Hola gorgeous goddesses,
I wondered what it is
you needed to know
so I listened to the wind
and all I heard was this:
Right click then Save link as (for Windows) or Control-click then Download linked file as (for Macs.)
.
All my love,
Creative gatherings, artist’s dates, pancake frippery and other acts of magnificence
Organise regular acts of magnificence, both by yourself and with friends – a splendid mix of the two, fulfilling both your inward and outward facing selves.
Have picnics often (even just in lunchtime or in the backyard).
Gather random friends who don’t know each other yet and play games such as Pink Hat Questions (preferably undertaken at pancake houses). Pink Hat Questions is a simple but delicious game – take one pink hat. Or blue. Any colour will do. Ask everyone to write down one question on a piece of paper – a question they would love to know about other people. Everyone puts their questions into the hat. The hat is then passed around. Everyone pulls out a question, and asks it of the group, with everyone to answer. Too much fun!
Investigate places that intrigue you – my favourites are old churches, dirty backstreets, musty second hand bookstores and hole-in-the-wall restaurants – any place where treasures may hide. I like to find Spirit wherever I go.
Go on adventure walks in a place you haven’t walked in before.
Find a medicine place near your home that you can walk to easily. A medicine place is a spot in nature where you can meditate and connect with the earth. Your medicine place will fill you with a sense of peace and power. My medicine place is on a mountain near my house, and is a little alcove of lush grass beside a fallen tree. Near my medicine place is a handmade rock circle beside two boulders. I go there to refuel myself and remember who I want to be in this world.
Buy yourself a journal with beautiful papers – and use it. Don’t save it for the perfect day and the perfect drawing. You are Perfect just as You Are, Right Now.
Decide you are going to become an Expert on One Thing – and research well. A friend of mine took a summer to thoroughly research and try all the chai lattes possible.
Or be like me & invent a cocktail called a Pink Frothy Vulva:
What other acts of magnificence can you do today?
A ginormous goddess giveaway
Hola gorgeous hearts,
So I’m sitting here.
Wedged in our laundry on a card table, a mug of tea beside me.
Other Creative Mamas may recognise this manouvre:
It’s called the
“Creating Hiding Spot That My Darling Kids Haven’t Discovered Yet.”
So I’m all cosy & bundled up with my happy healer doggy while my daughter Ostara plays with her daddy upstairs.
In the interests of all that is Adorable and Holy, here’s a photo of me & Ostara with one of our gorgeous friends on a Goddess photoshoot yesterday afternoon.
YOU NEED TO SEE THE CUTE GODDESS BAYBEE.
(I’m the one with the pink hair, by the way.)
Anyway.
I am sitting here in my laundry after a totally spectacular day, wondering just what on earth I can send you.
To tell you I love you. To tell you that you are good.
To remind you that all is well in the world.
To remind you there is this beyooooootiful, exquisite Goddess inside you.
And a little voice whispers inside me:
“Give them the workbook. Then they’ll understand.”
“WHAT?!?!? The 2011 workbook? But… but… that’s one of my big paid products! That’s like one of the most popular things I sell! That’s a paaaaid thing! UM WHATTTTTT???”
But again, the voice said:
“Just give them the workbook. They will understand.”
And I sat and I listened.
This voice inside me, it’s never led me wrong.
It’s told me wild & magical dreams that I’ve followed & made happen.
It’s told me to believe in myself, and in being a Goddess, and in making a business from it.
And here I sit, in tropical paradise, in our dream lil cottage, with my dream job.
My love & I get to be stay at home parents to our daughter, I get to create miracles as a professional Goddess…
all because the voice told me too.
So that voice?
When it speaks, I listen.
And it wants you to have the book.
The book?
It’s the 2011 Creating your Goddess Year workbook, planner & calendar.
And eveeeeen though it’s September… even though it’s 3/4 of the way through the year…
right now is the perfect time to dream. To plan. To write out the big dreams & make them happen.
Because I’ve seen it, over and over, what this workbook can do.
It works all the time. Right where you are right now.
And it wants to be yours. It wants to be held and loved and poured over and made your own.
Here’s the secret code my dear.
The secret fairy password to open the door is:
highfive2011yay!
(make sure you include the ! … that’s the important bit! Fairies love exclamation marks! Life is an exclamation mark!)
I hope it does good, good things for your soul.
I know you have it in you.
And so my dear, I sign off to you.
From the laundry in tropical paradise, where all my dreams have come true.
I’m sending you love across the turquoise sky, knowing your dreams can come true too.
all my love,
Spirited creativity
Every time I create it is a magical experience.
Before I do any creative work including painting and photography, I smudge myself, and the goddess I am photographing. I pray, ask for blessings and set the intention that I will create from Great Spirit.
I have sacred contracts with my creative tools – my camera & I have agreed to only document and record the goddess in the women we photograph.
Every time I turn up to be present and trust my creative spirit, miracles pour forth. Words flow from my pen that I need to hear.
I paint the artworks that heal me.
I see the goddess in another woman.
It’s the strongest meditation and medicine I know.
A few years ago, I went a couple of months without painting. I just fell out of the habit, and when I did I forgot to trust my gifts. I got rusty and stuck instead of flowing and glowing. I went away to a work course, and it became a sacred retreat for me.
I would walk in the golden fields at sunset, and curl up in the cream womb of the apartment I was staying in.
It healed parts of my soul that felt sunburnt and stinging, and poured water through my cracks. I came home, and I wanted to paint again.
I wanted to dance the colours of my spirit across canvas again.
I took a big canvas out into my backyard, and a bucket of paint tubes. I squeezed long loops of rainbowed paint out onto the whiteness, then splayed my fingers and hands into them.
The distance between me and the artwork still felt too far, so I knelt down, and embraced my artwork. I slithered, and clamoured and danced all over it, mixing grass with tears and giggles and runny, radiant colour.
It was ecstatic and vivid and soaked with senses and emotion.
Afterwards, I lay on the artwork, panting, watching the turquoise sky drift overhead. My dog jumped onto the artwork and me, leaving paw marks all over the canvas and my heart. I smiled. It was so very, very right.
Within the rainbow swirls, a woman in ink emerged. She was dancing, shaking her hips, vibrating to the sound of her own heart.
This beautiful, messy, adorned, celebrated canvas.
This beautiful, messy, adorned, celebrated life.
This beautiful, messy, adorned, celebrated me.
Creation is sharing your magnificence with the world. It’s allowing the energy, gifts, wisdom, insight and inspiration to travel through you and out into the world in the shape of an artwork, a song, the written word.
Creation is the act of birthing something that needs to be in the world into the world.
Creation is trusting the whisper inside us that tells us: You are loved. You are needed. You have all the wisdom and beauty inside you that you will ever need.
How to get grateful (part two)
There are six gazillion ways to get grateful.
I only know my own way.
Last time, I shared the story of my brother dying.
This is the story of a goddess named Debra who taught me how to be alive.
*
I was 21.
I’d just moved to a big city.
And I was searching.
*
Always in the places you least expect to find them – that’s where they are.
Our teachers. Our soulmates.
The Ones Who Change Our Lives.
*
I found her in a small, cramped lift in my tall office building.
She had hair as indigo wild as a peacock,
green eyes that glittered of years spent dancing with fae folk.
She laughed & spoke like no one else I’d ever met before.
This woman, Debra – with her big brave heart, astonishing honesty &
heart-soaked glamour.
*
I took to standing by her desk at work.
I just wanted to be near her.
To bathe in her homeopathic essence.
To learn her giddy, giggly secrets.
She was alive.
*
And she took me beneath her iridescent wing.
She talked about sacred moon ceremonies and sex and womanhood and
bleeding and books and vision quests and wild adventures like they
were accounting,
like they were the most normal thing on earth.
And to her they were,
and to me they became.
*
Above her desk was a sign:
“For today and its blessings, I owe the world an attitude of gratitude.
- Clarence E. Hodges”
*
“You know what’s changed my life more than anything?”
she said to me one day, leaning over the cubicle divide with a mug
creased between two hands.
“Whatwhatwhat?”
I asked, leaning forward.
Whatever this woman knew, I wanted to know.
“Everyday, before I go to sleep, I write down in my journal beside me.
And I write down five things that I’m truly grateful for each day. And
some days are so shitty, all I manage to write is “Thank God that’s
over. Also, I had a nice cup of tea today. Thanks for that.” But
always, always – it puts me in the right place to go to sleep at
night.”
“Oh,” I said.
And “Shit!” I thought.
That would mean having to give up pre-snooze times as my designated
Freak Out About The World & Daydream About Awful Things time.
*
I genuinely thought that if I thought enough about the bad shit?
I could solve it.
I could make it go away.
Or I could build up enough fury & acidic retorts to make it all go away.
It hadn’t worked before.
But I kept at it anyway.
*
And here – here was this woman.
Shining. Bright. Alive.
Utterly mesmerizing.
Telling me the secret of her joy?
Was to be GRATEFUL!?!?!??
*
It was worth a try.
I carefully selected the journal.
(All new endeavours & projects must be accompanied by the addition of
a new piece of stationery, you see.)
And I started.
Each night, before bed,
I took out an inky pen.
And wrote
“Thank You For…”
*
And I fell into an easy sleep, no longer littered with plans and ploys
of resentment.
*
Over time,
the Thank You notes became
Love Notes to the World.
*
And as months unfolded,
I began to see -
the things I wrote down each day?
They grew bigger. Deeper. More luscious. More profound.
I retired my resentment radar,
and crafted new rose-tinted gratitude goggles instead.
*
In the days & years that followed,
gratitude became a walk, a dance, an exhale, an ease.
To search for the loveliness in every cloud,
the medicine in every lesson,
the beauty around every corner.
*
I still have that journal.
And I still have that dear friend.
It all began in an elevator,
a magical book,
& an attitude of gratitude.
*
(P.S. I made you a mini Gratitude Journal. Print it out, put it together. Just try it for 21 days. If it works for you & makes your soul sing? Keep playing. All the best things in life are the things we said yes to.)
Either right click then Save link as (for Windows)
or Control-click then Download linked file as (for Macs.)
.
