Painting – When Life Feels a Little Prickly…

Dive into the Sweetness.

This painting is about the sweetness of life in the midst of the thorny moments.

I live in the center of a major city, an oasis surrounded by desert. Most all of the plant life that creates the oasis has been brought in from other states and cultivated over many decades. When I first moved here I thought, “Oh my God, it’s so hot….its so brutal, what have I done, how will I ever survive?” Over time I came to see that there is an incredible beauty to be found in the desert. The miraculous gift we have within each one of us is the ability to to suspend judgement, observe, and find the inherent gift in being right where we are in this moment, and simply being alive.

If we choose it. Joy is not a “gimme.”  I have found it is not a good plan to wait and expect joy to show up at my door and yell “surprise!”

Joy is an active choice of awareness.

I sometimes have “prickly” days. Over time, I have created a fool-proof recipe that snaps me right out of it. I know that it’s a possible prickly day the moment I wake. Like a stealth saboteur, a group shows up in the back of my mind. I call them “The Band” and they first show up as a faint murmuring and grumbling in the background. The Bands name is;

“The Commentator and the Beat Up Squad.”

Have your ever heard them?

If I allow it, they will jump on anything and everything, people, world events, even the colour of my toothbrush. They offer no valuable information, and no solutions, ever. They can really put a spoke in my bicycle wheel of life.

My recipe not only turns the volume down on the band, it disconnects their speakers, and they slowly slink back into the corners I have yet to explore.

The recipe.

I begin outload (louder than the Band playlist) listing all that I love, anything, and everything.
I can’t hear them if I am talking about what I love, it’s like changing the channel. I start right in the moment, I love my bed, I love air conditioning, I love my sons, and on and on, small to big.

Then, outload I thank everything I am grateful for; beginning with the fact that I woke up, therefore I can be valuable on the planet. I move through my morning thanking everything I see. I am thankful for hot-water, coffee, having a kitchen, a roof over my head. I can continue for 30 minutes, and by that time I feel so much love and gratitude that I have forgotten about “The Band” and the rest of my day is off to a positive start.

Yes, there are a few bumps in every day, and like most everyone, I have lived through horror stories, but the grounding in the sweetness of love and gratitude brings me back into my own “Oasis” in the desert. It brings me into the the sweetness of the gift of my life, and back into myself, a valuable person on the planet who is showing up to do my job of being alive, with gratitude and love.

And that is how I choose to beat the The Band,

and the inspiration for;

When life feels a little bit prickly, dive into the sweetness.

– Thank you.