Changing It UP!

I've decided that this idea--to do a daily blog based on interesting quotations--has played itself out.
I got bored with it, and, more importantly, it was taking time away from something I've shined on for a while: making stuff.
So I've decided to base my posts on things I make myself: drawings and other bits of art, poetry, photography and writing. This includes sharing that which I find inspiring or really funny.
I'm also easing off of the "Daily" thing and doing a "when I feel like it or when I have something I really want to share" thing.
I'm at an age where I not only want to make more space in my life for personal, visual expressions, I want to rediscovering the joy I had as a child when I simply made things for fun..
My posts will be my progress report, and I hope they will be enjoyable for us all.

"The more one judges, the less one loves."--Honore de Balzac

Love has nothing to do with being a perfect 10.  Love has nothing to do with being a good provider.  Love has nothing to do with being tall, dark, and handsome.  Love has nothing to do with being charming.  Love has nothing to do with being smart.  Love has nothing to do with anything you can measure, evaluate, or factor in.  Love IS blind, and that's it's best quality.

"You will find as you look back upon your life that the moments when you have truly lived are the moments when you have done things in the spirit of love"--Henry Drummond

Fear and anger shut you down. What is closed cannot receive. Nothing changes if you haven't room in your heart to accept what life brings you.
Love opens you up. What is opened is receptive. When you love, you welcome life into your heart and you begin to truly live.

"All that we love deeply becomes a part of us."-- Helen Keller

This is true and more than this: what we love is already a part of us. We are made of love and made for loving. Love is who we are.
We've been taught not to love, but what we recognize when we finally overcome our training is that love sets us free. It feels RIGHT to love, and when we love we feel like we are living the truth about ourselves--and, in fact, we are.

"Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place."-- Zora Neale Hurston

To feel comfortable enough to be yourself is the cherry on top of the love sundae. Feeling safe with someone is a sure sign of love. It's absence means that you're mistaking love for something else.

"We live in the world when we love it."-- Rabindranath Tagore

Love dissolves barriers; at least we want it to. We want to merge with what we love. When we love to paint, losing ourselves in the process is the greatest pleasure. When we love a person, feeling we can be who we truly are in their presence is the greatest relief. When we love the world, we forget that we've been taught to fear it. When we lose our fear, that is when we start really living.

"We have enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another."-- Jonathan Swift

Ironic, right? So many religions preach loving one another, but so few actually practice what they preach. When people join together to worship might it be because they feel there is safety in numbers, and if you need to gather together to be safe then doesn't that imply that there is an enemy? That would mean that it is only safe to love those who are in your group, while those outside the flock must be dangerous.
This is the great mistake of religion.

"The art of love is largely the art of persistence."-- Albert Ellis

Love is as natural to us as breathing, yet it's so hard to love! We've been raised to see others as competitors, dangerous, wrong-headed, different, above or below us.  Love demands that we be blind to the prejudices we've been taught. Love must be unconditional or it isn't love. That kind of love flies in the face of convention, and takes the persistence Albert talks about to achieve; yet what an achievement! How free, how wonderful we will feel when we can love without blinders or boundaries!
Only when we can love like that will we also be able to love ourselves.
This kind of love isn't easy at first, but practice makes perfect, and perfect love is worth the practice.

"Love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is done well." Vincent Van Gogh

And people think Van Gogh was crazy.  Well, maybe he was, but boy, what he describes here is a wonderful way to live a life. The aliveness he brought to his paintings testifies to his love for his subjects, be they human, flowers, fields, or stars, and I'm thinking that his ability to "love many things" is the key to his genius.

"Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place."-- Zora Neale Hurston

Your hungry soul craves love. Feed it well. All flavors of love are welcome: romantic, parent/child, brotherly, spiritual, love of doing, playing, being, competing, art, acting, music, comedy: all love, one love, nothing is rejected, all are consumed with gusto and shouts of "More, More!".

"Do all things with love."-- Og Mandino

Ahhh, this is such good advice! When we do all things with love, we find ourselves completely in the moment, enjoying the feel of, say, computer keys clicking away underneath our fingers, the sound they make, and the march of type across the blank page.  It all adds up to the enjoyment of being present, which brings luster, a sense of peace, and feelings of ease and joy to even the most mundane activities--like writing this blog.  Amen.

"Take part in love week." Vishen Lakhiani

Love week.  Like the Secret Santa, but really lovely!
Check out this video that describes what happens and why it's important.
http://www.mindvalley.com/culture/love-week#sthash.gBpjKF0V.dpbs

"If you can't be/with the one you love/love the one you're with"-- Crosby, Stills and Nash

Sounds like a line straight from the '60s, and it is, but there's a germ of truth here.  Love in it's purity is object-free.
True love is an act of inclusion, and it must begin with self acceptance; for then the love one feels for another is not a search for wholeness, it's an extension of the love one feels for oneself, for the world, and for the universe at large.
Love without object is love without seclusion. Love that seeks to isolate, make special, control, or seclude is not love at all.

"I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear."-- Martin Luther King, Jr.

This quote reveals not just a great man, but a great truth.  Martin Luther King, Jr. was wise enough to see that the answer to oppression, anger, and hate is not more oppression, anger and hate.  It is only and always love.
He understood that the seeds of love lie in every heart, and that they grow if they have the opportunity to bask in the sunshine of regard and be bathed by the water of compassion.  By meeting hate with love, he starved the weeds of hate by sowing and nurturing the seeds of love. It took great courage and great trust to do this, and may we all find it in our hearts to do the same.

"Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage."-- Lao Tzu

When you are loved, you have the strength to overcome temptation for the sake of they who love you.
When you love--and the best example is a parents love for a child--protecting that child brings out the grizzly bear in even the most mild mannered mom or dad.
You can have these same protective feelings for anything you love: our mother earth or the god you worship for example.
Hopefully we will learn to love ourselves with the same fervor.

"Dance is the only art of which we ourselves are the stuff of which it is made."-- Ted Shawn

Unless you count living. Living is an art if it's done with intention. Bringing presence, beauty, and intensity to whatever you do makes you an artist every moment you're alive.

"Of all lies, art is the least untrue."--Gustave Flaubert

We're, all of us, trying to find a level of truth.  I don't mean "facts", I mean that feeling you get when you know that you are completely yourself: relaxed, refreshed, and totally at peace.
It's not about the "right/wrong" of life, it's more about the right/wrong of YOU.
Art is a way to discover that place where you feel completely whole.  Art is the way to communicate that wholeness, the knowledge  that you are not alone and that you are exactly enough in and of yourself.
It is the lie that is least untrue, because we all have to find this out for ourselves--but art points us in the right direction.

"If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it."-- Anais Nin

I'm right there with Anais.  She demands that the act of creation elicit feelings of aliveness in the artist because only work done with energy and intensity can communicate those feelings to others.
I'm reminded of a story I heard once about an artist and his client.  The client admired one of the artist's paintings but the artist loved that piece so much he refused to sell it at any price.
"I can make you a copy." he offered.
The client agreed, but when he returned to the studio some weeks later and saw the new painting he was disappointed.
"I don't know what it is", he said, "for even though this painting is identical to the original in every way, it lacks something. It's just not as good."
"There's a reason for that." explained the artist. "This painting is a copy, the original is art."

"Art is the only way to run away without leaving home."-- Twyla Tharp

This quote by Twyla brought one of Rumi's poems to mind:

"Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing
and rightdoing there is a field.
I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass
the world is too full to talk about."
--Rumi

That's the place in which art happens.

"Art is made to disturb, science reassures."-- Georges Braque

I guess exceptions prove Georges rule, except when they don't.
Matisse used to say he wanted his paintings to feel as comfortable as an easy chair, and nothing soothes the soul as beautifully as a lovely piece of music.  Sure there are works of art that are disturbing, but that's not art's main job, and the job of science doesn't, in every case, do much to reassure us.  Heard of the atomic bomb?
I'd say both can, and do in many cases, do both.