The first time it happened, I was painting at the Hilton Hawaiian Village.

As I lifted a loaded paintbrush to the painting on the easel, my hand suddenly went back to touch the paper towel.  

What?

I hadn’t decided to touch the paper towel, my hand simply did it.

Since that day, my hand often spontaneously releases excess water & paint — apparently, the brush is too full!

This kind of experience is one reason to develop a painting practice.

Another reason is that when your mind is focused on painting, you’re distracted from the daily issues plaguing you.

This level of joyful focus opens you up to receive insight and inspiration for your painting and sometimes even for your life.

My friend, Rebecca calls this phenomenon “epiphany city” — that’s how often it can occur!

Taking a class is a great way to start painting.

Classes both inform and give you permission to set aside time for yourself each week.

 You deserve a “time of your own!”

If you enjoy painting, consider creating a painting practice for yourself.

By deliberately setting aside time to paint once, twice, or more each week, you signal to yourself, and to others, that you deserve a joy-filled life.

By making yourself a priority, you increase self-care, paint more often, and your paintings improve more quickly.

 For best results, schedule your practice ahead of time.
Look at your calendar to decide the best days and times to paint.
If this week is full, look at next week.  

Get started in 15 minutes!

You don’t need a dedicated spot to paint.

Watercolor is easy to set up & fast to clean up.

 Try a few different time slots to see which ones feel best, then commit to this window a few days or weeks in advance.

 Until your practice is a consistent part of life, keep it short, sweet, and regular. 

In the beginning, even if you have the time to paint longer, stick to 15 minutes.

If you increase your painting time too quickly, one day you’ll decide you can’t fit it in. You’ll skip a day and maybe the next. Pretty soon you’ve lost your rhythm and the slippery slope to not painting is paved.

I’ve been there.

The more often you paint, the more rewards you reap.

Sometimes, my hand drifts from the color I’d intended to use to another color on the palette. Imagine my surprise when, instead of blue, I see orange or red show up on my painting.

The first time this happened, I flinched.

Now I figure my painting can benefit from the surprise and I find a way to work with it.

One day, your hand will spontaneously touch the paper towel, or choose a color.

If a hand can receive guidance, and if it can be accepted so easily, maybe you can receive guidance in other areas of life as well.

Maybe the more you trust, the more you can receive.

When you’re focused on painting, you are in a mindful moment.

That’s when inspiration flies in like a breeze, so quickly and lightly that you don’t always realize it’s happened.

In those moments of flow, your batteries are recharged, and your heart & mind are inspired to new levels.

By distracting the thinking part of your brain, you become the observer of all that’s before you and within you. 

In this way, you’re meditating with eyes wide open, allowing the flow of synchronistic happenings to form a new hologram for you to follow.

This is all part of your Inner Wisdom. It’s always here with you, ready to fill you with enthusiasm.

Be playful and light. Wisdom is patient and all-loving. Time is elastic and when you’re ready, your wisdom is here for you. 

While it might seem like a big jump to go from receiving painting inspiration to life inspiration, it’s not.  

Watercolor is a great, patient teacher.

What is needed in a painting can be reflected as what is needed in your daily life.

Does your painting need more dark colors to give it more depth? Or a bright color to add spice?

Does it need to rest before your next painting session?

How about you?

Do you need time for reflection, a rest from all that you’re doing, or maybe a change of pace or of perspective, a little more spice?

Painting is the reason I moved to Hawaii. Painting with Watercolor taught me how to trust the painting process.

I keep learning to trust life.

If watercolor can teach me, it can teach you too!

A few years ago, exhausted from living my dream of being an artist, a good friend reminded me why I’m on this journey.

I wondered if I’d made a mistake by moving so far from home to make my dream come true. Had I given up the wrong things — my home, a relationship, close friends, and family ties — all to live 5,000 miles away to be an artist?

She said she didn’t think so. That for as long as she’d known me, over 30 years, all I’d ever talked about was being an artist.  

I’d forgotten that!

At that moment, she refocused me on my return trip to Hawaii.

Seeding the Stars is an Analogy for Creating Dreams

Living in Hawaii has been wonderful in many ways, and difficult in others. No matter what decisions we make in life, something has to “go” in order to give life to something else. After all, the root of the word decide means “to cut off.”

The world isn’t a big fan of dreamers. If it were, more dreams would come true!

The world isn’t a fan of change either — and change almost always accompanies dreams.

The collective unconscious is like the great Mississippi, the Amazon, or the Nile — dividing consciousness instead of continents. As it sweeps with us through life, our dreams can be tossed and turned in watery emotions and jumbled thoughts.

Dreams are real.

Their purpose is to shift us forward in our quest for expansion and growth.

We are a part of nature, not separate from it. All of nature is constantly expanding, seeking more growth, bringing more change. Try stopping growth in one area and it burgeons forth in another.

While dreams might feel singular to the person having them, they’re actually held by scores of individuals at once.  Thus, when you think of a fresh idea, you’re surprised to hear it echoed in the words of another halfway around the world.

Our dreams are as connected as we are.

If a dream were a virus, it would infect each of us differently as it searched for a place to take hold, for a source to feed it to fruition.

For some of us, this dream would alter life as we’d strive to make it come true. For others, it might be a mild niggling thought of interest that never quite takes root. Still, others would think of it as a strange dream they had one night, and others forget it altogether.

A dream can become woven so deeply into the fabric of your life that it becomes an invisible piece of who you are. A symbiotic relationship is formed between host and dream.

When that happens, the responsible thing to do is to follow your dream. Allow it to lead you to unimagined places of location and thought.

You will be changed in ways you couldn’t have foretold. But then that happens throughout life whether or not you follow your dream.

Life is risky.

Another word for risk is Adventure. It’s a shift of perspective. 

To follow one’s dream is to buck the current of consciousness in which you were raised.

You might go against “the flow” until you realize you can simply step outside that flow.

With one sideways step at a time, you’ll inch your way to the nearest guidepost. From there, your next step will be revealed.

 Eventually, you’ll find your own personal stream. After a while it becomes your river, your own flow to be followed, leading you to the next leg of your next adventure. 

By following your impulse to jog left when the current of those around you jogs right, you’ll likely be following your soul’s dream for you. 

Following dreams isn’t always easy or rewarding. No matter how long it takes to reach your dream, following it can be the very best use of your time.  

Dreams are harbingers of changes to come. If you’re out ahead of the pack, your dreams might be of the utmost importance to you and to those around you — perhaps even to those who have yet to hear of you. 

You might take some “wrong” turns until you adjust to this “new” way of living and intuit your own next right action.  

Keep going. Nurture your dream, mature; and change along with it on your journey through life. 

Your dream might not seem like much at times, but it might just mean the world to others.

Take your opportunity, follow YOUR dream!

Whenever we plan to start or try something new, stuff happens — often a natural result of adding one more thing to an already busy life.

Like a seedling pushing the dirt out of the way before it can break through to the sunlight, whenever you embark on a new thing — be it a painting, an exercise routine, a new recipe, a new class — a new way of doing anything in a new way, some part of you rebels.

If you hear yourself think “I don’t want to!” or even “NO!”
you can be sure your inner 2- or 3-year-old has a different opinion.

Some part of you feels uncomfortable.

A new honu (turtle) painting begins. The honu on the left is going down to eat.

Depending upon the change you’re making to your daily routine,
you might feel excitement, trepidation, or anything in between.

Habits and routines are great. They act as on- or off-ramps,
helping to ease you into, through, and out of your days.

Habits help create your comfort zone
— and sometimes they lead to boredom & inactivity.

As a creative, consciously evolving being, you crave change.
You want to mix things up a bit, try something new, certain this
new thing will put some spice or pizzazz into your life.

Then, right before, or at the onset of your adventure, you realize the
ramifications of what adding something new to your routine really means.

OH! The disruption!

You might feel an internal earthquake, or a tsunami
of emotions flood your bloodstream.

When adding something new to your schedule, trade-offs
have to be made. Something has to go!

You’re uncomfortable. What you were thinking when you added “xyz” to your schedule?

The honu are more visible as the painting evolves. The center honu is turning around.

15 years after earning a degree in Art Education, I took classes
in graphic design at the local technical college.

I was SO excited to buy fresh supplies, set up a new drafting table,
figure out which classes would fit into my work schedule, and go to class.

Imagine my horror when toward the end of that first class,
I heard the instructor tell us what our homework would be!

Homework?

I’d completely forgotten about homework
and hadn’t factored it into my schedule!

I ended up dropping one of the two classes out of necessity
and learned a valuable lesson — something’s got to give!

Fortunately, the class I kept led me to my next, better job/career,
which is where I stayed until moving to Honolulu to paint in June 2000.

You are resilient.

Simply remember that “freak-out moments” are transitional phases. They pass.

Lean into your transitions to really FEEL them (emotions only last 60–90 seconds).

Then BREATHE, before reassessing your situation.

Your breath is your doorway to your
calm Inner Wise Self & to your Future!

Breathe — that’s what these honu do … they dive down to eat & rise up to BREATHE

Comfort zones are meant to be stretched,
not snapped into submission.

When you stretch them incrementally each day, you’re more likely to weather
the bigger stretches that circumstances beyond our control require.

Please do something new today — just for a stretch of it.

Then breathe and give yourself a hug for stretching.

When I take a walk, I take photos of the things that capture my attention. I’m amazed at all of the new things I see on the very same walk I take several times a week.

These photos are clues to what’s going on inside of me, just below the surface of my consciousness awareness.

This week, as I slogged through my days, I asked myself what I wanted to do — not what I had to do, but what I wanted to do.

It’s a true luxury to be able to ask these things.

While it’s not a luxury to be without the income I had when visitors were here buying my art, time is a true luxury.

As a result, I’ve been painting, writing, and reading more. The paintings have a new and different quality to them.

Thoughts of old creative ideas have bubbled up to the surface again, bringing joy with them.

I’ve begun to work on a Coloring Story Book that’s been languishing in the clouds for six years!

I’m glad I had as much of it done before I stopped. Now, with fresh eyes and renewed enthusiasm, I’m ready to play with it again.

Two other coloring or storybook ideas have jumped back into my life with an eagerness I wasn’t expecting.

The weird thing is that these ideas jump in whenever there’s a lull in my attention. Heck, they jump in whenever they want to. It’s up to me to take note before they jump back out of my awareness!

These are difficult times for all of us to varying degrees and for a variety of reasons.

The lean years, the tough times can either wear us down or build our resilience.

That doesn’t mean it’s easy. You can begin with simply noticing what’s around you, what’s capturing your attention, and where your curiosity takes you.

This is the time to “Hitch Up to Your Own Special Star”.

We might have, in the past, tried to “Hitch Up” to someone else’s star, and while that might have been the right thing to do then (emphasis on the word might), it’s clear now that listening to our own inner wisdom is a much better idea.

We each have a guiding star within. Follow that star, Your Star.