Building a Year.

Today is the anniversary of moving into my home,

 and I am busy pondering the amazing lives we can create in a short period of time. 

For me, this has been a year of building. 

I have nested and turned my house into my home, 

a place I feel reflects me. It contains all of my favorite things,

memories of ones I love, objects of beauty, tools that are useful,

and animals of a fur and feather variety that provide daily entertainment.

I have built a business, one where I work for myself.

My deepest joy arrives during teaching, helping others uncover and

discover creativity and creation. And my studio continues

to be a place of personal growth, where Art has space unfurl.

I have grown a garden, abundant, wild, crazy, unkept and also tame.

I have watched seeds turn into plants, flowers, fruit.

I have eaten with wild abundance raspberries, apricots, and tomatoes.

Watching the cycle of life, growth, death and decay fills me with a calm joy.

And lastly I have found and cultivated a deep love.

Thank you Philip for a year of deep laughter, growth, and sweetness.

You are the kindest human I know and I feel so lucky 

to share this life with you.

Spring Equinox.

Ah, at last....SPRING!

It's the mudwonderful time in the Pacific Northwest and my hen 

Buttercup is thoroughly enjoying romping around in the squishiness.

Check out the right sidebar of the blog, all my classes through April are listed.

Gratitude.

In these sweet days of spring, there is so much to be thankful for in this little life.

I believe in synchronicity. I believe in kindness. I believe in silliness. I believe in life.

A short list of things I am grateful for: Home, both physical and psychological.

Music, company for all of life's feeling and adventures. Words, wonderful magical

letters that hold hands and form strings of delight. Hope, a lightness and buoyancy

to return to more often than not. Laughter, please do not let me ever live without it.

Ones to love, thank you, thank you, thank you. I'm better for having felt it.

Thank you universe, you've been awfully good to this girl as of late.

Road Trip, Day Twenty Eight: Home.

Twenty eight days of open road.

Here are some of the highlights and things learned.

The practical: You can never have too much music, you can however have too many shoes.

Bringing your favorite pillow saves you. Hot tea is even good the next day as iced tea

when you forget to drink it and it freezes. You need a lot less than you think you need.

The must have list: Headlamp, hiking boots, down jacket, sleeping bag, art supplies,

a good book, pillow, a few changes of clothes, camera, little bags to put seed pods,

bay leaves, sea glass, succulent starts, and rocks into, and a backpack.

The mental: Your mind can become very clean after a month on the road.

If you forget who you are, or have momentarily lost your way, I suggest travel.

It helps to see the world in all its vastness. There is SO MUCH out there.

And although it feels so good to be in my very own bed tonight,

I already have the itch to get back out there.

There are so many of us, doing such interesting things.

There are so many lives. So many ecosystems. So many creatures. So many plants.

There are so many colors, smells, textures, shapes. My great friend Lori talks

about the idea of "eyes on fire" when you find inspiration in the world.

I definitely feel inspired. I feel full and empty all at the same time, both in a good way.

The physical: We live in a crazy time. There is so much going wrong,

global warming, ice caps melting, war, shootings, extinction, oil spills, horrid things.

But there also is so much going right. There are so many kind moments of

folks helping others. Traveling alone you spend whole days not talking,

and when you come into a town just making eye contact with someone can

mean more than a whole conversation. It's interesting to see all the various

ways people are tending to life, giving to others, building community.

It was nice to step out of mine and into others, and to be welcomed.

Lastly tonight I would like to thank all my hosts.

There was so much generosity of place, time and spirit. 

Thank you friends.

Warm hugs go out to: Mary and George, Tony and Jona, the kind caretakers

of the many yurts and cabins (especially Jug Handle Creek), Steve and Janet,

Lisa and Barry, Kaye and Adam, my wonderful Mother, Sage and Jane, 

Marylee and Jack, Tessa and Julia, Aunt Pat, Uncle Ken, KD and JR.

My door in Portland is always open and the kettle is on.

Road Trip, Day Sixteen: Things I Love.

Not many photos today.

But I will share with you my recent, Things I Love, list.

It was definitely inspired by my thoughts of home,

what that means, when I will have it again, and how it feels.

bent wood chairs, oil lamps, wood stoves, wooden family tables, old patchwork quilts,

woven rugs, jars of flowers, nesting mixing bowls, old ticking pillowcases, down comforters,

wool shirts, mismatched china with floral patterns, woven baskets, heavy white mugs of tea,

hand thrown pottery, norwegian ski socks, granny square afghans, wool blankets,

baskets of firewoods, music with a fiddle, hay lofts, goats, watercolor sets that look messy,

old leather lace up boots, wool long johns, enamelware, a sharp knife, cloth napkins,

clothespin bags that hang on the clothesline, claw foot tubs, zinnias, cosmos, beeswax candles,

the smell of woodsmoke, smoked salt, wrap around porches, porch swings, the ocean,

singing around a campfire, mushrooms sautéed in ghee, collections of rocks, wooden benches,

lines of boots all in a row, curtains waving in a breeze, washing camp dishes, 

cabins in the woods, the smell of ears, tea with coconut milk, old paintbrushes, bird watching,

searching the water for whales, wild edible plants, huckleberries, the smell of dirty hats,

aprons, the scent of cedar, a fireplace, barn wood, pantries with glass jars full of stores,

rain on a metal roof, floor pillows, hiking, waterfalls, icicles, gardens fenced for deer,

the smell of rotting apples, bowls of abundant fruit, dried plums, pinecones, wildflowers,

fabric with eyelets, constellations, hand knit scarves, fingerless gloves, blooming clover,

neatly stacked wood piles, moss and lichen, rooflines with scallops, clogs, 

outhouses with moons cut in the door or fantastic views, snow on evergreen boughs,

sunlight filtering through leaves, printing ferns, cursive typewriters, wooden greenhouses,

red cabooses, cedar shingles, weathered wood, log cabins, rocking chairs, leather cording,

golden pastures with daisies, watercolors and gouache, acorns, fiddleheads, buckeyes,

river and lake swimming, old barns, wearing someone else's shirt, hand carved wooden spoons, 

blue mason jars, pepper grinders, cast iron, tree houses, down jackets, hammocks with quilts. 

Maroon Tricholoma   Habitat: on conifer logs and stumps.

Road Trip, Day Eleven: Return to the Family Home, Palo Alto, CA.

There is nothing quite like solo travel and exploration to bring you back to yourself. 

There are so many thoughts that have come streaming through, so much pure clarity, 

so much ease even in the midst of change. I've been thinking about the difference between vacation and travel. Vacation to me summons trying to escape from one's life, 

to leave it all behind, to "relax" and push it all away. And then there is travel, 

where we take it in, we ask for more input, more experiences, newness, 

we see another culture, another town, another way of life…and for a minute we try it on.

And even if we don't stay, we carry a bit of it with us. I am carrying so much input, 

and so much gratitude. There are so many visual moments to take in when traveling 

that you wish your eye lenses were indeed the lens of a camera, that to just look 

you could capture those moments to share with others so that they might understand 

why you are changed. There is the magnificence of redwoods bursting from flat forest floors, towering…truly towering over everything. I know that I feel small when standing 

at the edge of the sea, but the sea seems like a collection of so many things, 

while a redwood seems like an "it", a singular being. Those sweetly scented trees 

feel like history and hope. I wish I could show you how it looks to drive down the 

windingest road of the coast, where two feet from your right side tires is a cliff 

plunging down to a teal sea, the broken grapevine fence on the left is roughly containing

white sheep with black heads who are content in green pasture with bright yellow 

wild mustard flowers dancing in the breeze, you pass the second cemetery of the day, 

this one with a rough white picket fence. There are the barns, the homesteads, 

the shacks, the cabins that all call to me, saying "you could have this life." 

And me calling back, not yet. We could all be so many things, we could lead 

so many lives, we could do so many jobs. And I hope that in my life I will be lucky
 enough to try on a few more lives. For now I am clear, MAKE ART, make a home,
 see the world, be in nature deeply and often, and share all this with the many in
your life you are truly blessed to call friends.