D68: Little dolls find new homes

tomorrow we are going home to London [I exaggerate, we’re visiting, but it still feels like going home!] and so i find myself doing grounding things today, just by kind of automation in a way. It is one of these times when I feel glad that myself knows what to do, and does it, without a big jostling match. It is rare, but good when it happens.

I haven’t been running for ages.. for various reasons, the dips and crannies of living I suppose.
Anyway I ran to the beach this morning, had a swim and ran back, picking up a box of apricots on the way back.
I enjoyed that. I need to touch the earth and breath air and space and move and put one foot in front of the other. I did it. It’s grounding.
Now I am quickly writing this, a visual mark, to myself. I am in a rush, which helps me actually do things because it quietens the critics a wee bit.
Also, I guess, knowing that we are going home lifts my spirits a bit and gives me a bit of soul energy to do this.

Going back to my scapegoat doll, which is hard to explain and still isn’t ‘finished’ as such, the process is turning out to be quite illuminating for me.. I might have to finish this post later..
so I started off with ‘I need to make my heart’ … and I am making it.
Here it is so far.. it has two sides and I am not sure yet, how I will display it, showing both or one.. we shall see… I am not even sure where it is heading exactly.. but the tassles coming from it, and the stick structure, i like, so far.

Somehow, I would like to attach the little folk being made, to the heart.
See how it was

But that was a while ago… the heart has changed.. and two of the little people have followed new life paths and been given away by the heart.
This is what I want to write about. This is the process that feels like the gold in the cracked vessel,  for me at the moment.
Firstly, here is this little dolly

On the front is ‘Mama Rosi’ [oops slight little spelling mistake… but ], and on the back ‘Gabriel’.
She made herself, it turns out,  to be given to Rosi, Gabriel’s ‘maestra’ from his ‘Asilo’ where he went for the first 3 years of being in Italy. He finished at the end of June. He called her Mamma Rosi and adored her and she was such a special part of his life [and of mine in a way] because she just cushioned our landing a bit, and took Gabriel under her wing and just had a mindset and outlook that just bridged the chasm between our home in London and this new very different place and culture. I wanted to thank her, in the way that I know best and that is most authentic to me, and I wanted to teach Gabriel about endings and about gratitude and the importance of special people.
So that dolly was for Rosi with love and it gave me a huge amount of joy to give it to her. I feel strongly that giving my art away, art that I love, is also, for me, a kind of vulnerability, and so its good. I guess that’s why this process has been important for me, as part of my scapegoat. To give and receive are two things I find equally difficult and yet something I yearn for because it is connection. Its a big topic! We also wrote a letter thanking Rosi. [I’m trying to work out how to download it from instagram because we forgot to take a photo but Rosi put part of it on instagram!]

and now for my next little dolly. We had some family visit us from America, my cousin G who I havent seen since school I think, so that is a loooooong time! and i met his amazing wife and their little boy who is just a bit younger than Gabriel, and he’s the youngest of 4, so they are a big family like we are, my brothers, sister and myself.
I as inspired by both what my cousin and what he has achieved in his life so far, and also by his wife who
totally inspired me on many levels. I wished I had had more time and foresight to pick her brain more on parenting things, as I just related so much to the little bits i witnessed and heard about her parenting [and family] approach.
here is her dolly!

 

and then, i have another of the collection of dolly’s made! it hasn’t decided to leave, yet [?] so maybe it will stay and be with the heart. who knows!

I feel a tenderness to this little dolly. She feels as if she is breaking out of her shell, trying to be tough and grownup but she’s still little, not tiny, but little. I put her with my Guardian. The Guardian and her seemed to click immediately. Here they are!

so that is the state of the dolls….

oh, this is what the family used to look like… just to remind me!:

and i dont know what else to say!
I need to try harder to connect more and write more and not hide.

Wednesday 27/6 D53

still hanging in here… getting a bit used to my days now, at least without wine.
the rest, well…
now it is the afternoon and I am sitting in a place i recently found which feels as if its another city altogether and apart from the swarms of mosquito’s its a great place to be. Light, air, nice music, WiFi, more creative types, and no loud car noises as we are too far from the roads!
I am sitting here because I dont have lessons and because I cant handle being in the house where we live because I can hardly breath in that place and it makes my entire body crumble in on itself and curl up into sadness. I even forfeit being with my little boy to avoid being in that place. The serenity prayer is not yet sinking in as far as that place goes.
the weekend just gone was G’s 5th birthday party and we had a trail race for the kids, which they LOVED and did twice!I made medals, numbers for the kids with their names on them and the prizes were giant lollipops. We got a friend of ours, the Park Run Manager of Italy, to come and be the ‘race director’ and do the pre-race briefing and the start.
The kids loved it and so did the parents. Not your usual Italian party especially as I brought sweets for the kids, which are not usually part of Italian birthday parties, but are definitely part of British and South African parties!

Friday will be G’s last day at his nursery school, where he’s been since we arrived in Italy.  Fortunately, the year he saturated, when he was 2, Rosi, his teacher, was just taking on a new class of kids, which she would then stay with throughout their time at the nursery. Fortunately she is an absolute angel and the best thing that could have happened to G, arriving in this new country where little did we know how difficult and unstable we’d feel for years to come. So at least, even though in 3 years, we’ve never really been able to unpack our things or feel as if we have a home, at least he’s had that stability of the same teacher since he got here. Small graces.

She is like an angel and when I think of her, I am always reminded of “the people that cross our paths…”. She has taught G some amazing lessons and values in life. she has accepted him 100% the way he is and celebrates each child.
I have made her a little dolly as a goodbye present from G. I want to teach G about appreciation, about beginnings and endings and recognizing the importance of these times in life, be they difficult or exciting. I still feel as if our leaving the UK and arriving here was, at least for me, so traumatic, that I am still suffering the aftermath. I wish in a way that I had had someone to hold my hand and help me go through that transition with some ritual and some meditation and some right of passage.

I hope that between me and G and his teacher we can mark this transition with respect, joy, pride and gratitude, even if there’s the sadness that inevitably comes with goodbyes and transitions.
I want to teach G [even if its something I haven’t managed to do with much success myself!] to sustain, if is possible, relationships, that are important and healthy, and that the door can always remain open between him and his nursery teacher. I am reminded of one of the most significant lessons that Gabriel has learned from his teacher, about the things we store and keep in our hearts.
I think it was the first grandparents day in Italy, and of course, Gabriel was the only child to have no grandparent to take to the grandparents day. He came home and told me “my grannies and my grandpas are always in my heart” and this is how his teacher had chosen to deal with the day with him. Since then he has applied this to many aspects of his life. I will be forever grateful to his teacher and to him, for this lesson.

I am still making my heart. This dolly was one of the dollies from my heart! I think it has chosen a good new home and heart to live in.

Friday 8 June Day 34. I am making my heart

I have somehow got very tangled and sort of contorted in my scapegoat doll. perhaps a mirror to some extent of life.
I am grateful for the movement and flickers of light that inevitably appear when you creep and climb over routes and branches and leaves and webs.
I never knew how to start my Scapegoat. But I had a sort of idea that i wanted to reach that part of me that I fear so much, the authentic absolute truth, of me. So I kind of started off with bits of knitting as I have been doing lately, just to sort of rhythmically warm up my fingers and connect them to my self.  The methodical physicality of knitting just helps me to move out of my brain and kind of into a different realm.
[its um, i dont know, strange perhaps? i dont know. I remember when I was at a point where drinking was ‘helpful’ to me. I remember distinctly thinking, that drinking helped me to feel, it helped me to access emotions. without drinking I felt numb and cold and just like metal or rock. I felt I was also untouchable and unreachable. drinking seemed to soften me and let me be brave enough to have feelings. It seems the opposite in a way to what a lot of people say when they stop drinking, is that their feelings come back, because when they were drinking, they numbed their feelings. The spiral for me was that the feelings I started to feel when I drank became darker and darker and more and more destructive and i had no protection and was utterly exposed, unless i was completely isolated, and that was the price i chose to pay as much as was possible given day jobs and all of that..]

back to my scapegoat, so as I started knitting and making little random pieces I started joining them together and the message I got, was ” I am making my heart” and this message just keeps on as I make, like a pathway i need to follow.
I had an image of finding one of those volcanic rocks that are usually egg shaped and quite bland outside, and very hard. When you open them, they are filled with crystals, I remember being amazed by them as a child. I have since found out that they are called GEODES
I came up with this image, which appeared as a gift in a guided meditation, and I felt strongly that this rock was a symbol of my intuition, it talked of trusting my intuition. So although the rock appears to be a solid plain lump of rock, inside are the crystals, and I must carry this, and not worry what it looks like but trust in it’s magic and depth.

So that was quite powerful for me, in telling me to keep going with making my heart even though i felt as if this heart was battling to be formed and battling to represent anything near what my heart might be.
But while I have been tinkering away at it, i thought a lot about the process of making ‘ugly paintings’ and seeing what emerged, and so i stitched making sure my stitches would show on the other side, it is double sided where each stitch is on the one side meditated and decided, but on the other side a surprise to be discovered and used.

But at the same time, i had this urgent need to make a few little people. Again, I don’t know really what this is about and how they connect to my scapegoat. My thoughts so far while making them and with a few left/right hand conversations, is that they are in one way parts of me, my different voices. Some of them I am also sewing faces on each side so that they are like the heart, and i am watching what emerges. On the other hand it feels to me as if this is a kind of mirror of being in my big family growing up. I felt lost and unseen in that family and as if I had no voice but this powerful pulsating heart that had to be squashed into my pockets. But strangely I see I have 5 children, but we were a family of 6 kids. I haven’t made parents. That I never wish to do or have any inclination to do.
So I don’t know, this scapegoat seems once again to have a million strands and paths and messages and I am trying to feel that I am making it trusting that somewhere lie the crystals.
I do feel, that the heart of it is the heart and I am not sure how to connect the little people to the heart, do I hang the heart like dream catcher and hang the children from it, or attach them to the heart or put the heart on a giant pole, like a talking stick. I don’t know.
I remember when I was in art school, my tutors used to tell me that i was saying too much and to choose a focal point otherwise the eye doesn’t know where to go. I feel this is the way I make art, without a focal point and I feel this is the way I live my life too, a lot, without a focal point.
I guess its not good or bad,  maybe I need to figure out how to mine the gold from that let it serve me and my ecosystem.   [also attached the post I sent to my group about this ..]

 

scapegoat writings group 8 Junev2

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Day 10

Wednesday 16th May. Day 10… little bit of a shift today/last few days. Been listening to the World Hay House Summit and just trying to reframe stories and just trying all the usual – accept / be in the moment / be grateful… all that stuff, but I guess what has been most prevalent for me in terms of shifts has been handing it over. Trying to hand over before there is something to even have to let go of.
Not easy but a few little successes … building blocks and foundations.

I cant quite put my finger on things really, at the moment, I just wanted to write something and just ‘plonk’ some thoughts down. A few synchronicities too, which is always a good sign for me, it shows my thinking is a tad higher than …
I cant really say what they are, exactly but, ok so one is around ‘a course in miracles’ which i want to buy. Another is around an exhibition and the idea of having one.
A few others… some lovely visual Artie ones for my art.

In terms of art, i am making this small family of tiny people. I dont know quite where they are going and how they will connect or how exactly they fit, if they do, into the next doll project which is the scapegoat. We shall see.
This evening I have just been looking at a new doll artist i found on instagram and just loving her grungy colourful wonderful collage-ey dolls and her art works. She’s called Corrinegilman.
yesterday was a ‘suppressed holiday’ here in the South and so my little guy had no school. We had a great morning running around to various places with our running buggy and then going to a friend for supper which was lovely and refreshing. So nice to be in a family home!
I still feel so pained about this place where we live and miss so much having a home of my own or even a home that isn’t mine but feels homely.
I think it is the thing I think about most out of anything, other than my small person.
I am really battling with that one. I feel as if handing it over is just giving up and accepting that the way we live is acceptable when it is NOT.~
I guess this is the true test of ‘handing it over’.
My cards this morning spoke of a talking stick and I thought, as I have a few times, that I MUST make a doll with a talking stick as a mirror for manifesting my voice.
I dont know why i am so slow at my doll making…. I dont even like the word ‘doll’ . I think I know where that comes from… but i must say if i am reading words written by a doll maker where the doll becomes a character and there is a rich story with the little person then i have no issues with the word doll really.. but on its own.. it has history and connotations for me.
interesting… words…. Ok, day 10… they say it gets easier!

The illusive wagon

Friday 3rd May. Day 3.
I fell of the wagon on April 25, just after my birthday. I just had this overwhelming need/urge to ‘have a rest’ from this hardcore constant sobriety thing. My brain and my heart were so tired and exhausted and I had been given all this wine for running races and i just drank it.
Now I’m on day 3 again. I am glad about that but I am seriously battling.
I am just waiting to be tired enough to go to sleep.
I know that addicts often have a tendency to find fault in their surroundings [people, places, things] and I guess I am a prime contender.
I feel as if when I come back towards this place where I live with my little boy, I just dread walking up the stairs and walking through the door. I feel so uncomfortable here, mostly in this house, but also in this city, in this country, pretty much everything.

I don’t know how I am going to pull up my bootstraps or if I ever will. It feels like the effort of surviving as a human is such a high price to pay for a return that does not seem equal. I guess the only ‘thing’ in my life that I truly value and love is my son.
But sometimes I feel as if even he would be better off with another family and not me.
But there is NO ONE here that I would dream of leaving him with and so that is perhaps a reason to just keep going one way or another.

I wonder if moving back to the UK WOULD be better, I don’t now. But all I know is the logistics are close to impossible, given what I have lost and given up when I moved here.

I feel so stuck and trapped in this place. I just have NO idea how to deal with it or improve it. I feel that I am so far down the wrong road mentally and emotionally, that I feel like i have no choice but to isolate. To put myself in the midst of people, electronically or in person, people would be to do them such a disservice.  All of that, I guess, is why I feel so desperate to just quiet my mind and numb myself.

It is pretty much a given that there will be no change to this place and setup where we live. I cant afford to move and my husband’s priorities are his family relics, his family of origin, and his previous marriage. [the order may vary depending ]
That is abundantly clear. So we are stuck. It feels.
I feel as if I am having the life squeezed out of me, systematically and on purpose.
I am exhausted, I just want to evaporate.

My Guardian Doll so far and almost.

Day 54. This is my guardian doll so far.
She is the guardian of my journey, this one or another, they intertwine, are at crossroads, they seem to compete but mystically unite, somehow, out of time and place. i am trying to believe.

I like her face the most at the moment. She is full of detail, with the sewing, her face is layered with colours and texture and roughness. her eyes are open and she is not afraid to cry. Her charcoalness makes her brave even if a little unreachable. She has
coloured forms coming out of her head, making her at first surprising and a bit shocking but then brave and full of voice. She speaks her own language, but only some can hear. Only some will dare look.

Her body is still a bit awkward, and she wishes to hold something, up to the sun perhaps. She likes her baggy clothes full of colour and beads and joined together fabric like a fishing net or passed down clothes. She wears Spiderman on her arms and Aslan on her front. Her neck is strong, it holds her tears.
She speaks to me of ambiguity and dichotomy and holding opposites, and being all things, sometimes bravely sometimes not sometimes quietly sometimes not.
I think she has a lot to say, I hope she tells me, I hope I can receive her messages, i hope they reach me.
I think that today, she is saying happy sad birthday. Even though it does not feel like a happy birthday kind of  day, perhaps it can be happy and sad at the same time, somehow.

Perhaps my guardian will need more colours and threads and beads and maybe even a little spirit animal, but for now, she is giving me my birthday.

23 April. Monday another day.

It is a battle. I’m sitting in bed . Just had a coffee instead of a wine. I feel like I’m living on a knife edge with this not drinking wine thing.
Yesterday i was given 2 bottles of wine after a race. Now I have 4 bottles of wine.

Its all i can do to not open them.

this evening i had two lessons and today i just spent most of the day making my guardian doll and i watched some great video’s made for our doll group course which were great and I am excited to make what the videos were about.
I need to make something and do something to fill this gaping hole and to soften how sad and down i feel.

I am finding it so hard to connect and have a voice. It’s like on the one hand I feel that to survive here i have to absolutely squash myself into a thimble and be silent and never move. But on the other hand I desperately need to do the opposite and its a constant battle between the two where I feel like I’m at war with myself.
at the moment i feel as if the silent part of me is winning and this lack of colour or expression or validity or even recognition of my existence is like knives into my heart.
I feel as if this is my existence now and I have no choice but to raise my son in this, or move somewhere else and live in poverty literally.

tomorrow is my birthday and I am dreading it. Last year which was a Sunday, my husband just ignored me and went off to one of his many houses. Now I just feel like i want to curl up with some drugs and sleep. I never even took drugs because of this very fear that if i did, i would. So its purely my imagination imagining this.

I cannot work out why i am writing this, here, perhaps it is all i can think of as a way to talk to someone whilst remaining silent at the same time. Perhaps it is to give my hands something to do until i am too tired to stay awake and then i can keep my day count without having to start again, again.

what could i do tomorrow to make my birthday ok:
1. I could go running with my little boy before school.
2. I could go into a park in nature where I know I will be a lot more comfortable than being in this house which isn’t mine and in no way do i relate to this space AT all. I feel suffocated here.

3. I could drown myself with wine

4. I could go to a gallery and see some art.
5. I could take myself out to lunch but at the moment i am trying to lose weight

6. I could go and buy some little goodies for my art like crayons, buttons, fabric, whatever.

7. I could do some ‘ugly’ paintings – which were part of the video tutorial and find some soul secrets in them.

8. I could read a book

9. I could run away

10. Do nothing.

I don’t know. I have no petrol in my soul and no inner strength or energy. Maybe i just have fumes.

A guy died in the london marathon.. a young guy who was a chef.
22.03 now. May as well go to sleep. Or try. At least i held off another day…. i suppose that is something.

Home

https://blog.oup.com/2016/12/home-place-environment/

“We’re going on a bear hunt,
we’re going to catch a big one,
I’m not scared, what a beautiful day!

uh oh, mud, thick oozy mud.
We cant go under it,
we cant go over it,
oh no, we’ve got to go through it!
Squelch squelch squelch squelch squelch squelch.”

They say…. that whatever is so so painful or difficult that we can barely touch it or think about it, actually requires us to plummet and dive into it: extreme squelch-squelch-ing you could say.

So, the image of my mud is a home. I wish to have a home, and to feel at home.
That’s the bricks and mortar of it. THEN, there is the rest.
and this is what this is about, a way to try to find my way through it. The inside and the outside of home.
So far, in the last 3 years, I haven’t, I feel, got anywhere really.

So now I am going to try to investigate ‘home’ and what it is and different ways it can be and different ways it can speak and hold and comfort and express and protect.
This morning, i got the card of the medicine wheel, which talks about the path of life being not linear but multifaceted and of different realms of being and sensing etc. I like this image, with its 3D-ness and depth and no real start or end line, so no starting gun or medal, just a journey to go on.
It suggests making a visual medicine wheel of stones or other objects in a specific space that holds meaning.
This might be a good starting point or a kind of anchor.
a metaphoric visual home to earth and ground me. ——

that was a few days ago. Today is Saturday 21st of April. Day 51. Right now it’s Saturday night and my brain has been scheming all day about how or when or what to drink. So far I have managed to avoid all possible traps. But this scheming worries me.
I feel so down and out of it and just out of place. I was wondering what I would say on this blog if I fell off the wagon. Not that anyone knows about this blog, but still, for me, it would be something else to deal with on top of it all.

this home thing. I have been taking on more work. This is a known thing for me. When I feel uncomfortable or insecure, I work more. I think this work thing is about a few things:
[not in order}
1. Being out the house more, so that I don’t have to be in this environment, especially with my son because raising him in this place is unbelievably painful to me. It is so far off my dream reader we may as well be on Mars.
2. I need money so that me and Gabriel can go to london in the summer and I don’t want to use more of my savings, which are not actually savings but the remains of my home that I had to sell in London.
3. To feel as if I have a purpose and am visible and perhaps somehow needed or valued. In this house, I feel as if I am in the way, its not my place, I don’t know who I am here and I feel just like I’m nothing and have nothing and feel as if there is no future for me here, or life or anything. [and ALL of that transfers as well, of course, to my little boy, which breaks my heart]. In fact I just feel that my very existence in this place is just one giant humiliation.

I have read a few times that our outer worlds are in fact reflections of ourselves and our inner words. I don’t like reading that because I don’t agree that that is true in all cases. Refugees don’t choose to live in camps or on the street. We don’t choose the space that our parents provide us with when we are kids. I certainly did not choose to live in this place at all like this.
anyway I digress, at least I am not drinking wine.

walking my little boy back from a party at his school, I was reminded yet again about how abnormal we are. A mom i met said we should pop round some time for the kids to play. Of course that is not possible, as i work, and also I can never invite the child back to play with him and so it’s like a burst bubble before we’ve even started.

Husband had gone to some event where he had written the forward to a book about something like how art heals and all about art and psychiatry.
Astounding. He has never ever once taken the slightest interest in my art,and I have a degree in art. It is my passion. He has never ever expressed an interest or wish, in the slightest about my art, which is in boxes packed in some underground flat, because we are not allowed to move anything in his museum, or at least what we can move is a drop in the ocean and doesn’t even put a dent into the fact that we are locked out of the husband’s 4 bedroom house next door, while me and my son share a bedroom and a bed.
so he can go and talk about art and how he loves art and how powerful art is to heal, isn’t that wonderful. As long as its someone else’s art not mine and as long as the healing is about everyone else except his own ‘family’ and he can stand up and be the hero to the world of psychiatry and art therapy while they remain oblivious.

I am going to post this now.

dis-connection

Friday 13th April: Day 43
I feel still as if I am wading through treacle and mud in life, in my mind, in my heart. I feel I am my worst enemy but my only ally.
Very pleased that I am still keeping on keeping on not picking up, just for today, one day at at time. I still feel in a way a bit weak/ashamed/insecure about the fact that this is my 2nd time round and am I really ? Was it bad enough? I haven’t even told anyone. I feel not good enough or bad enough to ask for support and if I do, I feel guilty for taking up space and other people deserve ‘it’ more than me.

In my various attempts at bombarding my brain and soul into trying to change/ be more open/ more brave/ more receptive / more positive/ more hopeful/ more like-able/more honest/ more real, etc etc, I have been realising, [I suppose again] that one of my biggest obstacles is lack of self worth and self belief, which I felt so strongly as a child.
I felt that I was not important enough to get enough attention, to be considered enough, to be believed in enough, to be listened to or heard for what I am/was etc.
I felt, partly as a girl, but also in my family, that i was just not deserving or important enough for anything.
Now I feel the same.I feel as if other wives would fight more for their child or for their life and their own sense of worth and validity.

Just writing this makes me feel like crying. I feel so ill at ease and humiliated where I live and in this situation where I feel a prisoner.

I don’t know how to get out of this pain and humiliation and just feeling like i don’t have a home.
I feel helpless in many ways too , because I feel that when I do reach out to people, I am surprised that they do care and respond. I then feel this surge of guilt and shame for even attempting to contact them authentically and I run away.
I feel straight away as if I am taking up space that someone else deserves and I feel too as if they will hate me for what I said or did, and so they are pretending to be nice but cant wait for me to go away.
I feel paralysed.
and then to compound that, I feel so caught in my negativity and just years of this kind of thinking and feeling that I feel how will i ever get out of it?

I know in my heart, that I do need connection, I desperately need deep and meaningful connection and yet I feel that it is impossible. It is not so much that I cant find someone who is willing to meet me at a deeper level, but I feel as if I cant sustain more than a few minutes of connection and then I need to could back into myself.
I feel burned by the connection.
I hide behind my walls, literally, and if it weren’t for a certain little boy, I don’t know what would happen.
I wish to make art about this and try somehow to let this more gentle connection with my own soul start to melt this ice and temper the fire a little, but even my art is like treacle and mud and i feel awkward and cut off and disconnected and like I have nothing to give. I can only ‘take’ secretly from my computer, listening to people talk and talk and talk about everything i need to know about, and this listening fills the gap of talking.

My eyes are so sore, and I have headaches and I’m so tired all the time.
I am trying to write my ten ideas a day though.

Consistently doing

9 April: Today is Monday. I have been thinking a lot lately about consistency. Not of my own volition but out of bits and pieces that have emerged out of stuff I’ve been listening to, and of course, well, I am reminded that ‘just for today’ IS consistency, and at least I am doing that! More on that… [and linked to consistency – focus and truth, the path, gut, intuition and finally.. action]

I don’t have anything particularly urgently crucial, as such, to write about, although I do want to write about the art exhibition opening and performance from Friday night Perhaps at the end… right now I am in full audio and visual view of BLIPPI! , which is not all that conducive to contemplation. And then off to teach English to the youth.

This morning I wrote some lists, painted part of a door yellow [transforming it from its depressing dirty greyness] , ordered a birthday cake and present for my mom, made a start on my Guardian Doll’s head and listened to a Rich Roll Podcast as well as a James Altucher podcast, a podcast pro and writer and many other things, and who I learned about from a Rich Roll podcast. It’s like a giant spider web this podcast world.
James was interviewing this business/personal coach and they were talking about how valuable reading books is, but how when looking back in hindsite, the biggest improvements or changes in life, generally come from doing rather than reading.
So in other words the importance of action, whatever that may be, and how, often, radical action is not such a bad thing.

here are some things I wrote down this morning from the podcasts I listened to. I cant remember who said what exactly, and they might not be word for word exactly, but here they are for what they are, for me to remember, in the spirit of what I needed to hear.
”Do something radical and it upgrades your life”
”If you’re honest, you’re free. Aim to be honest in each thing you do and say”
..and then I wrote that I should try to get and read James Altucher’s book ‘Choose Yourself’ , although it seems it is a lot about making a lot of money and my interest was peeked more by the idea that if we choose ourselves, we choose to take responsibility and empower ourselves etc…
Ok, so the lady that James was interviewing was Cheryl Richardson, who is a life coach and angel business investor, and a book she wrote which also  appeals to me is ‘The art of extreme self care’ but the only thing that is sort of holding me back, considering I don’t have huge volumes of time for books, is that she doesn’t use nature a part of the approach, but still… i should at least check it out on Amazon. I also just like the idea of reading  a book about self care.

Oh and the other thing I found quite striking was a quote that Sheryl mentioned which actually comes from someone else “You will marry or partner with the person who is least capable of meeting your most important needs and that’s when the work really begins” I think the guy was Harville Hendrix , who I had never heard of before.

They also spoke of Jo Dispenza and his meditation practice and writing. I know the name but have never actually read anything of his.

So i felt quite enriched by what was being discussed.
My art is taking me AGES, although I am doing stuff, I feel like its really muddy and just not flowing. I don’t know.. I want to do so much stuff, but get caught in the weeds all the time. I don’t know what its about.

My cards this morning spoke of being still, and in quiet, and listening to the very quiet inner voice. Maybe I need to do that more, and just not be so ‘busy’ trying to be busy.

lastly one last tip i picked up was this idea from James: In the morning, write down 10 ideas. Do this every day.  I can try that in my morning pages! It appeals. I love ideas.

Bed time for a little boy now. End of day 39