“Love all your thoughts, even those that are limited or fearful. Think of them as small children needing your love and reassurance. If you catch a negative thought, don’t make yourself wrong for having it. Love all your negative thoughts and they will have far less power over you.”
—Orin
November 2011
19 posts
“The more you struggle to live, the less you live. Give up the notion that you must be sure of what you are doing. Instead, surrender to what is real within you, for that alone is sure.. you are above everything distressing.”
—Spinoza
“We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.”
—Carl Sagan
“I like people who have a sense of individuality. I love expression and anything awkward and imperfect, because that’s natural and that’s real.”
—Marc Jacobs
What You Make of It
I’ve been sitting quietly, thinking about my life. Sunny Friday afternoons adorned with the sound of swaying trees and crinkling leaves seem to have a mystical effect on me, putting me in a meditative state. Brett and I have been renting a modest three bedroom bungalow for nearly two months. The home was built in 1943. It has character. It also has its fair share of blemishes, cracked paint, and uneven plaster walls. Somehow these things just don’t matter. I’ve been building a sanctuary here for us, but this process has been mostly beneficial to me. Over the years I’ve learned that I thrive when I have a strong foundation. A place to call home. A place where everything else can rest upon and spring from. This house has been my muse and my art—a labor of love. It isn’t much in the grand scheme of things, and I realize how easily this can all vanish, but it’s enough for me. More than enough, even. A home is what you make of it. If only my thoughts could stay here.
“If a union is to take place between opposites like spirit and matter, conscious and unconscious, bright and dark, and so on, it will happen in a third thing, which represents not a compromise but something new.”
—C.G Jung
“Boredom is the feeling that everything is a waste of time; serenity, that nothing is.”
—Thomas Szasz
“There is no coming to consciousness without pain.”
—Carl Jung
I feel like I could create so many things, but I can’t even find a single reason for doing so, aside from the fact that there might not be any reason at all and I should just do it for the sake of doing it.
It’s like there’s a whole part of myself that I can’t access, but I know it’s there, lurking behind the scenes. I just want access already. Things have just been so incoherent and jumbled lately, and my energy has been all over the place.
People have been asking me about my art and what’s been going on with it. Up until recently I’ve said that I simply don’t know or haven’t put much energy into it. I’ve been refurbishing old furniture and picture frames for the house I moved into last month and I’ve decided that they have been my art. The whole process of finding, cleaning, sanding, priming, painting, and finishing objects with old stories in order to give them new lives and new chapters is art and now I see that.
That’s all coming to an end for me though, and it’s time to move on. If I could only figure out this ‘thing’, then maybe I can push forward.
There are many nights where I sit at the computer and wonder, “Why do I do this?.” Why do I continue down this path of creation, riding the ups and downs; jumping from project to project? Why do so many of my ideas never see the light of day, while only a select few are realized? I don’t have the answers. Anymore, I feel like I’m here on this planet to experience and to create. So, that’s what I’m doing. I guess I’ll figure it all out one day.
“You desire to know the art of living, my friend? It is contained in one phrase: make use of suffering.”
—Henri Frederic Amiel
“To do the useful thing, to say the courageous thing, to contemplate the beautiful thing: That is enough for one man’s life.”
—T. S. Eliot
