“Today I’m flying low and I’m not saying a word I’m letting all the voodoos of ambition sleep. The world goes on as it must, the bees in the garden rumbling a little, the fish leaping, the gnats getting eaten. And so forth. But I’m taking the day off. Quiet as a feather. I hardly move though really I’m traveling a terrific distance. Stillness. One of the doors into the temple.” ~ Mary Oliver
Art by Paul Bond
Source: Cosmic Dancer
“Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.” ~Louise Erdrich
Art by John Hyde Phillips
“You’ll learn, as you get older, that rules are made to be broken. Be bold enough to live life on your terms, and never, ever apologize for it. Go against the grain, refuse to conform, take the road less traveled instead of the well-beaten path. Laugh in the face of adversity, and leap before you look. Dance as though EVERYBODY is watching. March to the beat of your own drummer. And stubbornly refuse to fit in.” ~ Mandy Hale
“Artists are prophets. We speak of a world yet to come. We bring the far things near. We create the new earth with our love, our faith and our vision. Our vision will be clearer if we do not entangle ourselves with the problems of this world. To be powerfully prophetic, we cannot give a voice to the day we live in. We must be deeply acquainted even intimate with the One who has already created our future home. When we are in that creative spirit painting, we find the vision of this future world and we make it seen, we make it known. Before anything is ever done on this earth, it was first sung, written, or painted.” ~Art and words by Elli Milan
“It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them. I was so preposterously serious in those days… Lightly, lightly – it’s the best advice ever given me…So throw away your baggage and go forward. There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet, trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair. That’s why you must walk so lightly. Lightly my darling…” ~Aldous Huxley
Art by Katherine Smit
“To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places–and there are so many–where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.” ~Howard Zinn, the optimism of uncertainty
Art by Laura Graves
“The world is violent and mercurial — it will have its way with you. We are saved only by love — love for each other and the love that we pour into the art we feel compelled to share: being a parent; being a writer; being a painter; being a friend. We live in a perpetually burning building, and what we must save from it, all the time, is love.” ~Tennessee Williams
Art by Jim Warren
“The only transformer and alchemist that turns everything into gold is love. The only magic against death, aging, ordinary life, is love.” ~Anais Nin
Happy Birthday Anais. I love you.
Art by Anna Baibokova
“someone asked me, what is love in your opinion? answer – I don’t have an opinion about love – Love is when your hiding time is over and you are ready to come out in the open and start blooming – If your whole body is a beehive, Love is the honey coursing inside you – it is a hidden perfume and only those who are broken open can smell it-” ~Guthema Roba
Art by Lord Gris
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming… and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.” ~Theodore Roosevelt
Art by Amanda Cass
“When evil men plot, good men must plan. When evil men burn and bomb, good men must build and bind. When evil men shout ugly words of hatred, good men must commit themselves to the glories of love. Where evil men seek to perpetrate an unjust ‘status quo’, good men must seek to bring into being a real order of justice.” ~ Coretta Scott King from ‘The Words of Martin Luther King’
Happy Winter Solstice!
“On December 21st, we experience the shortest day and longest night of the year. The increased hours of darkness guide us to enter into the dark night of the soul, a time of retreat where we can go within and hear the subtler stirrings of our being.
Sometimes it is only in the darkness that we can truly feel comfortable to be ourselves. When the spotlight of the Sun shines down on us, we can feel exposed, we can feel that we have to act or be a certain way.
When the lights are turned off, when it is just us, alone with our thoughts at midnight, that is when we can truly dive deep into our core and come face to face with a new truth of who we are.
It is not that we have to shame who we are under the bright light of the Sun. For this is a part of us too. But if we stay there too long, we tend to get disconnected, which is why the Universe calls in the longest night of the year.
At this time, it is an opportunity for us all to enter into the darkness. To move away from the spotlight and instead to sit with ourselves and our own truth.
In the darkness, our thoughts don’t matter. It is our feelings that can truly shine. It is our emotional voice that gets a chance to speak, and we have to allow it to be heard.
We need to forget the labels and the judgments of the mind, and instead, allow ourselves to feel with the power of the heart.
When we sit in the darkness, and just allow ourselves to be, what feelings emerge? What discomfort grows? What happens when we just allow ourselves to be?
This is what the dark night of the soul calls us to surrender to. This is what we are encouraged to practice. We need to stop talking, and start listening.
We need to find the stillness, for when we do, we will be able to step into a new power and a new truth of who we really are.”
~Tanaaz, excerpt from Forever Conscious
Art by Anne Stokes
“Many women do not even have the basic teachings about predators that a wolf mother gives her pups, such as: If it is threatening and bigger than you, flee; If it’s weaker, see what you want to do: If it’s sick, leave it alone; If it has quills, poison, fangs or razor claws, back up and go in the other direction; If it smells nice but is wrapped around metal jaws, walk on by. Early training to “be nice” causes women to override their intuitions. They are actually purposefully taught to submit to the predator. Imagine a wolf mother teaching her young to “be nice” in the face of an angry ferret or a wily diamondback rattler. As long as a woman believes she is powerless and/or is trained to not consciously register what she knows to be true, the feminine impulses and gifts of her psyche continue to be killed off.” ~by Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes
Artwork by Kazuaki Horitomo
Source: Toko-pa Turner
“The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up.” ~Paul Valery
Art by Shawna Erback
“I was laying in bed one night and I thought ‘I’ll just quit…to hell with it.’ And another little voice inside me said ‘Don’t quit…save that tiny little ember of spark.’ And never give them that spark because as long as you have that spark, you can start the greatest fire again.” ~Charles Bukowski
Art by Christian Schloe
Source: Ravenous Butterflies
“We are slowed down sound and light waves, a walking bundle of frequencies tuned into the cosmos. We are souls dressed up in sacred biochemical garments and our bodies are the instruments through which our souls play their music.” ~Albert Einstein
Art by Catrin Welz Stein
“My friends, do not lose heart. We were made for these times. I have heard from so many recently who are deeply and properly bewildered. They are concerned about the state of affairs in our world now. Ours is a time of almost daily astonishment and often righteous rage over the latest degradations of what matters most to civilized, visionary people. You are right in your assessments. The lustre and hubris some have aspired to while endorsing acts so heinous against children, elders, everyday people, the poor, the unguarded, the helpless, is breathtaking. Yet, I urge you, ask you, gentle you, to please not spend your spirit dry by bewailing these difficult times. Especially do not lose hope. Most particularly because, the fact is that we were made for these times. Yes. For years, we have been learning, practicing, been in training for and just waiting to meet on this exact plain of engagement.” ~Clarissa Pinkola Estes
Art by Sara Riches
“The black sheep are the artists, visionaries and healers of our culture, because they are the ones willing to call into question those places which feel stale, obsolete, or without integrity. The black sheep stirs up the good kind of trouble. Her very life is a confrontation with all that has been assumed as tradition. Her being different serves to bring the family or group to consciousness where it has been living too long in the dark. As the idiom implies, she is the wayward one in the flock. Her life’s destiny is to stand apart. But paradoxically, it’s only when she honors that apartness that she finally fits in. The world needs your rebellion and the true song of your exile. In what has been banned from your life, you find a medicine to heal all that has been kept from our world. We must find the place within where things have been muted and give that a voice. Until those things are spoken, no truth can find its way forward. The world needs your unbelonging. It needs your disagreements, your exclusion, your ache to tear the false constructions down, to find the world behind this one.” ~Excerpt from Belonging: Remembering Ourselves Home, Toko-pa Turner
Art by DreamerWhit
“I dreamt last night that there were honey bees in my heart making honey out of my old failures.” ~Antonio Machado
Art by Autumn Skye,
Source: The Way of the Priestess
“You did not come to this life to get through life. You came to this life to follow your passion throughout the world. You came to chase your joy. You came to do the thing that you love doing so much that no one could pay you enough not to do it.” ~Teal Swan
Art by Catrin Welz-Stein
“The modern hero, the modern individual who dares to heed the call and seek the mansion of that presence with whom it is our whole destiny to be atoned, cannot, indeed, must not, wait for his community to cast off its slough of pride, fear, rationalized avarice, and sanctified misunderstanding.” ~Joseph Campbell, from The Hero with a Thousand Faces
Art by Varga Tomi
“Wolves and Women have much in common. Both share a wild spirit. Women and Wolves are instinctual creatures, able to sense the unseen. They are loyal, protective of their packs and of their pups. They are wild and beautiful. Both have been hunted and captured. Even in captivity, one can see in the eyes of a Woman, or a Wolf, the longing to run free, and the determination that should the opportunity arise, Whoosh, they will be gone…..” ~ CLARISSA PINKOLA ESTÉS, [WOMEN WHO RUN WITH THE WOLVES].
ART BY KELOGSLOOPS
“We must discover the power of love, the power, the redemptive power of love. And when we do that, we will make of this whole world a new world. But love, love is the only way.” ~Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
When I am among the trees, especially the willows and the honey locust, equally the beech, the oaks and the pines, they give off such hints of gladness. I would almost say that they save me, and daily. I am so distant from the hope of myself, in which I have goodness, and discernment, and never hurry through the world but walk slowly, and bow often. Around me the trees stir in their leaves and call out, “Stay awhile.” The light flows from their branches. And they call again, “It’s simple,” they say, “and you too have come into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled with light, and to shine.” ~Mary Oliver (1935-2019)
Art by Séverine Pineaux
“I believe we have more than enough creativity to solve the problems of our times, but we have to make a perilous trek into the wilderness within to reclaim it. There is a stand of undeveloped jungle, a place of “indigeneity” within each of us, that can never be domesticated. It is a borderless land, beyond personality and convention, even beyond thought, where pure creativity arises. Like the signature song of a tropical bird, the spiraling of an arbutus tree, the evening scent of a jasmine bush, there is an essence in each of us intended to be expressed. Few make the trek into this creative wild, because the path requires great vulnerability. To come into our true originality, we must surrender the layers of numbness we use to protect our hearts.” ~Toko-pa Turner
Artwork by Pierre Artista
“I thought the earth remembered me, she took me back so tenderly, arranging her dark skirts, her pockets full of lichens and seeds. I slept as never before, a stone on the riverbed, nothing between me and the white fire of the stars but my thoughts, and they floated light as moths among the branches of the perfect trees. All night I heard the small kingdoms breathing around me, the insects, and the birds who do their work in the darkness. All night I rose and fell, as if in water, grappling with a luminous doom. By morning I had vanished at least a dozen times into something better.” ~Mary Oliver
Art by Natasa Ilincic
Source~ Shamantube
DANGEROUS COATS by Sharon Owens
“Someone clever once said Women were not allowed pockets
In case they carried leaflets To spread sedition
Which means unrest To you & me
A grandiose word For
commonsense
Fairness
Kindness
Equality
So ladies,
Start sewing Dangerous coats Made of pockets & sedition.”
“I call upon the oldest of old ancient feminine, the original Mother. I call upon Hecate, Calleach, Nana Buruku, Baba Yaga, Kali, Pele, the wise ones, the Crones to come marching in to surround our sister that stands in the trenches of the patriarchal halls of the “White House!” May the truth split open the skies & Oya, goddess of storms, blow through the lies and illusions of the old order & it crumbles to the ground. May all women across eternity, those living and those dead stand behind around below & above Dr. Ford protecting and guiding her heart & voice. May all female ancestors that were burned, sacrificed, raped by the patriarchy who believed their God gave them permission to do as they pleased, scream like wild banshees to destroy the story that is killing us all. May tomorrow be a new dream that is an old dream from a long long time ago, a dream where all of creation stood in the circle of life and was celebrated for simply being an intricate part of this great mystery of living on the skins of Mother Earth! Bonewoman.” ~Reda Rackley
Art by Autumn Skye
“DESTINY is a feeling you have that you know something about yourself nobody else does. The picture you have in your own mind of what you’re about WILL COME TRUE.” ~Bob Dylan
Art by Dimitra Milan
“The awareness of our separateness is what often brings on despondency and despair. We begin to think of our small human lives as inconsequential, even unnecessary, to the great diversity of things. If we let this awareness unconsciously drive us, our lives can become endless treadmills of desperation. Wishing to create a legacy, to make a mark, to create evidence of our specialness, we build from the lowly perspective of the drop. Forgetting our belonging to the greater ocean body, we become trapped in this cult of individualism, where nothing we achieve can ever be enough. But purpose, in its purest sense, is not that different from being an organ in a body. By themselves organs are useless—unless they work together, in their wholly individualized ways, to serve the greater body. We are not separate, but also we are. We are these completely unique individuals who are capable of infinite configurations of innovation and beauty, but we are embedded within and entirely dependent upon the larger ocean of allness.” ~Toko-pa Turner, Belonging: Remembering Ourselves Home (belongingbook.com)
Artwork by Gemma Capdevila
The Mexican Government Asked Street Artists To Paint 200 Houses To Unite Community.
“A youth organization that’s been known to use graffiti as a means of expression has teamed up with the government of Mexico to rehabilitate Palmitas, a town in the Pachuca district. Under the moniker “Germen Crew,” the group painted 209 houses, or twenty-thousand square meters of facade, into a single rainbow mural.
According to streetartnews, the impact has been extremely positive: 452 families, or 1808 people, were affected by this project, resulting in violence amongst youths being entirely eradicated. The group, whose name literally means “germ crew,” have made community involvement a priority, which could partially explain the good results.”
Beautiful idea. Love this so much.
Source: boredpanda.com
“The flower doesn’t dream of the bee. It blossoms and the bee comes.” ~Mark Nepo
Art by Christian Schloe
“They want us to be afraid. They want us to be afraid of leaving our homes. They want us to barricade our doors and hide our children. Their aim is to make us fear life itself! They want us to hate. They want us to hate ‘the other’. They want us to practice aggression and perfect antagonism. Their aim is to divide us all! They want us to be inhuman. They want us to throw out our kindness. They want us to bury our love and burn our hope. Their aim is to take all our light! They think their bricked walls will separate us. They think their damned bombs will defeat us. They are so ignorant they don’t understand that my soul and your soul are old friends. They are so ignorant they don’t understand that when they cut you I bleed. They are so ignorant they don’t understand that we will never be afraid, we will never hate and we will never be silent for life is ours!” ~ Kamand Kojouri
Art by Tomasz Alen Kopera
“Forget conventionalisms; forget what the world thinks of you stepping out of your place; think your best thoughts, speak your best words, work your best works, looking to your own conscience for approval.” ~ Susan B. Anthony
Love Your Solitude
“Therefore, dear Sir, love your solitude and try to sing out with the pain it causes you. For those who are near you are far away… and this shows that the space around you is beginning to grow vast…. be happy about your growth, in which of course you can’t take anyone with you, and be gentle with those who stay behind; be confident and calm in front of them and don’t torment them with your doubts and don’t frighten them with your faith or joy, which they wouldn’t be able to comprehend. Seek out some simple and true feeling of what you have in common with them, which doesn’t necessarily have to alter when you yourself change again and again; when you see them, love life in a form that is not your own and be indulgent toward those who are growing old, who are afraid of the aloneness that you trust…. and don’t expect any understanding; but believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.”
~ Rainer Maria Rilke
Art by Nei Ruffino
Source: Shamantube
“Difficult and painful as it is, we must walk on in the days ahead with an audacious faith in the future. When our days become dreary with low-hovering clouds of despair, and when our nights become darker than a thousand midnights, let us remember that there is a creative force in this universe, working to pull down the gigantic mountains of evil, a power that is able to make a way out of no way and transform dark yesterdays into bright tomorrows. Let us realize the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” ~Dr Martin Luther King, Jr.
Art by Thien Bui
“Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up. This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold, this is what they understood. This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall. This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering it’s a feather bed.” ~Terence McKenna
“There can be hope only for a society which acts as one big family, not as many separate ones.” ~Anwar Sadat
Happy Spring Equinox!
“On this day in the Northern Hemisphere, we are in perfect balance between light and dark. Let us pray loving attention to the fragile sprouts of inner beauty which have survived the long dark of hibernation, despite all odds, to push up through the soil into the light. Let us honor the faith it has taken to believe in the invisible, upper world, where soon we will blossom into sprawling gardens overflowing with fruit. Let us hold our painful hearts with gentle hands today. Let us express our gratitude to the light that can only be found in the dark. Let us ask our vulnerability to shine radiantly with knowing that we are unfolding right on time.”
~Dreamwork with Toko-pa
Art by Christian Schloe
“Dismantle the masks, mental games, grips, and all other illusionary ways you might gather like wool to safely cushion your skin. Step into your world with all the truth, love, and courage you can. Freedom comes after constriction. Sanctuaries crave the open hearted. Amazing loves the vulnerable.” ~Victoria Erickson
Art by Christian Schloe
Dandelions, Few words are enough to disclose you, You lose your shield, now you are naked, Your mind is free but you are not afraid. Teach me.
Art and words by Aquasixio
“This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.” ~Toni Morrison
Art by Rovina Cai
“Mass beliefs in the power of outside authorities are firmly entrenched in your psyche; they are strong and old, and somewhat like a redwood forest they too can be felled very, very quickly, raising many questions about the truth of who you are and why you place your trust outside yourself.” ~Barbara Marciniak
“There is a woman at the beginning of all great things.” ~Alphonse de Lamartine
Art by Miles Toland
“The world without spirit is a wasteland. People have the notion of saving the world by shifting things around, changing the rules, and who’s on top, and so forth. No, no! Any world is a valid world if it’s alive. The thing to do is to bring life to it, and the only way to do that is to find in your own case where the life is and become alive yourself.” ~Joseph Campbell
Berlin Street Art
“I am seeking, I am striving, I am in it with all my heart.” ~Vincent Van Gogh
“One doesn’t want appreciation… one wants response. To tell you the truth, I don’t know what I want of you, or of anybody for that matter. I want more than I get, that’s all I know. I want you to step out of your skin – I want everybody to strip down, not just to the flesh, but the soul.” ~Henry Miller
“You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers. Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting – over and over announcing your place in the family of things.” ~Mary Oliver
Art by Dan May
“It is written in your blood, that you will fly. So let your heart bleed when it is struck by the tendernesses of life or the whirling thunderstorms – and let it burst open when it is drunk on too much pain. Everything unresolved, let it come. Do not hide. Do not bandage your heart half in shame. Let the tears rain from your eyes when all is stirred. Let the messy goddess emerge with dead grass still in her hair. The sky calls your wings. Let your blood respond. Soaring will come naturally, I promise. But for some reason we must fall before we can fly. We must hear again the song of our blood. It is blood we all share and the soil knows it as much as the sky. They wrote it all together.” ~SC Lourie
Art by Heather McLean
“Love is the ultimate outlaw. It just won’t adhere to any rules. The most any of us can do is to sign on as its accomplice.” ~Tom Robbins
“In such ugly times, the only true protest is beauty.” ~Phil Ochs
Art by Martin Johnson Heade – Hummingbird Perched on an Orchid Plant, 1901.
Source: Ravenous Butterflies
“When you have a dream, you’ve got to grab it and never let go.” ~Carol Burnett
Street Art from Ojai California
“Wild women are an unexplainable spark of life. They ooze freedom and seek awareness, they belong to nobody but themselves yet give a piece of who they are to everyone they meet. If you have met one, hold on to her, she’ll allow you into her chaos but she’ll also show you her magic.” ~Nikki Rowe
Art by Joseph Christian Leyendecker /
Source: Ravenous Butterflies
Happy Full Moon!
“Full Moon energies bring what’s been hidden from our ego consciousness to light.
As we re-engage in the world, this Scorpio Full Moon might reflect back to us what we really yearn for – those things in life that bring us peace and joy and satisfaction.
While this watery Full Moon brings up issues of letting go of what no longer serves life, it also has a powerful hit from Neptune in Pisces, opening us to compassion, not only for all people suffering during this pandemic, but also for ourselves.
Neptune also gives us the tool of the creative imagination to help us through this death and rebirth of our culture.
As we release the emotional wounds that keep us repeating our insanity, we need to fill those spaces with possibilities. And that’s what Neptune can do for us.
Living in our active imaginations can change our habits quicker than anything else.
Since Mercury is conjunct the Taurus Sun, we have the ability to see and communicate what is broken in our society, as well as what expectations we need to let go of in trying to return to ‘normal’.
Instead, we can be looking for opportunities to bring something into play that people need.
Something many of us have spent our lifetimes discovering and learning. Now is the time for us to lead the way into a better future…”
~Cathy Pagano, excerpt from Mystic Mamma
