Tangled Stitch

The journey to find our soul begins with a single step.   My step begins with hand embroidery and ends with a way to find a living being true to myself and my god and living by the spiritual principles I believe in.   I believe God will find a way for me to become a productive, loving, peaceful individual which is who I was to begin with. The journey starts today with a trip to see my beautiful loving Godmother Madeline who has loved me and stabilized me since I was a little girl and the beautiful brave warrior princess LuAnn who I idolized as a young girl and who I idolize even more today as a completely inspiring breast cancer survivor.   I know I will come full circle and return from the windy, peaceful Taconic and the traffic laden streets of New York City to find my own personal warrior princess with gifts of love from God and the universe. Hand embroidery and computer with me as I chronicle my journey to recapture my soul.   I will write about the wo...

The tree of life is open and wanting and transformational.    We lose old habits and sprout new ones like buds forming on our branches.   We seek the sun and it’s warmth as the leaves on a tree sway towards the sun.   We suffer like a tree when we lose our branches because of an exceptionally strong wind or a disease that withers away part of our human trees. Trees are eternal until we cut them down.   Our souls are eternal like the tree.   Each one of us is different just as each tree is different.   The amount of sunlight, love and pruning of a tree equal the amount of sunlight, love and pruning of our souls.   Cutting off the parts that no longer serve us and making the parts that remain stronger.   The oldest part of the tree is the wild and woolly part at the top where it takes more than a mortal man to tame, just as the oldest part of a person is that part which he has carried since he was a child and is usually the hardest to...

All of my life I have been falling down rabbit holes.  Things would be going smoothly and I would be following my dreams and then something would happen in the world or my world and I would shut down and fall down a rabbit hole.  I solved puzzles, or played solitaire or lost myself in my work(which was a productive rabbit hole to fall down). To be honest and authentic  I've spent a lot of my life lost in one drama or another.  Perhaps I'm a drama queen stuck in a drama habit or perhaps I'm just a sensitive soul that has a hard time navigating through the real world without getting detoured. Really doesn't matter, if you are lost in your head or in my case trying to escape, it is very easy to forget the plans and forget the dreams and just wake up every morning with an endless to do list and a million ways to waste your time doing things that really aren't all that important.  And then one night in the middle of the night you wake up and you look at all the thi...

This funky soul is Lucinda.  She is currently living at Valley Artisans Market looking for the right man or woman to take her home. She is hand embroidered. I am the authentically funky soul today.  No earthly delights seem to be working on this funk that goes way down to the soul day.   Perhaps it's the clouds, perhaps it's the temperature, perhaps it's just a day to remember so I can rejoice on a happy soul day. Funky is a cool word.  You think of Funky Chicken and you smile.You hear a funky tune and it makes you move and if your soul feels in a funk you try to protect yourself a bit.  I fit into that last category so I'm listening to Mozart cos I'm a little too sensitive for words at the moment. I'm working up at VAM( my favorite place on earth), hand embroidering,(my favorite thing to do) and listening to all kinds of music which usually rocks my world and soothes my savage beastly soul.  But today nothing is really doing it, not even Aretha Fra...

Couldn't we all use a little more sunshine in our lives?  Sometimes when we are stuck in the middle of a dark and windy road we can use a litttle sunshine for the soul.  A reason to wake up and smell the roses or the coffee. I have recently taken up meditation, to new age music, to silence, to chants, to classical music.  Any of them will take me where I want to go.  I close my eyes, breathe deeply and am transported to a simpler time and place.  A place of beauty and peace.  A place where even the most difficult questions can be answered peacefully. Of course then I open my eyes and I am still having a wee bit of trouble getting back into the real world, but since I've started meditating I find that the minute I become present with my breath I can make it go away.  It is one of the greatest gifts I can give to myself.  My human brain is very busy, it can take molehills and make them into a mountain range.  I appreciate the ability to...

If the world is a reflection of who you are then I am one wonderful person.   I had a craft show this weekend and sold a pillow.   But you know what money can’t buy you love and I had such a lovely weekend when it came to human interaction and inspiration I think I had a great weekend. The business part wasn’t so bad, it means I have to think up some new ideas and change my focus a tad bit.   The christening outfit which I was just inspired to make got the most attention so I’m going to add that back into my bag of tricks.   And the small framed pieces also got a lot of attention so onward and forward and better luck next time. This piece is called Just Hand.   I met the lovely young woman who purchased it at The Katbird Shop and it was just a pleasure to meet her and talk to her.   She loved the piece and I have to admit it was one of my favorites to make.   It was made just for the love of embroidery and it is wonderful that someone saw...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sswg6xH56Lk I don’t really have an answer to that question but it is a lovely song by Johnny Mathis.  Since anything I can write today about myself will be pretty pitiful I’m going to write about music.  I love music.  I love to dance, I love to sing. Music has the ability to pick you up and drop you off in any destination you wish to visit.  It transcends life.  Whether it is the voice of an angel like Andrea Bocelli or the bluesy grrrr of the Black Keys, the music picks you up and carries to a place you might like to visit. I love to listen to Chopin and imagine myself a child sitting next to him on the piano bench totally enamored of the beauty of his piano. It really is amazing to listen to the fingers going through all those keys so quickly and so beautifully.  I imagine myself sitting in a room with Mozart just closing my eyes and letting the beauty of his music take me away, there is such a lightness and ...

Sometimes the time between your dream and the completion of that dream is a transition period.  This piece is called Transitions and it is available at Valley Artisans Market. Everyone has dreams, big dreams, small dreams, just dreams.  The ability to create a vision of that dream is very important as are the actions taken to follow that dream.   I still need a plan but I am taking action.  So the glass is half full.  I prefer the half full theory as to the half empty theory. I am figuring out that it is not just the dream but the importance in your life that you give to your dreams and the importance you give to the naysayers.  I was reminded today of how someone else's plan for your life has the ability to take your day in a completely different direction then the day you had planned on working towards your dream.  And then I remembered that I am the captain of my boat of dreams and I have the ability to steer my boat where I wis...