Possibilities:  Live Your Passion, watercolor print, 8"x10" double matted, finished edge, $20, Tammy Vitale

No new work yesterday (this  Possibilities is about 4 years old)as it was Daughter and Grandson Sunday.  Poppy and Grandson took a short trip to the Marine Museum up on Solomons and then we all ate crabs.  Meanwhile, Daughter managed to get ActivX loaded onto my computer so I can use QuickBooks on-line with the part-time job.  I knew I had her for a reason!  She’s very good – spins all over the place, windows open and closing, clicking away and is very comfortable doing that.  I’d like to think it’s because we had her plugging cable into a sound board when she was 10 years old, but it’s probably because she’s just smart like that and I can’t take a lick of credit for it.

So I thought I’d just share some favorite books with you about finding the possibilities within ourselves.  Currently I’m reading Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert on the suggestion of at least two bloggers I regularly read.  I have to admit the eat part left me thinking of Ann LaMott’s Traveling Mercies, a lot, both in voice and writing style.  But pray, is different.  Well, not really.  They are both talking about God while going to length explaining that word – which is a word I have a terrible time with.  I never use it with the capital if it can be avoided, and hardly ever read books that use it all the way through. Both of these books do – and I love both of them.  Gilbert’s pray  is in an ashram in India and maybe that makes it easier for me to see the word more universally.  Ann Lamott is pretty straight on – there’s no way for me to guild her use of the word.  So both books help me to understand that not everyone gets the heebie-jeebies over that word.  To some it means something holy and loving.  So I grow a bit.  Anyways, Gilbert’s pray is intense for me, having just had some of the same conversations about meditation experience with Son – who has just discovered meditation and the places it can take you (my own take:  as good as drugs and legal to boot!).  Both are good for me as I open the energy pathway for some writing to come through in short spurts for these Possibilities I am creating.  At the moment they are being bulbs under the ground and gathering strength.  And I am being patient.

Other great books, not necessarily in order of preference since that tends to change with what I need for the day:

Women Who Run with the Wolves  Clarissa Pinkola Estes

The Women’s Room (this is a 70s book I didn’t read until the 80s that would mostly, unfortunately still hold true now – I used to buy used copies to keep to give to women who really needed to read it) Marilyn French

This Time I Dance Tama Kieves

Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom, John ODonohue

Calling the Circle Christina Baldwin (people in community, business and otherwise)

The Spontaneous Fulfillment of Desire: Harnessing the Infinite Power of Coincidence  Deepak Chopra (the only of his I’ve managed to read even a bit of – I don’t think I ever finished it)

Crossing the Unknown Sea: Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity David Whyte

The Tao is Silent Raymond Smullyan

Art and Fear:  Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking David Bayles and Ted Orland:  "Each new piece of your art enlarges our reality.  The world is not yet done.

Julia Cameron’s early works (but oh, not Finding Water – a most depressing book!)

Writing Down the Bones Natalie Goldberg – about writing, but writing is life for me, so.

I will not die an unlived life:  Reclaiming Purpose and Passion Dana Markova (the title is good enough to hang on the wall all by itself):  "I realized that my transformation of pain into love was an act of service for humankind.

Holy the Firm Annie Dillard (another god book of sorts, with capital "G" in many places…and it’s ok altho the masculine pronoun sets my teeth on edge): "This is the one world, bound to itself and exultant.  It fizzes up in trees, trees heaving up streams of salt to their leaves.  This is the one air, bitten by grackles; time is alone and in and out of mind.  The god of today is a boy, pagan and fernfoot.  His power is enthusiasm; his innocence is mystery.  He sockets into everything that is, and that right holy.  Loud as music, filling the grasses and skies, his day spreads rising at home in the hundred senses.  he rises, new and surrounding; he is everything that is, wholly here and emptied – flung, and flowing, sowing, unseen, and flown."

Anything by Pema Chodron (who I don’t necessarily understand, but who’s voice I love)

Poetry by Margaret Atwood.  Ok, fiction too.

Poetry by Jorie Graham (meaning slips out of your fingers just when you think you had it), Lucille Clifton (with whom I  had the privilege of being in a writing group for two years); the poetry anthologies (of women’s voices only):  No More Masks and Cries of the Spirit (in case you need to browse to find out who voice in particular you’d like to hear more of).

thought for the day:  Every person comes to a place, at one time or another in their maturation, of complete loss and deadness, a stark and frightening absence of creativity and enthusiasm, where life seems to retreat away from us like a tide.  our desperate grasping after the outgoing energy only marks our desperation more fully.  The old magic seems to be ours no longer, and we look enviously at those still able to create it.  This is the very point where deep physical memories are our lifeline to any future we want for ourselves.  In effect, somewhere inside us, the child is still running enthusiastically toward a horizon it once glimpsed.  our future life depends on finding this original directional movement in our lives, no matter how far we feel we are into middle age.  …The essence of midlife crisis is that something has to change…A deeply held desire is a star that is particularly our own…the entire journey demands a more measured pace, and a perseverance we can only learn in the pilgrimage itself.  David Whyte, Crossing the Unknown Sea….