LIFTING THE VEILS

Please enjoy the following pieces of sculpture, mostly of the 18th century.  Amazing work with the substance of granite.  These days might only know see this great stone on kitchen counters, cut into slabs and shined to a high polish.  These artists allowed themselves to be challenged by a medium in which there is no addition, only subtraction.

                                       Giovanni Strazza, Nineteenth Century




We might imagine, we might play with the idea that our lives can be looked at as medium.  The mass, the material with which we are allowed to create.

                                                      If we take away just enough,

                                                   Being careful...

                                          Seeing deeply beneath the surface of things...

                 We might escape the layers of mess and mire to see the beauty beneath.

This is a monument to the father of Prince Raimondo Sangro Antonio 1685-1787.  It is called Freedom of the Spell c. 1787 by Franschesko Kvirolo

These last two by Lorenzo Bernini, depicting the abduction of Persephone.

Can you not almost feel the skin, hear their breath or breathless energy?








How will this inspire you today?
                29-05-14

LONGING FOR BELONGING

The Oxford English Dictionary defines longing as a yearning desire.  Belonging  defined variously as  1) Circumstances or relations connected with a person, thing or event.  2)  Possessions or goods.  
3) One's family, tribe or relatives, and 4) The state of having properties appropriate to something.





It has been written by people wiser than I, that all human longing is desire for Spirit, spirituality, God energy, Oneness, a whole greater than ourselves..  I personally always think of spirituality as that which evokes a sense of  belonging.   By this definition it could mean, a place, a group of people, an attitude and energy, an ideology.

Our search for love is being driven by a need for a greater/deeper connection.  So how do we find it?

Answering these questions may get you closer:   Where is home?  In what places do I find myself at peace and content?  What qualities are existent in the friends and family that I cherish the most?  Are there groups of people with whom I feel a sense of belonging?

Common as it is to struggle a bit with belonging, I believe that there are threads, paths and portals into this knowledge.  If you have been particularly isolated, now is the time to start saying YES to invitations.  Ask your world, your people to invite you to things that they love, or that move or nurture them.  




It may not be a direct route, but certainly an interesting journey.  If seeking spiritual roots, keep trying new and different-to-you spiritual events.  Some will resonate more than others, follow those leads.




Also if on the search for more belonging, keep trying new activities of all kinds…sports, environments, events, books. 

The broad space of artistic expression leads to passionate places, emotional resonance and works on our ability to see things from different perspectives.






Home for me is the ocean.  Someone asked me that question a few years ago and the answer popped out of my mouth before I could even think of it.  I am always content there, peaceful, cradled somehow in both the vision, sound and sight of it.  

As for human qualities I resonate to creative, sometimes irreverent, playful, gratitudinal folks.  Specific groups might be theater people, animal lovers, people who enjoy the arts, gardeners.. grounded folks, but light energy.





Make your lists, then head out….. and don't stop until you find some… and then plant yourself for awhile in the joy of that.

blessings, Misty
Saturday May 24th, 2014
Los Osos, California

MINDING THE EDGES

I started swimming again on Friday.  I didn’t all winter because the pool got too cold but with our recent heat wave (It was 102 here on the coast) all is toasty again in the pool.  I swim for about an hour doing the breast stroke.  I love the balance of it and how it looks in the water.  I know I can’t see it when I swim but my dancer mind has a good imagination.  Anyway, I got in my lap lane, got my goggles on, and dove in and began my strokes.   I found that I was often catching a bit of water in my mouth.  Not doing this thing for about six months had blown my timing.  It took me about 15 minutes to make a lap without missing the right edge of the water.  It got me thinking about edges of things.

Sometimes they are so important that perfection is almost necessary. Sometimes we need things a bit blurry, almost like squinting your eyes to see better.

Later the same day I was looking at a wall hanging that I had found at a garage sale.  I loved the shapes but it had big triangles of mustard yellow and a field of yellow upon which the main figure rested.  Since I am rarely liking that color, I found some red and green fabric dye and mixed some up with hot water and decided I would just use a paintbrush to put it on.  I knew it wouldn’t be an exact edge, but I kind of wanted a more rustic, aged look as I was going to hang it in my patio.  I kind of reveled in being messy.  I didn’t get the perfect lines along the geometric shapes, and some of the paint ran a bit.  But when I stood back to look at it.  It was PERFECT!

In swimming, the edge between the lip of water and my lips has to be very precise for maximum glide.  Too much of a head raise slowed me down, too little and I was taking in water. Hard to know just where to put oneself.   

I know this isn’t an earth shaking thought, but I did muse on the maker of the weaving and how beauty for him or her was probably based on no mistakes, perfect edges, but later than same object made so precisely could now be beautiful in a messier looser way.

 

I suppose there are a few things to extrapolate from

this.  First, at my age, I shouldn’t stop swimming for six months.  Second, it is good remember that things are what they are for NOW.  How we see something, use something or want something will probably be very different later on. 

We do tend to want things to remain the same, as it adds to our illusion of safety and control, but letting things go the way they need to go can be wonderful too. Adjusting ourselves to now, moving in on what is being asked in this moment, listening to something other than the old patterned thought of what we should do… can be lovely.

Have a good week.  Misty

May 18, 2014

MOTHERING COUNTRIES

I  have recently been grieving the loss of two close friends.  One I have known for 48 years and the other for under 20.

Both were somewhat sudden, the loss slicing into me like sharp knives.  The initial numbness leading to that stinging high pitched note of pain.  Each of these people held very different locations in my time, my history and I in theirs. I am struck by the stark differences in those places.

How could there be such separate and disparate zones within me that could each house whole acres of relationship unknown to the other?  We are rich with love. We are rich with our inner diversity.  We have space to entertain tribes and clans of folk in our inner world.  Each deep connection to another human nurtures and mothers our core, our direction, our compassion, and our outlook. Each, like our mothers, take  us on enormous and important excursions.

We have the ability to travel to those delicious sidings and stopovers and challenging treks.  These are vast undiscovered countries whose passports we are only given in specific and particular relationships.  These are places we could not visit without that other person by our elbow or within our minds and hearts.

Find those people.  Cherish those people.  Celebrate the continents that you are allowed to visit in the realm of your friendship.

Hold the images close to your sensibility and relish the sweetness of the journey.

It is all passing.  I like to think that when I reach end, that my human passport will be filled with a myriad of stamps and visas from long lists of sweet friendship.

Blessings and peace to you on this Mother's Day, 2014.  Misty

TAKING THE CALL

I have been busy with a guest for the last  few days, but last week I was playing.  Creating candles.  I unearthed by candle making box when I was cleaning closets for the yard sale.  I thought about how long that bin has been waiting for me to have time to play again…. And then the day appeared.

I have spoken many times in this blog about the creative impulse.  How important it is to our wellbeing.  The act of creation is a meditative state in which you might say you are crazy.  That is, you are not in your right mind….if your right mind is the linear, rational one.   Sure, we use our intelligence, reasoning, thought in the work of creating, but we do it in the context of something so much bigger than us.

It has been argued that both meditation and the creative process are the same as prayer, in that we are communing with energies far larger than our human vision.  Carl Jung might have said it was dipping into the “collective”.  The collective unconscious that was the wellspring available to all, at all times.

However we enter that space, it is so special and sacred that we are often drawn into silence.  We seem “away” from ourselves.  You know this, but a reminder that it doesn’t have to be ART, LITERATURE or some grand thing.   It can be the act of gardening, making dinner, rearranging furniture, placing a stone on a pile along a woodsy path.

This place is so healing and restful to the soul.  It is always calling to us.  In the next three days……take the call!

TRAPPED IN THE NARRATIVE

I have for the past month been doing that thing called SPRING CLEANING.  For the last three years I have participated in a city wide garage sale.  A whole town puts their things out to sell and cleans up their yards and garages and closets.  People come from many miles afar to wander through the streets and re–imagine the purpose and value of someone else’s castoffs.

Last Saturday I sold or gave away many things that had been taking up space in my life that had clearly passed it’s date of expiration…at least for me.  As I said I have done this for three years now, and YEP, I still had a van full of goodies, many that people were only too happy to take home and weave into their lives, if not garages, yards and             closets of their own..

I have to say that other than the drudge work of lifting and toting boxes and figuring out how to price things so I wouldn’t have to bring them home, I enjoyed the sifting, and most immensely the letting go of things that I think have defined me, or somehow I thought they did.

The narrative of my private life played out in art objects, mementos, crafting materials, office supplies, furniture, clothing and kitchen tools…I am pleased to say I went though every box, closet, shed, cabinet and drawer in my house and LET GO of more of my story.

There was plenty of time to consider how tied we get to who we WANT to be, who we THINK we are, who we want OTHERS TO THINK we are and who we HAVE BEEN.  It is a funny thing when you retire and move to a new area where people only know you NOW.  How important are those stories?  The ones we tell, and the ones we keep.  How much space do these stories take in our day to day living?  Is there room in our lives, rooms, walls to make a new picture?  To step out of the narrative and allow for new visions of ourselves to develop or emerge.

I can only tell you what a relief it was to leave all of those things elsewhere.  I felt as if I was let out of a cage of sorts…. Of course I will still remember those stories and they will remain a part of who I am today, but I do think that AT LEAST after 50 we have an opportunity to stop sitting on top of our pile of stuff  and calling it the whole world.

Take a moment and imagine meeting someone new.  Now imagine that you cannot tell them one thing about who you have been or what you have done.  They can only know you by how you act today?  Is that a comfortable feeling?  Scary, or Fun?

Not only can we  finish the story differently, but we can write new books about ourselves and about ourselves in a state of discovery and innocence.  Before we started acquiring all those things that define us, we were in a state of discovery and innocence.  It was fun………and the world was wide open……. 

As it could be now.  Keep the memories…  otherwise….start clean!