Life is too short not to love hard

When I planned this challenge I knew April would be busy- 5 photography classes to teach, Circling with Persephone to plan and hold and quite a few collaborative pieces to finish. That's why I do them, to trick myself to the canvas when life is busy doing. Oh, I could so easily get lost down the wonderful rabbit hole with Persephone, reading stories and studying mythology, not to mention other projects I'm working on (spoiler alert- pop back in May to hear about two exciting projects) so much so that I might not find the time to pick up a paint brush to just move paint around, let alone paint a painting. April was going to be so busy that I just knew I wouldn't have time to work on my Oracle series, but a little face a day, I could still manage that- they wouldn't need to be deep or complicated, just a quick expression and play and exploration and experimentation. Just a way to keep my hand in.

What I didn't account for was our beautiful cat Sukie getting cancer, nor that it would eat him up from the inside so so quickly. All I wanted to do was snuggle him, and follow him around with bowls of water trying to tempt him to stay in this world. Yet he sat between the veils, being called home, getting close to the earth and wanting to stay with us. And we just sat with him holding space for him, trying to hold onto him and in the end we had to let him go. Then the river of tears, the saying goodbye, the sadness, the shock, the missing, the honouring.

 ♥♥♥

I step through the doors and into the day
The birds already here
    making plans and chatting
The light softly joins us
The earth is tender and hard beneath my feet.

A cockatoo flies over head, keening
    He holds the light
In his outstretched wings

My cat is dying  
    as we all are
This creature that came to teach us
    a new layer of love,
Now teaches us that
Life is too short not to love hard

His time untethering to the libation of life
    he sits in the garden sniffing the air
    the breeze rippling through his fur,
An indoor cat, such as he is,
    now drinks in the pleasure
    of looking out over the valley
Watching life do life

And we sit near him,
    gifted time in this world of tangible stars,
    reminded,  
    and cracked open
Life is too short not to love hard

 ♥♥♥

Everything that April was busy with got abandoned so that we could just be here, in this life, with our love and our grief.

I'm not sure whether I will catch up on the missed days within the 30 days, I'm not sure it matters, or whether I care (I'm of two minds on this). I'll just lay it down for sometimes this life requires living which requires just being in it, the precious moments of it, the fullness of it, the greatfullness of it as my friend Maya would say. I'm practicing laying things down as I unwittingly yet timely wrote for Empresstides over here.

With just under a week to go, who knows how things will unfold, I certainly don't. In the meantime I will paint, but first I will live this precious life moment by beautiful moment.

{ Monochrome Day 8 } “Both light and shadow are the dance of Love.” Rumi 
I’m preparing for my circle with Persephone, so I’m thinking about her time in the underworld and her time above ground when she brings light. I’m thinking about the dance of light and shadow that she is able to hold within herself, I’m thinking about the perfection of cycling through them both, of the spectrum of possibilities when we allow them to mingle. We are all black and white and a million shades of grey in between.

{Water Day 9} Queen of Salmon, she knows when to swim against the currents, and when to go with the flow. Today was a sunny autumn day, Saturday, in my part of the world, a day for pottering in the garden and hanging with the family so I decided to keep this one light, just pure play in my art journal.

{Silence Day 10} I thought this one was going to be a Silent blank canvas as sadness descends over our house but a few moments were found for some art therapy between the covers of my journal.

{Muted Palette Day 11} Just a moving meditation…

{Repurposed- Day 14}  With the deep sadness in our house right now I fell way behind in the challenge- painting did not rank high in priorities, rather holding space and being with my family, snuggling my babies won out as it should. Then I got an urge to rework this painting of my precious daughter which is on a page in her special book that I made for Of the Heart, my mixed media workshop creating an heirloom- it is on an antique lace handkerchief of my grandmother’s stitched in as one of the pages, mixed with plaster and all sorts of other mixed media bits and pieces of treasured memories.

{Draw- Day 15} For this one I wanted to take an idea from Day 5, high key, and play with it further. On day 5 I had used a bit of pencil work to define some things in the painting and for this one the idea was to use even more drawing and sketching on top of a painting to see how that might  work.

{Fairytale- Day 16} “When we assert intuition we are therefore like the starry night, we see the world as if through a thousand eyes.” Clarissa Pinkola Estes. Persephone is not exactly a fairy tale, but she is a story that lives within each of us and she has been at my side walking with me these last few weeks as I learn to let go and as I prepare for the next Circling with the Goddesses session- so many rich lessons and wisdoms does she hold. I am still so far behind in this challenge, Persephone whispers “its ok, let it go, everything has a time and a season, been in the season you are in- divine timing, trust.”

{Performer- Day 18} I’m going to catch up slowly, ever so slowly. I love how the prompt for this one was a way in, a little suggestion and then it just went its own way- Pierrot meets Goddard meets Roversi meets Alena ;)

{Blues- Day 21} I couldn’t help myself, that complementary peach just insisted on playing with the blues- aqua, teal, cerulean, sky, sapphire, cobalt, paynes, grey, smokey- who am I to deny such joy. 

{Earth- Day 22} I had planned to paint a little face on a rock in honour of my friend Jeanne-Marie’s beautiful teabag girls but it was this rich piece of bark that spoke to me on my nature walk. She’s small and fast, interesting to paint as the bark was so thirsty, taking lots of paint. While painting her I remembered it was Earth Day, don’t you love synchronicity, I had no idea when I put the list of prompts together.

Beautiful Sukie ♥♥♥