Just breathe

Just breathe.

When you feel anxious.

When you can't think.

When you feel overwhelmed.

Just breathe.

When you want to clear your head.

When the sun is shining and the breeze is cool.

When the day just couldn't get any better.

Just breathe.

Life is short. Slow down. Breathe.

Soften

There are days when I'm cranky for no reason.

I just feel out of sorts and annoyed at the smallest of things.

My heart feels small and hard and I don't like it.

I need to be softened.

Each day I need to be moisturised to prevent dryness from creeping in.

I need to be deliberate about it, because as soon as I start to slack off, I start to dry out, shrivel, and harden.

Published!

A couple of weeks before we left Australia I was approached by Kelly Kirchner. She had seen my Instagram feed and gone from there to my blog, and was now asking if I would send in a journal to be featured in Art Journaling. I was obviously thrilled to be asked so duly sent off a journal before all our belongings were packed up and shipped out. 

And now the issue has finally hit the stands. I am delighted to have my work included alongside the pages of some very talented art journallers. 

So if you're on Instagram or you have a blog and some days you wonder if there is anyone out there looking at your work, hang on in there - you never know who might be seeing your pages.

Glimpsing

Starting to catch a glimpse through the fog.

When you move to somewhere new you spend a lot of the first few months working out where you fit in, how you can contribute, what life will look like for you in this new place.

Now the dust is settling from opening all our boxes and the house is starting to feel like home. The week is beginning to get a shape. The fog is beginning to clear.

New horizons

This page, for me, is a view of a beach with the sun coming up.

It's a view of the horizon.

Horizons are full of promise and mystery, just like new places.

The sun is rising, so it is a time of new beginnings.

What does the day have in store?

Sing your song!

Sing your song!

Don't let anyone put you off.

Don't worry about what others are doing.

Sing the song you've been given and sing with all your heart.

We all need to bring our own voice to the music.

Let your voice be heard!

Out of my element

Sometimes I feel out of my element.

How about you?

Monuments

We all set up monuments either physically or in our memories.

We live opposite a graveyard and it is visited regularly. There are some people who are there nearly every day, visiting the graves of loved ones. The headstones have the names and dates of those buried there, but the memories of the visitors hold so much more.

The monuments we set up in our head can be good - remembering people who have loved us, mentored us, helped us along the journey; and those times of victory in hard circumstances, when we have stood firm, when we have stood up in the face of injustice. These are helpful monuments.

But we can also set up monuments over perceived slights and insults. We sometimes allow bitterness to take a hold, building a large monument to our hurt. These monuments are not at all helpful. If we keep revisiting these feelings they become embedded and built in stone, not easily removed.

What monuments are you setting up in your memory? Are you remembering things which are best forgotten? Holding on to hurtful words and setting up a monument of bitterness? Or are you remembering the good things, the things which build you up rather than the monument?

Cracked ribs

Sometimes to fix a heart you have to crack a few ribs. When your heart is broken, bleeding, calloused, malfunctioning or the like, it needs operating on. Breaking open your ribcage -whether physically or metaphorically - might feel a bit extreme, but not doing it is worse. Having your heart put right is painful but necessary.

These 'ribs' turned up on my page out of the blue. I'd made a few marks with a red neocolor II but they were a bit dark. When I went over them with some acrylic paint I joined them together. Then all I could see was ribs (even though my daughter commented that my page had a petticoat). So why were there ribs on my page? What was it all about? Ribs protect the heart, so I added a heart and then contemplated it all for a while.

The ribs are lying down, which made me think they were either lying in a desert, long dead, or lying on a bed or table. As they were red rather than white, it suggested living ribs to me - hey, it's how my brain works :) From there my thoughts went to open heart surgery. But of course, you can work on the heart in a spiritual as well as a physical way. Sometimes having our heart set right spiritually can be just as intrusive and uncomfortable as actual surgery.

Character

Remember, it's not about what you do but who you are; character over skills.

It is so easy to equate ourselves with what we do. Often it is one of the first questions we ask when we meet someone new. But what use is it being highly skilled if you are not a nice person?

When failure comes, or we feel like we're just not enough, it is good to remember that it is not what we do that gives us value, but who we are on the inside. God looks on the heart. So should we.

Remembrance

When this page started sprouting poppies and headstones I thought it was about death. Then the door arrived (it's from a postcard by Kim Nelson).

Suddenly it wasn't about death but about remembrance.

A door has shut, but there are still memories, and that's as it should be.

But that shut door is there because it was an open one that we walked through. So, though there is sadness and some things have passed on, there are new opportunities as well.

Remember and learn, but also move forward.