I'm Getting Ready

I live to be inspired. No other way around it. In the past year I have been so blessed. This is Garden Tree. This is the piece that started the wonderful journey I have undertaken. The piece that started the realization that I am an artist. Sometimes you can make art and not feel like an artist. Artist is such a loaded word really. It means you see the world through a different lens. You have to be thick-skinned, inspired, tenacious, and positive and sometimes in real life those attributes are hard to find in yourself.

When you really start to express yourself, your world totally changes. When you finally decide this is who I am and this is who I want to be, the world accepts your uniqueness and you move forward into the life you've imagined. Simply all those wonderful inspirational sayings are inspiring for a reason. Because until you believe them somewhere in your soul they will just never happen. No matter how hard you try.

Every unique individual has a unique path that they have to follow. Doing the work is the hardest and most rewarding part. There are a million reasons every day why we don't reach our potential but most of it is because we just don't realize that it can be done. That it's about the work more than the reward. It's hard to try to find your own path in a world where talent is not always rewarded and a pretty face can make you much more important then you deserve to be. But then we have to become artists again and just block out all the suggestions about who we should be, what we should make, and most of all how selfish we are to spend so much time doing something we love. Yes selfish is the real word, the word that stops us dead in our tracks. I guess for those who love us they want us to be happy but they really don't want us to change or slip back into the cocoon we have to live in to create. But since they loved us when we were broken, I guess we have to give them a break sometime. Hopefully they adjust.

Being a hand embroidery artist means I need a lot of focus. Most of the time I live between my headphones because that blocks out the outside noise and the other voices who want to play when I want to work. As you know most of the time that music is provided by the Black Keys, who frankly I wonder where they have been all my life as I enjoy every single song they play, a different one for every day and every mood. But I digress.

The song of the day is I'm Getting Ready. It is sung by Michael Kiwanuka. A beautiful, soulful, inspiring artist who sings as beautifully out in a field as he does on a stage or on a recording(go look for him on Youtube). He's also young, I so appreciate young people who realize they are artists and don't have to go through the years of searching to find themselves. So give him a listen and hopefully we will be hearing his beautiful music for decades and decades to come.

Have a great day and find something that inspires you, if you look closely enough you will find it. Blessings.