Take Back Your Life!

“The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it.” ~ Michelangelo

Most of us are not encouraged to aim high in the life of our choosing.

For that matter, we aren’t encouraged to really aim anywhere at all despite that we keep hearing to live our best lives.

By the time you hear this edict, you’ve been trained to follow the beaten path of wherever society is going. Get onto that bandwagon, sagging as it is, and follow it wherever it heads. It can be confusing to get the mixed messages.

The few who pick their own place to aim and aim high can achieve all kinds of self-fulfilling fab things.

Every time I have aimed high, I achieved something I didn’t think possible.

Be it community projects or art or writing.

Over the summer I submitted my story to Psychology Today for possible publication in their Two-Minute Memoir column.

Two weeks later, they told me my story was being considered. A few weeks after that they told me I’d been selected. (more…)

“All humans are essentially wild creatures and hate confinement. We need what is wild, and we thrill to it, our wildness bubbling over with an anarchic joie de vivre. We glint when the wild light shines. The more suffocatingly enclosed we are – tamed by television, controlled by mortgages and bureaucracy – the louder our wild genes scream in aggression, anger and depression.” ~ Jay Griffiths

For some reason, our society likes to de-wild people. At younger and younger ages. For reasons that don’t quite make sense to me.

“Shut up and sit down, please!”

Most will learn to sit more quietly at their school and work desks, presumably learning and producing more. They are deemed brilliant. Those that do not are deemed troublemakers or misfits and left for societal dead.

But are the over-domesticated ones really learning and producing or is that an illusion? And are they happy?

Perhaps not as much as you might imagine. (more…)

Here’s the long and short of it; There is no why. You don’t have a right to the cards you believe you should have been dealt. You have an obligation to play the hell out of the ones you’ve holding.”
~ Cheryl Strayed

I love this quote by Cheryl.

It’s easy to throw a pity party for yourself and bemoan the cards you’ve been given, instead of embracing those cards and using them to your advantage.

Cheryl’s mother died young. She took her often unbearable loss and turned it into essays and best selling books and the book became a film.

Reminds me of that other quote to take lemons and turn them into lemonade.

When I was a girl, I used to wish I looked like Marcia Brady, especially her long, straight blond hair. I spent hours smearing my hair down taut with goopy gelatinous products, trying to erase the waves. If if it didn’t look right, I’d wet it and start all over again.

If it had as much as a minor bump in it, I spun into a funk and often couldn’t even leave the house that day.

Hours lost in front of the mirror, upset with unruly hair that kept betraying me.

Then one August day in my late 20’s, I got caught in a rainstorm during my work lunch break, followed by a burst of humidity and my wavy hair re-asserted itself.

I saw a mess of curls, completely out of control. All I wanted to do was hide in the bathroom until 5 pm, but I couldn’t. I had no choice but to go public with this insidious spaghetti on my head.

The guys I worked with began stopping by my desk and saying, “I love your hair like that.” (more…)

“Be proud of who you are and not ashamed of how someone else sees you.”
~ Author Unknown

My husband was in a band and I’m was in a band last summer, so we love to watch band documentaries or interviews with Dan Rather about people in bands.

Recently, we saw a great one with actor Kieffer Sutherland, who is way more interesting than we ever imagined. He acted, left for  while to be on the rodeo circuit, returned to acting and is now also in a country band.

When asked a question about certain aspects of his life, he said, “You Are Who You Are, Be Proud of that.”

Totally resonated with me because of a recent chat I had with a wonderful up and coming coach named Kayla MacArthur. I was talking to her about my Demi Moorish type voice and how it was my perception that some people listening to it assigned false attributes to me. After dissing my own my voice, she said, “Why not think of your voice as what makes you unique?”

Bingo. (more…)

“Never give up. You only get one life. Go for it!” Richard E. Grant

About twenty-five ago, after having all sorts of battles with my inner adventurer’s reluctant nature, I decided to just go for things. The first thing I did was go to Greece by myself. It was nerve wracking and I cried a few times, but in the end it was one of the best things I ever did for myself. That opened the door to all sorts of adventures.

Since then I have just gone for it many times. Each time it gets easier. (more…)

Hello there,

This is a post I wrote back in March 2008 when I was blogger for the month at Skirt! Magazine. That was near the beginning of the blogging craze.

Thought you might get something out of it!

Thanks, G.

~

Ruby Slippers, Anyone?

I enjoy writing essays because they force me to reveal my vulnerable side not only to the reader, but also to myself. Back in my late teens and twenties, I often felt trapped behind a locked emotional door. I’d bang, bang, bang on that little windowpane hoping somebody, anybody would unlock it, but no one ever did. Knuckles bruised and bleeding, I’d slump down against the door and wonder, “Is anyone ever going to rescue me?”

Many life experiences later, I discovered that the only person powerful enough to rescue me from behind that door was Giulietta. That I have always been the heroine of my own life.

And so have you.

You see, the “theys” don’t want us to know that each one of us has a pair of ruby slippers tucked away in a locked room. Special designer shoes capable of transforming our tentative womanistas into confident, powerful heroines who can leap tall solar-powered shopping carts in a single glass pump bound. The “theys” prefer we shuffle around with our heads down waiting to be rescued by a bouquet, a mate, a job title, a compliment, a new hair color. (more…)

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“Don’t be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment.”
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

It strikes me as ironic how liberated in thought were some of the folks who lived over 100 years ago. Folks like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Thoreau. They didn’t have access to the Internet and all the mega knowledge you can find on there, yet they seemed to have this intuitive grasp of the human condition.

I’m big on experimenting with life because it leads you to places the “permission” and “perfection” blueprints would never take you. I know I say this a lot, but children are naturally curious and explorative. Yet, we decide around first grade that only certain people should have the power to decide what are youngest folks will do. Why not let the children take on more responsibility for their own lives? They are wiser than we believe them to be. That will empower them to achieve full selfdom instead of molded, someone else’s selfdom.Lately, I’ve been a mad, creative scientist of art! Trying all sorts of art techniques, mixing it, freeing it and I must say, wild experimenting! is super fun and liberating. Talk about a natural high. In one painting, I might start with watercolor, then add acrylic paints, then scribble with acrylic or water color markers or regular markers or add some fibre paste or glitter or stick-on bling. (more…)

“All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.”
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Okay, so I’ve had this history of jumping around from one new program I create to the next. The thought of doing something twice can put me into a creative tailspin. I’d spend a lot of time creating a program, offer it once and then move on to the next one. My program content was piling up on my hard drive!Yet, two of my friends kept urging me to run my programs monthly. The. Same. Ones. The horror, I thought, of doing something more than once.So I resisted. And resisted. And years went by. I spent a lot of time continuously creating new programs. Because … that is what creative folks do, right? (Read, crazy folks?)Finally, I agreed to try what my friends said and am running my writing and wild painting programs on a regular basis.You know what?

They were right. It works. People sign up more often when they see a program running over and over. They might not be able to take it in January, but they can take it in February or May or November. It helps you and them plan.

Yet, I resisted this notion!

Sometimes, even rebellious folks can get in a rut. You can jump out of one rut and land in a different rut and not even know it because you are blinded by your own narrow field of vision.

Thank god, I listened to them and experimented like Mr. Emerson suggests above. It’s made a huge difference!

Now onto you.

Is there anything you are resisting that might actually be good for you? In business? In life?

If there is, try to dive into that resistance and see what you swim up to the surface with in your teeth.

Do you have it? Yes? Great.

Okay. How can this thing you’ve been resisting help you enhance your own life? How can you embrace it and experiment using it in a different way? A way that probably makes you want to stomp your feet and scream that it is going against your own personality grain?

Take this pièce de ré·sis·tance and work it into your life. Then see what happens!

Muse thanks!

PS, interested in joining us in Holliston for Painting Wild and Imperfect Faces. Click HERE