....fearless love

When I was a little girl I wanted to be a dancer...alas, my father wanted me to play the accordion..lol...so I didn't get dance lessons. My love for dancing has never left so put 'Dance' in the title and I'm there...

add Melissa Etheridge and I'm uplifted...

Turn up the volume

.....love is in the air

Spring is here!

This is a lilac bush/tree that Daughter #2 and I planted 15 years or so ago as a memorial to my mother who loved lilacs.

In all those years it has only grown to little over 2 feet tall and this is the first Spring it has bloomed.
I'll admit to not having a green thumb but I have loved and pampered this little bush for a very long time and I was beginning to feel a little like something was seriously wrong in the world because it wouldn't bloom.

But here it is...blooming!
And it smells so good!
And it reminds me of my mother....
I miss her everyday.

Spring is my favorite time of year...there is something about it that is almost like falling in love. Only the Earth is my lover...bringing color to my world.
The springtime sun instead of teasing as it does in the winter, or burning as it does in summer, becomes a lovers warm and sensuous touch.
It makes me want to lay down in the sweet green grasses, closer to the smell of new life and watch the clouds go by....
allowing my imagination to paint me other worlds in the sky.

Love for a specific person is radiant when it arises in Emptiness.
It is still love, it is still intensely personal, it is still very specific;
but it is a wave that arises from an ocean of infinity.
It is as if a great sea of love brings forth a wave, and that wave carries the force and thrill of the entire sea in its every breaking crest.
The sensation is like watching an early morning sunrise in the desert: a vast open clear blue spaciousness, within which there arises, on the horizon, an intense red-yellow fire.
You are the infinite sky of Love,
in which a particular fire-ball of personal love arises....

Ken Wilber...embracing you true nature

These are my children.....
Amazing Daughters #2 and #1, the gifted young man who has been part of all our family gatherings for 10 years, and Beautiful Grandson...
They come to me with all the good and the bad that they experience and they fill me with love. I saw them all yesterday and that makes for an extra good day.
I'm a very blessed woman.
I have love in my life...
I know someone who feels she has none...
and the saddest thing is she may be right
I think lack of love and the human touch could make a person go insane.
Can you imagine?
No love...

Love...

Love as a work of art...

"There are all kinds of artists. A group we should celebrate more are artists of life itself who use their tools to express the inexpressible. Without a bursh, they depict life with bright colors. Without a knife, they sculpt the magic of being . Without a scale, they create music for us all. Without choreography, they engage in the dance of life.

When we are born, we are each given tools to create a life of beauty. These same tools can be used to perpetuate ugliness and destruction. Hopefully we will understand at some point in our lives that we can decide to reflect beauty. tangible works of art fade with time, chip from walls, and may be discredited by passing trends. But a life of love lasts forever...."
from Born for Love by Leo Buscaglia

Love for a specific person is radiant

....listening is love in action.

Life is our greatest possession and love it's greatest affirmation.

...It is only when we have experienced love
that we truly realize what would be lost by missing it.

Love is not about opening old wounds, it's about healing them....

...Love is far less concerned with what's past than with what's next.

The life and love we create is the life and love we live.

Any act that inhibits is not love. Love is only love when it liberates.

As long as one can admire and love, then one is young forever...

Various Authors

Have a lovely day!!!!
love, love

....water, water, everywhere water...but none to drink

Looking for something I could post about Earth Day I searched anti-war songs, because so many of the wars around the world aren't about ideology, they are about the plundering of our natural resources so that a handful of corporations can make money...and that search led me to water wars...Water should be a human right...it isn't....




Happy Earth Day...

....spirithelpers

The Lake

through you
I am all things
in your depths the world is quiet
I remember
I am silence
along your shore

waters warm
I remember
I am the heat of the sun
floating on your skin
caressed between your water
and sky
I breathe and I am buoyant
standing
feet buried in your sands
I am rooted
in water languid
in air spirit
when I swim
through your body
I am movement alive
we are
much the same
my body is earth
container of living waters
you flow with and around all you meet
a mutable dance
changing form
liquid ice mist

honoring always the substance of who you are enduring endlessly through all whom you nurture...

This beautiful photo and poem are from Tammie Lee's Spirithelpers blog...
Tammie has a true gift for seeing nature in all her glory and Spirithelpers is one of my favorite places to go to get in touch with Spirit...
her photography is over-the-top wonderful...
add her words and chances are you'll be feeling Spirit too.
She is a gentle gift.

I send you here to share the joy.

....look, I'm in a book!!

This is it, and it's beautiful....I haven't had a chance to go from cover to cover, I just got my copy yesterday, but there is a lot of wonderful art being shared...I'm just going to give you a glimpse today and probably a bit more later....some of it I just have to share.

Here's my page...I'm in the section Tapestries and Display Art
I'm so excited!

There are some fabulous clothes...this by Yvonne Wakabyashi, Canada

....and look at this quilt by Denies Labadie, USA...amazing...
I thought it was a photo...

Vessels...I love vessels and bowls...these are beautiful...by Sharon Costello, USA

Gotta love this shoe by Lindsay Taylor...I would wear them, yes I would!

.....little bundles

People I know, and people I don't, gift me with little bundles, sometimes big bundles, of things they hope I can use in my figures....wonderful fabrics, little boxes of beads, baggies with seeds...paint, yarn, knitting needles (I don't knit, but if I ever decide to I have an amazing number of these)...I get bones, feathers, fabulous feathers,skulls, fur, shells, earrings, lot's of earrings, books..all kinds of books from spiritual, to art, to healing, cds & dvds..And pine cones and sticks...Sometimes I don't get to these gifts for awhile...
I put them here and there for later inspection....
After this last run of creativity I could no longer ignore the chaos in my studio.
So I did a bit of cleaning, straightening.

And I went through a couple of the gifting bags....

I found these dream catchers...

They came from friends Sallie and Louise..Sallie has passed and Louise has moved away. They were such wonderful cheerleaders for the arts. They are missed and finding these dream catchers really touched me,
and sent me down memory lane.
I will keep one of them...
When people gift me I accept little bits of there energy into my space..good energy from these friends for sure.

Sallie and Louise called them Web Catchers....
The Spirit above will be adorned with one incomplete, but oh so beautiful web.
They gave them out as gifts with a little scroll that says...

This gift is given to those we love so that you will constantly be surrounded by warm, loving, positive and good thoughts. These captured thoughts will then enhance you and bring you added love, joy and beauty.

And that is exactly what I experienced at Art Hop this past Saturday...I'm sorry I don't take pictures...I always take a camera but I get busy with people and never get around to snapping that photo.

It was a very good day...I sold which is always nice....but much of the high I felt after came from the other artists joanne Burgess & Vicki Thomas, Kimee the manager of the Mind Shop, and the people who stopped by to see us.
So many friends, and I met a fellow blogger for the first time, Megan @ Praying Horse...she and I sat together and made clay faces...
I love her gentle energy and the fact that she is a bit of a hermit like I am.

Maybe all artists are hermits at heart? Our work is so solitary. If we didn't have to market ourselves would we ever see anyone??
I go to Art Hop because people want to meet me..and I want to meet them too but it still feels strange, and I'm shy about it, but what an honor.. I worry afterward that they are disappointed because I am pretty ordinary,
neither magical, or particularly wise.

It was a good weekend here in the foothills...we even got a much needed storm yesterday, which will carry on today with possible thunder storms.
Much joy to you!!

...... more smalls

Abundant Spirit

The Wind

1000 French Kisses

I think you can tell I am really enjoying creating small figures with spirit...

In order to hang at the Timberline Small Wonders show nothing can be larger than 10"....I have a large stash of bits and pieces of fabric and other special little bits of this and that.....
these little spirits allow me to use them....
so as long as they keep talking to me, I will keep making them...


I'm going to be at the Mind Shop Bookstore in Oakhurst from 11am-4pm on Saturday the 10th...I'll have some of the smalls with me. I'm going to bring some clay to make masks with....You can make one too.

I'll be sharing space with the enchanting and talented joAnn Burgess, I collect her wonderful pixel angels...and the enchanting and talented water colorist Vicki Thomas...Come and see us if you can!