Listening to Shanna spout crap like that made my belly churn. What the heck was she thinking??? But suddenly, she went into this kind of glassy-eyed trance . . . Shanna came back over today to tell me she was so grateful to me for stopping her panic attack yesterday. And, all excited, told me […]
You are browsing archives for
Tag: choice
STOP WASTING YOUR ENERGY!
My neighbor Shanna came over, crying, utterly bereft about the election. I told her to put her big-girl panties back on and quit indulging in weeping and wailing and moaning and being angry and sad, moping around like a victim, wasting her energy She yelled at me. I don’t do well with being yelled at. […]
DON’T GO CRAZY – JUST DRAW!
There are some days when things in life seem so shitty that I can’t get my mind bent around a single thing – except drawing. Drawing is my life-saver. Today was one of those days. I’ve been completely occupied with the travesty happening in North Carolina - I got totally sucked in. I try to not do […]
“I Can’t!”
Here’s a little inspiration for you if you are worried, anxious, scared, or having a desperately hard time. Or maybe it’s for someone you know. I’ve heard you say, “I failed.” I’ve heard you say, “I’m so tired.” And “I’m so afraid.” I know it’s hard when you’re exhausted and it feels like you have […]
Healing/Creating Hands
Source energies curl and furl in my palms. They remain there until I start working on something. Sometimes they churn and make my hands tingle. As soon as I begin to focus, the energy passes through to my fingers. Way back in the 60s when I was a potter living in Hawaii, my logo was […]
Be A Fierce Bear about Your Art
You have to know the value of what you create. To me, whether it’s my visual art or my writing, it is the Divine Voice speaking with my voice and hands. Its value is incalculable. Never let anyone dissuade you from regarding your art as valuable. When my kids were little, they’d join me in […]
What Inspires You?
I was taught that “great artists wait for inspiration to come to them, and then they create.” So obviously, if I wanted to become a great artist, I needed to wait for inspiration to come. Well that’s just total BS. Smart me! I didn’t believe it. Life moves faster than that. And I don’t wait […]
Teachers: Make Money Selling Your Lessons
Here’s something that surprised me recently – did you know you can sell your lesson plans? You can! And people pay dearly for them! You can also sell your worksheets, class exercises, reading guides, and other helpful educational resources! ARE YOU A TEACHER/INSTRUCTOR/PROFESSOR? Why teach one group of kids in school, when you can teach […]
Get Your Audience Settled, whether Live o...
You’re about to lead a workshop or presentation. You want to begin, but your audience comes into the space full of energy, busy-busy chatting, walking around, chaotic. This is for you. What I’m about to show you works for in-person, online, and zoom events. The first thing I do is bang on my podium. Or […]
Signals that There’s Something Going on U
Speaking with my business coach about a plan we were creating for my own coaching, I started to get really sleepy. If I didn’t lie down right now, I’d simply collapse on the floor in a puddle… (Watch/listen to me reading this story to you here!) I had been blazing wide awake the moment before, […]
Dreams of Devastation Morph into … Pickle
I keep having dreams where I’m standing in a dried up, deserted field. In the distance, I see the crumbling husks of hundreds and hundreds of houses, and the blackened, burnt skeletons of the once-magnificent trees that used to shade them. The cracked mud on the bottom of the creek is rock-hard, bereft of even […]
My Mind Starts Eating Before I Do
I’ll be sitting here writing, or doing some other task, and in the back of my head I’m busy preparing the juicy makings of a delicious tomato salad, or a nice spicy wrap around some cheese and micro-greens, or some yummy curried lentil soup… Or making art of some kind…. If I don’t get up […]
Unity-ness. Loch Ness. Lock-ness. Open-ne...
From a Dream, Narrated by The Voice of Dreaming: Word play. Philosophy in Silli-ness. The Doctrine of Jest. Farcicality of Foolery… Starting here and ending where? Unity
Last Does Not Mean Loser
(Published in Small Craft Advisor Magazine) We were in the last part of the first pack. The finish line seemed impossibly far away. It was right then that I made the most colossal mistake. I had been so proud! I’d been invited to be one of two kids to represent our local sailing club as […]
Your Work Doesn’t Speak for Itself
It was only after that decision that people started seeing things through my eyes. They started comprehending the value of art – the effects of color, the harmonizing of life through good design, the pleasure a painting or sculpture could bring . . . I’m a stone carver, painter, author and book designer— among other […]
SIGNALS that THERE’S SOMETHING GOING ON U
Recently when I was speaking with my advisor about a business and marketing plan we were creating for my coaching, I started to get really sleepy. I felt like if I didn’t lie down right now I would simply collapse on the floor in a big ole slippery puddle. I had been blazing wide awake […]
HOW I DEAL WITH DESTRUCTIVE MONEY BELIEFS
Annie and I allowed ourselves to face the debilitating beliefs we had about ourselves, money, and business. Here’s what happened. Not too long ago, my buddy Annie and I got together on zoom, and did some inside work on our relationships with money. Hahaha — no, we weren’t going to get a divorce from money! Quite the […]
BE KIND. NO MATTER WHAT.
We learn to hide the pain. We feel unacceptable. We learn to present happy faces, calm demeanors, soft voices — where what we really feel like doing is screaming until our throats rip apart. Be kind. That’s what comes to mind when I see people getting down on folks who write about being depressed and […]
JAM the LOW FREQUENCIES with the HIGHEST ...
How we can drum in a new era of joy, peace, beauty, and love. I guess I’m still an old hippie at heart. I look at what’s going down in the world right now, and remember the 60s, and how the world looked upside down and crazy, then, too. Out of that ‘bad’ time, men’s […]
WHY WOMEN ARTISTS FAIL(ed)
I had deeply internalized all those negative, destructive messages and made them into my own beliefs that >I< was a failure, that >I< was the one to blame, and that >I< would ‘never make it’ – I attended an intense marketing workshop for women artists a while back. It made me cry. It put me […]
HOW I REDESIGNED MY FUTURE
I threw out all of the first and second stage work — it was horrendous. I wouldn’t want my worst enemy to have to suffer seeing those designs on even his underwear. In January of 2021, I took a plunge and enrolled in an intense 3-month long course in surface/pattern design. In case you don’t […]
HOW SAYING “I FORGIVE YOU” SAVED HER LIFE
Sitting like a little kid, with her legs straight out in front of her, she was shock-white, with glazed- eyes seeing nothing. The webbing between her left hand first finger and thumb … My mother and I got into a huge argument during my senior-year spring break. We disagreed so vehemently that after three days, […]
SHY ARTIST DEAD TOO SOON
One day about a month before she left the planet, she turned to me with such a galvanizing look that I felt my feet suddenly get cemented to the floor. If I’d wanted to pay attention to anything else, I could not have. I’ve always said I’d be a psychologist if I hadn’t trained to […]
‘I DIDN’T SIGN UP FOR THIS!’
The secrets every last one of the characters carries are all starting to dribble out, with horrifying consequences. Everyone’s true nature is being revealed. I’ve been watching a fairly new show on Amazon called POWER. You have to know that I don’t watch TV. Not EVER. So it’s pretty near miraculous that I even heard […]
THINK, FEEL, TAKE ACTION, ASSESS, REPEAT
Despite feeling so insulted and so enraged, and so helpless to do anything about what had happened, I also knew I had to, could, and absolutely would, change How Things Were. After I got home from my sailing-across-the-Pacific journey, I spent a good amount of time cogitating about what I wanted next in my life. […]
LEARNING to READ the ENERGY
There was one point where I felt funny, and I looked over to see his face flash this weird face-video of emotions. I couldn’t read it, it went so fast. But I felt alarmed…. Right after George W. Bush the very junior got elected, I left the USA. Bush’s idiocy during and after the event […]
THE ANCIENTS
When T and I moved into the little one-BR house on Maui near the beach, no one thought to mention it had been built over an ancient Hawaiian burial ground. It had been covered up in the late 1800s to make room for a white-man’s housing development, rows of little plantation houses for the cane-field […]
A HARD-WON PEACE
Our drive from Des Moines to Long Island was flawless. I was almost shocked at how easy and fun it was, after our two almost-fatal encounters with truckers. Our ride, Harley, was a delightful man who, instead of leaving us off in Des Moines as we had planned, invited us to stick with him all […]
CRUNCHY YOGA & AUDIO BOOKS!
Recently I’ve been creating a 1-2-3 systems webinar for teaching authors how to make their own audio books. Why audio books, you ask? Because although it’s easy to publish kindle books on amazon, you can get your audio books onto 47 other platforms! Imagine you have one book, and you put it for sale on […]
TWO for TANGO
When I first moved here to California, I went through a bit of culture shock. The air is grey, not yellow; people wear mostly dull browns, greys and blacks, not bright aloha shirts, sarongs and bright-colored clothing; friendly greetings in stores on the street are regarded as suspicious and either ignored or given stink eye; […]