...questions without answers

Today I feel like I'm in a play

 and everyone has a script but me....

.......studio avoidance

A happy life must be to a great extent a quiet life, for it is only in an atmosphere of quiet that true joy dare live. 

Bertrand Russell

On the table

Seems I've got Studio Avoidance...

Altar at night

You might know what I mean...Creative avoidance....

Lakshmi

Mine isn't total studio avoidance.  I love my studio and I spend a lot of  time there...

on the table too

I've done a little hand work...worked on little figures..

dreaming window

I go everyday for a few hours...

books

I read and watch old Ally McBeal  episodes...

I love the magic in them and they make me laugh..

On the wall

I listen to Free Speech Radio out of Berkeley because 

I appreciate news that isn't corporate owned and packaged.

more books

I find inspiration here...I meditate and dance 

my lovely little wood burner

It's cozy and one corner is quite seductive...it beckons to come and curl up next to the fire and read or write or just day dream.. 

Gaia at night

So it really isn't whole studio avoidance...

it's the creative work side of my studio that's I'm avoiding...

Medicine

I've done some cleaning and straightening...
wandered through on many occasions...
looking for that spark..

But I haven't wanted to call in my Muse....

I'm avoiding her..

What's up with that...

and what's the cure????

I do

....evoking the Goddesses

our altar 
 it's not recognizable but I brought a little turtle, my totem,
 emerging from her egg...the intent there is obvious..
alway hope to be changing and emerging...
Growth can be hard, looking at flaws and weaknesses..
Change, oh my, how I sometime resist...
but the alternative is not so good..

I belong to a Sacred Circle..
.every other week my goddess sister friends and I come together to talk, and love, and explore our paths on the twisty, turning, sometimes crazy journey we are all on.  We take turns leading.  We are a spread out group of women...and although the gatherings are at different places each time, someone always has to travel an hour or so. 
It is a commitment...and not always an easy one to keep...but we do...
we make every effort to be there for each other...


A few weeks ago our hosting sister asked that we come as our most glorious goddess selves and talk about how Goddess works in our lives...
which one, or two, or three, we most identify with..
or the goddess whose qualities we'd like to evoke..


Of course Goddess Nu Kua is my art muse...
I've written about her many times...paying homage...
She is my partner in so much that brings me bliss.


And for a while now I've been aware that Aphrodite has come along to teach me a few things about love...
 I decided to pay a little closer attention to her...study up a bit.  
I pulled out my beat up copy of 
Goddesses in Every Woman by jean Shinoda Bolen 
So much of what she has to say about this, 
the alchemical goddess, resonated with me.


Yes, she is the goddess of love...but not just romantic or sexual love...
She is also there for platonic love, soul connections, deep friendships...
Bolen says..."when ever growth is generated, a vision supported, potential developed, a spark of creativity encouraged"...Aphrodite is there.

"Aphrodite consciousness is present in all creative work, including that done in solitude...."  Whenever she is present energy is generated...she adds the spark, the sizzle, the passion, to every encounter...rather it be in our creative life, or in our relationships.   

 She brings so much energy to the creative process we often lose track of time when under the influence of her magic.

Aphrodite is also there to encourage the sorting of things..
when a crucial decision must be made she reminds me to go within and sort those jumbled feeling...take an honest look at what is important to me and what my motives might be....what passion is at work.




I decided that I wanted to call in Athena too...
she is the goddess of wisdom, strategy and clear thinking...much needed here.  
And I called in Persephone...to help me stay open and receptive when sometimes I want to close up and run away from life....it happens...
I am an emotional being.


Hera came to me to help me make commitments that I can be comfortable with, and faithful too..
and last but not least..I called in Artemis 
to help keep me focused on my goals...
not let myself be detoured from what it is I vision for myself...She reminds me that I don't always need to know every step to getting where I want to go....that sometimes it is enough to be clear and to take the steps as they come...I don't need to have all the answers..
often intuition speaks loudly enough...if only I'm clear enough to listen.

I've covered some bases here...yes, I have...


I think we can learn a lot by reflecting on the archetypes, 
and the myths and stories about larger than life women.  
It helps me to look at my strengths and weaknesses...call in balance.

There is a lot of joy in being a woman, exploring with other women...
we are so multi-faceted...
so much to share and offer each other and the world....
I think we could use a little more Goddess energy floating around...
.woman energy...not so much the energy of women who have turned away from their feminine qualities to be more like men in this man's world...
but women who celebrate our feminine strengths.  We are pretty amazing in   our ability to love so deeply and live so creatively..stay so strong.
Hat's off to my sister goddesses..xo

....One World One Heart

One World One Heart ended yesterday,

it was the last one of this annual event.

This was my third year as a participant..and I will miss it next year.

I have met some of my very best sister friends via the journey that is OWOH and I believe I've connected with some new ones this year!

I want to thank Lisa at The Whimsical Bohemian for taking on this task of what must be a labor of love...


My winner for this year is Wendy at Year of the Cats.
I'll be sending the Woman Talking Stick off to her next week.


I want to thank all of you who stopped by my blog during this event......


Enjoy the journey...julie

.....Throw your love into the Universe.....it will return..

I actually had something else for today, but I liked this so much more..

.it is hopeful about love...it a little long maybe but worth the time..

.Made me cry a little, but that's not so hard to do..

Happy Valentines Day

“Love is a mighty power.  It is light.  It is the energy of life.  It brings us into life and sustains us while we live and breathe.

Love is an energy, not a substance.  It is essence, not matter. 

 You can't contain it; you can't put it in a box, 

but you can feel it, taste it, and know it.  Its presence is unmistakable.  

It is exquisite and profound. 

 And when you are in love, nobody, not your best friend, your parents, or even your own mind can talk you out of it.

Love is mysterious and beautiful.  

It makes us happy, gives us hope, allows us to believe that the impossible can happen.  And yet, it's inexplicable. 

 It can't be defined or analyzed, cataloged or priced. 

 Its premiere property is that when it exists it can never be mistaken for anything else, and nothing else, no matter how worthwhile or supposedly grand, can ever be passed off as love.  

Love is a divine energy that steps into human circumstances, a timeless essence that enters time.  

It is older, wiser, finer, truer, sweeter,

 and more radiant than any human being.  

It is what makes us wise, fine, true, sweet, and radiant.  

It is the best - the essence of God - in us.  

And it is love, this exquisite energy, with which we connect when we first enter into the human experience we call 'a relationship'. 

We see this energy in one another's eyes, we feel it in our bodies, and we know that something bigger than life has stepped into our life 

to capture our attention.  

It is this highly charged, buoyant, transcendent, delicious feeling, 

and the longing for more,

 for a lifetime of it, that propels us into relationships.

Relationships are the endless interplay of this vast energy of love and all that occurs in our daily human lives. 

 Our desire to feel this love forever, to be in love always, to repeat and endlessly recapture this ecstatic luminous feeling day by day, year by year, with the person who first inspired it in us is not only why we 'fall in love'  but also why we choose 'to have relationships'. 

It is also why, when our relationships go sour or grow threadbare, we reminisce about the way they once were. We want to reconnect with love.

Our greatest desire is to have our relationships return to us again and again to the transforming and beautiful experience of the love that first inspired them and brought them into being.  We live to love.

If all of this is true about love, and I believe it to be, then why are we so often disappointed in the love in our lives?  Why does it so often seem to fail us and why is it so often a pitched battle?

Like so many of the rest of us, I am a veteran of the relationship wars, and by profession I am also a diplomat in love's peacekeeping operations. 

 I've entered and ended more than a dozen fully formed intimate relationships, ranging from conventional marriage to passionate interludes that ran their course, then ended. 

 In some I left; in others I was left.  In some I was betrayed;

 in others I was the betrayer.  

A few ended in anger, 

many more ended by creating the portal to a new and deeper connection, allowing the love that had fused them to become even more profound after the relationship's so-called demise. 

I've written more than half a dozen books about relationships from the point of view that an intimate relationship is the ultimate container of love in the human experience.  

As I wrote these books about the traditional forms of relationship, urging people toward the enchantment of romance and the fulfillments of marriage, I watched as my own relationships broke the rules of convention and assumed surprising and extraordinary forms. 

 At first I thought this was just me, but then I realized everyone I was counseling was also living in relationships that were in conflict with their own definitions of what a relationship should be.  

Their relationships, too, were turning somersaults and taking on forms that shocked them, and the very strangeness of all this change was sowing a sense of confusion and disaster.

In fact, these startling, new relationships, which conventional minds might call aberrant, are actually Roman candles lighting the way to a world of new possibility. 

Something wonderful is happening in all of this chaos 

but nobody knows what it is. 

 Everybody in this position is thinking, 

'Other people have real relationships.  What's the matter with me?'

There's nothing the matter with any of us, but  there is a grand transformation afoot.  A mysterious energy seems to be taking quietly over, and things, we may say, just aren't the way they used to be. When we say this, we aren't like our grandmothers, crotchety in their rocking chairs, lamenting the passing of the past.  A new world, a new way of being, is being born in our midst.  We can feel it.

Things are categorically different.  Time has a strange new quality.  'It passes before we have a moment to rest in it.  

There's a new softness in our midst, a way of being with one another, that is gracious and gentle and kind. 

There is also a beautiful strangely infiltrating awareness, a mystic pulse of connection that seems to be gathering us together. 

 Love is trying to find us.

And in the process, all the forms are changing.  

Our whole world of relationships is in an uproar.  

Love is the wrecking ball that is pulverizing every relationship of record that isn't wide enough or brave enough to let real love in. 

As a consequence, we can't fantasize anymore about what our relationship lives will be.  The truth is exceptions and aberrations abound.  

It's as if we've awoken one morning to discover that a blizzard of transformation occurred during the night.

 The new world has its strange beauty.  

Familiar landmarks are vaguely, heartwarmingly still visible beneath the blanket of new snow, but it's treacherous out there.  

We're cold, we long for the hearth; we want to come home.

Having been raised to regard marriage as the only honorable relationship, we woke up to discover that it was only one in a vast array of intimate connections.  Our relationships are about our hearts, and all of this chaos is breaking our hearts.  We don't know whether to go along with all this transformation or re.

sist it, whether to think of it as some kind of progress or to dig in our heels, praying for a reprieve from all this harrowing evolution

The truth is we all come from love, 

but our relationships have often been a detour from love.  

I believe that we were all together once as a single, vast, pulsating, luminous consciousness that was divided bit by bit, person by person, into the tiny shining fragments that are our individual souls.  

Love is the river, each human being a droplet of water, and together, in spite of our fears and resistance, 

we are returning to love, melting and flowing toward home.

We're all looking for more love.  It's that simple.  

In the end, nothing else really matters to us.  In the beginning and in the middle, we're concerned with the forms of our relationships, what they look like, what our parents think of them, how they stack up in the eyes of the world, and whether we're getting our share of the goodies:  

sexually, emotionally, and financially. But in the end, we won't care about the forms.  The forms will be as multitudinous as the stars and all that will matter is the love that was in them. 

 No one can escape the divine upheaval of love.  

I haven't; you won't; your neighbors and strangers and family won't either. 

Love is coming to find us.  All of us.  Because love is our essence. Love is who we are.”

- Daphne Rose Kingman, “The Future of Love”

thanks for sharing...

coyoteprime-runningcauseicantfly.blogspot.com

.....ummmm

Pray for your desired experience

rather than the thing that represents the experience.

Allen Cohen

A novel idea.   

One I've heard before, using a lot more words...

I think I will make the sincere effort it will take to put it into practice..

I sounds so freeing to me.

....what if?

"Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God’s eyes. If only they could all see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time. There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed…I suppose the big problem would be that we would fall down and worship each other.”

Thomas Merton

Amma