Another morning of waking up to myself, wondering where I've been.

Uncomfortable in this body and always, it seems, in conflict with the physical nature of being.

That makes me sound a bit crazy, but I'm not. Just aware.

Maybe that's why I "go to sleep" and am surprised when I'm jolted, for some reason, "awake" as happened this morning.

Surely there is some peace to be found if I focus on being compassionate and loving instead of allowing this constant negative chatter to continue; chatter I employ to belittle myself and hold myself back.

Surely there is some peace...

When the world is too much with you and the responsibilities and cares of being an adult create a massive depletion of the Joy that normally nurtures and sustains your soul, it's nice to take a break and make an effort to recapture the splendor of: Possibilities.

So, if you believe (or even if you don't!) clap your hands as you turn around three times saying "I believe!"... then enter HERE!

There is a certain comfort in holding space in your heart for the wee folk... There's even more comfort in being one!

I was pleased that I was actually able to produce, in a mere 30 minutes, a relatively good poster for the annual studio students show:

I was surfing the web the other night and found my way to Sister Joan Chittister's site. What a remarkable woman. It comforts me to find women who persist, in the trenches of organized religion, and find their voices. Or maybe it's that they are reclaiming them from long ago and showing the rest of us it can be done. They manage to find their way in what, to me, is an increasingly foreign land. I admire that. This prayer she wrote truly spoke to my heart:

A Prayer for You

May your journey
through the universal questions of life
bring you to a new moment of awareness.

May it be an enlightening one.

May you find embedded in the past,
like all the students of life before you,
the answers you are seeking now.

May they awaken that in you
which is deeper than fact,
truer than fiction,
full of faith.

May you come to know
that in every human event
is a particle of the divine
to which we turn for meaning here,
to which we tend for fullness of life hereafter.

I love this quotation...describes how I've often felt in my life. (Maybe a little too often.)

Coming home from very lonely places, all of us go a little mad: whether from great personal success, or just an all-night drive, we are the sole survivors of a world no one else has ever seen.
- John le Carre

Things are coming together design-wise! How to get my various enterprises and "styles" to work with one cohesive "look" has been a real challenge but I think I'm getting there. Here's the front and back of the new card I came up with. And I've added the red flowers to the new banner for this blog...I just love doing this stuff!

One of the faculty is pregnant and we're presenting her with a wonderful rocking horse that even makes whinnies and clip-clop sounds! Guess who got to make the card???

So I've been playing around with the avatar and banner for my Etsy shop; feelin' the need for something bright and fun and graphic. You can click here to see it on the site. It could translate easily to some fun wrappings, hang tags, etc. that would fit well with the pieces I'm designing to sell (fun, quirky, graphic, using some surprising materials). I'll post pictures when I get batteries for my camera. I had so much fun this weekend playing in the studio and asking "what if..."!!!

So when am I going to be ready to start selling? Hopefully by the fall so everyone can do their Christmas shopping at Karen Anne's!

My horoscope for today (which I just now read) started out with:

"The Full Moon in your 6th House of Habits brings awareness to your daily routine."

OMIGOD! I had absolutely no idea I had a "6th House of Habits" and what is even worse (I think it's worse anyway...) I don't even know what a "6th House of Habits" is!!!!

Am I doomed???

(Thank heavens today is almost over and the only bad thing that's happened/happening is a tornado that may or may not be heading our way even as I write this...but not to worry; I've got my glitter shoes on and am all set to click my heels together if need be...)

I thinks it's time for a martini. With THREE olives. You???

I'm remembering last May and can't wait to sit in the garden again, listening to the birds and sipping tea while reading a good book. (Blink is my current read...)

Our magnolia is blooming!

Amen! (This was posted today on Common Dreams)

Obama, Bitterness, Meet the Press, and the Old Politics

by Robert Reich

I was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, 61 years ago. My father sold $1.98 cotton blouses to blue-collar women and women whose husbands worked in factories. Years later, I was secretary of labor of the United States, and I tried the best I could - which wasn’t nearly good enough - to help reverse one of the most troublesome trends America has faced: The stagnation of middle-class wages and the expansion of povety. Male hourly wages began to drop in the early 1970s, adjusted for inflation. The average man in his 30s is earning less than his father did thirty years ago. Yet America is far richer. Where did the money go? To the top.

Are Americans who have been left behind frustrated? Of course. And their frustrations, their anger and, yes, sometimes their bitterness, have been used since then — by demagogues, by nationalists and xenophobes, by radical conservatives, by political nuts and fanatical fruitcakes - to blame immigrants and foreign traders, to blame blacks and the poor, to blame “liberal elites,” to blame anyone and anything.

Rather than counter all this, the American media have wallowed in it. Some, like Fox News and talk radio, have given the haters and blamers their very own megaphones. The rest have merely “reported on” it. Instead of focusing on how to get Americans good jobs again; instead of admitting too many of our schools are failing and our kids are falling behind their contemporaries in Europe, Japan, and even China; instead of showing why we need a more progressive tax system to finance better schools and access to health care, and green technologies that might create new manufacturing jobs, our national discussion has been mired in the old politics.

Listen to this morning’s “Meet the Press” if you want an example. Tim Russert, one of the smartest guys on television, interviewed four political consultants - Carville and Matalin, Bob Schrum, and Michael Murphy. Political consultants are paid huge sums to help politicians spin words and avoid real talk. They’re part of the problem. And what do Russert and these four consultants talk about? The potential damage to Barack Obama from saying that lots of people in Pennsylvania are bitter that the economy has left them behind; about HRC’s spin on Obama’s words (he’s an “elitist,” she said); and John McCain’s similarly puerile attack.

Does Russert really believe he’s doing the nation a service for this parade of spin doctors talking about potential spins and the spin-offs from the words Obama used to state what everyone knows is true? Or is Russert merely in the business of selling TV airtime for a network that doesn’t give a hoot about its supposed commitment to the public interest but wants to up its ratings by pandering to the nation’s ongoing desire for gladiator entertainment instead of real talk about real problems.

We’re heading into the worst economic crisis in a half century or more. Many of the Americans who have been getting nowhere for decades are in even deeper trouble. Large numbers of people in Pennsylvania and across the nation are losing their homes and losing their jobs, and the situation is likely to grow worse. Consumers are at the end of their ropes, fuel and food costs are skyrocketing, they can’t go deeper into debt, they can’t pay their bills. They aren’t buying, which means every business from the auto industry to housing to even giant GE is hurting. Which means they’ll begin laying off more people, and as they do, we will experience an even more dangerous downward spiral.

Bitter? You ain’t seen nothing yet. And as much as people like Russert, Carville, Matalin, Schrum, and Murphy want to divert our attention from what’s really happening; as much as HRC and McCain seek to make political hay out of choices of words that can be spun cynically by the mindless spinners of the old politics; as much as demagogues on the right and left continue to try to channel the cumulative frustrations of Americans into a politics of resentment - all these attempts will, I hope, prove futile. Eighty percent of Americans know the nation is on the wrong track. The old politics, and the old media that feeds it, are irrelevant now.

Robert Reich is Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley. He has served in three national administrations, most recently as secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton. He has written ten books, including The Work of Nations, which has been translated into 22 languages; the best-sellers The Future of Success and Locked in the Cabinet, and his most recent book, Reason. His articles have appeared in the New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal. Mr. Reich is co-founding editor of The American Prospect magazine.

I'm trying to bloom where I'm planted but I'm also wondering why it often seems I'm doing so between two very hard places. Nevertheless, here's me...and in my head I'm hearing Maya Angelou reciting "Still I Rise"...

In which we discover that Walt Whitman was really an almost 58 year old woman:

Do I contradict myself?/ Very well then I contradict myself,/ (I am large, I contain multitudes.) - Walt Whitman

(Sound like anyone you know????)

Spring is here! Yes indeedy!

When I was little, and living in Norway, I would make daisy chains to wear in my hair.

Oh. Never mind. (geez!)

Just wondering if having a solitary daffodil in my garden truly connotes ! SpRiNg! in it's fullest sense.Okay so this looks like a daisy. The point is the same. One puny flower does not a spring make. (Or does it?)

Uhhh...what can I say, 'cept this is sooo what I wanna be when I grow up!!!

Merriam-Webster’s
Word of the Day for April 7

luftmensch

\LOOFT-mensh (the “OO” is as in “foot”)\ noun

Meaning : an impractical contemplative person having no definite business or income

I woke up this morning with this thought: By the time you say you are leaving you have, in fact, already left.

A simple truth. But how to live with it?

Today I see the wisdom in giving two weeks notice to an employer. Right about now, the three months I gave is feeling, well, like wa-a-a-a-y the hell too much time. Not for them, perhaps. But for me, without a doubt.

So now what?

Look at this as an opportunity to reflect on what I've learned the past nine years. Take the odd moment here and there to think about what I'd like to do for the next nine years. But, most importantly, try not to wish this time away, try to stay in the moment, try to breathe and not get anxious when I know in my heart that my heart and I have already left the premises...

There is, I think, a difference between being patient and waiting. Waiting implies a certain amount of finger-drumming, toe-tapping and other assorted angst-inducing by-products of impatience. (Like using too many hyphenated words in one sentence.)

B-u-t I, a-h-e-m, d-i-g-r-e-s-s ._._.

I'm going to muster up my inner resources and practice being patient until June 15th. That day will come in its own sweet time and nothing I do or think will hurry it here. Nothing.

But next time, if there is a next time, 2 weeks notice and I'm outta there! (Come to think of it, though, the last time I gave two weeks notice was when I had been on a job - at the female bastion known as the Chi Omega Sorority Headquarters in "omigod!" Memphis TN - a mere ten days. And four days after giving notice I announced, in no uncertain terms, that I had places to go and things to do and "enough is enough!")

Some lessons have, obviously, been lost on me. Probably because I had already left the building...

Yesterday I got an email about 1-800-Flowers.com featuring all the flowers that Martha Stewart is offering through them. They are exquisite...case in point the loverly gathering of fuchsia and orange blossoms above. I worked some magic on PhotoShop and turned the image into a backdrop for my Mac so I can remember to breathe...

(My thanks to Martha and the photographer)

What fun! I've been playing around with a new banner for the blog...I think I still prefer the "clean" feel of the original (remember? just a blurred part of a photo?) but I'm having fun doing some illustrations and trying them out. Anyhoo...

Spring is in the air!