Take Back Your Life!

“You must go after your wish. As soon as you start to pursue a dream, your life wakes up and everything has meaning.” ~ Barbara Sher

Can you imagine a world where no one ever had a dream to achieve something great?

Most of what you see wouldn’t even exist.

Recently, I rewatched Flash Dance, an 1983 movie that got panned by critics but went on to be loved by the people, making it the third highest grossing film in 1983. When I first watched it I was enamored with the dancing. This time I was enamored with Alex’s dream process.

A welder by day, dancer in a club by night, Alex had a dream to attend the prestigious Pittsburgh Conservatory of Dance and Repertory. But didn’t really have the guts to apply, worried by her lack of formal training. Her boss turned boyfriend reads her the riot act when she whines about not being good enough to apply to the program.

“When you give up your dreams, you die, ” he says and walks away.

That riles her up to apply and, of course, she does the most amazing emotionally pumped up audition in the history of auditions. It’s so good, I’m not sure she even needs to attend the school anymore, but as the film fades to black, I presume she gets in and does.

We all seem to have dreams as children and some later as adults, but too many of us reject our own dreams as impossible, without even trying to achieve them.

I fell into that chasm for awhile myself.

It’s easy.

You stop believing in your own dream and so do your friends. You all end up living the life of quiet desperation Henry Thoreau warned us about 1885.

However, if you are lucky, something will reactivate your dream — at any age — and you will have a second or even third chance to pursue it.

No matter what anyone tells you, it is never too late to go after your dreams.

Stan Lee created his first comic at 39. Laura Ingalls Wilder published her first little house on the Prairie book at 65. Susan Boyle won Britain’s Got Talent at 47. Vera Wang entered the fashion design industry at 40. Julia Child didn’t have her first cookbook published until 50. Charles Darwin was 50 when he published On The Origin of the Species. Ray Kroc was 59 when he bought his first MacDonald’s. Grandma Moses started painting at 78. Gladys Burrill ran her first marathon at 86.

Thankfully, they didn’t listen to the naysayers who have given up on their own lives.

If something “lights you up,” do it. I can almost guarantee it will make all the difference in your life.

Start with baby steps and keep going … It will be the best of times, it will be the worst of times. At times you will want to give up. These are the times to steel yourself and keep going. Many people give up right before they achieve their dream. That is often the darkest of times.

Want to share your dreams? I find giving them voice can be a good way to get them rolling again. Add them below!

Muse Thanks, Giulietta

“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…)

The greatest risk is really to take no risk at all. You’ve got to go out there, jump off the cliff, and take chances.” ~ Patrick Warburton

As we head into 2018, which has such a lovely ring to it for some reason, you have a wonderful opportunity to throw more caution to the wind and pursue more of what will make your heart sing. Life goes by in a flash. Why keep waiting to do what you truly, deeply, madly want to do?

The only right time is now. That is all you have at your fingertips. You may or may not reach retirement. I don’t like that living model anyway. Working like a dog until you are 65, then finally doing what you want. That makes no sense. Why not just live along the way?

I always loved the film, “The Year of Living Dangerously” with Sigourney Weaver and Mel Gibson (1982). The title drew me in and didn’t disappoint. It has romance, intrigue and danger. They live on the edge and love every minute of it.

Can you make 2018 the year you choose to live dangerously? I am going to make that pledge for myself if you care to join me. I will be more dangerous in making my art, programs and stories and marketing my art, programs and stories. I will take even more emotional risks speaking up, something I view as my life’s big project. (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…)

Be daring, be different, be impractical, be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary. ~  Sir Cecil Beaton

Like many people, I have seen Wonder Woman at the movie theater. I’d watched some episodes of Wonder Woman when it was a TV show starring Lynda Carter and knew it was based on a comic book character created in 1941 by psychologist and inventor of the lie detector William Moulton Marston. Early feminists and a lover that lived with Marston and his wife provided inspiration.

It was fun to see a woman other than Angelina Jolie be a fearless bad ass. My favorite scene was the one where WW/Diana bursts into No Man’s Land, while the men are cowering in the WW I trenches. Nice role reversal.

Wonder Woman took a risk because she didn’t have another choice that sat well with her. She showed those around her how to get over their own fears and take action. (more…)

In May, I went to the memorial services for a fine young man who died too young in a motorcycle accident.

As grieving friends and family got up to speak about the contributions he made to the world around him, the same refrain kept coming up. He was known for saying, “Live At The End Of Your Comfort Zone” and by all accounts lived his life that way.

It is indeed a fabulous way to live your life. A way to feel alive and enjoy every morsel life has to offer.

I wish more people adopted that creed of living. Instead, most of us are terrified to leave the comfort zone we draw around us at an increasingly early age.

My grandfather came to the US from Italy at 17, to find a better life. Alone, he worked hard, saved money, opened his own company and paid for the passage of many of his family and cousins. That took courage and guts!

Today, I think he would be talked out of doing that, which would be a shame.

We are all so concerned about living safely, that we have forgotten how to live at all.

Sometimes to live a life with meaning, you have to live what others might call dangerously.

Dangerously might mean travel or it might mean challenging the status quo. Or talking to strangers. Or standing up for the defenseless. It can mean physical danger or it can mean emotional or financial danger.

The men and women who have successful companies usually put everything they owned on the line to get their business up and running. They knew that taking that risk was the only way to get where they wanted.

How often do we have the courage to tell someone what we really feel? We say, “Oh, it is nothing.” When it is anything but that. If you think about it, sharing your feelings isn’t that big of a deal, but we’ve turned it into something huge, something we should not do. And it has serious consequences down the road.

I entered life living dangerously, forging streams, climbing small hills, exploring the woods, expressing myself, telling the truth about how I saw things. Today, kids are pretty much  forbidden from doing the childhood activities I took for granted. Life has inherent risks, my husband always says, “It is the price of admission.”

There is a quote by Charles Lindbergh, “A life without risks, is a life not worth living.”

Ask yourself, do you live a safe life, do you live a dangerous life or do you live something in between?

And is that okay with you? Is there anything you long to do, but do not because you are afraid to venture out of your cozy comfort zone?

Muse thanks, Giulietta

ps, in honor of this fine young man, I have started a painting called, “Live at the end of your comfort zone.”

pps, if you want to write, please join me in July for Writing Under The Stars. If you child would love to paint whatever they wish, please have them join me for Wild Expressive Painting for Children.

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…)