Energy flowing back in

    I've had some good energy flow back into my life recently.  For a year now, I have heard my inner guidance telling me "Be still". It's hard to be still sometimes. But I've been meditating and I have been spending a lot of time alone just staring into nature. I think that my lifestyle is far more still than the vast majority of people's. I'm grateful for that. There was a moment a few weeks ago when I visualized the life that I want and all I could see was me having a conversation with a friend. It was a friend who I had a rift happen with a few years ago and it hadn't been resolved. I value this friendship immensely, but I didn't really know what to do. 

    A few months ago I started meeting with a non-dual therapist, just to have someone to talk with because I've found that so helpful in the past. I think this has also helped. Sometimes we just need a listening ear and someone to reflect back to us what we are saying to ourself in our own mind. It needs to be a kind person, of course, someone who catches us when we are believing things that aren't true or are mean to ourselves. Someone who can hold a space to help us get clear about our own inner truth. I think this helped me finally realize that I needed to go reconnect with my friend and that I wanted to. 

    At first, I just thought I would connect with her and I didn't really want to talk about the rift that had happened between us, and then, thankfully, I realized this is exactly how my family functions. That tendency to sweep things under the rug doesn't do anyone any good and it's not how healthy relationships function. I'm glad I caught myself and realized this. As scary as it was, I brought the issue up with my friend as best I could and we talked about it. 

    I feel like I am in a much better position now to have these conversations than I used to be. I, honestly attribute this to flower essences. I really think that helped. I started using flower essences about 5 years ago. They are a branch of herbal medicine that helps us with emotional and mental and spiritual wellness. For me, I really feel like I have had trauma around having assertive conversations that address something uncomfortable and I used to go into a full on fight, flight, or freeze mode all day long in anticipation of one. I read in Bessel van der Kolk's book, The Body Keeps the Score, that the part of the brain that is devoted to language gets damaged when there is trauma. This makes perfect sense to me and it makes having difficult conversations that much harder. This is why I think the flower essences helped. I've noticed since I started taking them, that I have more ability to find words to express what I want to say to someone. It's an amazing feeling. 

    The next day after I reconnected with this friend, I got a text message from Julian at Downtown Books and News saying that one of my paintings had sold. It was a painting of birds. I found out later that a framed print of mine also sold on the same day to different people. 

    It just felt like a confirmation, energetically. Do you know what I mean? Personally, in my own healing and life journey, there has been nothing more important than noticing and respecting and honoring those subtle inner energetic feelings. They are real. We get educated to disregard them, but they are, in fact, the single most important thing in our entire lives. They guide us to our right life, they tell us when to say no and when to say yes, and they let us know if we are on the right track or if we are off track. Learning this has opened up my life to peace after living in depression for years and years. 

    Anyway, that is what I felt in that moment, an energetic connection between having that conversation with my friend and that painting selling. It felt like something that was blocking my flow had been removed, finally. 

    This painting is of cliff swallows. I painted it at a time when I was living in my studio in the Phil Mechanics Building. Yep, living in it. I had a loft on the top level of the studio and I was able to fit a full sized bed up there. I wanted to live there and I was excited about it, but it was also partly out of financial necessity. I do think that living there helped super charge my productivity though.

    Sometimes in the mornings, I would go outside and walk over the bridge that crosses over the French Broad River right by the Phil Mechanics Building in Asheville's River Arts District. I would stand on the bridge and look down over the river and there would be hundreds of birds swooping all around right under my feet. I did a little research and found out that they were cliff swallows. They build their nests out of mud by carrying little pieces of mud in their beaks and then they stick it onto cliffs (or underneath a bridge) creating a little pocket of dried mud. 

    So, I realized that's what they were doing down there. They were all swooping around under the bridge in the hundreds or thousands creating little mud pockets and feeding their babies. It was mesmerizing. It was such an incredible feeling to stand right over them and see them all flying around right under me. 

    So, that's why I created this painting. It's an ode to the cliff swallows who helped make that time in my life a magical time. Thank you cliff swallows and thank you to the person who bought this painting and thank you to the stillness and my inner voice that helped me to wake up and reconnect with my friend and remove a block for me that didn't need to be there.