I’ve studied healing plants for years, and have always wanted to honor them somehow – the ones I have used always did such wonders for me and my family. So I’m working on creating a series of designs featuring plants used for healing. Each one of them has specific properties that help with various different […]
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Tag: energy
THE BUNNY & THE TORTOISE Give Up the Race
There are days I’m so full of ideas and images they feel like popcorn popping and bursting and trying to get out of my noggin. Today was one of those days. Usually, before I open my eyes to fully wake up, I spend a bit of time appreciating what I’m most grateful for, and then […]
NASTURTIUMS: MY SAVIORS
The Park Fire here in northern California tried to snake its fiery fingers right into my world, coming within three miles of my house. It freaked the living daylights out of me, relentlessly debilitating me for a whole month. The fire is still raging, many miles to the north, over 450,000 scares burnt, lives cut […]
What Do You Do to Come Back to Your Sense...
Do you ever start something and end up doing something completely and utterly radically different? I fought it, but that’s what happened today. I started out tonight intending to write a story about a disastrous sailing adventure I had when I was 15. Then I started thinking about how, in the past three or four […]
What Do You Do if Someone Steals Your Art...
A fellow artist asked me: You’ve sent a company your images to see if they’d like to carry your line on their products. How do you know they won’t steal your artwork and put it on their products and sell them without your knowledge? My first thought was, in that case, either the company will […]
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 […]
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 […]
Reading Time
My buddies love it when I read to them! We gather together and sit on my bed with piles of snacks, and they help me choose which books to read. We love the Mysterious Island, and all of Nathan Lowell’s sci-fi stories. I have to be careful of Kitty, though — she likes to lean […]
Practice
I discovered that practice meant giving up trying to achieve perfection. What it really gave me was a calm, quiet belly. Many long years ago, I practiced Tai Chi Sword, and Naginata, a women’s sword-fighting art, where the sword is bound to a six-foot bamboo pole that extends the reach of the sword. There was […]
The Squall of All Squalls
I used to love to fish. Down at the dock, I’d dangle my feet off the end, feeling the outright peace being saturated with sun and calm and things-are-just-right brings. Sometimes I’d row a skiff out, and float around in the shadows under the piers, throwing in my line to see what I could catch. […]
Kitties Don’t Give Up!
I used to watch my cat sit still for hours watching the birdies – he never, ever gave up. It made me wonder why I often gave up easily. . So I stopped doing that. Now I’m like a ravenous tiger with a fresh steak – get away! Mine! I’m going to get this done! […]
Comments, Connectedness, and Kindness
I wonder why people feel so free to be outright a-holes, mean sons of bunches, and screaming ranting judgmental karens out to intentionally destroy some innocent person’s reality. I’m thinking about the comments we all make online — on Medium, Substack and other article sites, social media — from Facebook to X to instagram and […]
I Had A Tantrum Yesterday, and It Wasn’t
Finding out I had zero choice set me on fire. I can usually put up with automated customer service, whether on the phone, or online chat. But this time? Oh my. We bought a new mattress/box-spring set from a company we found online. It was delivered, unpacked and set up; the delivery guys left; I […]
Caught by A Monster Outgoing Tide
(Published in Small Craft Advisor Magazine) My friend Jana and I decided to take the little blue skiff out — we’d row across the harbor to the tiny crescent-shaped beach right under the old Tiffany mansion, and have a lazy picnic. But we never got there. We were bored. It was a hot July noon […]
What’s Your Destiny? Mine Is Scary.
I’m assuming that I’m going to live to be 100. So I’ve been thinking about what I want to see happen in my life in my last 22 years. On the one hand, most of me just wants to disappear to a small hideout on the beach somewhere. I want to putter in a thriving […]
Why Should I Bother Making Art in Times o...
I got a call from an artist friend who was all upset about the way the world seems to be inside out and utterly falling apart. She said, “When I look at how the world has gotten, I think why bother making art anymore? People say they are either too worried about rent to buy […]
Excruciating Pain and Horror to Unending,...
The emergency room intake attendant side-eyed me in disbelief from under frowning grizzled brows. Holding my pulse with one hand, with the other he was hurriedly filling in my chart with cryptic slashes and numbers. He looked back down at it on his lap, and glanced at me again. Not really seeing me. “How is […]
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 […]
Erecting Energetic Safety Zones
‘They’ say “we are all energy, frequencies…” So … I’m wondering … what if we could actually make use of that idea? We are all eating great quantities of chemicals, unbalanced or poisoned nutrients, plastic particles, and industrial byproducts that our bodies cannot use, metabolize or eliminate. We just can’t actually see it all, or […]
That Damn Cat!
How my mother was attacked by an enormous rasty-looking tabby cat…. (You can watch/listen to this story in a video at the bottom of this page!) My family used to live in a wonderful old 1880s farmhouse. Upstairs, my folks’ bedroom had a dutch door that opened onto a wide, sunny deck. My mother liked […]
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 […]
Got A Recipe for Eating Crow?
Is it better to just let things go? Or risk being criticized or countered or even cancelled, because of making a mistake? In a post I read on medium the other day, the writer said something I thought was incorrect. I was surprised, because he seemed pretty knowledgeable. Normally, I don’t try to correct people […]
How the Voice of Dreaming Saved My Life
Isn’t it funny how, even though a period of time was one of the most painful ones of your life, later on you can look at it as one of the most fortunate? It’s January, 1999. After returning from visiting a friend back east, I’ve been homeless for months because I can’t afford to rent […]
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 […]
You’re Always Late! You’re So Annoying!
It was Sara’s 40th birthday party. I had barely walked through the door when she pounced on me, screaming. Right in my face. Behind her, the casual low-level murmur of party-din dissolved into a ragged silence. Every head swiveled toward us, mouths agape with surprise. I was so taken aback I almost turned around and […]
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 […]
My Queendom for A Bag of Cookies
Yesterday, I was graced by the help of a young man who had no clue how much his assistance meant to me. Due to a funky situation with my back, I don’t walk — I hobble. And it hurts. All day, every day. So when I had to actually get a ride and go to […]
GIVE IT UP!
(Published in Small Craft Advisor Magazine) Sailing is more than ‘just a skill.’ It’s a life-and-death adventure every time you go out, and if you have even one smidgen of smarts in your head, you know you have to be prepared every time you go out onto the water. Since my parents took me sailing […]