanished — AGAIN!

Beware! Once you pass your comfort zone, keep going!
There is no turning back!

No worries, you will reach a new comfort zone — although it might be a while before you arrive.

Take heart; expansion, growth and change are what you wanted.

You wanted to go beyond the places you’ve been before, to "Feel the Force”, the pull of new adventures.

Feeling the excitement of new adventures is not the same
as going on those great adventures.

There are always ups and downs on the great adventures we read about in books or watch in movies.

In life, these ups and downs take longer to experience.

Momentum is a powerful neutral force — yet a force nonetheless.

Inertia is an opposing and equally powerful force.

I think of inertia as more of a negative force, but maybe it’s just HEAVY. It takes powerful lifting to get moving once inertia has set in.

Fear is often the force behind my inertia.

When I’m afraid to take action — which often means I’m afraid to start a new project, inertia digs in its heels.

Dread is one of Inertia’s best friends.

The emotional space that Dread occupies is immense.

Dread and fear dance maniacally round and round, eating up precious moments and consuming vast amounts of time and energy.

Awareness is key, and is the first step to conquering Dread, Fear, and Inertia.

Once we realize the crazy “do-si-do” going on in our brain (and stomach), we can devise tools to “stop the music”.

Changing our focus helps us to change our thoughts. Once we’re looking at something different (a new novel or movie), or we’re exercising, our focus softens and relaxes.

With relaxation and a calm breath, comes the power
to change our thoughts.

Changing thoughts, whether or not they’re related to the cause of our dread/fear/inertia (“D/F/I”), helps move us into a neutral zone.

From a neutral zone, we can reach for better feeling thoughts in general and eventually to thoughts about the cause of our “D/F/I”.

From here we take action, even the tiniest action will help.

Before you know it, momentum takes over and you’re back in business.

This painting was started in front of my Hide-N-Seek watercolor class at Hawaiian Graphics. I wanted my students to see what it feels like to create a painting that's asking to be painted. It's a very different energy to paint something that's calling you rather than painting something just for the sake of painting.

A better question is what don’t they have in common!

Math immediately came to mind, but that’s not true. Artists do use math, just not in the same way scientists use math.

Both scientists and artists use the scientific method of experimentation regularly.

Every time we begin a painting, a sculpture, a story, a dance, or a piece of music, we are experimenting.

We continually change our variables: color, tone, volume, temperature, meter, structure, etc. and we eagerly watch while creating to see what more we need to add, subtract, or change.

Artists are the constant variable in the equation of art.

Curiosity is a driver, a motivator of both science and art … What will happen if … How does X affect Y? (Math!)

I took my first art class in college (Art for Non-art Majors, while in the Nursing program) as a Pass/Fail course.

I had NO, I mean ZERO confidence in my abilities.

The real problem with the idea of pass/fail is that I no longer believe in failure.

The common, oft-repeated phrase is that Thomas Edison failed 10,000 times before discovering the tungsten light bulb.

Thomas Edison didn’t see it that way. He knew that he had discovered 10,000 things that didn’t work before discovering the thing that did work.

Imagination is not an option; it can’t be turned off. We all have one and we all use it daily.

Imagination is a tool we can use to help us or to hinder us.

We decide how we’re using our imagination with every option we weigh and with every decision we make.

Are you looking at your painting/sculpture/music/dance/life through the lens of possibilities or through the lens of pass/fail? You decide, every time!

Since we have the ability to learn from everything, failure isn’t really an option either.

There were myriad small changes made to this painting during the month that I painted it. Subtle yet important changes. My intention for this painting was to paint the energy of the ever-expanding universe.

A friend recently gifted me with eight or nine ceramic bowls that her husband had made. She has too many and he keeps making them.

I hesitated. They were all SO beautiful!

“No!” my friend exclaimed, “These are his “seconds”. If you look closely, each one is flawed.”

Slowly I put one aside, and then another, and another, being careful to not take too many.

Truth be told I would have taken them all — although I certainly don’t need them all, they were just So Beautiful!

As I was walking out the door, she said, “Don’t you want this one? I just love the colors on the inside.”

Of course I wanted that one! I just didn’t want to be greedy. I took that one too — it’s Stunning!

Heck, I even had the nerve to ask if it would be okay for me to share one or two with a friend (assuming I could bring myself to part with one or two).

“How rude”, I thought to myself, “but we’re friends”, I reasoned.

Except we’re sort of “new friends” if you know what I mean, so I really hope I wasn’t too rude!

As I left, I said, “I feel like a thief!”

My friend assured me, “no, these are all seconds — they’re flawed.”

I placed the bowls on the studio counter so Rebecca and I could “Ooh and aah” over them before I took some back to the house.

The bowls make us to want to have a party. We want to clean the studio and use all of the bowls for finger food.

That’s how festive they feel.

These beautiful bowls are one person’s idea of “seconds”, of flawed pieces of pottery, of an art form that didn’t quite meet the standards that they’d set out to achieve.

So what? They are still beautiful!

Most of us fall short of the standards we want to achieve.

We “fall short” because we’re moving forward, we are growing and expanding our universe. And we keep moving the standards further and further from where we began!

Creation and expansion are imperfect processes.

I appreciate the generosity of my new friend and I love the way I feel when I see and use my beautiful new bowls (“flaws” and all).

There is joy in feeling the heart-or-head-to-hand-to-creation connection coming through the bowls. These bowls are perfect to me, although they might be imperfect to the creator.

Handmade art has loads of qualities and character, and is always made by “imperfect humans”.

The more we’re able to put ourselves into our art, the better and better our art becomes, even when it’s “flawed”!

We love the perfect imperfections seen and felt in art that speaks to us.

Before you cross the street”

That was the jingle I learned when I was growing up.

Today I use "Stop, Look, and Listen" as my intention for every day of my life.

Today it translates to:
Be Present, Be Aware,
and Be Open.

Being Open means open to receiving guidance in whatever forms it comes.

Sometimes it’s a whisper, a word that pops into your head.

Sometimes it’s an article in a magazine or newspaper — even the comic strip!

Sometimes it comes in the form of a dream, or a dream fragment.

Sometimes it’s something you see, or think that you see, out of the corner of you eye. Then it’s gone in a flash!

I like to think of these “nudges from the universe” as a game or a puzzle. It’s FUN!

It’s up to me to interpret what they mean and what I’m to do with them.

That’s how the “BlockHeads” came to be (btw: they desperately want a new name so if you have any ideas, please share them with me!)

The other day, as I lay down to take a ten-minute nap (I’ve been a “power-napper since high school), this phrase popped into my head:

I’ve got more than a few ideas of what to do with this, and I’m open to finding out more — and a bit excited about it too.

I must confess that all these ideas, coming so quickly, make me wonder how to squeeze more hours into each new day!

What a wonderful problem to have!

I drew this Octopus in my journal. That's when I saw a piece of coral on the lanai from a new angle, and it looked like an octopus. What fun!

I wouldn’t have this kind of fun if I weren’t aware of all the guidance surrounding me.

In the “olden days” (a.k.a Biblical/Torah/Koran times) people talked of angels appearing. Heck, Angels started to reappear in the 1970s too!

Intuition is another common word for guidance.

No matter what verbiage you use, I know you receive guidance too.

Remember: STOP, LOOK,
AND LISTEN!

It might take a while for you to be aware of all the guidance you’ve been receiving, but once you do, your excitement levels will soar!