Please enjoy the work of the talented and charming Linda Hartog…go over to her blog The Fairytale Cottages of Carmel and take the tour…

It was one of those dreams…again…early in the morning, barely awake.  I had come across a bicycle out on the street, abandoned. So I took it home, knowing it had been left for me. And then all sorts of magical things began to happen…but wait, if this is a magical bicycle…
I can’t have a magical life…if too many good things happen, then the bad things will be really bad. And I heard “It doesn’t work that way anymore. This is the age of your enlightenment.”

So, I’m keeping the bike…

One morning recently I woke hearing this song. Where the bleep did THAT come from? I mean, I probably heard Dean Martin sing it on television when I was a kid (and TV was still in black and white!) and I’m sure I saw My Fair Lady, also as a kid…but that’s been a few years- like forty, give or take…

So, why this song? Why now? It absolutely changed my state of consciousness. It was God. Singing. To. Me.

And I share this with you, whoever should happen to be reading this, now…because it is for you, too. It is for us to get it, once and for all…he is waiting, on the street where we live…he’s happier there. Go look, he left you a bicycle.

My heart is broken. My friend Dick DeVinney passed away yesterday. He and my dear friend Marion had owned Synchronicity Gallery in Glen Arbor, Michigan for seventeen years before selling it and retiring back to their native Grand Rapids. They had employed me for nine years, but they became my family, too. This picture was taken with my iphone at ArtPrize this past fall…we had such fun.

Dick was an accomplished musician, choir director, teacher and author of both music textbooks and a novel, an untiring supporter of the arts in northern Michigan. He and Marion founded the Celebrations Art Show at the First United Methodist Church of Grand Rapids many years ago, and that show has grown since.

More importantly, Dick was a remarkable human. He never met a stranger. He fought for equal rights all of his life, he was a loving husband and father above all else, a “mensch”. It was a privilege to have him in my life…and my world is a little dimmer today…although he would say to me “try to remain calm”…I will miss him.

What if God were one of us?…when I anthropomorphize God- and do not pretend you don’t!- he is a big, clumsy galoot like me…just a slob like one of us…but I’ll bet he cries a days’ worth of nourishment over the rainforest in awe of a tiny blue beetle…I imagine he wonders for eternity over a drop of dew hanging from a delicate petal…and I’m certain he rejoices as a father watches the moment that the daughter he has always believed in meets her destiny…if there is anything I know of God, it is that he is incomprehensible in his faithful and infinite love…a stranger…just like one of us…just tryin’ to make his way home…

http://youtu.be/Ns1YPjlkZeg

If God had a name…

Yesterday I told my Dad that I have come to realize I am solar powered. He looked over at me quizzically, as you can imagine…but it’s true…I don’t seem to have any energy unless the sun is out! And here I live in the darkest corner of the United States. Literally, the northwest corner of the lower peninsula of Michigan has less sunny days than anywhere in the fifty states.

It has been a long winter. We have had record snowfalls, less sunshine even than normal. We are still experiencing record low temperatures for this time of year. It was in the teens last night, my sidewalk and street are covered in ice. My dear little corgis and I have really packed on the pounds this winter.

http://youtu.be/3ZVKhgRSt3Q

But it has been a long healing, this isolation…through the dormancy of my expectations, a new life is beginning to emerge. The preacher likes the cold…he knows I’m gonna stay…

Your inner wise self is SO in love with you…self love is not narcissism, it is self care. Why is it important? Because it is the only way to save the world…it is how miracles happen. Live juicy, because the opposite of young is not old, it is new…and I am new here.

Peter Diamondis, one of the greatest minds on the planet, speaks about the moment when the fall of the American Empire began- not long ago, perhaps a decade or so now,and HOW this occurred…when RISK AVERSION became the acceptable modus operandi…and he says it is killing us.

He then presents the model of a new paradigm which will transform life on the planet…and take us into The Age of Abundance. Do yourself a favor and watch his inspiring videos.

We all hide our genius, in so many ways…we are Will Hunting waiting for our ride to work, spending our days mopping the floors… it is time to leave the mop in the closet and solve the problem on the board when no one is watching…to step outside our limited thinking and IMAGINE, to be ARTISTS.

Years ago one of my favorite Interior Design authors, Alexandra Stoddard, used a phrase in one of her books which I will never forget: “the insidious, evil, creeping taupe…”

Alexandra won my heart early in her illustrious career by advocating for the riotous use of color even in defiance of the Taupe era…that dull “griege” movement that seems to have taken over the design world since the seventies, like an invasion of some alien virus that permeated the human psyche unnoticed and unchecked. Alexandra warned us, like the early warnings from environmental scientists of global warming…

You Laugh!!! You think I make funny, outrageous comparisons…and I do…I posit however, no more outrageous than ANY comparison between the inner and outer realms of man’s consciousness…the American mindset drifted off course and we became subject to the dysfunction of a society with no clear conscience…politically correct, dumbed down, made into a taupe-y mush…and hence, Clinton couldn’t inhale…but I digress…

We live racked with guilt. Whatever we do, we mustn’t offend…we go to the meeting because we should…we are nice to the ornery neighbors. We need to stand up to those who would wittingly sell us their malaise, their taupe…or, as another brilliant artist of my generation describes the problem: “Richard got married to a figure skater, and he bought her a dishwasher and a coffee percolator and he drinks at home now most nights with the TV on and all the house lights left up bright.”

How do we say yes powerfully if we don’t have the courage to say no? More importantly, how do we know we are acting out of guilt if we aren’t clear about what we really want? I question when we became so complacent, how the compromises overtook us little by little, crept into our consciousness like an alien virus…

And this relates to Interior Design HOW? Well, my influences all have a common criteria intricate to their design decisions: NATURE, the natural world. It’s integrity is built in, dependable. Where do you see TAUPE in nature? I have looked, and the answer is that you seldom find it…you see it best in the mourning dove. That’s spelled MOURNing…because taupe is just sad.

Be a good dreamer. Defend your sweet revolutionary soul. Stop the insidious habit of acting out of guilt, out of your codependent conditioning…and for God’s sake PAINT OVER THE TAUPE!

I am so worried. I am worried about my brother, I’m worried about my Dad. I’m worried about my son. I’m worried about my dogs, and I’m worried about me. My Dad and my brother aren’t talking to me. I wish they would talk to me and voice their worries. I wish my friend would have told me his worries, more importantly, I wish I could have voiced mine. I tried, but all he ever said was, “I can’t help you.”
“I can’t help you” is code for “I don’t want to hear about your worries, because then I will feel responsible for you.”
“I can’t help you” is a cop-out. It is a way to shut the other person up- and out, and it is a missed opportunity to shed some light through that crack of human flaw.
But guess what?! When we shut the other person out, we get their worries anyway. They come like a psychic e-mail delivered right into our brain. Then when we open our own worries, they get opened, too, just like the attachment that they are. And the virus is automatically downloaded before we knew it existed!
Wouldn’t it be so much easier to have said, “Tell me what you are worried about”? We don’t have to fix the problem. It doesn’t require taking responsibility for them. It just requires a willing listener. Let’s acknowledge them – not the worry- just them, and honor our human condition, wrought with problems and worries as it seems to be.
All spiritual teachings tell us that the answer lies in the question. When you are in the thick of your problems, this just isn’t helpful. Another way to see it, perhaps, is that every worry is an inside-out prayer.
So we help by listening to the inside-out prayer. We ask God, Holy Spirit, our higher mind, to turn the prayer right side out. And we don’t take responsibility for finding their answer upon ourselves. We just sit with it.
What I believe this does for me in my little pea brain, is to relinquish any GUILT that I might have harbored about not being able to fix it, and any time guilt is taken out of the equation a solution is close at hand.
The answers seem to emerge out of nowhere…which is why they are called miracles.

The irritation began with his qualifying me: “You don’t do that, do you?”…”because I could never be with someone who…” and he would fill in the objection of the week (dark painted toenails, too skinny, etc, etc…) Apparently I had just reminded him of something he did not like. My response was always the same, “I am not someone. I am me.”

He didn’t get it. So he’d have to find another way in, another way to trigger my insecurities…perhaps he could find me jealous…it would be really convenient if I could be jealous…that’s such a needy insecurity, and easy to trigger…

The recent ex lived nearby, and they shared custody of the dog.  So when his family and I flew in from Michigan to visit, she naturally hoped to join the party. And I was fine with her being invited. But wait! She didn’t want to meet ME! Perhaps…if I could leave the party for an hour or so…

Well, I refused. Had I agreed to leave the party, I’d have walked to the corner Starbucks and called for a cab to the airport…”Well, I told her I’d ask…” was his explanation. That way, he didn’t have to take any responsibility for hurting anyone’s feelings.

I wasn’t about to let him off that hook. What was I doing with someone so emotionally immature, anyway? I just excused it…and did what any loving Mother would do with her beloved child: I held my own healthy space, and let him feel uncomfortable at not finding a solution equally suitable for all. I figured the awareness would benefit us both in the future.

But the awareness didn’t happen! A few months later he planned a necessary trip to England, and a side trip to Spain. He would stay with an old girlfriend in Madrid. “Does that bother you?” he asked. “No.” “May I ask why it doesn’t bother you?” Apparently it bothered him that it did not bother me.

I don’t get jealousy, I admit it. I never have. If HE chooses HER, how does that diminish ME? That’s an adolescent set-up if I ever saw one.

We are all so insecure, for so many convoluted reasons. I wish we could all just be honest about that instead of defensive. The world is so scary, life is so scary…I wish we could all learn how to be scared together.