Outside in

My son is a body builder and a strong man competitor.

When he was 16 he was a tall skinny lad with a desire to compete in something. He developed a tenacity that he enjoys to this day.

It build up more than his muscles.

Making your body your slave is good because as far as you push your body, your mind follows right behind.

There is body mind connection that cannot be overlooked.

If there was one thing that if you started doing it now would change everything. Everybody would say doing something we naturally don't want to do. Work out and spend more time learning. Two things that when you make yourself do them change you from the outside in.

My girls and Ahhh

My girls for France are done. They are what they are and they are screaming French if you ask me. I should know as everything I had in me absorbed everything I could while I was in France last year and soaked and soaked and soaked and then the girls were born.

A facebook friend asked me what French looked like. Let me tell you.

You can feel the ancient stones alive with all the people that have walked the ancient streets and lived in the ancient buildings. You can smell the wine growing everywhere. In France you cannot irrigate. They depend on natural rain to make the wine different every year.

Every person is slower than here and they are open to taking to you about where they are from and where they want to go.

I think you can know France just by going there. You can get it in your bones.The light is diffused and dreamy. Here it is harsh and glaring and jolting. There is comforts you like a kiss.

I would say France is sexy because it makes you feel alive and all mushy.

I know the south of France better than Paris but it is the same. Girls are girly there. My goal is to paint there because I wish I could parlez that into a show so everyone could bring a piece of France home with them. Ahhh

they

When we talk to ourselves we will often say," Oh I can't do that because they wouldn't like it. or "no way can I get away with that nobody would believe it was good", or the ubiquitous "What will they think?"

Who is this they person? Who does "They" really constitute. All other people. Yes. That is what we think to ourselves. All other people will not like what you want to do so you better not do it. Love will stop coming your way and you will be rejected as a person who has value.

That is the power of they. Reality is different. Every other person on the planet will not hate your idea. Some will love it. It is just a numbers game.

Your job is find the ones who do love it and ignore the ones who don't like it.

That is all.

Just find your market.

Now the secret of life is how to find your market.

I believe that you can find who likes you on facebook.

There that was easy and free. You get instant feedback and all you need is friends and their friends and their friends. Post your thing and see who says Oh I love it. Then email them and they will buy what you have. I think facebook has changed the marketing world. Where else will you find an audience of people who are not grumpy when they read your post. They are on facebook because they want to see what is new. I personally love it when people post pics of their new products. I like the fact that I do not look at a million things at a time, just a few and then it is not so overwhelming.

Market research is free now if you get a lot of friends on facebook. It does help to post a lot so you are not a stranger. I have purchased things because they were on facebook. I like knowing who is selling something, it makes a big difference to me.

Art and the art of living

Today I painted roses on my patio. I have a plain cement patio. . I was looking at it and thought why not paint what I want to see, I would like to walk on roses every day so why not paint. them.

The result is YES. It looks great and I wonder why I did not do that before.

I am a painter.

so my husband loved it and started to think seriously about finishing the work we had planned to do on the patio.

Paint sparks creativity in everyone. Oh yeah we can do this. It is easy. Solutions are often so easy and cheap and wonderful that we tend to overlook them. Everything you need is right here, right now. We think oh I have to buy this or that first. Maybe you have all the raw materials right there. And besides the more creative you have to be the more fun the result is. Your work will be unique without rushing to the store to buy what everybody else is buying. and every single time unique is more charming then store bought.

Mommy

I like being the mommy. I like taking care of people and feeding them and washing their clothes. I like loving the people I have to care for. They are my jewels and my desire is to make them happy.

They are my sweethearts.

Having people to care for is a gift. Only taking care of yourself is boring.

My advice is if you have nobody to take care of anymore because your kids are grown or you never had any , is to adopt somebody.

So many people need someone to mother them, including your husband that you can do it till you are done living.

I even love washing dishes because I like to think about the person as I wash their plate and put it away. I feel lucky to have people to love.

the feminist movement moved away from that but they were wrong. Women need to mother somebody. That is how we are made.

Even women who have big fat careers need to take care of someone.

faces

I paint faces all day. every day. I never get tired of them. the variations of two eyes a nose and a mouth are infinite. What is most compelling to me is the fact that painting the same shape for they eyes can have a totally different look with the smallest of line alteration. And when the face is complete , I like to stare at it and wonder what this new person is like. How can a whole life be in a face. All the joy and experiences and sorrow and time. All written in a face.

even though I do not paint very distinct faces they all have a unique feel to them. Your mind has to fill in the lines.

sometimes I think people like a certain face because it reminds them of someone good in their life.

Thats what is great about doing simple faces. You get to personalize it.

Every person viewing a painting will have different emotion that they pick up. what is sad to one is intense to another.

always personal connections. Every face I paint I get enriched from it and it is sort of like meeting a new person. It makes me more alive and connected.

Working

I have been thinking about work. What do I do all day. Does it have value to others. that is the only thing that makes anything valuable. Does it help anyone be better. Sometimes the house work I do has way more value than what I came up with at the studio. At least I fed somebody and they can live another day.

Living for others is the goal of life. What we do should always benefit someone else. The stuff we do for our own enjoyment is meaningless unless it is making us healthier and stronger .

It is like junk food. It is so tasty and when you are hungry it is so easy to grab, but it doesn't build your body and on the contrary it destroys what you already have.

I am trying to think about food like that as an enemy to life. It only tastes good for a second then it goes about its task of destroying health. There is no free lunch. Everything costs.

The weeds, the junk food and the time suckers all exist with no effort. It always takes effort to grow in any area. Garden, muscle, minds. All painful effort. All of life is a struggle against the easy. Most people don't struggle but just go with flow. the flow takes you down the lazy river to death.

On my deathbed I hope I can say I fought the good fight. You have to fight for everything. If you even think about this for five minutes, you will get resolve. the thing is we forget almost immediately because it is a fight to keep remembering it is a fight. WE are in the fight of our lives for our lives.

there is a thing we do in creative group that is a reminder trick. If you wear a ring make the ring remind you of something. Put a meaning on it. If it is a diamond wedding ring all the better. Diamonds were born in absolute struggle. Look at that ring and remember what it took for that lump of coal to turn into a sparkling diamond.

today

I found out something about myself today. I have changed. I no longer am drawn to modern clean lines in buildings and rooms.

I used to love that but now I am feeling so cold toward it that it is almost shocking to me.

I need need warm colors and peeling paint and worn furniture and yellow walls and rusty wrought iron . I need aged everything.

the warmth of the old is what is fueling my life these days. I don't know if it is me getting older and I can relate to it more or what but I can no longer stand modern. I feel more complex than that.

Has anyone else out there felt like this. Is it me or the times or what.

A gift

I went away for a few days, with some friends to work on a planning project.

We went to soap lake to our vacation home.

Planning a whole year out and doing hours of work is more tolerable if there is a nice quiet environment.

What I am always surprised to find is that it is like going to a different planet. Planet love. Sage wafting in the air and birds of all kinds singing sweetly and soft breezes in the warm sun made the whole trip euphoric. We found ourselves staring into the clouds and losing our grip on the stressful world of home. We did not even know it was stressful till we stopped having the stress. It lifted off our shoulders like a quiet giant arm carrying away our cares.

Lessons from the yard

I was pulling weeds yesterday. WE have a rental with a yard that was inundated with weeds. Some the size of a dinner plate.

As I was pulling them I was thinking how similar they are to every wicked thing in our lives.

We don't intentionally plant them yet they grow as though they have been cultivated in a greenhouse. They grow in the areas where nothing else would grow.

I never find roses sprouting up in the lawn plated by the birds.

Never

the roses I have to baby and prune and spray and labor over just to get a rose that is wonderful.

The weeds, ignore and they get to be the size of house in two months.

Just like life.

any good characteristic is hard won.

Bad habits are cultivated by doing nothing.

To do anything good you have to work and work and work to make it establish as a permanent thing.

You have to be a fighter.

always fight.

or the weeds will win every every every time.

Solitude

I was thinking again of the life suckers. Every time you a do a passive activity like watching television, it does soak some of your brain cells out,

Each time we actively have to work out a problem it builds your brain up so to speak.

The awful thing is you are either moving forward toward good or backwards toward bad. Nothing is stagnant. Nothing stays the same.

Each day that I write this blog I am trying to convey something you might need to know or at least something to think about. I do not want to waste your precious time with drivel.

Being proactive about time is essential to not going backwards.

I used to teach aerobics. No matter what I had to do it as I had a class that showed up every day. That was the biggest blessing to me. I had a lot of energy even though sometimes I would do a few classes a day. I was strong. The worst mistake I ever made was stopping teaching.

William Turners Studio

I went to visit William Turners Studio yesterday. He is a well known artist who does these paintings that are soft landscapes and soft focus figures. They are nice and big too. Spending time with him was like being with a king.

He is regal and full of passion and repose. He is easy to talk to and to experience of being with him with his work is wonderful. He is just like his work.

I had the sense of being with a great man.

Artists are the most wonderful people and I think of them a diamonds of love. They give everything to their work and people get to bask in the radiance of that work, what a gift to humanity.

Anxiety

Believe it or not anxiety is a necessary part of the creative process. I have been reading how even people with a track record a mile long of successes, have tremendous anxiety starting a new project.

I certainly do and I am thinking what am I going to paint. I have no ideas whatsoever and I feel like I am going to just plum run out of ideas.

This has never happened and in reality I doubt that it will so why do I feel anxious.

It does not happen in other areas of life . You don't stand and the fridge and freak out and not know what you will make for dinner. You just use what you have in there and make something.

Or driving a car, you don't sit there and say I hope I remember how to drive. No you just drive.

But the creative process is different and anxiety is a (get this) necessary part of it. Without it you would be arrogant and horrible. There has to be a faith involved in getting through the anxiety and relying not on our own selves but on God actually. We are creative only because he allows it to flow through us. Anxiety just reminds us "it ain't me babe"