Sharon read the following poem while we were at the Barefoot Works Yoga retreat last weekend and it kinda kicked me in the gut a little and made me want to read everything I could be Oriah Mountain Dreamer. I love this poem.

The Invitation ~ Oriah Mountain Dreamer

It doesn’t interest me what you do for a living.
I want to know what you ache for
and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart’s longing.

It doesn’t interest me how old you are.
I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool
for love
for your dream
for the adventure of being alive.

It doesn’t interest me what planets are squaring your moon…
I want to know if you have touched the centre of your own sorrow
if you have been opened by life’s betrayals
or have become shrivelled and closed
from fear of further pain.

I want to know if you can sit with pain
mine or your own
without moving to hide it
or fade it
or fix it.

I want to know if you can be with joy
mine or your own
if you can dance with wildness
and let the ecstasy fill you to the tips of your fingers and toes
without cautioning us
to be careful
to be realistic
to remember the limitations of being human.

It doesn’t interest me if the story you are telling me
is true.
I want to know if you can
disappoint another
to be true to yourself.
If you can bear the accusation of betrayal
and not betray your own soul.
If you can be faithless
and therefore trustworthy.

I want to know if you can see Beauty
even when it is not pretty
every day.
And if you can source your own life
from its presence.

I want to know if you can live with failure
yours and mine
and still stand at the edge of the lake
and shout to the silver of the full moon,
“Yes.”

It doesn’t interest me
to know where you live or how much money you have.
I want to know if you can get up
after the night of grief and despair
weary and bruised to the bone
and do what needs to be done
to feed the children.

It doesn’t interest me who you know
or how you came to be here.
I want to know if you will stand
in the centre of the fire
with me
and not shrink back.

It doesn’t interest me where or what or with whom
you have studied.
I want to know what sustains you
from the inside
when all else falls away.

I want to know if you can be alone
with yourself
and if you truly like the company you keep
in the empty moments.

Let’s all get together and dance. The world would be a much better place I think:

Exactly one month ago I wrote an entry about the things I want to do in this life and one of those things included a trip to Fairbanks, Alaska to see the Northern Lights. I have heard before that writing down your goals, illustrating them with images or simply visualizing yourself attaining those goals is a good way to make them happen. Since I wrote that post, I have checked prices on tickets, sent for a travel guide, planned the dates I want to go and even started thinking about how to get the money to make it happen.

Here is were things get interesting. While reading an entry on one of my favorite blogs today, I decided to check out the comments and then clicked through to the blog of one of the commentors and, lo and behold, she is leaving this weekend for a roadtrip to Alaska! She has the whole trip all mapped out in google maps. I sat forever clicking through the stops marked along the way, all the time getting more excited about my own journey there, hopefully in the beginning of next year. The other thing this discovery did was to give me other options than the ones I had limited myself to in my mind. Plane tickets are expensive and I had not even though about a possible road trip. It may be just as expensive but then again it may not. At least I have opened myself up to other ways of making this dream happen.

But wait there is more! Yet even later tonight, I was checking my flickr account to see if any of my contacts had updated their photos and one of my contacts that I don’t follow closely had indeed uploaded some new photos so I thought I would quickly scan them. Well…. He is Alaska right now. I’m not even making this up! Yea, a lovely landscape photo of Denali National Park just looking up at me from his photostream.

And finally, I have managed to land a couple of extra freelance jobs just in the past month that could potentially pay for a couple  of plane tickets to Fairbanks or gas and hotel room costs along the way.

Maybe I’m super hyper to all things Alaska right now and am therefore seeing things that were there before and I had not noticed until it became an interest of mine, sort of like when you decide you want to purchase a particular car and then you see it everywhere. I’m going to say there is something way more cosmic going on here though. I think I have become open to the possibility of a great adventure and therefore it is making itself achievable. Isn’t life interesting?

Tonight my friend Shannon and I decided we would skip our weekly planned yoga class and head over to the Lexington Art League for an ARTalk. Tonight’s artist was Phillip March Jones (I love that his middle name is March) and his presentation was fascinating and inspiring and witty!

ARTalks are regular events were an artist is invited to speak about their work and its evolution and the processes they use. First off, Jones’s journals intrigue me. Many of his thoughts and drawings in the journals become larger paintings but the journals themselves are little works of art. And he has SO MANY journals. He is constantly writing and drawing in them. Second, his exploration with medium and techniques was really interesting. It was great to hear his thoughts behind the works and how those thoughts evolved. The one thing that he reminded me about the most was the need for a sense of exploration and play in creativity. He started a lot of his pieces just seeing how different elements (paint and beer in one painting) react to each other and he worked with the results. It was very liberating to hear him talk about that.

I came away from the talk tonight inspired and excited about my own art work. I often get caught up in the final results I want and don’t do enough playing and experimenting. I think it might be time to brush off the moleskin journal and art supplies and see what happens.

A couple of Jones’s journals from his website:

Read More about him on his mySpace page, http://www.myspace.com/phillipmarchjones

I woke up this morning full of wonder, wanderlust and excitement about all the things I haven’t done and seen in this life and so thus begins an ongoing project for me to start listing these things here to capture them so that I can start marking them off my list. Because I’m going to you know! I am!

1. Travel to Fairbanks Alaska to see the Northern Lights.
2. Learn how to sew my own curtains and shopping bags (Must buy sewing machine!)
3. Learn how to screen print (maybe get a gocco)
4. Travel abroad for at least a month
5. Go to Iceland… Some friends just went there and their photos make me drool!
6. Build a compost bin and acquire rain barrel(s)
7. Go to New York City.. I have never been… and see a Broadway play
8. Bike to work regularly
9. Become a Yoga diva
10. Become a better runner. Maybe do a 5k or something. I need to find one and start training eh?!
11. Focus on shopping local.

Some of these things on the list scare me and really push me out of my comfort zone whether for money reasons or just the unknown or the fear of trying them and failing. Yay! That is exactly why I wanted to make this list. My comfort zone has recently started to smother me.

Thanks to my good friend, I was introduced to a wonderful artist yesterday. My friend Kathy emailed me a few weeks back and asked me if I had heard of Charley Harper and if I knew about an exhibit he was part of at the Contemporary Arts Center (CAC).

CINCINNATI’s Contemporary Arts Center ends 2006 with the most anticipated exhibition of the year. Graphic Content: Contemporary and Modern/Art and Design unites the internationally praised work of Cincinnati’s modernist pioneers with the work of today’s most exciting emerging artists. Designer/celebrity Todd Oldham’s enthusiasm for Modernist painter and illustrator Charley Harper’s work sparked the inspiration for this exhibition.

I had not heard of him and, being one that is always open to a road trip, I agreed to drive to Cincinnati with her to see what it was all about. I’m happy to say that I love his work, his wonderful sense of humor and his dedication to environmental causes. Part of the exhibit was a video of his life and work described by him himself. It is always nice to hear what the artist was thinking when they were creating a piece of art.

Read more about Mr Harper on Wikipedia
A large collection of Mr Harper’s works for sale at Fabulous Frames