Milestones and Butterflies

Tags

beauty, birthday, butterflies, butterfly, flowers, kindness, Monarch, photograph

I have made 200 posts! Wow. Thanks for stopping in and sharing some kindness. I hope you enjoy this butterfly that helped me celebrate my birthday. My husband took me to a labyrinth that is a flower garden. It is one of my favorite places in Wisconsin and it happens to be up the street from a lovely art museum and a delicious restaurant. So I will be posting a flower a day or so for a while. I hope your day was as beautiful as mine.

Let Kindness Ring

Tags

altered art, Altered book, art journal, flag, folk art, kindness, paisley, pig, zentangle

Kindness has been my daily intention most days lately, so when I saw that it was the prompt for Journal 52 it made my day. This last weekend was also the Fourth of July, known as Independence Day here in the USA. As I was creating the juxtaposition of the flag and the word, it made me wonder what our country would have been like if it had been founded on kindness rather than independence. The red stripes of my flag are quotes that are relevant to kindness, my week, and/or things I am grateful for of late. The stars represent states of mind  that I aspire to, rather than states of the union. My flag of kindness, I guess. If I was designing my own flag it would be different, but this is an interesting start. What would your flag look like?

The facing page is an illustrated pig that I’m working on as a gift for a friend and also as a coloring page. The way it is decorated is inspired by a paisley shirt that I have with some Zentangle patterns thrown in for fun. It led me to return to my altered book journal as my watercolor journal is too small to include much in the way of sketches of art that I’m working on. The background of this page represents a significant event that I was able to participate in with my mom.  I was able to perform a kindness for her and it has turned out well for us. It is so satisfying to be able to help someone.

That’s all from my corner for now. Have a beautiful day.

Kindness in Communication

Tags

art journal, gratitude, gratitude journal, intention, kindness, Mandala, New Year, zentangle

My intention for 2015 is to increase my kindness in my communication. I have been doing a lot of reflecting on my intentions for 2015 in the last 10 days. In the process of reflection I have created this mandala.

I have been looking through a few different blogs that have challenges that I intend to follow this year to aid me in keeping to my intention.

http://kindnessblog.com/

My good blogging friend http://suzjones.wordpress.com/ has been a guest blogger on the kindness blog. The idea of making a commitment to speaking kindly really resonated with me. In discussing my struggles with this commitment with my husband I discovered that one thing I can do is to communicate what I am grateful for to the people I am grateful for. This may seem obvious to you, but it was kind of an aha moment for me. One of the greatest struggles I have with speaking kindly, other than the whole humanity thing, is the ever present migraines that I have. I always feel a little bit crappy at best and that tends to make me feel crabby. The introspection on this topic has led me to the awareness that as a consequence of feeling crabby and crappy, I don’t communicate very much with my friends and family in fear of being a whiner and being too negative. So I don’t say much of anything at all.

Here comes the TaDa:

I have been keeping track of things everyday that I am grateful for and I take time to illustrate them in my art journals. Then I take the time to blog about them and share them with all of you. How have I been doing on sharing them with the people who are directly involved? Not so hot. Well, here is one area of kind communication that I intend to improve upon! I will keep you updated on how this plays out.

This year I plan to step back from teaching art and/or gratitude workshops and focus more on making art and blogging. That has led me to the other 2 websites that were part of the introspection process. The first is http://collagediva.typepad.com She is hosting a 100 mandala challenge that I plan to take part in and may incorporate into my gratitude journal. Also http://journal52.com/2015-week-1-pathways/ This blog is a natural support for my art journal and I am very excited about seeing how weekly prompts impact my journal. The introspection mandala is a nice synthesis of both of these paths. I’m curious to see where they take me.

I would also like to ask you a specific gratitude question each week. My question for this week is who was kind to you today or this week? Take a moment to relish that kindness and maybe even pass it on.

Happy New Year!