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Intention

Yesterday I sat in the company of my 19 month old grand-daughter as she spent most of the morning fixated on exploring water in a cup. In her water bottle, my cup and her sippy cup it was all water; but somehow the water in my cup held the most appeal. The appeal was so great she offered me the exchange: held out her water bottle to me and reached for my cup. The end result was a lot of water everywhere when we took the exchange outside and I gave her space to play. She wanted the best cup for herself perhaps.

Hanging with her; chatting, commentating her actions and contributing water to the moment; gave me an opportunity to consider again the messiness of self-discovery. I could have stopped her but where would the understanding come from for her. She needed to experiment and experience the consequences of her decision to pour and not pour. Right down to the feel of the water in the cup, she played with it all. At one stage she deconstructed the lidded cups and tried to put them together in different ways.

I could have told her about it all but a lack of shared language skills and life understandings precluded a cohesive meaning being understood. Granny has a few more words than grand-girl. Granny knows that the straw from the water bottle lid won’t work with the sippy cup but it didn’t matter. She was imaging it was possible and showing me she understood that water came up through the straw to the mouth piece. This fact and that wearing the water on a cold day was just fun. I never did get my cup back.

The big life lesson. We all need to explore and find what we know when it is our time to know it. It is okay to experiment, find similarities and explore differences but the knowing soul is different in all of us. In the same way that it was unhelpful to want to short cut grand-girl’s experiment with my knowledge so it is unhelpful to hold others back who are down the road from us. Sameness may not be helpful when it comes to the gaining of wisdom, particularly self-wisdom.

Growing in wisdom is messy and sometimes uncontrolled. It’s the intention of growing through an experience rather than growing into someone else’s idea of what it should or could be; that makes all the difference. Wisdom that serves us is the wisdom that has been experienced and in a sense proven to us by ourselves. (Having said that, others do know tings we don’t and it is Ok to listen to them but never to intentionally turn out personal knowledge and responsibility over to them)

This week there is emotion on the streets and in the airwaves. The emotion has a voice that can sound like judgement to some, call to arms to other and still others hear painful lament. It is evidence that something is happening and ides of belonging and respect are being explored. As members of ‘tribes’ or culture groups some of our birth and some of our choosing there is a sense of being asked to decide what is absolutely correct from polar opposite views.

In the street the other day I was asked to justify the view points and actions of people who are protesting by a blustering man who was all puffed up with fear and anger (my assumption from the signs available to me, he might not agree). He didn’t seem satisfied with my answer that every human regardless of ‘tribe’ or ‘belief’ deserved to live respected, safe and well. If that was happening thoughtlessly or intentionally, then it was a problem which required a solution, not violence of heart or hand.

Skin colour makes it obvious that prejudicial actions happen. Even more obvious when it is shared in pictures across all the media sources available. I don’t know what that story feels like because it has not been my experience: to be treated badly because my skin is the wrong colour. I can not tell that story from a person perspective but I can see it from the metaphor of a small child playing with cups.

Dreams, hopes, human hearts exist in billions of forms. All of those human hearts want to be alive because their body is still breathing and blood is still circulating in it. If humans were merely animals as breathing implies then they would do what animals do without thought for the consequences of their actions on others. There are many who say we are no better than that anyway, look at the media. Maybe they are right, but maybe it isn’t that simple.

Belonging and the impact of that for each human is linked to health and well-being. Just because the form that holds that need is different doesn’t change the heart’s desire to be fully human in a connected and welcoming society. Joshua Greene in Moral Tribes spends a long time explaining and asking questions about what is possible for all members of all tribes to agree on so we could be a morally unified mass of humans on the planet. He came to no satisfying answer except to say that everyone is looking for the same thing in the end.

Potentially that may be the key. Intention! Intention to try and find a way. intention to listen and try to understand. Intention to hear what is being said from the speaker’s point of view not an attack on one’s own and find a shared understanding. Intention to see if parts that have never before been tried together can work or be adapted. Intention to respect with loving concern….. Intention for good to come out of what is loud, painful and at times scary to behold.

Possibility can allow that adults could be as innocently intent as a 19 month old trying to reshape the best way to drink water.

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‘Towards’ is here and ready for sale

It’s taken several years of journaling in the morning at my favourite coffee places. An activity which I enjoyed as for a little while before work I got to remember that every minute not working is a holiday. In that holiday time I wrote and drew mostly quietly. Sometimes there were conversations that what I was doing triggered and sometimes they grew simply from ‘hi’ or a comment about the day.

The title ‘Towards,’ happened a long time after I had thought about life or nothing at all, and drawn pictures which made me happy. It came from a folder on my computer in which I had dozens of first chapters for books. All those good ideas, that are always best when the idea is fresh and never seemed to lead to a complete project. Towards something. I wrestled with whether this was so but in the end just left it as one word.

Towards is about the part of being in which we realise we know something but don’t know or understand everything yet. I am unsure if we ever really arrive anywhere or each experience is simply adding towards the big picture we would like to master.

As I played with ideas and eventually talked with an editor to help me conceptualise what this would be in book form, the notion of an illustrated shared space came to mind. I had loved the blank pages in ‘When Women Were Birds,’ and how they allowed me to write into the story in my mind without the author dictating what I would find in her words. The gift of silence in a book.

Silence was the gift of writing and drawing over coffee. Hush from the impending day of responsibility. that is one of the reasons I wanted to put space into the pages. There are questions and leading statements too. I don’t tend to think in questions until after an idea arrives. Questions are included because not everything is certain.

So here it is: Towards. I have published it to share it and allow any good that can come from its existence to do so.

I hope you make a choice to bless yourself with time spent inside this book. When you do there is a Facebook page waiting for your posts of the choices you are allowing yourself to make for you. Blessings and peace.

Sandy.

Want to know more about the book? Then simply click on the link. Towards

Sometimes reading a book or looking at a picture might spur you to want to create something different in your life. When this happens for you and you want someone like me to help you explore the life yet to be lived, life coaching could be the choice you make for yourself. Coaching

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Traveller

Traveller. The image at the top of the page, appeared on a weekend of painting retreat with a group of like minded ladies and a gifted artist who was teaching us. She appeared largely because I had been writing her story for a few months.

Her name is Traveller because in the words of the story that was who she became as she followed the impulse to walk out through the gate and keep going. She heralded the actual allowing of my life becoming different to what it had been. It was necessary. my inner being knew it but my stubborn mind had taken some convincing. It needed to almost break apart before my body and heart could get my attention.

Traveller’s words came in purple…not black on white. Purple was needed as Black linked me to the mode of work. Work was where I learned to type and type reports was how my hands linked to my brain. It’s different now. I am different now. Finding out what allowing life rather than finding life means for me.

Allowing has always been easy in a creative context. If people ask me about where my inspiration comes from I don’t have an easy answer because it is this subconscious reaction to holding a pencil or having paint in my hand. The inner voice that didn’t require words to express and idea or struggle with an image until….. Until is the important word there. Until defines when it is finished. I’m not even sure Traveller’s story is finished I just started writing until I ran out of words. I think I am close to that point.

She felt soft and wise to write. The best parts of myself and my wisdom written down in Purple.

I think there are times for everyone when we reach the point of ‘until’ and then we allow an end or a beginning or a corner to signal a change. Change isn’t actually hard. We do it all the time but there are seminal life moments that we move towards. In the same way the Earth and the Sun slide through space following a path that seems to dictate that they do, there are times in our lives when we do a similar thing. We keep moving toward the thing we need to find.

Prototypes… a memory of wings

A memory of wings was foremost in my mind as i created.
Lunchbox lids provided more than just a winged object.

Last weekend I went to a masterclass… masterclass conducted by Sam Cranston. Sam is an artist from Brisbane in Queensland. His theme for the weekend was around monuments and how they exist in our lives both physically and metaphorically. The responses were focussed on making a prototype of a sculpture from our lives.

‘The memory of wings’ is a phrase that appeared in a relaxed conversation with a glass of wine as I was describing the life journey of the dragonfly from egg to flight. Conceptually it is an evocative image for me. An insect which spends most of its life under the water in the form of its nymph developing slowly and shedding until its body has tubes over it to breathe air above the water and it leaves on a warm day to shed for the last time. It is always a dragonfly even without wings, just like a butterfly is always itself even when it is vulnerably a caterpillar. Written in its DNA is a memory of wings and flight. It can have no actual knowledge of wings until it has them and yet it grows toward it.

My little sculpture was born in Sam’s process of collaging abstract shapes into a form then drawing a monument in 2D which could be something in a real place. I drew a huge pigeon with a tiny male form on its head. An image inspired by a memory of a town square in Glasgow 10 years ago. Distinguished men in bronze adorned plinths. Each man with a helmet upon which stood pigeons to attention.

It all triggers a notion about what a monument actually is. To the maker is has a personal relevance to a time and place but as years pass and the living memory of the people who view it becomes repeated memory the form can inspire new stories. The question has arisen in recent time about what should be seen as representative of our history and community, the tangible constructions of our present which has evolved to become what it is. There is no easy answer as there are many views on the topic: politically fuelled, personally emotive, dis-interested observations…

Hegemony: manned pige-mony. 2021 Sandy Skinner

The existence of the question provokes debate and the tension of what is morally the right decision. In a multicultural society which exists in our present how do we balance the opinions of others and our own fuels that tension. Joshua Greene in Moral Tribes asks this question around much bigger issues than statues. Yet statues are prototypes for those big discussions. What morality is it that we can all agree upon which can hold peace in place in-spite of diverse religious and historical needs? Are we mature enough to have that discussion and let go of ‘rightness’ for a greater good if the moral foundations of a way of life are all shared.

It is at this point that the simple notion of the memory of wings becomes a metaphor. It is the memory of what will be that fuels the process of becoming for a life form that is driven by its DNA. As a species of humans who have a memory of existence as tribes of belonging who have become so diverse that the pecking order of existence can no longer hold in a balanced way. I find myself wondering what it is a memory of that fuels the need for humans to segment and rise up against one another. The story of inclusion also involves the tacit notion of exclusion based on the rules of being in.

In a world full of prototypes which is it we will create? Every family, tradition, tribe, community is in reality a fluid experiment in what could be yet none are fully universal. The one thing which emerges from my observing is that the need for human survival seems to be the fuel of all decision, debate and justification. At our moral core perhaps the man standing on the pigeon’s head is more apropos than massively reasoned arguments for thought supremacy. We are perhaps just part of a global striving for survival driven by a ‘memory of wings’ spawned from 300 million years ago when dragonflies roamed the world and humans were just a glimmer in becoming millennia in the future.

On a rainy day in my world it is helpful to remember that the memory in my DNA is one born of hope and the movement toward being alive and well and able.

The ‘memory of wings’ gives us hope and the ‘knowledge of earth’ gives us reality and somewhere in between the two we make a possible and live with it.

Happy Day

Sandy

…shared Meaning….

I am exhibiting a piece called shared Meaning in an upcoming Springboard exhibition for first year students at the University I attend here in Brisbane, QLD. The theme is around Communication and Connection which found an easy resting place for me after years of working in education, helping children communicate more effectively.

In the window of Pop Gallery on corner of Ivory Street and Brunswick Street in Fortitude Valley.

Regardless of how information, communication comes to us; the understanding of meaning is the vital connection. Finding that shared meaning is an organic process that links multiple centres of the brain and sorts through past experience and knowledge to find understanding. In some ways it is a negotiated process and one of trust.

The initiator has to trust the receiver will ‘get’ what they mean. Intention does not always mean that is how it turns out. The initiator must trust the receiver will clarify what they understand and make sure in their knowing of the them that it is true to the source. There is a vast difference between seeing and knowing another through their eyes and values than interpreting it as if I am in their shoes.

So, in this world of technology and faceless communication nothing can replace the human connection in any exchange. For better or worse this is the place our life together as a species has brought us. It is our challenge as a species committed to a common life that we choose the engagement of listening for meaning rather than just for responding.

The shadows somehow make it more and point out the need for deep listening. Careful responding and open engagement are the gifts of deep listening that we can give to another.

…shared Meaning…..

Click this link to visit the exhibition opening event:

https://www.facebook.com/events/4420808834675564?acontext=%7B%22event_action_history%22%3A[%7B%22mechanism%22%3A%22your_upcoming_events_unit%22%2C%22surface%22%3A%22bookmark%22%7D]%2C%22ref_notif_type%22%3Anull%7D

liked V not liked

An idea, a feeling, a response begins with a ‘trigger event’ and grow ….. spread like cracks in the windscreen. The impact site is small but the cracks which emanate from it are the places of weakness which causes it to shatter.

So it is with responses to many impacts. Impacts are neither good nor bad but our reactions can change the course of our lives. At times disempowerment results from the shattering. Other occasions the shattering is an opening to a new perception of our beings. Either way the only time an impact occurs is when we are open to the effects of vulnerability…. living with an open heart.

Being an artist is a rare opportunity to expose myself to other people that most avoid. Many people feel they have a right to critique something I have created and tell me how it could be improved. Some people will say they like a piece and some will say they do not. I have friends who always critiques my work at any stage if it is on view around my home. It can be daunting. It can be daunting when someone says I don’t like your work. Equally daunting when they want me to explain it to them because they want to relate to because they don’t like it. All of this is something which non-makers don’t have to encounter. Others don’t question their works in progress or expect explanations of it.

There is a relationship of sorts with a piece that develops during creation. It is of course with myself as I am putting something like an idea or a feeling outside of my word driven being and responding to it. It is like thinking out loud and having a conversation with myself. A voyage of discovery to borrow a saying, into knowing something which might immediately appear or in most of my instances take time, sometimes years, to unearth. Yet as an artist the world around me wants to value my worth as an artist by whether they like it or not….

Being me, I can’t say it matters anymore. I don’t even have to like a piece for it to have value and meaning. Creation is for no one else but myself. If I create without relationship to the outcome then for me it is soulless and looses worth to me and yet, often they are the things others like. Should I create to please others and not myself then if I want to be profitable?

Anymore, my answer is no. I can’t stay with it and it sucks all the joy out of how I get to a picture in the end.

After the best part of my life pleasing others and making situations pleasing to keep peace, I have stepped back from enacting other people’s agendas. It is freeing but it is not necessarily profitable. In a work sense I am not really very employable as my boundaries say that my boss needs to be aligned to my values and always have a socially acceptable behaviour system. That is hard to find.

It is likely why I have always created.

The art of drawing has become so integral to my life my days feel incomplete without it at some stage. It is the one place which as always been my place. It is my soul’s poetry in a way… and this brings us back to the idea I began with: liked by another V disliked by another. Drawing and painting do not have the same effect within me. One is strong, the other soft…. when I feel within my creative experience.

Irony is I don’t feel the same way about drawing in public. Folk speak differently about images without colour in them. There is a difference in there I want to explore sometime, about how colour and painting varies in intent, form and feeling for me, from images drawn with a pencil or pen. I think I am beginning to know but not everything needs to be shared right now.

In a world in which we increasing cling to the notion of ‘like’ it is okay to be ‘disliked’. Equally in this social world in which others feel an open invitation to critique without consideration of the feelings of others discomfort is a common experience. I just want to record that I think discomfort and even pain sometimes is normal and our responses to the critiques of others are ours. It is a vulnerable feeling to expose a part of the inner-ness of my being in the stages of creation.

Whether I trust another or not, it is still an unknown experience to have them judge my work without invitation. I don’t read their diaries and offer comment on the spelling and sentence forms. I currently realise it is why having a studio to work in is making creative life feel more comfortable. My inner journey in stages has a door. Living open-heartedly does not mean I have to expose every part of myself for observation.

What it has taught me is to try to be kind: 1) To speak well of what I like about my friends or their artwork if they like me are creators. 2) No matter how I feel about what someone else might like or dislike in my art or in my life, I am the only one who is creating it and I don’t create to please them. 3) The relationship between myself and the object I am creating needs to be robust and fluid so that I can find my way to the end of the idea even if it means painting over things I like to leave a truer picture. 4) Courage is necessary to publicly create and reveal my work…. and I should only listen to people who are willing to do the same with their creations, when I would like support and advice.

Happy Day

Sandy

Having a style.

For the past 6 months I have been studying visual arts at university. University like the rest of life struggles to let you be yourself without the need to pigeonhole you into a particular style or school of thought. Especially int he world of the arts. We all like to think we are originals but there is a part of the put them in a group thinkers that may have a point. As humans we are a product of our DNA and our life experience. We learn from those who have been before us and the influence of all of the learning experiences our each day.

My painting lecturer seemed quite pleased to be able to give me a style label offering. It was never something I particularly cared about, especially sinceI was keen on having to replicate my creations every-time I made something ‘new’. My house is after all filled with a plethora of my work and most of it is different to the last piece. My drawings probably hold together more with a cohesive style.

So it was interesting to investigate his suggestion of ‘biomorphic abstraction’. In simple terms, it is art created using rounded shapes from those found in nature. Seems broad enough and specific enough for me. Nature plays a huge part as a source of my inspiration. Curved and rounded forms are far more appealing to me than architectural rectangles in skyscraper forms. I’m not driven to create absolute accuracy and exact replica of the object or scene but more the feeling for me of engaging with it.

A few yers ago I was painting my feeling of dancing light. Now it’s landscapes with bright colours. it helps I live surrounded by green, cacophony of green in every direction. The longer I live with in it the more pixelated the environment has become. I’m unsure I have arrived at a static style but there are elements of biomorphic abstract forms in most of my work for the past decade. So I will sit with it for a while and play with the idea of creation.

This week’s painting comes after a semester of university and a fall which landed me in a wheel chair for a month, looking out at the world immediately around my home while I waited for my cracked bones to heal. It has inspired a need to care less and play more with what I have. After a life time to feeling like I had to care about everything so I would be liked and therefore my work liked, I am feeling the need to not care at all. To simply play along and see what happens. To that end a few paintings have arrived. Today this one is nearing finishing. It is for sure abstract. It is for me I painted it, to see what it would be. It has to do with rain.

Happy Day

Sandy

It is TIME

I am as I should be….. I am……

It’s time for the end of my last and longest adult relationship. The one that I have struggled the most with internally and has left the deepest marks. It’s the one which has pushed me to seeking another and left me vulnerable and different as a result.

We seem to think the only thing we can have a relationship with is a person. I would disagree. My relationship with my work life is just as real. It’s the place where I spent more time as an adult than with the people that I love. it is the place that exposed me to experiences I was never prepared for in any other sphere of my life. It’s the one which asked the most of me.

I have had a relationship with working as a teacher since I was 21…. well really some time before that because I chose it. I studied it and I wrestled with it for most of my adult life. Like all relationships employment as a teacher brought me blessing and hardship. Those hardships left marks for a life time. Those blessings did too.

So in a few weeks I will be properly resigned. Like all good breakups the hardest part was the separation. It was emotional and transformational. The separation was freeing. In the same way I experienced my X-husband telling me he was divorcing me, like a car crash…. (I was in a car spinning out so it’s true)…. the nano-seconds become minutes and everything is imprinted and all is experienced and felt. That first separation I felt total inner peace in the car crash then in the real moment I understood it would take time to get there.

It is that experience that has past and transformed my now. In a few weeks I will be unemployed because I can’t remain employed there any more. I am choosing the divorce from work. I have complex PTSD as a result of a particular set of experiences some year back in that place, and it places a barrier between me and the environment which triggers my body to hyper-vigilance and interferes with life as it can be lived for me. Fault is irrelevant like all good break ups it is only that it is necessary.

I will be unemployed and I don’t know what that means. I have dreams and loose plans but this is really a life I was never patterned mentally and ethically for. I am about to create a whole new set of neural pathways that allow me a different life and for me as my story-teller to shape new ways for provision to come to me.

I was broken and yet I was whole enough to hold my light and shine. I was considered unwell because I could not keep doing what hurt me so I would say I was never so unwell that I would continue in that path of self-abuse. It’s big this relationship ending. That said it is still the easiest thing I have had to do as an adult. I am as I can be.

Now that I read the words: I am as I should be…. I want to go back and edit should to can or choose or allow… all are true. The easiest decision took a long time but it will allow a new creation to unfold in my life.

Doing the same thing over and over became repetition. It allowed for tuning out to the effects of the one problem being all problems. It allowed the numbness internally and did not require me to speak my truth. I wish everyone could understand what those words mean for themselves…. whole rather than broken, healthy rather than unwell…. as I should be. If we can apply it to ourselves then we begin to allow it to be possible in the lives of all the people around us.

So now is THE time in my life for me. I once chose safe and responsible. A change the world with kindness drove my heart to the notion of serving humanity. Ah the path of a heart newly born to religion. A right choice for that time in my life. It’s still a good choice. It is just the how I go about it.

It is THE time in my life for experimenting and freedom. My decisions no longer effect the lives of other people up close. I can be anything I want to be. It is thrilling and terrifying all at the same time. A great combination for the PTSD pathways within. But time and breath work and allowing a new vocabulary to arrive makes it all possible. It is time.

So to all the people I have worked with since 1983 and all the people I have met in so many moves only my mother can tally, I want to say thank you. The comfortable and the uncomfortable of you all, thank you. All have contributed wisdom and pushed me toward hope and peace and the now that is the only thing I can know. Creating a life without an old routine means walking with faith that the path is there. Finding the tiniest hopes in the hardest times and remembering trust and gratitude when it all goes well is all that can be. New pathways for the life yet to be lived.

I’m not starting life over, I have always believed it is all part of one life, I’m editing and putting away in the basement that which is getting in the way of the balcony view and the coffee place down the road where the next great conversation will begin.

Right now I would like to work as a life coach. I’ve lived enough of it to compassionately walk with others in theirs. I’d like to sell paintings for the great investment I have put into them not the paper they are created on. I’d like to allow whatever else might come….. that is after all what would be doing if I was 21 again.

So I am finishing with a picture of the tiniest flower I saw out of the corner of my eye this week. A freesia a plant group on Facebook told me. Flowering grass. It looks like any other grass until it blooms. It’s then you can tell what kind of sensation it is, blooming from a tiny plan at the base of a rangy plant on the block next to mine. No bigger than a 10 cent piece this flower is evidence of the predisposition of the bulb which it came from to become and to bloom.

I always trust that in the end I will be as I should be and in the mean time I will become because I am. For those of my friends who love their relationship with their educational institution I wish you blessings. For those who do not: I will wish you likewise. May we all find we are living lives of purpose without ever seeing the outcome for anyone else but ourselves…. teaching after all is the greatest teacher of faith for all who feel ‘called’, ‘led’, ‘inspired’ to go there.

happy day

Sandy

P.S. please buy a book: Towards, or Journey to Beautiful, or both. In Australia from this website and if overseas from any online book seller.

It’s time for my new life part to begin but first I want to say good-bye with respect to the last one.

The Colours of You

A gather of local ladies came together on Sunday to re-visit or visit for the first time, the peaceful, mental quiet of colouring in for themselves. It has been about 5 years since I ran a colouring group. It was back when scientists were talking about the benefits of it for mental and emotional well-being. It’s still all true by the way.

The ladies reported enjoying the experience, unaware time flew past as they simply coloured and chatted as they wanted to. That is the other nice thing about coming together in a group to do it: people forget to be self-conscious with the people around them.

I am always astounded by the tranquility that arrives and how everyone settles into long periods of quiet and focus without even trying. Meditative calm and internal peaceful feelings can be that easy to find.

‘Aha’ moments occurred as ladies realised that lines only looked coloured over when they were by themselves. When the page was coloured around it, the ‘transgressions’ were simply part of the whole and somehow belonged. Ladies chose images that somehow matched where they found themselves right now. We found out at the end when I described what the feeling and idea that happened when I was drawing each of the images.

It really can be that simple.

My Aha for the day was to deal with the look of myself in the videos the coordinator took and shared. It is what it is.

Thanks go to Taylor of the Women of Woodford and surrounds for organising the event and sharing it among her group. Such a wonderful way to spend a rainy Spring morning in Woodford.

Visit my webpage. Maybe life coaching is for you or even just buy a book. If you live outside Australia please access my books via online booksellers. inside Australia I am able to handle your order.

Happy Day

Sandy

What to do with a vision…..

Vision Board made 01.08.2020

I have been completing a research project for a Life Coaching certification program I am doing. I chose to look at arts based supports for the coaching process or if an arts/creative process could be a self coaching tool. I didn’t come away with a clear answer but the thing I know for myself that diving in without thinking but with clear intention causes images to appear. Understanding them can come later, sometimes much later.

The thing is what do you do with a vision board? Most people I have encountered over a number of years who advocate them tell you to put it in a prominent place and look at it frequently and ….. I can mostly understand the and but for many people it is a mystery around how the vision board becomes reality in their world. In the same way that many folk respond when they are asked to journal. So frequently the response I hear is: ‘I don’t know what to write.’ (that can be another blog, as you may have figured out I am prone to using lots of words)

My understanding of a vision board is that it is like a download of what it is the maker wants to see, feel and have in their life. A set of goals in their most rudimentary form. The thing is that goals, actions and values can get really mixed up on a board. Especially one like mine that was very responsive simply to what I found in the magazines that appealed to me and I randomly glued on. Well it would be easy to think that, it is visually cluttered with lots of colours, lines and layers.

Let me tell you what I see this week. The tree is my metaphor for living so I am the tree all adorned in flowers with the curious addition of the book. The rocks were pleasing to me to hold the tree up but a good foundation in life: family, caring relationships, work, resources…… are all those things. The earth holds and feeds the tree so they stand for the things which do that in my life that keep me upright. Some of my values will fall in there.

the corner of my vision board spoke loudly
page from my journal

The moth on the thistle surprised me when I found it in a random magazine. It reminded me of the day I recount in my book, Towards (p106) when I tell of falling in the mud on a track outside Melrose in Scotland and looking up to the ground in front of me, I saw a tiny butterfly on an equally tiny thistle flower. It’s beauty existed whether I saw it or not. It didn’t exist for me, this moment in creation was just the natural order of things, but that day it touched me very deeply and the lesson of flourishing as self rose within. I included it as a reminder that lessons of the past are always present. I especially included it as anything I create within my life needs to include me, and is the natural for me. If it doesn’t feel like that I need to think carefully.

The thing is there are so many of those moments in this board. It’s nice as a blessing point but it can be the source of reasons to find the dream and write the story (in my journal). I was given at the afternoon I went to, a book that I could record my thinking in, so I decided this should be the place where I continued to create and write the story of the board and desires it contained.

In the journal I am writing about what comes up but I have reached the place about what comes next. What I wish and dream of. The heart’s desires that have not been lived yet. I can clinically make a list, which I might or I can write them as a story to myself about what it could look, feel and be like. That is what we do in a visualisation process it is just using all of the senses to do it.

So what will you do with your vision board? Would you like help to turn what you hope for and envision for your purpose of your board to get turned into real life. You have recorded intention and decide what you really are saying to yourself in the images you have chosen. Then ….. there is the option to turn that knowledge into goals with scaffolding around them so you can take action to turn your intention into something real.

Towards life is the only direction

Sandy

Consider a tree

Dreaming through the Tree of Life….
Sometimes the things around us give us clues to ways to look into life and see more than we thought could be there. Recently I did a live video on my FaceBook page: Towards about how I use the lessons of a tree to allow thoughts and images to what I want or need to find. Here it is for you to watch. https://www.facebook.com/pg/Towards-100284768329442

Sometimes it is hard looking for the right words and we go round in circles in our thoughts…. thinking things that sound the same no matter how many ways we look at them. A tree on the other hand may or may not have thought but one thing we know for certain a tree is just what its DNA calls for it to be. So many parts of living have to happen for it to grow from year to year and yet it does. It never remains exactly the same as it was or it will be. I’m not sure why we think we have to be never changing when every moment of living asks us to be in it and respond to it.

So a tree is my thing. If I am a little lost or feel something I need to understand and don’t know where to start, I draw a tree. If I want to dream a dream about my life I begin with a tree and see what becomes among its branches and where it is placed. Images make it easier for me to access that information. Perhaps it is the same for you. The knowing I have arrived at is that being in flow allows me to open the options of creative pathways and so often what I know simply floats to the surface and can be seen easily.

Understanding what I see may take longer but once it is seen an inner truth will be understood. It is like an alchemy of time and events but the right people and situations arise to shine a light on that image and give it a voice.

If you’d like to know more about what has come out of the pencil and time spent in flow for me please check out my books. They have space for you to explore what you think too.

This is the tree which arrived while I was working through the life chat video ideas. Accepting and allowing the processes of life and becoming a creation that is rather lovely in the end. That’s a fair life goal without delving any further. But there is always more.

Happy Day, Sandy