There will be a brief hiatus in posts over the next few weeks as I recover from surgery.  What better way to begin the break than with a GRAND FINALE a la 4th of July fireworks style?  So here is a mash-up of many things all rolled into one wild and crazy post!

 And here's a little something to grin about...this happy buddha, (do click on the link - I adore this painting!) created by new artist in SoFlo.  A bit of joy to infuse your week with the potential for spontaneous giggles.  The artist is a groovy, good-energy human, too.  Thank you, Sharon, for putting this happy stuff out into the world!

This post began with the bees, so let's wrap it up with them...literally!  See sweet little bee nests made of flowers.  Now go on and have yourself a playful day. :)

Mark Nepo (oh yes, still stumbling my way through The One Life We're Given) said this: "No one knows how to live or how to die.  We only know how to love and how to lose, and how to pick up branches of meaning along the way."   These were not my own furry sweetlings, yet there are branches of meaning for me in these encounters - a reminder of the fragility of life and love - the need to grab and hold and love and cherish right now. 

I could use a magic wand this week.  And a hoard of minions.  ​I wonder if Joey also makes minion hoards?

 If I've learned nothing else from painting, it is that the paint is always, ALWAYS boss.  So I followed the paint (or pigment, in this case).  And like the Family Circus comic, when you follow one thing, you start wandering and it leads to another, sometimes unrelated thing, like this bit from The Wizard of Oz, which prompted the name for the painting.  Hmmm - is there something psychedelic in these pigments? :)

Or they thumbed their noses at me like these two starts:

Though I've never actually met the author, Z. Rosti, I can feel her love of animals shining through this delightful tale.  And through her donation of all proceeds from the sale of this book to the Lost Dog & Cat Rescue Foundation.

Now here is an intriguing project  - interpret a figure (or face) in four different ways. I hadn't a clue where to begin.  When in doubt, just paint, right?  And so there emerged a face with a florescent underpainting to get me started.  For the next three, I created a stencil (really, truly just to buy time while I figured out what to do next!  Making stencils is like meditation.) and put down some gouache and watercolor just to create the basic shapes.  Paint, pen and ink and collage followed.

This could become a workshop in the fall, as my brain noodles and muses and ponders hundreds of ways to interpret faces in mixed media.

But let's begin our week by channeling our inner Bailey....or Lino, in this case, who runs like the wind through the forest of the Alps.

experience and therefore be tended to, treated kindly and observed.  Household pets became common, including birds.

As I read the descriptions of the Mozart family's likely relationship with the bird, including cage-free frolicking when no visitors were around, I realized exactly why this book was in my hands.  The anniversary of my dad's passing is next week, and he, like Mozart, kept a bird.  A bird who sat on the edge of his breakfast plate and ate scrambled eggs while leaving poops on the newspaper.  A bird who slept cuddled under his neck, occasionally checking his mustache and nose for interesting artifacts.  Dad was a big fan of Mozart, and Jujube and my dad likely listened to Mozart while drifting off together in the chair, dad draped with a huge beach towel (or poop catcher).

When someone we love passes, it is hard to mentally place them anywhere.   Something about this book (fully researched, full of philosophy and classical music) seems so dad-like.  The vision of him sitting in a salon with Mozart, each with their bird shadows busily exploring from the safety of their shoulders, clicks with me as where to visualize him now.  There is peace and a wee bit of closure in this thought.

​And now let's enjoy another human's pet starling, Stella, as she talks, whistles and blows kisses:

There is grief in my bones...the loss of parents, of pooches, of strength and youth.  A nearly empty nest - the loss of fertility and motherhood.  The running shoes I can no longer wear to lope through forest trails and city streets.  But Nepo warns us of these canyons of lament; easy to sink into and flounder in our own regret and attempts to unravel the knots of the past.

When lamenting the past, our own reception is limited...Nepo compares regret to  misaligned plumbing pipes - things cannot flow through us and to us freely because the flow is interrupted.  How do you know if your pipes are askew?  "...if you have trouble hearing or taking things in."  Well sure enough that happens often.  So what now?  Call a plumber?  Nope.  The answer, says Nepo, is to "give of yourself - anywhere and everywhere.  Sometimes the only remedy is to empty ourselves and begin again."

Though I don't think Nepo meant this literally (my apologies, but the plumbing metaphor has my mind turning to all the wrong images here - as if you could read my mind, dear reader!  Wait - maybe you can?), I can't help but wonder at the universe as I prepare for a surgery this summer where the insides of parts of my cervical spine will actually be removed - emptied, as it were- and a long recovery set back into slow cycles begun.

Whew!  That's a lot of philosophy for a Monday morning.  Let's enjoy some classic dancing skeletons instead. :)

Now I am a sucker for good words, so when she described intuition and subconscious thinking as "under the bonnet of our awareness" I was hooked.  But there are more than high falutin' science terms and well-turned phrases in the article.  Van Mulukom describes how overthinking can be detrimental to our decision making processes.  Now this is just EXACTLY what happens during the creative process, when we stumble into the mindset of trying to control and plan every brushstroke and somehow lose the soul of a painting.

But neither does she recommend we give up our old friend analysis.  Intuitive decision making is great as long as it isn't complicated by cognitive biases like stereotyping or putting our heads in the sand in denial. The link lists a bunch of bias types I wasn't really aware of.  Maybe awareness is part of the fix for that?

Though it may be just my own clustering illusion bias, I take comfort in today's chapter in Mark Nepo's The One Life We're Given in which he writes "...we are drawn to what we need to learn.  Nor is it by accident that authors and artists are drawn to subject matter they need in order to grow."  As I pursue a trust-fall approach with paint, it is nice to think these nuggets of information were dropped along the path just for me.  Or is that a candy-covered cottage in the clearing ahead?  Awwww Hansel, let's just have a few more sweets, shall we?