Re-do

Here is a re-do of an older painting.

I love paints. Nothing is totally set in stone. You can make changes whenever you wish. Although you can sometimes really screw something up by playing too much with it. But then again, you learn in the process so it's okay. I like the older version, but I was really just playing. I love the color and meaning in this one.

Well I can't seem to get the link back to my older page. The post is titled graffiti if you want to take a look.

Around the studio

Well I bet you expected to see pictures of my studio or some new work with that title.

My studio is in shambles!

It's just too messy to do any kind of creating in it.

Yesterday I decided to do something about it. It is much better but still needs work. I need to purchase containers to hold all the stuff that is loose on the shelves. It is impossible to keep things neat and orderly as is. And I need some bookshelves for all my books!!! I think I found an arrangement for my tables that works very well for me. I'll post some pictures later.

The pictures are of Jack the cat! I had a helper while cleaning. Jack is the little barn kitty we found in our barn last June. She is adorable, but the most mischievous cat we have ever had.

She steals socks!

Then she puts them in the toilet!

Swishes them around, and then drops them on the floor!

She also unrolls the toilet paper rolls!
My daughter took hers of the holder, placed it on the top of the toilet, and later
found Jack had pushed it off into the toilet!!

Now, if you are not a cat lover you are asking yourself why in the world do we still have her, maybe you are thinking SHE should go in the toilet!!

But we love her, quirks and all.

She has another, see her sucking on the blanket?????

She sucks on anything fleece, flannel, or soft!!!
Unfortunately I wear fleece - a lot!!!
Yep, you can find her attached to my shirt if I am sitting down!!!

Maybe we took her away from her Mama too soon, but for goodness sake, she will be a year in a few months!!!!

Oh I forgot, she also steels gym shorts!! lol

Do we really see??

Today's devotional reading titled "Jogging"

"It is supposed to be good for the heart, the lungs, the muscles, and physical well-being generally. It is also said to produce a kind of euphoria known as joggers' high.

The look of anguish and despair that contorts the faces of most of the people you see huffing and puffing away at it by the side of the road, however, is striking. If you didn't know directly from them that they are having the time of their lives, the chances are you wouldn't be likely to guess it." ~Buechner

I thought to myself, the opposite is true as well. We see a multitude of people everyday, with smiling happy faces. But they mask a hurting sometimes devastated heart.

I seem to be drawn to this scripture again and again.

"My people are broken and shattered and they put on band-aids, saying, "It's not so bad, you'll be just fine!" But things are not fine!! (Jer 6:14 The Message)


I think this speaks to me in part because I walked through life with a smile that said all is well, things are just fine. When the reality was they were not. I had ignored all the "signs" that said differently. Until I acknowledged to myself first, then to God that I was a mess, that I was not doing well on my own, could change begin to happen.

I am seeing a little clearer these days, I am learning to see with a little more love, mercy, and tenderness.

Just a little, for I have far to travel.

Blessings!

Abiding Monday

Prayer from my journal

Lord, I feel like I get a glimpse of you
then I loose it
I get a touch from you
and then it is lost
How can I live in those moments
more present
more aware
more abiding
more lasting

Does anyone else feel this?

Open Wide - our eyes, ears, and hearts

This is a rather lengthy excerpt from "Listening to Your Life" by Frederick Buechner, but it was so timely for me, and I thought it may be for some of you as well. It's too easy for me to sleepwalk through life.

“An old silent pond./ Into the pond a frog jumps./ Splash! Silence again.” It is perhaps the best known of all Japanese haiku. No subject could be more humdrum. No language could be more pedestrian. Basho, the poet, makes no comment on what he is describing. He implies no meaning, message, or metaphor. He simply invites our attention to now more and no less than just this: the old pond in its watery stillness, the kerplunk of the frog, the gradual return of the stillness.

In effect he is putting a frame around the moment, and what the frame does is enable us to see not just something about the moment but the moment itself in all its ineffable ordinariness and particularity. The chances are that if we had been passing by when the frog jumped, we wouldn't have noticed a thing or, noticing it, wouldn't have given it a second thought. But the frame sets it off from everything else that distracts us. It makes possible a second thought. That is the nature and purpose of frames. The frame does not change the moment, but it changes our way of perceiving the moment. It makes us NOTICE the moment, and that is what Basho wants about all else. It is what literature in general wants about all else too.

From the simplest lyric to the most complex novel and densest drama, literature is asking us to pay attention. Pay attention to the frog. Pay attention to the west wind. Pay attention to the boy on the raft, the lady in the tower, the old man on the train. In sum, pay attention to the world and all that dwells therein and thereby learn at last to pay attention to yourself and all that dwells therein.

The painter does the same thing, of course. Rembrandt puts a frame around an old woman's face. It is seamed with wrinkles. The upper lip is sunken in, the skin waxy and pale. It is not a remarkable face. You would not look twice at the old woman if you found her sitting across the aisle from you on a bus. But it is a face so remarkable seen that it forces you to see it remarkable just as Cezanne makes you see a bowl of apples or Andrew Wyeth a muslin curtain blowing in at and open window. It is a face unlike any other face in all the world. All the faces in the world are in this one old face.

Unlike painters, who work with space, musicians work with time, with note following note as second follows second. Listen! Says Vivaldi, Brahms, Stravinsky. Listen to this time that I have framed between the first note and the last and to these sounds in time. Listen to the way the silence is broken into uneven lengths between the sounds and to the silences themselves. Listen to the scrape of bow against gut, the rap of stick against drum-head, the rush of breath through reed and wood. The sounds of the earth are like music, the old song goes, and the sounds of music are also like sounds of earth, which is of course where music comes from. Listen to the voices outside the window, the rumble of the furnace, the creak of your chair, the water running in the kitchen sink. Learn to listen to the music of your own lengths of time, your own silences.

Literature, painting, music – the most basic lesson that all art teaches us is to stop, look, and listen to life on this planet, including our own lives, as a vastly richer, deeper, more mysterious business than most of the time it ever occurs to us to suspect as we bumble along from day to day on automatic pilot. In a world that for the most part steers clear of the whole idea of holiness, art is one of the few places left where we can speak to each other of holy things.

Is it too much to say that Stop, Look, and Listen is also the most basic lesson that the Judeo-Christian tradition teaches us? Listen to history is the cry of the ancient prophets of Israel. Listen to social injustice, says Amos; to head-in-the sand religiosity, says Jeremiah; to international treacheries and power-play, says Isaiah; because it is precisely through them that God speaks his word of judgment and command.

And when Jesus comes along saying that the greatest command of all is to love God and to love our neighbor, he too is asking us to pay attention. If we are to love God, we must first stop, look, and listen for him in what is happening around us and inside us. If we are to love our neighbors, before doing anything else we must see our neighbors. With our imagination as well as our eyes, that is to say like artists, we must see not just their faces by the life behind and within their faces. Here it is love that is the frame we see them in.

In a letter to a friend Emily Dickinson wrote that “Consider the lilies of the field” was the only commandment she never broke. She could have done a lot worse. Consider the lilies. It is the
sine quo non of art and religion both.

Color

I love color!!
I seem to be obsessed with color!!!
This is what my sweet hubby gave me for Valentine's Day.
Lovely color!!!!
Red
Turquoise
Yellow
Purple
Orange
Green
wonderful color!!!!

And as you can see new color on my blog!!!!

Abiding Monday

I am at my grandson's home today. While he is taking his nap I wanted to share a book that I am reading called "Listening Prayer - Learning To Hear God's Voice and Keep a Prayer Journal" by Leanne Payne. I think it will be a good tool to use as I learn to abide daily. It looks like a great way to keep my conversations with God, as well as scripture I want to remember and pray back to God. Listening with pen and paper ready to record what I hear as I am sitting at God's feet.

I have kept a written journal off and on for many years in bound journals, but I find it difficult to put my fingers on something I want to look at again without thumbing through many pages. Leanne suggests using a ringed binder with tabbed dividers in it. I am giving it a try to see how it works for me.

I would love to hear of your experiences in keeping a spiritual journal.

I have a few hours to do some reading, maybe a little snooze before Sean wakes up from his nap. I told Seth and Brooke they needed to be home by 8:30 so I can run home and watch 24!!

Blessings!

Snow

We had a beautiful afternoon of snowfall.
It lasted into the night, and it was wonderful to wake up to a bright snow covered world in the morning.
It is mostly gone now.
I would have like to enjoy it a bit longer.

My daughter Megan took these lovely snow photos.
Our Molly dog loves the snow.
We found her just rolling in it this morning, making doggie snow angels.

Wishing everyone a Happy Valentine's Day!

Today's journal page

Created from Monday's Abiding post. (see below)

Abiding Monday

I read this a few days ago in "Listening To Your Life" by Frederick Buechner.

"What I began to see was that the Bible is not essentially, as I had always more or less supposed, a book of ethical principles, of moral exhortations, of cautionary tales about exemplary people, of uplifting thoughts - in fact, not really a religious book at all in the sense that most of the books you would be apt to find in a minister's study or reviewed in a special religion issue of the New York Times book section are religious. I saw it instead as a great, tattered compendium of writings, the underlying and unifying purpose of all of which is to show how God works through the Jacobs and Jabboks of history to make himself known to the world and to draw the world back to himself.

For all its vast diversity and unevenness, it is a book with a plot and a plot that can be readily stated. God makes the world in love. For one reason or another the world chooses to reject God. God will not reject the world but continues his mysterious and relentless pursuit of it to the end of time. That is what he is doing by choosing Israel to be his special people. That is what he is doing through all the passion and poetry and invective of the prophets. That is why history plays such a crucial part in the Old Testament - all those kings and renegades and battles and invasions and apostasies - because it was precisely through people like that and events like those that God was a work, as, later, in the New Testament, he was supremely at work in the person and event of Jesus Christ. Only "is at work" would be the more accurate way of putting it because......his work goes on still, of course, and at one and the same time the biblical past not only illumines the present but becomes itself part of that present, part of our own individual pasts. Until you can read the story of Adam and Eve, of Abraham and Sarah, of David and Bathsheba, as your own story, Muilenburg (one of Frederick's teachers) said, you have not really understood it. The Bible, as he presented it, is a book finally about ourselves, our own apostasies, our own battles and blessings........"

It is a love story!
A story of God's pursuit of us,
of me,
of you!
We are a people
broken,
flawed,
hardhearted,
searching,
yearning,
desiring,
tender,
hurting,
confused,
as well as,
compassionate,
giving,
loving (as best as we can)
creative,
as Brennan Manning says, "A glorious ruin."

God continues to pursue.
I am thankful!

Blessings!

more journal playing

A few more journal pages, some have a few words - but all are awaiting more.
I have been out of sorts the past few days!
Thank you for you kind affirming words, they have blessed me more than you can know!

A few journal backgrounds

Graffiti

Why do I love graffiti???
Just playing, but I think I really like it! :)

Abiding Monday

Last week was a restless week for me - it continues. I seem to do everything else, but quiet my heart long enough to spend any quality time with my Lord. I wrote in my journal Thursday, "Why do I hide from you? Why do I jump to do anything other than spend time with you?" I wonder if there is a heart attitude I do not want to face.

Does anyone else ever feel this way??

I was spending some time in Psalm 63 last week. Verse 8 says, "My soul clings to you; your right hand upholds me."

Cling.

To adhere closely
stick to
hold tight
grasping
embracing
cleave
remain close
to remain attached

Similar to abide.

What do I cling to? Is it a list of rules, is it man made traditions?

Verse 5 says, "My soul will be satisfied as with fat and rich food, and my mouth will praise you with joyful lips."

Satisfy.

To put an end to a desire, want, need by sufficient or ample provision.

Jesus says, "I am sufficient enough for you."

I cling to Jesus!

So, where does that leave me. You know I don't have any specific answer to my restlessness, but I do have clues. I have been here enough times that I know usually it means there is something I need to address with my Lord. Or he is wanting to take me a little deeper into my heart. I am learning to not fight or ignore the restlessness. It is uncomfortable, but it is necessary.

I fear this entry is as disjointed, as I feel, but it is what I have for today.
Sometimes our hearts are messy.

Blessings!