This December I decided to make my own calendars and cards using the portraits I have been painting over the last eight months or so. The whole process from mixing the paints to applying paint on the canvas to cleaning my brushes! had become a long awaiting and somewhat feared process that brought many things together and created openings. So, may each month of this New Year bring joy, health, love, peace, compassion, more conscious living, and a remembrance of what we once all knew as children:
“There is such a place as fairyland – but only children can find the way to it. And they do not know that it is fairyland until they have grown so old that they forget the way. One bitter day, when they seek it and cannot find it, they realize what they have lost; and that is the tragedy of life. On that day the gates of Eden are shut behind them and the age of gold is over. Henceforth they must dwell in the common light of common day. Only a few, who remain children at heart, can ever find that fair, lost path again; and blessed are they above mortals. They, and only they, can bring us tidings from that dear country where we once sojourned and from which we must evermore be exiles. The world calls them its singers and poets and artists and story-tellers; but they are just people who have never forgotten the way to fairyland.” (From The Story Girl by L.M. Montgomery)
‘Once upon a time, when women were birds, there was the simple understanding that to sing at dawn and to sing at dusk was to heal the world through joy. The birds still remember what we have forgotten, that the world is meant to be celebrated’ (Terry Tempest Williams)