WEF is on summer break!   You will find me working on my latest and greatest… a writing blog I am really excited about.   Come and see me if you get a chance.   I’ll be hanging out there for most of the summer…stay thirsty….

http://www.thirst4writing.blogspot.com

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And for that matter, what makes art art?   I think an artist is anyone who speaks in and interprets the vocabulary of spirit.  And anything created in the sprit of spirit is art!

Artists live in the underground tunnels of humanity.   Expressing art is a unique dialect of communication that weaves existing threads of knowledge with new understanding.  Artists live in CONSTANT CONTINUATION.    This flux enables the artist to see the world differently – not rightly or wrongly, but differently.   Artists seek to make unusual connections.   X-loring relationships is a central theme in the process mind of the artists.     

This CONSTANT state of awareness, called PROCESS, is a bridge.  Whether with a paintbrush, creating cakes or saving lives, the artist seeks to move something out — to WORK OUT some thing that needs re-touching, re-membering.   The artist’s eye and hand are like a needle and thread, stitching ideas into workable form.  In their art, artists stitch towards connection– new and old, found and unfound, in hopes of better serving the planet they inhabit and the planet that inhabits THEM.

Artists live within the walls of the inner working of their senses.  The projections form a screen of their minds onto the art they create, to express how feel and see the world.  I find art more intriguing when I understand the thinking behind it.   My relationship to art is constantly evolving.  Right now I am xploring thinking and how that stirs art.  The InForm (what informs the artist) is as compelling and THE FORM and part of the art of the art!      

The purpose of art is to make you see, think and enjoy.   The goal of the artist is to enrich - through their special sense of seeing and sensing all forms of beauty - represented and underrepresented…

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I think creativity is a cycling and recycling activity (imagine a bicycle pedal going round - the turning revolutions create forward motion even though the actual revolution is simply going round and round).       

Creatives create in an effort to really understand something.  Ideas constantly revolve in an artist’s mind as ongoing open/close loops.   I have often wondered why artists repeat same theme through their art , rendering many interpretations from a single subject of exploration.   The xploring is an open platform still revolving in the artist’s mind.  

This led to me wonder if creativity cycles in stages or recycled loops:  Initiation – Passion – Action – Resolution – Detachment.   The creativity agitates naturally inside the artist towards continuing levels of “unsatisfaction.”    This quality is a mainstay of art and of creativity – drawing the artist inward towards resolution–and then release.       

Creative cycles can oscillate days, weeks months in the artist’s mind  until there is a satisfactory resolution  to rendering issue.  Creative cycles are forever circling loops.  The artist comes in and goes out of the loop – rather cycling the creativity back and forth, until the exploration loop has been sufficiently tied, or closed in the artist’s mind. 

The creative process is an open-ended loop inviting the flooding of new combinations to cycle and recycle through the filter called the artist…

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I am of the belief that we need to create many different places for “conversation” in our lives – and by conversation I don’t just mean talking.    I think we do ourselves and our children a great disservice when we impose the notion of achievement as the only yardstick to measure success – creating a full life is and should be the end goal. 

The thinkers of early childhood education –like Waldorf had it right.  By giving kids, who are the collective ethos of the human spirit, places and spaces to go inside themselves,  newly inspired possibilities emerge from within the soul of the human imprint.  In the end, by fulfilling ourselves, we serve others naturally.  

I hope education finds a way back to this place while walking the achievement tightrope.   The question of “who are we and who am I” is getting lost in the shuffle of academic metrics – and the price we all pay is a shared loss of our human spirit…

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WEF:  I thoroughly enjoyed our March 4 evening  and presenting “Interconnectedness: Women, Nature, and the Stories of the Stars” under the West Ottawa Planetarium’s night sky. Like my astronomer characters Jillian and Kera, I read under a “red light at night to keep the stars in sight” and was inspired by being able to share, while reading, the stars and deep space wonders that were in my mind as I wrote Base Ten.

The women of WEF definitely “got” the connection between the inner workings of the stars and our human lifecycles, especially the wave-like changes we go through as women navigating milestones such as love, career, partnership, and motherhood (often simultaneously!) that have us constantly reforming our definitions of self.  As our discussion revealed, even as we marvel at the presence of great star-forming stellar nurseries in space – the maternal echoed in the universe – claiming and reclaiming our truest sense of self (our core) is important work in the quest toward self-fulfillment and service to others. And, as The Pleiades demonstrates, it’s imperative to seek self with a great group of sisters.

So to All:  Take heart, stay as true to your core as you can, and keep looking up – together.

Maryann - Thanks for an enlightening evening and providing the women of WEF a unique glimpse into the nature of stars…and ourselves…~ Meena

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Small talk is part of everyday life, but it’s the substantial, meaningful conversations that may make you happy. That’s one possibility suggested in a new study examining how conversation connects to happiness.

Researchers, led by Matthias Mehl at the University of Arizona, looked at the different types of conversation that happy and unhappy people participate in. The study, published in the journal Psychological Science, was somewhat small, involving 79 undergraduates, but meshes well with established ideas that happiness and social life are intertwined.

Experts found that the happiest people in the study engaged in only one-third as much small talk as the unhappiest participants. Happy people tended to have twice as many substantive conversations, and spent 25 percent less time alone, than the unhappiest participants.

These insights fit with what psychologists have seen previously: that loneliness predicts depression, and that feelings of social connectedness are important for happiness, said Susan Turk Charles, psychologist at the University of California, Irvine, who was not involved in the study.

Substantive conversations create a feeling of belonging that leads to happiness, she said. Conversely, people who suffer from depression tend to withdraw from others.

The method that the researchers used was creative, Charles said. Instead of bringing people into a lab, as traditionally done in these sorts of studies, they had participants wear a recording device for four days, picking up conversations that they had.

The Electronically Activated Recorder sampled 30 seconds of sound every 12.5 minutes, giving researchers a broad range of conversations to examine in terms of “small talk” vs. “deep conversation.”

The bottom line is that maintaining friendships can help with emotional well-being. Friends buffer negative events and provide support, Charles said. Don’t be too busy to have a meaningful conversation, she said.

“It really is important in your life. It should be something that you prioritize just as much as you prioritize, maybe, working on your career or getting that project finished,” she said.

Editor’s Note: Medical news is a popular but sensitive subject rooted in science. We receive many comments on this blog each day; not all are posted. Our hope is that much will be learned from the sharing of useful information and personal experiences based on the medical and health topics of the blog. We encourage you to focus your comments on those medical and health topics and we appreciate your input. Thank you for your participation.

Posted by: Elizabeth Landau – CNN.com Health Writer/Producer
Filed under: Psychology

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To turn and re.turn.  The search and practice of authenticity – where does it comes from?

Truth in our spirit, truth in our experience and truth in the imagined life, not yet lived out.   Authenticity is about letting go as much as letting in.  Which to do when is the hard part.  Authenticity is a circular wheel.  It goes round and round with each turn, the chance to see something new …maybe that is what authenticity is all about — when you can embrace something totally new - never before felt,  not yet seen, untouched in some corner of our experience.   Circling around the familiar in hopes of discovering something new…

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“All really valid poetry (poetry that is fully alive and asserts its reality by its power to generate imaginative life) is a kind of recovery of paradise…the living line and the generative association, the new sound, the music, the structure are somehow grounded in a renewal of vision and hearing so that he who reads and understands recognizes that here is a new start, a new creation.  Here the world gets another chance.  Here the reader discovers himself getting another chance, another start in life, in hope, in imagination, and why?….probably the language itself is getting another chance, through the innocence, the teaching, the good faith, the honest senses of the workman poet.”    (From Louis Zukofsky – the Paradise Ear, 1966 – Thomas Merton)

To touch the unseen is the brilliance of great poetry.   Poetry rejoins the travelling poet – from imagination to innocence.  Another chance – to teach, to live another day, resplendent with the beauty awash in the brilliance shores our imagination…birthing new seeds of innocence with each step forward….

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Happiness I have decided is like the sun. 

There are moments when happiness rises within us and moments when it sets.  This happens daily in nature.  The sun comes up – sometimes bright, other days hiding behind the clouds.  Each night, it disappers with the rotating axis of Earth.  

It seems we want bright sunny days -365.  It dawned on me, if the sun doesn’t always appear in nature, why do we expect it in our everyday lives?  I think it is okay to feel happy sometimes and not so other times.  Maybe the place to feel most connected to the earth is when we are in touch with our true (rising and setting) nature — what if this was the new happiness ?!

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WORLD WITHOUT US, author, Alan Weisman shared thoughts to inspire WEF WOMEN to action: 

1) Limit the number of offspring. (A 2008 study by Oregon State University scientists — “Reproduction and the carbon legacies of individuals.” Murtaugh, Paul A.; Schlax, Michael G., Global Environmental Change, Vol. 19 (2009) pp. 14–20 — estimates that “…under current conditions in the United States, for example, each child adds about 9441 metric tons of carbon dioxide to the carbon legacy of an average female, which is 5.7 times her lifetime emissions.”)
2) Write your legislators to demand introducing a bill to make it a crime for any store in Michigan to give away a free plastic bag.
3) Emulate our female ancestor by planting a garden each spring and living as much as possible off its produce.  Include nutritious crops like potatoes and cabbages that can last all winter.

Resources:  The Curious Garden by Peter Brown

                         Brother Eagle, Sister Skywith paintings by Susan Jeffers

                         Carbon footprint calculator: http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/emissions/ind_calculator.html

ps – Thank you Anna Bonnema, our Guest Lecturer, for providing green fuel-for-thought for WEF Members!

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