Friday, March 8, 2013

Flowers as Mandalas...AND... The Paintings of Georgia O'Keefe

Here's one...


And another...


And my pastel of a section of Georgia's sweetpeas that I did and framed for my mother...



And one more:



Listening to Mary Clare at lunch yesterday at The Mud House, eating Vegan vegetable wraps and roasted potatoes with truffled sour cream, and talking about so many, many things that I can't even remember because it was so non-linear, so intuitive, so unfocused...just exactly the way I love to communicate with others, I found that parts of me were healed that I didn't even know were being healed. Just like we were discussing about the way the writing of Haruki Murakami, Tom Robbins and Flannery O'Connor isn't really using symbology per se, just taking you down deep into healing scenarios, swishing you around in it, and then pulling you back out. It was amazing!

Strangely, what really caught my attention in the most whimsical way was her description of a coffee shop in D.C. called Tryst, where they served an animal cracker with every cup of coffee. I was thinking, and said to her that I would always be excited about that too, just like she was, wondering every day whether I would get a giraffe, an elephant, or what? She said that one day a friend of hers asked if she could have a whole bowl of animal crackers, because that was what she really wanted, and the waiter, without skipping a beat, said: "Yes, we'll bring you a bowl. You can have a whole menagerie!"

How did that afternoon start? Danielle calling me, and us talking about being considered sensitive or overly-sensitive by others...my telling her how Gurucharan Singh Khalsa had written in my "21 Stages of Meditation" book about it not being a bad thing to be sensitive, because as a matter of fact, when we are working to develop our intuition, we are working on becoming more sensitive. Not just more caring, but more aware. So when my Dad talked about how you develop a soft heart, with a hard shell, that's it! Developing the intuition to know where to be at the right time, so that if you get the sense that you are in a not so hot environment, you can leave before your heart gets stomped on. I recited Dorothy Parker's poem: "I wear my heart on my sleeve like a wet red stain."

Then Mary Clare called inviting me first to a movie, and then as I was running out the door, not having done very much of my meditation practice today at all, and feeling a lot like Cinderella again, the phone rang and it was Balprem! Do you know that I have invited all 3 women to be in our Mandala group? They will love it. I just know. It's my intuition. And we'll make mandalas on paper, mandalas of flowers, and mandalas of our grocery lists. No linear stuff. Ha, ha!

The funniest thing Mary Clare said was when she just, out of nowhere seemingly, was talking about people posturing and pretending to be deeper than they are, when they are really hiding out inside themselves, was this: "Come on. You know you aren't writing anything really profound in your moleskine, you're just writing your grocery list."

That cracked me up. Talking about creating art, writing, and even the medical profession as an opportunity to really live, and not just function...to be no holds barred in love with the world and all it has to offer, no matter what is happening and what is going on around you. And then...my boss Cathleen walked in to cozy up in a corner with her computer. When she left for her meeting, she stopped to smile at me, and I spontaneously hugged her. I think I really like my boss...





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