What To Do In Parking Lots

Make Super Model photo shoot.


"Levels: work Levels babe!"


"We iz suburban grunge"


"We iz modern dance"

Taken approximately five hours before we danced in front of Bobby Flynn wearing angel wings and cowgirl hats.

We were just warming up.

What do you do in parking lots?

My challenge to you this weekend is to go out and make parking lot art. Make those concrete jungles a place for beauty and creativity to bloom. (post a link in the comments if you do it)

:)
blessings,
Leonie

beauty

The last few weeks have been a cornucopia of pleasure and adventure.
I've been dancing at concerts dressed up as a cowgirl angel, waking up before dawn to go on a photography adventure with a bus friend, sitting in sacred circles, spending the weekend at a healing retreat with my love, our dog and a dear dear friend, walking in the bush, canoeing in misty lakes, having all day slumber parties, climbing mountains in pyjamas and just generally being amazing.

Most importantly,
I've been not comparing, sitting in the silence of my own life, committing to the sacred joy of keeping some stories all to myself and remembering my own beauty.

May I share this knowing:

you need not be like anybody else.
in fact, please do not be like anybody else but you.
you were made the way you are for a sacred, special reason that is still unfolding.
live your life as it appears in your own vision ~ not anybody else's, but yours.
you are amazing. you are needed.
you are all kinds of flavours of magnificent, delicious and inspiring
just as you are, right now.

nobody is any more beautiful than you.

remember your own beauty.

who you are is enough. your precious life is enough.

i write this with a tender heart that's been finding its own way back to those knowings.

blessings on your path,
leonie

Ways to Change the World

• Books can be our best friends, our inspirations, our wisdom jewels and our delights. They nourish us deeply. It's time to nourish Mama Earth for providing us with all the paper in those books! Have a tree planted for every book you buy at Eco-Libris.

• Make your adventures to discover the world a healthy thing for the world too! You can make your flights carbon neutral here. (With thanks to my lovely name~sister Leonie Wise for these two links!)

• Instead of birthday and Christmas cards or presents you feel you *should* buy for friends and family~ why not gift them with a good feeling? You can gift them with the pleasure that a third world community has just been changed by being given a business loan, animals, tools, water or education. You can gift Hope through Oxfam Unwrapped Australia, UK and American websites. Plus, it feels kinda fun to tell someone you bought them a goat for their birthday.

• Become a lender to an entrepreneur in a developing country to help them fulfill their dreams. You can become a lender to change lives through Kiva.

• Planning a wedding, and don't know what to have as those bags of sugared almondy thingies? I say give them a little bag of seeds, and a card that says a tree has been planted and named in their honour. What a beautiful emblem of your growing love that could be!

• The energy saving version of Google: Blackle
  
  
• Become a part of a heart shaped forest at Tree Nation (With thanks to sweet Silvia for this!)
  

Got ideas and ways to save the world? Email me at leonie (at) gmail (dot) com & I'll add them.

With Mama Earth love,
Leonie

teal

Somedays I get so caught up in my head.
In comparing myself, in believing things that aren't true, in disregarding and judging and being divisive and just generally feeling a lot of soul pain. So apart from myself and apart from My Self ~ that is ~ You. All of you. Every soul on this Earth, every breathing tree, every panting dog, every swelling sea. When I am hard on myself, or hard in my thoughts about any one of You ~ I feel soul pain, because I am apart from the Great Truth of our Divine and Lovely Oneness.

(Writing that, I see that apart is a-part, so any feeling of disconnection or away from is an illusion and not the Beauty Truth.)

I decided last night that I'd had enough. That I needed - somehow - to make new brain synapse pathways instead of driving the jeep down the rutted brain thought roads of Not Good Enough Street, I Am Unloved Circuit, I Am Unseen Driveway.

So I went to sleep with meditative music playing in my ear, imagining all the angels rushing to my side just to monitor my life source.

I wake up, and somehow I can't quite fall as low as I did yesterday.
At lunch, a burly, beautiful man takes me on a walk. Past a sales bin, and there is a treasure calling my name. A gorgeous soft beanie cap (in the colour of "teal" as my New Best Friend At Work labelled it). Somehow, under its embrace, I feel safer, like my head is enveloped in Clouds of Gladness. It is my own little emblem of hope, an adornment on the altar of my body to symbolise who I am under the sky.

We move to the bookstore, and over and over books peek out at me from a woman with radiant grey eyes. She reminds me on one page that when we say we need to love ourselves more ~ it is not the truth. Because that makes the assumption is that Love is something we need to DO, and that we do not already Live in a State of Love.

I forget, sometimes, about that Love.
Please be gentle with me, World, when I forget that. It pains me just as much as you when I forget about Love. And I promise I will try to remember that we are ALL in this sway of forgetting and remembering about Ourselves and Love. Sometimes I think the crabbiest and most jaded amongst us are the ones keening for Love the most. May I always Love them.

Such small but huge things ~
a beanie, and a book,
to make things seem beautiful and My Own again.

As the sun set, I find myself giggling in the bedroom,
rolling about with a camera,
finding delight in my own gifts again.

I love you, just as I love myself, and I love what we are doing,
and I will have faith for Us as tiny as a seed and as mighty as an oak,
as much as I can from wherever I am.

With love, gentleness, magic and remembering to you ~
Leonie

why art

she dreams in the desert, charcoal, pastels and mixed media

Not so long ago, I had a conversation with a sciency friend.
We had similar marks at university before I decided to take another path and actually DO my art instead of learning about its history.
He enquired ~ "Why art?"

It was a good question.
At school, I finished with good marks - great marks. In approximately the top 5% of the state or the like. I could do anything I liked. I elected to pursue a Bachelor of Arts which required an entry level of OP 16 or below. I had an OP 2.

I studied full time and part-time, on and off for a few years, changing my majors from journalism, to sociology, to Australian Aboriginal studies, to psychology, to public policy, to art history and economic policy.

I have flirted and considered seriously career aspirations of being Prime Minister of Australia (not joking), senior public servant and Mayor of my hometown.

All of these things because I knew I could do anything I wanted.

Nothing really challenged me. In intellectual matters, I knew all the games. I was (and still am) an information sponge. I have somewhat a photographic memory at times. If I wanted a mark, I could get it. If I wanted a job, I could get it. Life was, and still is, all about choices. I am not limited by any outside circumstances or influences. Everything is my choice.

And I chose art.

I explain the past above in order to emphasise this point -
out of all the things I could have chosen in life, I chose art.

He wanted to know:
Why art?

Art is my greatest challenge and my greatest pleasure.
When I get it right, I walk out beaming and thrilled in every part of me. I wonder back in my studio as I walk around the house just to peek at her. Before I go to bed, I go and absorb her into me so the last thing I see is that something magnificent I just created.
When it doesn't work, I roll it over and over in my mind again, calling the answer to me. It comes in visions, in dreams, in sudden bursts of "getting it." I listen to her, to the story she wishes to share, and play until she is in this world how she wishes to be.
Art terrifies me. It calls on all parts of me. It's not something I can work out with a simple equation. It's not something I can memorise. It's not something I can use my ginormous (he he) brain to work out. It's every single part of me ~ mind, body, soul.
It's something intangible that I attempt to document. It is ethereal and other worldly, and I am a woman splashing it down in acrylics.
Sometimes I am scared shitless of creating. Sometimes I am brave and courageous.
When things are right, they feel so very very right. I have cried upon the floor when things work out. And I have yearned, striving for that feeling of more, more. More authenticity, more reality, more dreaming, more colour. More being present with myself as I gasp my way through this art of creating art.

That's why I chose art. And that's why I keep choosing it.
It entices me, encourages me, and pushes me into being even more of myself.

It teaches me the possibilities of creation,
of the artform of shaping my own life,
and the miracle of making my own self more Leonie.


Why do you choose what you choose?