“If you change the way you tell your own story, you can change the colour and create a life in technicolour.”
— Isabel Allende
What is your story? Are you the hero, the villain or the victim of your tale? Do you face challenges or do you bear burdens? Do you have relationships that end when they are ready and learn lessons from them or are you love’s bitch ever suffering from the choices you make? Do you allow joy and humour in your tale? Do you allow for sadness? Do you accept the gifts that life has to offer you or do you throw them away for a handful of beans?
So much of who we are in our lives depends on how we tell our stories especially in our heads. If you feel beaten by life and feel justifiably beaten then maybe what you need is a change of perspective and a reframing on how you tell your tale.
Blessings, G
The art gallery page for 2015 has been updated on Waking Spirals (http://wakingspirals.me) and now has my art from July.
Please browse through and if you have an interest in purchasing any prints please contact me at rambled@mac.com.
Click on image to go to the 2015 Art Gallery Page:
“…Things get broken, and sometimes they get repaired, and in most cases, you realize that no matter what gets damaged, life rearranges itself to compensate for your loss, sometimes wonderfully.”
— Hanya Yanagihara
Leave the old behind
the past, the broken
the things that no longer serve
If we cling to old memories
new ones cannot be made.
Free yourself from burdens
unburden yourself from care
New roads forever beckon
new songs await to be sung
comfort can be a curse
as it keeps us in its grasp
long past time to go
let it be a mere way station
between adventures and lessons
and paths
Face the unknown future with a laugh
that continues to unfold.
— G A Rosenberg
“Well, as you can plainly see, the possibilities are endless like meandering paths in a great big beautiful garden.”
― William S. Burroughs
When I write, quite often a word is the shortest distance between two thoughts. When I sit down to write there are occasions where I feel totally stuck There is no crossroads more intimidating than a blank screen. I mean the possibilities are infinite. This can feel frustrating. After all I have made this commitment to write at least one hundred words a day and there are both too few and way too many things to think about, talk about and write about. With so many places to go, it is way too easy to go nowhere and stall out. Finally tho I have learned a trick that seems to work every time. Start with a word.
It can be any word. That first word tho like the primal point fixes me in one reality and possibly one topic. One word leads easily to another (after all the conceptual distance between zero and one is always less than the distance between one and any other number) Once something exists it is fairly easy to get it to multiply, so one word leads to another which leads to a second and a third and before you know it, an essay or poem or story has appeared. This concept is not a new one. After all in various scriptures, the act of creation itself is described as the speaking of one word. If universal construction from the void can begin that way than surely one little blog entry can as well.
Blessings, G
“We might say that the dream transforms the dreamer; that it possesses the ability to ‘initiate’, to bestow new meaning, to motivate new beginnings (Latin: initium – beginning), to permit our entrance (literally ‘en-trance’; Latin: inire init – to go in) to new orders of relation between ourselves and the ‘other’.”
— Andrew D. Chumbley
Dreams echo in the waking breath
and then ebb away
to distant shore’s calling
their transformations
internal and eternal
felt but unexpressed
in the morning light
except in subtle hints.
Once more I play the fool
in daily routines
as I pretend to a normalcy
beyond my reach.
yet in the evening
I create the flow
and the images arrive
through mouse and screen
and my own inner reveries
The tide has returned
and the dreaming begins again.
— G A Rosenberg
“Mountains seem to answer an increasing imaginative need in the West. More and more people are discovering a desire for them, and a powerful solace in them. At bottom, mountains, like all wildernesses, challenge our complacent conviction – so easy to lapse into – that the world has been made for humans by humans. Most of us exist for most of the time in worlds which are humanly arranged, themed and controlled. One forgets that there are environments which do not respond to the flick of a switch or the twist of a dial, and which have their own rhythms and orders of existence. Mountains correct this amnesia. By speaking of greater forces than we can possibly invoke, and by confronting us with greater spans of time than we can possibly envisage, mountains refute our excessive trust in the man-made. They pose profound questions about our durability and the importance of our schemes. They induce, I suppose, a modesty in us.”
― Robert Macfarlane
I spent the greater part of today in Whistler, BC visiting friends and enjoying the mountain view. Whistler, besides being the site of the Winter Olympics in 2012 is renown for skiing and hiking. Outside of the resorts it also has become something of a large picturesque shopping mall. On a busy holiday weekend, thousands of people could be seen shopping and milling around. Many were attending a yoga festival and in the main field of the tourist park mall there were around fifty people, impressing lookers on and their friends with the way that they could contort their bodies. There were kids running and lots of dogs and people generally having a good time but moving quickly from one place to another.
It felt good to look to the mountains and see the unmoving. They have been there way before there was an Olympic village and way before there was a native fishing village. They preceded humans and may very well be there way past the time when we are not. I look to them and find patience and acceptance of everything that happens and a will to observe the hurry-scurry with tolerance, forbearing and humour even as I participated in it. Like the mountains I will forbear what comes my way tho unlike them I find times when action is necessary and even preferable. A mountain view always strengthens me tho as I realize that little that seems traumatic and important in the moment truly matters from another perspective.
Blessings, G
“True alchemy lies in this formula: ‘Your memory and your senses are but the nourishment of your creative impulse’.”
― Arthur Rimbaud
What nourishes your creative impulse? What is it that you feel, think or see that makes you grab for a pen or a paintbrush or a computer keyboard and mouse in order to express it in your own unique way?
Is it a vision of beauty or outrage that strikes you? Is it a new song that you’ve never heard before? Perhaps it is the taste of something so delicious that you want to heap praise on it (‘His lips tasted refreshing like the first swim on a hot summer’s day’ or perhaps ‘I scream. You scream. We all scream for ice cream.’). Is it the first sound from a baby’s lips or seeing it smile? Are you inspired by a vision from whatever deities you hold dear? Whichever it is (and I have been inspired by almost all of these things), enjoy it and create on for every artistic endeavour becomes an electric impulse firing through the brain of the universe.
Blessings, G
Appointment to a Resurrection by G A Rosenberg
