Tag Archives: self-love

For Juan

Posted on by Standard 3

Melt II: Photo by Noelle

Melt II: Photo by Noelle

Melt: Photo by Noelle

Melt: Photo by Noelle

Did you know that when you take a photograph you can be in no other moment than ‘Now’. I learned this from my friend Juan. Our conversation began in a very dark time of grief. I could not find a haven from my sorrow and anger and I certainly could not stop my mind racing in an endless search for answers. He suggested I take pictures with my cell phone as I hiked the foothills near the Rockies. That it would help settle my heart and mind, if only for a moment. I did not own a camera, had not taken a photo in more than twenty years and had, in fact, jettisoned most of my personal photos in the previous year. But I had no where else to go. My rage was so great I couldn’t engage in much of the art that had filled my spirit until then.

So I began to take photos of grass and summer flowers. Most of it not very good. He’d coach me and give me ideas and my work grew. Yesterday, as I looked at these two pictures on my iPad and saw the moment caught so perfectly in this “Now”, I thought of my friend. Stay in the now and you will heal, he said. And I did.

Those drops floating in mid air, Juan, are you.

Tantrum

Posted on by Standard Reply
Free Bing Photos

Free Bing Photos

Dear Master

I have a bone to pick, but it sticks in my throat an old fish bone I keep eating with no hope of digesting. There’s no point to the rant I offer you. That’s what makes me wring my hands with an emotional wash that still smells of fumes and fish. I know the answers you’ll give me to every question I could ask. So why ask?

Knowledge is a devil if there ever was one. Gives you comfort while it steals your security in endless mind games you can’t stop tricking yourself with. How could you fill my head with all this knowledge of who I am? Light and gold. Miracles and love. I look down at my costume and want to rip it till I’m naked. I can’t escape my frightened thoughts that burn me in a lava flow, erupting in my brain and filling my mouth with an eager malice. I used to know myself, but now I can’t seem to rid myself of a woman with a lunatics thoughts. You could have told me in the beginning that ignorance was not only bliss, but a quaalude cocktail that would’ve left me sleeping; a contented mongrel in a sewer heap that knows no better. Now a youthful, hungry anger boils in my belly and it’s more bitter than death no matter how many times I swallow it down. But there be the rub, lassie. Poison is best drawn from a wound and all wounds must be opened to cleanse them of their infection. And so, my mind is rent until the ugliness that hides there oozes forth for me to see. No blinking.

For love you say, as I yank at my own chain. My choice you announce and I could beat you within an inch of my own life if I weren’t plagued by the truth in it. It eats at my brain until I’m smashing the bed, the couch and tearing up my brakes in the car. Screw the red pill, Neo. Gulp down the blue pill and relish the beauty of being blind.

You should’ve told me to leave when I came through the door, Master. You should have said the price for awakening is your sanity.

Namaste,
Your currently, wretched student

A Life Your Own

Posted on by Standard 5
Image re-posted from For Ever Art Facebook page

Image re-posted from For Ever Art Facebook page

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.

Steve Jobs

Limitless Heart

Posted on by Standard 2
Free Google Photos

Free Google Photos

There’s a point where we simply have to accept there is no limit to how much we can love. That this moment we are in now is always the beginning of our expanding heart. We are never at an end point. Everything you know and can experience is evolving. This Earth, the Universe, plankton in the sea – you. Nothing is stagnant and most certainly not your heart. We have to stop seeing ourselves as limited lovers. We use the moments where we fall short to love to confirm we have boundaries because we fear to step across the horizon. We don’t know who that version of us is, so we accept our frailties as sure signs that this is who we are. Yet those moments are just us cracking the chrysalis. We’re gnawing off the chain, splitting our emotional atom and losing our religion that says, “This is all that I am.”

It’s time we stepped up to the bar, laid down the money and said, “I’m in. I’m in with everything I’ve got. I’ll slay whatever dragons. Today and every day henceforth I am free to love more than I ever thought possible.”

Negative

Posted on by Standard Reply
Sunset: Photo negative taken by Noelle

Sunset: Photo negative taken by Noelle

The Dalai Lama is quoted as saying, “Sometimes the best thing to ever happen to you is NOT getting what you thought you wanted.” Spiritual evolution comes when we begin to see that the negative events of our life are actually the good things. That these same things, places, events were providing us an opportunity to see the world and ourselves completely differently. That they are meant to strip away our illusions, mainly, about ourself. When you can see beauty and motion and grace in negatives….well…then you are really onto something.

Little Gem

Posted on by Standard 2
Free Bing Photo

Free Bing Photo

“Size matters not. Look at me. Judge me by my size, do you? Hmm? Hmm. And well you should not. For my ally is the Force, and a powerful ally it is. Life creates it, makes it grow. Its energy surrounds us and binds us. Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter. You must feel the Force around you; here, between you, me, the tree, the rock, everywhere, yes.”
~ Jedi Master Yoda

Special thank you to Satyam T. Das for posting the quote in “Be Here Now” group on the Insight Timer app

Van Gogh’s Nap

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Sewer Run Off better known as The Sewer Sprite: Photo by Noelle

Sewer Run Off better known as The Sewer Sprite: Photo montage by Noelle

The quilt is for someone else. A body that will fill the space that now lies empty. Not my room and yet it is all about me, so I come here often. Shafts drift through Grannie curtains I should’ve taken down, but there’s no more money in the coffer so lace dresses up the poor girl’s pockets. The cats purr on the sills marking the territory with sonar and fur. Nothing much here, except my heart beats louder as I step across the threshold and smell the coconut verbena candles. Something of me that is good and sound lives here. Paint brushes stick out of the overstuffed closet that holds my art. Spent tubes and coffee stir sticks are meant to look neat in cups on shelves. Neat and art are antonyms, really, but I need the order in the chaos to feel accomplished, if at nothing more than organization. If the closet door is closed it’s a lovely, pristine guest room waiting quietly for visitors. But open that door and it’s color and chaos spill into the room a garden of wild flowers. My mind couldn’t be better described and maybe that’s why I come here. To see myself in furniture, folded blankets and used up canvases. The cat stretches in the sun and I lie back on the day bed in the warm pool of light, too. It is right to nap in the light and chaos of one’s creative genius. At least until the guests arrive.