Canadian Artist: The Creative Dance

I tuned into a seminar by Sonia Choquette an intuitive and teacher tonight and felt like I had been to the dentist and had my teeth cleaned. Not so afraid to smile. Starting over all fresh and sparkling. She reminded me that as she said, "Spiritual is not the goal, Be spirited." When one's body feels tight and contracted then the ego is at its strongest. The ego animal is a creature that shuts down imagination and growth.

Because I feel happy singing outloud and painting, I feel at peace. Expansion of my energy, my outlook is important as I explore.

Lately I have been making inspirational door stops and so enjoy the tiny brush strokes as I explore decorative designs. Infusing the door stop with energy is what I believe I am doing. As I lift acrylic paint onto a tiny, pointed brush and work on lines and swirls, my sense of anxiety about life.... about how everything will turn out, goes away.

We, in North American live in a state of wanting to see the results of time rather than floating in it. I heard on the CBC Ideas program several weeks ago that the many language groups of the Aborigines in Australia have no words for time that divide it into segments. There is no past, or future. We are. It is.

Awake to Your Life

The new book I am reading by Ken MacLeod has very clear directions as to how to practice meditation and mindfulness on a daily basis. I am learning a great deal from him about seeing the reactive state early on so that old triggers do not become the cause for new wounds.

I am playing French language instructions and through repetition improving my level of retention and I am working on technique in my art.

Going to the gym three times a week, is also helping me to become more focussed and not so reactive. When I feel sluggish and stumpish, I tend to feel like I have only two choices. I can react and "defend" myself or I can be come mute and take what is happening stoically.

Improving, bit by bit those things I consider important in my life is giving me a greater sense that I belong, in my body, in my community.

Weather: Should we discuss it?

It is unusually winterish. Snow, slush, sliding ice
To find our place on the street, tires lost in the ruts.

We are
awash in wind,
the rain coats mountain-sides formed from
dug up spaces where the vehicles hide , waving antenna
saying "I am here."

And everyone, my neighbor on a shovel
those who phone into the hunched over houses
everyone wants to talk about the weather.

"At least it isn't:
-50 below
one hundred kilometer an hour winds
snowing 30 centimeters tonight
raining 10 centimeters just today
washing the roads away
collapsing our homes under the weight of winter."

See, there is a sunny side of the street.
I think it is called Spring.

Weather takes our breath away
in amazement
and conversation.

Driving ourselves blind

Time, Bergsen looked at the concept, oh millions of hours ago. We like atomic particles seem to be accelerating at a speed that is leading to disintegration. Our collective expectations for ourselves, for others that we be all, do all, learn all, adapt to all and somehow still connect to ourselves is insane. People drive with their eyes rolled back in their heads trying to catch their own thoughts. Not dead in the eyes, but focussed elsewhere. So many times, I have someone curve towards me in an intersection talking on a cell phone, throwing his or her voice back over the shoulder at children in the backseat and making a mental list of how many events into the future the person should be at the moment. There is nothing in their eyes because there is too much static in their brains.

The ultimate horror of a consumer society is that we begin to see others as items to be consumed and finally it is our very being which is immolated.... self-combustion. Only a pile of ashes in the shape of a person.

You touch not
while you steer
but wheel around
every moment
unliving
like a stitched up monster
a Frankensteined techno-operator.
You are texting for contact.
Your eyes are gone
to some future
while everything
that matters
goes past.

It used to only be the Jones that had to be eyed hostily for clues as to where to drive ourselves but now it is planetwide. We can make invidiuous comparisons universally. I think we still make the same number of decisions based on a disconnect from the mothership..... the culture that spawned us. Step back for clear mind. Move on way, way back. Perspective. With seeing eyes and put the damn phone down.

Tulips are paint brushes

Out front, dripping in yellow, red and saturated pinks, the tulips are closed to the early morning sky. Soon as the sun grows more intense they will unfold. Yesterday I tried to capture the highlighter yellow spider fat with prodigy clinging to the side of an orange-red tulip. The burn of the full flow red against the lawn in the evening is almost hallucinatory as the eye tries to take in both colors. It seems to be nature's reward for surviving the gray winter. It is a promise of the rewards coming for keeping on with keeping on.

High rises push up... the value of land. But nothing can increase the value of a garden wild with color, shapes, smells. Hedging in these cultivated small installations only emphasizes their worth.
There is always an element of discovery in gardening.

mettle music muse

While the kitty litter waits, the list is growing for to do to dum, dum, dum the heart beat. The sun threatens to flood the room with the brightness we have been waiting for. I stopped to try to drop Bush's brain into his skull, an on line game a friend sent. How about my own brain... if I can just get all coordinated...

The controversy about the St. Paul's drug house, I have know since it first started will eventually result in the wet, oh how wet can you go, facility being shunted down into my neighbourhood. Immigrants founded this area and now it is "starter and finish them off" homes for the working, lower class to live. Either too old, too uneducated, too confused, or just too damn busy trying to survive to speak out and stop incursions. It is inevitable that high rises will stack up against the Knox Mountain and the lake shore. The occasional rich.... those who live in Kelowna only occasionally will inhabit physically but not emotionally. Meanwhile on my street, we all care for our lawns and our families, talk over the fences and hope for a future.

But the sun.... it threatens to burn away even dark thoughts today.

The concept of "Busy" did not exist 100 years ago, I have read. "Busy" mind static, noise, lists, collapsed time, longer lives, longer lists. Status this static to see how we consumer ourselves by being consumers even of time. A concept of our time. I wonder.... at it. I see the net I am caught up in. How beautiful the strands in this mornings' spring light. Oh, look it is already 8:17. I have to get going. So much to do.

My husband said we could fill out the Five Steps to Becoming a Millionaire financial sheet accurately if we knew the day we would die. He is right. I love that he is as strange as my mind. I don't mind.