Here's a mixed media piece I made in 2008. I gave it to my sweet cousin, who is getting married this week!!!! I wish her (and all of us!!!) a home and partnership which always provide safety, sanctuary, joy, and a place to nest!

My cousin is getting married next week. This afternoon I made this card for the wedding; she loves pink peonies as much as I do. I personalized the postmark with the date and place of the wedding. I'm flying out this weekend to indulge in week long girl fun and wedding prep with my daughter, aunt, and cousins at my aunt's beautiful farm house, followed by the wedding weekend at a gorgeous resort on Lake Michigan. Yum! Chances are I'll be away from this space for a week or so, but then back with new inspiration and post-celebration glow on!

Artful Life Moon Circle - New Moon!

Are we really affected by the phases of the moon? Does the moon exert some magical pull on our watery bodies or our primitive minds? Maybe. What I do know for sure is that to flourish, we need to feel connected to the world around us. The practice of patterning our lives, even in small, symbolic ways, on the patterns of nature can be very affirming. For me, the cycle of the moon is a beautiful reflection of the cycles of increase and decrease in my own life.

About the Artful Life Moon Circle:

It's moon circle time again! Here on the Artful Life we meet at each New and Full Moon to share inspiration and intentions, and to align our energies with the lunar cycles. Anyone is welcome to join the Moon Circle! If this is your first Moon Circle, read this post to find out what it's all about. You can also click here for a printable (and pretty) guide to the moon phases, from me to you. If you'd like to read all the Artful Life Moon Circles, click here.

In brief, here's how it works: on each New and Full Moon days, I will be posting my intentions for the coming moon phase. Then I will invite you to leave a comment, with your own intentions and reflections. Writing your intentions and sharing them with others will help keep you accountable to yourself, and you'll have the benefit of all the yummy energy and encouragement from the other artful women in the circle, not to mention the moon magic. In general, the New Moon is a great opportunity for new beginnings and goal setting, so you might want to set an intention for something you want to INCREASE or GROW as the moon waxes. The Full Moon is an opportunity to reflect on this growth, and to set an intention for something you would like to DECREASE or RELEASE from your life as the moon wanes. Questions? E-mail me - bbsimons@telus.net.

So welcome to the September New Moon!
What is it that wants to grow in your life over the next month? Where do you need the energy of increase in your life? This New Moon, my keyword is support. A change that I want to invite into my life this month is allowing myself to accept, receive, ask for and recognize support. This Fall I am embarking on a study of Restorative Yoga; eventually I want to integrate this powerful and healing practice into my teaching of dance & creativity. For now I am taking classes and studying. In Restorative Yoga, all poses are supported - literally supported by props, so the body can relax and surrender. This morning in class I had a wonderful AHA moment - about how perfect it is that I should be drawn to this discipline just now in my life - because what I need most is to learn to surrender to the support that is around me. I believe many of us struggle in this way - we value our independence, we cultivate strength, we strive for autonomy. These are valuable qualities, but if we forget to temper them with cooperation, collaboration, gentleness, and acceptance of our vulnerabilities, we suffer from stress, anxiety, and sometimes loneliness. I am hoping that through my yoga practice I will be able to access the wisdom of my body, which already knows how to surrender and accept support. I hope this wisdom will spill over into all areas of my life. Accepting support is not only about allowing other people to help us and give to us, but also about recognizing that life, nature, and our deepest selves are always supporting us. You know those moments in the water when you just really let go and allow yourself to float, just really surrender to the ocean and float? It feels so good, to be so fully supported, by something so deep and vast and powerful. I'm starting to see that life can hold more of those moments. Cultivating those moments begins with allowing support. So my intention this moon is to allow myself to accept, receive, ask for and recognize support.

Please share your own New Moon intentions here in the comments; join the moon magic! I would be honoured to have you here in the circle.

just a reminder

an ATC mini collage of mine from 2008. Click on the image to see full size & read what it says.

Bug Eyes

This is only half the image, click on the image to see full size.

I've been slowly bringing order to to the chaotic and neglected back room of my studio, where all my wonderful painting and mixed media supplies are. My ceramics business has absorbed all my creative time and energy over the last year or so, and I am looking forward to pulling in more art-for-me time, more art play, teaching, retreats, and workshops! Yay! The creating sanctuary process (otherwise known as cleaning and organizing!) has unearthed some fun things, including lots of art journals and altered books. Above is a page from one.

ayurveda & maintaining balance in seasonal change

Staying connected to the rhythms and cycles of the natural world is very important to me. We suffer from too much separateness in our world as it is now; at worst, immersion in the modern world can create an almost complete estrangement from the true rhythms of nature. I believe this amounts to an estrangement from our bodies, our creativity, each other, and our deepest selves. When we work, live, and travel in comfortably controlled environments, communicate and receive information about the world through electronic devices, we need to remember to connect with the real, tangible, and powerful forces of our actual natural environment. If we can maintain that organic connection, then all the shiny tools and comforts of our created world can be enjoyed and understood, in the greater context of nature. Perhaps maintaining this connection can help us to create new technologies and comforts which work in harmony with nature.

It's not such a daunting task, staying connected. Just pay attention - to the weather, to the moon, to the voice of your body, to the seasons. Get out there sometimes, and just be in the weather. Staying connected to the seasons has been a powerful practice for me since I left the ease and warmth of California for the intensity of the temperate rain forest of coastal B.C.. I love the times of seasonal change for the feelings of excitement and renewal they bring into my life. Like all times of change, however, the seasonal changes can bring a little vulnerability, and a challenge to stay in balance. Ayurveda, the traditional East Indian wellness practice, offers tools for staying in balance through the seasonal changes, and for keeping our bodies in balance with the larger rhythms. The transition into Fall is often a bit challenging for me, so I thought I'd look into how Ayurveda could help. Here's what I learned:

According to Ayurveda, September is the beginning of the Vata season, which lasts til around Winter Solstice. Vata energy is one of the three Doshas, or universal energies. Vata has the qualities of movement, activity, light, coolness, dryness, agitation. It is related to the element of Air. We are prone to imbalances of Vata during this season of late summer and early fall. Vata imbalances can manifest as:

• an over-active, agitated mind
• sleep disturbances
• low immunity
• achy joints
• dry skin
  
• loss of focus
  
• chills
• digestive problems
• worry and anxiety

Right? I've been suffering from all of these things in the last couple of weeks! So what helps? Here are some suggestions I found for restoring balance during Vata season:

• Stay hydrated by drinking lots of water or warming herbal teas.
  
• Keep to a regular, and gentle, schedule, especially with sleep. Go to bed early, and rise early.
• Practice restorative yoga or another gentle physical practice - stay active without overdoing.
• Stay warm! Practice gently warming yoga poses like backbends and extensions.
• Eat warming cooked seasonal food like squash, brown rice, and nourishing soups.
• Take immunity enhancing herbal supplements.
• Avoid too much travel, too much work, staying up too late.

These all sound like healthy, appealing suggestions, and I might even be able to integrate a few of them into my Fall routine. But the suggestion I liked the best was:

• practice self-massage every morning with warm, scented oils (sesame oil is traditional.)

That sounds like a wonderful, self-nurturing practice, and well worth making time for. So if we do a few of these things, focus on slowing down, staying warm, and nourishing ourselves with seasonally appropriate foods and activities, (common sense, right?) then we can expect to experience the best of the Vata season, which is:

• healthy energy
• clarity of mind
• awakened senses
• renewed sense of purpose
• positive momentum

Ayurveda is a sophisticated and complex ancient science. I found a good lay person's introduction here, if you are interested in learning more.

Florence, Home of my Heart

That's me in the garden behind my apartment in Florence in 2001. It's May and the roses are blooming. The smells of the street reach into this little urban garden; dry stone, exhaust fumes, dust, lemons. The sounds as well, the whine of Vespas, sirens and shouting. It's a rough kind of paradise. It is a place that feels like the home of my heart, just as much as my wild and pristine island. I'm achy lately to return there. Just casting the net of that intention out there! I want to bring a group of women there for soul reflection, art-making, breathing in the strange beauty of the place together, gathering inspiration. Do you want to go with me? Below is my favourite piazza, Santissima Annunziata:

living a sacred and sensual life

I believe our creativity blooms when we are nurturing our authentic spirituality, and when we are in touch with the sacred. For me, the sacred is very tangible, in the beauty and fragility of the rich web of life in which we live, and in the tender soft spot in our hearts which connects us with others and constantly reminds us of our shared humanity. I see the sacred and the sensual not as antithetical, but as deeply interwoven. Living a sacred and sensual life means cultivating awareness of and participation in our physical world; cultivating aliveness of all five senses; and cultivating love and appreciation for our own precious selves, bodies, and physical experiences

My own spiritual practice defies labeling. I am a committed Buddhist, because of the deep joy and inherent practicality I find in the Buddhist path. Over millennia, Buddhist practitioners have created incredibly powerful technologies for combating human suffering, both social and individual. These technologies - I call them this because they are practical sets of tools - mindfulness, study, meditation, and precepts for ethical living - continue to transform my life and my psyche for the better.

Alongside my Buddhist practice exists my natural and lifelong inclination towards folk magic and the sacred wisdom of women. My domestic life, my life-cycles, my body, my relationship with nature - all are supported by my deep connection to these earth-based traditions. Again, I am drawn to these traditions because they are both joyful and highly practical. I take pleasure in learning about worldwide and historical traditions of folk wisdom & spiritual practices.

I love incorporating ritual into daily life. For me the idea of daily ritual encompasses not only the time we set aside as sacred, apart from our mundane activities (like time for prayer or meditation) but also the acknowledgement of our mundane activities as sacred in themselves, the bringing of mindfulness and gratitude to our everyday. Much of what I share in this blog is about this part of our lives - bringing sacredness and creativity to our everyday. This is hugely important to me!

I can find things to admire and learn from in most of the world's spiritual traditions. Does it support well being of self, society, and earth? Does it engage the critical mind enough to encourage a thoughtful and living set of ethics? Is the idea of non-harming highly valued? Are earth and her creatures, including us, seen as innately good? Then the tradition earns my respect.

My next "7 Keys to an Artful Life e-Course" begins September 5th, 2010!
Start your autumn season with 7 weeks of creativity, life-balance, self-care, and fun. Read about it here.

muffin recipe with illustrations

It's a sparkly almost-fall day and I definitely have the urge to bake things and make soup. Savoury scones and potato leek soup are on the menu, but right now my sweetheart is making muffins with zucchini from the farmer's market. Like most of us, I have a notebook where I keep recipes; it's actually a spiral bound sketchbook, and when the mood strikes I do little watercolour illustrations for the recipe I'm recording. It's not a 'precious' book - some recipes are just jotted down, or torn out of magazines and stuck in, but the occasional illustrated ones make it a fun and beautiful journal - including the drips and spots and watermarks on the pages!

An Artful Gift for You:


Here is my basic muffin recipe - it's all-purpose, reliable, and super versatile. I know it's too small to read! if you click here, or on the image, a nice big printable page will open, and you can print this out and add it to your own recipe journal. It's easy to veganize too, just replace the eggs with egg substitute, and the dairy with soy or rice milk or soy yogurt. Enjoy!

"love is an ancient delirium..."

This beauty was blooming outside my friend's yoga studio - it looks like my tender heart feels sometimes.

I adore this quote from Diane Ackerman:

Love. What a small word we use for an idea so immense and powerful. It has altered the flow of history, calmed monsters, kindled works of art, cheered the forlorn, turned tough guys to mush, consoled the enslaved, driven strong women mad, glorified the humble, fuelled national scandals, bankrupted robber barons, and made mincemeat of kings. How can love’s spaciousness be conveyed in the narrow confines of one syllable? Love is an ancient delirium, a desire older than civilization, with taproots spreading into deep and mysterious days. The heart is a living museum. In each of its galleries, no matter how narrow or dimly lit, preserved forever like wondrous diatoms, are our moments of loving, and being loved.

embracing natural life rhythms

fal·low (fal′ō)
noun

1. land plowed but not seeded for one or more growing seasons, to kill weeds, make the soil richer, etc.
2. the plowing of land to be left idle in this way

Etymology: ME falow fealh, akin to fealh, harrow, felly (of wheel) pelk-, to turn > Gael olca, fallow land

adjective

1. left uncultivated or unplanted
2. untrained; inactive: said esp. of the mind


I have been having a bit of what is usually known as "down time." I've been down, and slow, and not focused on being out there or productive. These fallow times are always a struggle for me - I think they are for many of us. Here's what I wrote in my journal:

So it's been one of those low rhythm stuck slow kinds of weeks where all kinds of deadlines projects and ideas just seem to evaporate from my brain. These times are very uncomfortable and I berate myself for being unproductive. But I think they come about naturally out of a need for rest and reflection, and sometimes a need for a new direction. One of the most difficult things about being self-employed is learning to respect my natural rhythms without giving in to either sloth or frenzied busy-ness. What I would like is to be able to honour and acknowledge these times as natural periods of re-assessment, rest, mental freedom, useful doubt, creative questioning, and fallow or root-growing time. I would like to make room for these times in my life, honour them, and contain them in a little womb of safety. I would like to create enough structure around these times so that necessary work gets done, deadlines are met, and obligations are not neglected. Perhaps most importantly, I would like to learn to truly honour my instincts and rhythms enough to not feel angry and guilty, wrong and bad for these slowing down times.

How do you experience fallow times in your life? Do you have any special strategies for nurturing yourself through such times? I would love to hear.

Here is my view of the full moon. Can you see her?