Do you ever hear this question echoing in your head?

It’s a great question to play with consciously. Play with your inflection as you ask yourself:

WHO do you think you are?

Who do you THINK you are?

Or, Who the H*** do you think you are?

WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?

Do you feel the difference?

These questions came to mind after my photo shoot with Jeremy DeWeese at the SurfJack Hotel in Waikiki.

A photo shoot can have many uses and meanings. It can be a folly or an incredible experience. It depends upon the lens through which you and your photographer view the world.

Jeremy sees the world through the lens of love. By doing so, he gives his subject the opportunity to see self through the eyes of love.

The gift of being seen for who we truly are, from the inside out, brings tears to my eyes.

Seeing the world through eyes of love is something we can all learn. It’s a practice to consciously choose.

It’s rare for us to focus our lens of love upon ourselves.

To look through the lens of love is to see deeper than the surface, and to experience the heart of all matter.

We can reduce everything down to love —
even though love is a power
larger than anything imaginable.

Why do we so easily, often without thought, hide our love away from even ourselves?

Do we not know how strong and powerful our love is?

Or do we know how strong and powerful it is and fear its power?

Is our powerful mind at war with our powerful heart?

If so, it’s a waiting game, for the heart always wins. Even if it has to wait until the very end of life, the heart always wins.

The attitude, thoughts, and feelings that we exercise the most, become the strongest.

Make a choice in every moment to exercise the parts of you that you want to grow.

Learn to see the world & yourself through eyes of love.

To see ourselves through eyes of love might be the most important exercise we undertake in life.

Train your eyes to look for love within and, with practice, you will see love grow in our world.

“WHO do you KNOW yourself to BE?”

Be that YOU.

AARGH! I did it again! I turned my joyful expression, my passion, painting, into WORK!

This happened to me once before, about ten years ago, and it was devastating! This time I caught myself and am taking steps to get back to PLAY. Phew!

Changing habits and practicing new ones requires taking baby-steps. My first baby step was to take a walk (DAH!). This is the first thing that captured my attention on my walk.

Look at ALL of the texture. What do you think this is? Do you see the upside down heart?

The very first thing that caught my eye was the trunk of a palm tree. I'd never given them much thought until I REALLY LOOKED AT THIS ONE on my walk.

My world changed within the first five minutes of that walk! Wow! Just look at all of that texture and movement and LIFE FORCE in that tree trunk!

Okay, I got a bit excited.

I know that to make changes we need massive amounts of self-love and tenderness, with bits and pieces of tough love sprinkled in for balance.

I’m not fond of regimentation. Even though I know that following a schedule can increase productivity, I prefer going with my flow and following my impulses.

I also have to remember that I make my living from my art and that means I have to paint and sell art REGULARLY (as in a lot).

The trouble comes when I can't think of what to paint (yes that happens).

To me there's a real difference between painting for the sake of painting and painting something that I REALLY REALLY REALLY WANT TO PAINT!

There are two paintings here, side-by-side. It's the beginning, not the end.

All of my coaches tell me to schedule my “FREE-” or “DOWN-“ or “PLAY-time” first, before I schedule in other commitments.

Scheduling PLAY first does NOT come naturally to me.

“Downtime” is time to just sit and listen — or to “get bored”. You can lie down, but you don’t have to. You can close your eyes, but you don’t have to.

The only thing to “be done” is to release control
and surrender.

Oh, THAT’S ALL!

Surrendering feels scary, so I’ll start small. I’ll start with five minutes a day and work up to more. The important thing is to start.

I will breathe more deeply and consciously unwind, releasing my clenched fists as I breathe.

Go ahead try it.

It really does feel good — at least in short spurts.

Still a work in progress. It's a triptych, meaning in three pieces, still needs some love.

Teaching others to paint is part of my mission and service to the world.

There are as many ways to paint as there are people — and as many reasons to paint too! Not everyone wants to, or feels the need to make art.

Feeling tense or distracted or unhappy or just plain blah? You can find comfort, joy, and focus when painting.

One of the lessons of the Hide-N-Seek method of painting that I teach is how to use our awareness to look for what we want to see in life.

By looking past appearances and asking better questions, we find a fresh version of the world in which we live.

Gaze at this image of "Creation" to see what you can find within it.

Clues surround us all of the time. Looking for them becomes a game we play first on paper and later in our everyday lives.

The game involves a lowering of our expectations to see specific things and a heightened expectation to see more than what initially captures out attention.

When looking at our paintings, we soften our vision and look with eyes of curiosity — wondering what we might see.

The game, when extended to the world around us, requires a lowering of our "drama reflex mechanism", AKA fight or flight.

This is replaced by a deepening of our ability to see, sense, and wonder what gifts and opportunities our circumstances have to offer.

There is more.
There’s always more than initially meets the eye.

Take an internal step back into self. Take a breath, and take a moment, all before responding to the world around us.

Reaction time is not to be noted. Response time is different altogether.

Reactions take no time. They come from the limbic brain, the "reptilian brain".

We’re being called to respond from our neocortex, our “new” brain. It’s time to exercise that part of our brain on a more conscious and regular basis.

I sketched the images below all by sporadically gazing at a canvas giclée of my "Creation" painting hanging in my living room over the course of ten months.

The sketches on the left were seen after Creation was turned 90 degrees clockwise. The sketches on the right were all seen in the format shown above.

Play the game with me. Take another look at the painting above. Can you find any of the images? Better yet, do you see any new ones? Please let me know what you find!

I met her at the beach, Bellows Beach, one of the most beautiful long beaches on Oahu.

She stands stately and tall at the beach’s tree line. She’s been standing there for decades, maybe even a century.

Her limbs are outstretched, soaking in the morning sun and daring the trade winds to try to blow her down. They don’t, they invigorate and strengthen her.

Fearless, she relishes her position on Earth. Her wisdom runs both deep and tall.

She knows who she is and she knows her worth. She trusts the world will provide all that she needs.

Time spent in Mother Nature nurtures our spirit. It reminds us on a deep, often unconscious level, that we are a part of the natural world around us.

We’ve built so much on top of Mother Nature, and often marvel at that part of the world too. But that’s not the part we turn to when we need to feel revitalized.

When we need to “get away and clear our head” we turn to Mother Nature. Like a trusted companion, ever present, yet often ignored, she's always there for us.

Perhaps that’s why we call her Mother.

Mother Nature factors into most of my art. She’s even the inspiration for many of my abstract paintings.

Mother Nature catches my eye. My imagination transforms her energy onto paper. Look closely and you will feel her there.

Art is a natural form of communication. Art speaks to us on conscious and unconscious levels.

We fill our homes with living plants and often share our space with a pet (or several) to keep Mother Nature nearby.

Art is another way to keep Mother Nature close —one that doesn’t need feeding.