breathe dearheart, breathe

Category: Inspiration (page 2 of 5)

Your random act of inspiration for today

Today in Scotland we’re having a festive season embellished with piles of snow and wonderment. Days off school and work, a feeling of coziness in our homes, doors closed tight against freezing winds, curtains open wide to giant snowflakes cascading. Crunching through deep snow piles, slipping gracefully on ice and managing to catch ourselves before falling over.

This is the season when we are always surprised – by the weather, the kindness of those around us, expressions of love, traditions old and newly-created like an advent calendar sent across the Atlantic, new pyjamas for Christmas Eve. We are encouraged to ballet dance on thin ice, sip cups of too-hot hot chocolate and hold loved ones close.

There are many other lovely surprises – any one of which might be just a moment away for you right now. Who knows what wonderful thing is about to happen?

View the video clip above for your instant glorious, random act of daily inspiration. When I watched it, my eyes teared up and my throat got all thick and swollen – yay!

More money? No thanks

From Chris Guillebeau of The Art of Non Conformity – the most beautiful sharp-intake-of-breath-inducing statement I’ve read so far this week:


I’ve had a good year and don’t need any more money. I’m extremely fortunate, grateful, and even blessed to be able to write for a living and tour the world meeting fun people. Even though I’m an entrepreneur myself and don’t think there’s anything wrong with making money, I always try to be conscious of how much money I need and how much is just extra.

Read the rest of the wise one’s words in context in his post from Anchorage, Alaska.

Image – original charcoal drawing “I don’t know where I am going …” part of a series of works by Lee Tracy.

Being what you believe

You know how you can just be mooching about a website, aimless, (which is very nice) and something piques your interest and you have a closer look and next thing your mouth opens, you take a sharp intake of breath and suddenly the whole world is a more magnificent place?

This exquisite short film gorgeously directed by Pascal Perich with ‘Whispering Trees’ music composition by Marcy Hokama follows the beautiful gentle soul that is painter and sculptor, Jason Tennant who is such an inspirational example of being what you believe and aligning your life with your values that I wanted to share him with you.

Jason gathers vintage, sinewy remains of American Chestnut trees, cut in the 1930’s in an attempt to save the forest from blight, carries them in his arms back to his workshop cabin in the woods and then he honors these natural masterpieces with his potent artistic spirit, sculpting them into wildly majestic art.

“I look for really deep forests that look like they haven’t been tampered with for at least 50 years” says Jason. “I try to tell a story;  nature vignettes ….. I want to maintain a sense of wildness in my work.”

In this beautiful film, created for Etsy as part of its This Handmade Life series, Jason talks quietly about his ethos – in creating his “Nike of The Forest” series he says “the Greek Nike is one of my favorite gestures … it’s a hopeful choice, a triumph of the balance of humans and nature ….humans learning to respect nature so we can temper our greed, so we can maintain this beautiful planet for our children.”

Image, Nike of the Forest III, is borrowed from Jason’s Etsy shop – Available to buy! What a wonderful world we live in.

Constraint, Freedom + The Big Adventure of Quitting my Day Job

[I’m beside-myself with excitement and joy to bring you a guest post by Andrea from ABCcreativity.

Andrea is the coach I most admire and appreciate on the internet today.  She seems to constantly create and share a beautiful, vibrating feeling of love and abundance, creativity and spirituality. I signed up for Andrea’s Creativity 101 e-course – it is spectacular (+free!) and her honey-voiced, guided meditations have reduced me to lovely, healing tears.

Andrea is an artist, a creative journaler, creativity workshop facilitator, meditator and coach. Please be good to yourself today and visit Andrea’s online place of miracles-waiting-to-happen-for-you, ABCcreativity.]

“What I love about Inner Wild Therapy is that the posts here flow into that deep space beyond words. Right now, The Case for Constraint is speaking to something deep inside me.

For several years as a struggling artist, I saw day jobs as the devil and did everything I could do avoid them. I would not be constrained.

I had no idea that the very thing I rebelled so much against, the day job, was the very thing that would move me forward and onward and into fabulous new worlds and experiences i couldn’t even see from my day job-less world.

When I got that day job, seven years ago, I swore it was only temporary.

But as I settled into the routine of an employed person, my creativity began to soar. Constrained, for sure. My days weren’t free for art anymore. But when it was time for art – I was focused. I was clear. I was more productive as an artist when I had a full time job! Who would have thought?

New art supplies. Courses. Retreats. Stability. Routine. Growth. The biggest constraint, the day job, turned into my best tool for creating a life that feels right for me. It was like a little incubator. And as I grew stronger and my creative work great bigger, the incubator got smaller and I shifted into part time work.

I am coming up to the part now where it’s time to let the day job go completely. To release the constraint and fly free. And this part is so much harder than I ever would have thought. Every day I am stunned about how much there is to process in letting this part of my life go.

This is it. Freedom. No constraints.

And I know I’m ready. Or I’m getting ready anyway. I’m planning to leave my job by the end of the year. But in the meantime I am so really fully completely aware of how beneficial the constraint has been. The safety and nurturing of it. The familiarity.

And then I get to this part in The Case for Constraint.

And that means our creative power can explode like a new universe from a black hole.

Well yeah. On the other side of the constraint there is this magnificent explosion of creative delight. That alone is worth going into a constrained period, isn’t it? To go from the grey office day job to having this as my workspace:

fabulous art room

Creative explosion of delight.

But really what it’s all coming down to for me is that this can’t be separated. Constraint and freedom are partners. I’ll always have both and how comfortable can I really get with that fact?

There are ebbs and flows. There is downtime. There are reasons to contract. Just like there are reasons to expand and create and enjoy. There has to be balance. All I can really do is listen to my life, listen to my heart, do my best to do what feels right and trust what shows up – if it’s constraint or freedom or success or stillness or a big mess or a totally amazing adventure.

xoxo

andrea”

Image “i know who i am” borrowed by me from Andrea’s Art Exhibit: “let’s all live happily ever after, a celebration of life, possibility and dreams about to come true” which I just discovered is on redbubble – available for sale as Greeting Cards, Matted Prints, Laminated Prints, Mounted Prints, Canvas Prints and Framed Prints. For stories about Andrea’s series of darling & inspiring paper dolls,  creativity blog, art journaling videos, online creativity workshops and guided meditations visit ABCcreativity.

Wild is the wind ————> and so are you

Recommended: listen to David Bowie’s beautiful rendition of Wild is the Wind by Dimitri Tiompkin and Ned Washington while reading.

It’s so easy to forget about nature and the wild forces that are the backdrop to our tiny life plays and sit-coms.

We knew it was windy. We even heard the shipping forecast that morning spoken in hushed, hypnotizing tones telling of gale force 11 winds gusting to … something, I forget now. And out we went loving the gusting, the big breezes and the clouds spinning in the sky as though the universe in which our Earth resides was a centrifuge.

Off we went, skipping, to walk the dog with — what else but a huge, bright pink balloon? I made absolutely no connection at the time about the powerful affinity of the wind and a helium-filled balloon.

Let me introduce you to the balloon. My child had given it a name. I’ll just let that notion sink in for you. OK, it was called “Alice”. And Alice had already had many adventures as a balloon-person with a pink ribbon tail and a face drawn in black felt pen – it was a “she” and my child had chirruped various stories about Alice.

She was doing this when suddenly I heard “MY BALLOON!”. Balloon? Oh yes ‘she’ was a balloon and here she was, no – I mean there she WAS for now she was already metres up in the air and as I felt relief flood me that some angel had stopped my child from instinctively reaching for the escaping balloon and her pink ribbon which would have taken her onto the road, I also felt the rising of a quagmire of conflicting emotions.

It was exhilarating watching Alice the pink balloon with a felt-pen drawn face and pink ribbon zipping higher and higher, further and further away with a speed that had our mouths hanging open.

The wind. The wind had snatched Alice and she, so floatily, fit-to-bursting full of lighter than air helium was crescendoing with her natural element. We stared, we saw again the pale gray clouds slewing like a torrential, flooded river across a vast sky. Alice the balloon becoming smaller and smaller in our sight as she was carried by air currents higher and further away, away, away, northwards.

It was exhilarating to imagine how that must feel, to be in the wind and part of it, losing yourself to it, having no sense of where you end and the wind begins (I am an Air sign, can you tell?!) the freedom of flying with no attachment, being freed from a ribbon anchoring bond to earth via a child’s hand.

But it was also achingly sad. We were bereaved. We weren’t ready for Alice to go, to be snatched away so suddenly in her prime, not even a little deflated yet. A shock. Watching her, a lone, alone little balloon person in a vast sky of gray wind was stunningly upsetting. How awful it would be to be so alone in such vastness.

We stood and watched and in about a minute Alice was so far away she disappeared completely. Gone.

What would happen to her?

I will spare you the hideous thoughts of seals choking on a pink balloon burst on rocks in the North Sea or a small plane crashing because of a large balloon being sucked into an engine. I could make a very long list here of horrible consequences but notice I am not. That way desperate sadness lies.

And so  I brought all my snatched remembrances of Richard Bach’s Jonathan Livingstone Seagull to bear on the situation. Pink balloon named Alice not like a seagull at all but no matter!

I began a monologue about Alice dancing with the wild air currents, soaring and sliding, moving so fast she might make it all the way to Greenland, or Sweden, Norway or, if the wind changed direction, America even.

Alice was going wherever the wind took her, floating high and light and with no attachment whatsoever, the dangle of her pink ribbon a kite tail now. She was filled with air, like the wind, but helium weighs less that the wind I said.

My child was sad – but good, healthy sad. And she did not fixate on the balloon that was Alice nor the excitement of the wind and so it all seemed fine. Natural.

All things have their own lifetime, short or long and we need not grieve when they go for something else awaits to replenish our joy if we can but see it instead of staring too long after a disappeared balloon and wallowing in the torment of relating ourselves to imagined things like Alice’s situation, projecting our own neuroses on it with what might happen to Alice, for example, as though we were experiencing it ourselves. (This is one of the down-sides of having a well-honed creative imagination.)

The positive carefree soaring high was as powerful and real as the sad sense of bereavement and loss. Both are important emotions to feel and deserving of attention.

As humans we are made to, like flowers and plants, always turn to the sun; to please the mind with thoughts of wonderment and things that make us happy, to notice in things as bizarre as the sudden flight of a pink balloon named Alice with a felt pen face ways we can be braver, better and more inspired. And always know that nature is with us, helping us and showing us if we simply watch and allow ourselves to feel – to be like a beautiful balloon tossed and rushed by emotional forces, going with them, letting them blow all around us not matter how stormy or conflicted they feel because we are human and being human is a fine thing.

Image “Sending and Receiving” borrowed from Keith Dotson — Fine Art Photographs. Visit his Etsy Store for more beautiful images. Thank you for making the world more beautiful Keith.