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The Shiny Squirrels of Autumn

I really don’t know where to begin, so I will start writing and see where it leads. Starting is easy; staying on any track long enough to finish the job is a challenge as shiny squirrels are so enticing.

Shiny Squirrels?

Ahh, your local squirrels aren’t shiny? Mine either. In Brevard, North Carolina, there are white squirrels. But I’ve never seen a real shiny squirrel – other than as a Christmas ornament. On the other hand, I have definitely seen beautiful, sparkly objects and activities and possibilities that attract my attention. Yes indeed I have.

I’ll bet you’ve seen a squirrel scurrying around your yard, too. They appear to zoom from one thing to another with no rhyme or reason.

I watch them dig under fallen leaves, then zoom over there for something.

They cross the power lines way above the ground here, scoot down the tree there, and then deftly navigate the narrow top of the fence to another secret cache of nothing at all under the leaves.

Shiny squirrels are distractions.

Shiny squirrels are master magicians tricking you into paying attention over here while something else is happening over there – where you *should* be paying attention.

You’re busy paying attention to:

that damned iPhone,
the latest news about–
rumors,
gossip,
TV shows,
talk radio,
news,
celebrities,
politics,
the entire internet–
scrolling, scrolling, scrolling, scrolling on that damned phone, and
everybody but you.

We’re scrolling and scrolling as if the next scroll will save our souls or answer the one big question, or fix the issue of the moment, and then everything will be OK.

What Really Matters

These past months I thought I was going in one direction. But then the movie PGS: Intuition failed to sell enough tickets to be shown in Mount Pleasant, and I stopped.

I’d say that was the turning point for me, but that would be a lie. Two trips to the local emergency room on two consecutive days is a more accurate assessment of when that bottom hit this time.

[Total non-sequitur: I’m fine, in a future post I’ll write more about exactly what happened – then break down how I reacted. So no need to call or write or wonder why I have only told a couple people. Stop worrying!! If I’ve had dinner with you recently or talked with you recently, and didn’t mention it, there’s a reason: I’m fine. The details about this are on the way, provided no more shiny squirrels show up…

Oh wait.

What was I writing about?]

Shiny Squirrels Do Not Matter

Shiny squirrels are in cahoots with your ego mind, that part of you that wants to be in control of everything all the time.

The ego mind corrects you, criticizes you, and always has an answer to everything – except when it really counts.

My mind was attuned to negativity, I was overwhelmed with taking in too much information, I was on the computer 15 hours a day, I was reading big books, and was feeling way out of sorts. To top it off, I wasn’t eating well. I wasn’t caring for myself.

That is, I was showering and doing *that* kind of self care to maintain, but not celebrate. I wasn’t doing things that matter to me:

Spending time with friends and family
Loving on my furry friends – Ivan and Nebula
Walking in nature (I barely worked in my garden at all this summer)
Doing things that are fun
Laughing out loud
Listening to music that I love
The list goes on…and on…

So Just Stop Already

Whatever you’re doing right now, just stop it.

Take a deep breath in and look around you. Give thanks.

Pause just a bit longer, and take a darned good look inside yourself.

Have you forgotten to do something that feeds your soul?

Has a shiny squirrel distracted you? Have you wavered in your deep love for yourself, others, and this magical world of ours?

Breathe.

If you can change course right now, do it.

If you can’t, pull out your calendar and make plan an escape plan. My coach talks about finding joy in micro vacations – little escapes through the day.

Can you find five minutes?

Life is not about shiny squirrels. They’re cute little devils, and devils is the optimum word here.

Beware those cuties!

Beware the shiny thing that just caught your attention!

And breathe.

You can do this Monday, this week, this life just fine.

Creativity and Intuition Are Partners Made In Heaven

creativity and intuition are partners made in heaven

Creative intuition is the ability to quickly identify valuable or useful creative ideas without conscious thought. As with all intuition, it is described as instantaneous without any conscious understanding of how the mind created the idea. –Simplicable

Intuition is Creative

Back when I was first truly starting on my spiritual journey, I worked through Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way with a small group of women. Cameron encourages you to slowly begin exploring your feelings about creativity.

I’d done fairly well in art classes in middle school. But by high school I was a typically petulant teenager and stopped taking art classes: I had to go to college and get a job, after all. Art was not for people like me.

But by the mid-90s I had started meditating regularly, and used the gentle nudging of Cameron’s writing to explore creativity. Sure, Cameron made suggestions, but it was up to me to decide what to try. A friend suggested craypas, and boy, that was all it took.

I created craypas drawing after craypas drawing – just playing with the texture and colors, not following any specific rules and not hoping for a really good grade or someone’s approval. Remarkably, most drawings explored the images and feelings that came to me during meditation.

It was purely intuitive drawing. Listen to what Picasso said about intuition:

I don’t have a clue. Ideas are simply starting points. I can rarely set them down as they come to my mind. As soon as I start to work, others well up in my pen. To know what you’re going to draw, you have to begin drawing… When I find myself facing a blank page, that’s always going through my head. What I capture in spite of myself interests me more than my own ideas. -Picasso

You may not be Picasso, but you can definitely be creative. Grab some crayons and paper. Sit quietly, and then just color. Ignore the rules, and just do what feels right.

It OK to do what feels right to you. The idea is to figure out what you do all on your own, without an art teacher grading you or friends critiquing you.

Poetry is Heaven Whispering

I’ve always been a poet; heck I even won a poetry award in high school. But in my 30s, fell in with some amazing poets in Athens, Georgia, and created remarkable poetry.

In poetry, words slip and slide like colors on a painting, like craypas or watercolor. I just followed what was my unique way of using words and fellow poets encouraged me to “just do me.”

The ‘Morning Pages” technique of Julia Cameron gets me going. I simply sit down, take a pen in my hand, and start writing whatever shows up. Usually I’m whining about the fact that it’s early and I’m tired and don’t know what to write or why I’m bothering to write.

But then magic happens, and the voice shifts.

There is a marked shift in the writing. It’s whiny and then -poof! It’s clear and beyond competent. Look at these divine words that simply flowed out of me one morning on it’s own.

Creativity Is Intuition

Once you’ve tried your hand at a little creativity (whether it’s craypas or poetry – or your favorite creative endeavor,) it eventually becomes easy to intuit everything and anything. Want to add a garden to your back yard? Sit in the backyard at different times of the day and feel what would make you happy. Just listen to your heart, and you’ll know exactly what to do.

What creative practices do you do? How do you use your intuition when being creative?

Reading Soothes My Soul (September 2018)

I swear my last reading update was years ago, yet it was really only in July. How is it that it was only two months ago?

And I thought I hadn’t read much until I started to pile up the books…they’re more than fourteen inches tall!

And yes, that is an old-fashioned ruler, the kind that construction workers used back in the day.

Mindfulness by Joseph Goldstein. This is a series of lectures by Goldstein, one of the people who brought vipassana (aka mindfulness) meditation to America. Along with Sharon Salzburg and Jack Kornfield, Goldstein founded the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts. When there is a retreat being held at the center, there is always a dharma talk, or lecture, in the evening; this book is a collection of those lectures by Goldstein specifically covering the Satipatthana Sutta, the foundational discourse of Buddha on mindfulness. I find I can only read a one lecture a day because each brings so much to ponder. It’s worth it, though, as there are plenty of jewels like this:

An ironic and useless patter that I’ve noticed in my own retreats is that my mind comments on someone not being mindful — or at least not appearing to be in my eyes — all the while being oblivious to the fact that in that very moment I’m doing exactly what it is I have a judgement about: namely, not being mindful! It usually doesn’t take me long to see the absurdity of this patter and then just to smile at these habits of mind. It’s always helpful to have a sense of humor about one’s own mental foibles.

I’ve definitely never been guilty of this, have you?

The Little Old Lady Who Broke All The Rules by Catharina Ingelman-Sundberg. This was a fun little read that I picked up on a late summer adventure to Grand Rapids. I went over for the day and hit Nordstrom Rack, thrift stores on 29th street, Trader Joes, and (how could I not) Schuler Books. I ate lunch and gathered a few books including this one purely for the title.

The back-of-book blurb attracted my attention too: “Martha Andersson may be seventy-nine years old and live in a retirement home, but that doesn’t mean she’s ready to stop enjoying life. So when the new management starts cutting corners to save money, Martha and her four closest friends won’t stand for it.” This league of pensioners gets up to all sorts of hilarious hijinks and you’ll love it. Thank goodness there’s at least one more in the series: The Little Old Lady Who Struck Lucky Again!

On that same trip, I bought Bibliomysteries edited by Otto Penzler. This is a collection of short stories about bookshops, libraries, book collectors, and booksellers. Authors include Mickey Spiillane, Nelson DeMille, Anne Perry, and Laura Lippman. The subtitle of the book says it all: stories of crime in the world of books and bookstores.

Mindful Aging by Andrea Brandt. I really tried to like this book, but alas, I can’t do it. The subtitle of the book is “embracing your life after 50 to find fulfillment, purpose, and joy.” It comes off a little too simplistic for me, and probably for you, too.

The Greywalker series by Kat Richardson: Poltergeist , Labryinth, Vanished, and Seawitch, and others. This urban fantasty series features private investigator Harper Blaine who just happens to be able to see between the worlds. Start with #1 in the series, Greywalker, which explains how Blaine got these talents, among other things.

The Edge of Dreams by Rhys Bowen. Bowen writes the Molly Murphy mysteries series, set in the early part of the 1900s in the New York City area. Molly’s biggest challenge seems to be balancing what a proper woman should do (stay at home and take care of her young child) versus her natural instincts to solve mysteries as well as any man – including her police captain husband. Charming, if a little predictable.

The Tuscan Child by Rhys Bowen. Bowen is a prolific author, and this book is definitely not a Molly Murphy mystery. It does seamlessly blend the stories of a World War II British bomber pilot and his daughter in with a quaint rural Italian town. Bonus points for delicious food, but like The Edge of Dreams, this is a charming if a little predictable read.

Raspberry Danish Murder by Joanna Fluke. New Hannah!!! I read this super-cozy mystery in one night, and am delighted by the end. I wrote about the recipes on my other blog. Though I’ve been annoyed by plot developments in previous books, this one is sweet and complete, just like the perfect chocolate chip cookie.

The Last Girls by Lee Smith. If you got together with college roommates, you’d have a lot of fun, right? I would! But these roommates and friends seem more bent on destroying each other, or at least hurling insults and mean glances. There is fun, to be sure, as the women recreate their trip down the Mississippi, but I wouldn’t want to be along for the trip.

Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon by David McGowan. If you don’t know it already, I love me a good so-called conspiracy theory. I even wrote a little bit about the whole QAnon stuff going on this past year. QAnon and David Wilcock both posit that something much bigger is going on covertly, and that we’ll all know about it soon enough. So it’s the perfect time to read this little collection of stories from McGowan who wrote about a lot of very interesting things. This book explores the Laurel Canyon scene in the 60s and 70s that spawned a whole hoot of musicians: the Byrds, the doors, Buffalo Springfield, the Monkees, the Beach Boys, the Turtles, the Eagles, and more. And it especially delves into the underbelly of that scene (think Charles Manson connections) and a lot of military connections.

Don’t forget, I’m bringing PGS Intuition to the Mount Pleasant Celebration Cinema on October 1st. Hope to see you there!

Quotes About Intuition

quotes about intuition

If your car has GPS that helps you navigate the world, why don’t we have GPS for our lives? I don’t know about you, but I sure could use some assistance making decisions.

According to filmmaker Bill Bennett in the movie PGS: Intution we have built in GPS. That internal GPS is called intuition – your personal guidance system. Here are some awesome quotes about the power of intuition.

Trust your intuition. you don’t need to explain or justify your feelings to anyone, just trust your own inner guidance.

intuition is god talking to you

Come from the heart, the true heart, not the head. When in doubt, choose the heart. This does not mean to deny your own experiences and that which you have empirically learned through the years. It means to trust your self to integrate intuition and experience. There is a balance, a harmony to be nurtured, between the head and the heart. When the intuition rings clear and true, loving impulses are favored.

― Brian L. Weiss, Messages from the Masters: Tapping into the Power of Love

listen to the wind

Insight is not a light bulb that goes off inside our heads. It is a flickering candle that can easily be snuffed out.
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

the intellect has little to do

Listen to your own voice, your own soul. If something doesn’t feel right, it probably isn’t. –Anonymous

listen to your inner voice

Our intuition is like a muscle, we must practice listening to it and trusting its wisdom. When you take the time to ask and keep listening for the answer, being at peace becomes easy. –Lisa Prosen

PGS Intuition: Your Personal Guidance System

If you’re within driving distance of Mount Pleasant, Michigan, please join me to watch the movie PGS: Intuition at Celebration Cinema on October 1. The movie follows Australian journalist Bill Bennett’s journey to discover all he can about the voice that saved his life – what he calls our personal guidance system.

Please note this movie will not be shown unless 36 tickets are reserved by September 21 at 1pm Eastern. Tickets must be purchased in advance; no tickets available at the door.

Buy Tickets
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Be / Learn / Know

be learn know julieawallace

All Earth bound, tethered down Souls

All flying inside the mind of One,

All of You, friends unrecognized

and shying away from discovery by

repenting treacherous discoveries

to be named at a later date.

All of us sleeping,

and all of us waking

using metaphor and symbol,

using words, pictures, and songs.

All of us

here

learning the same lesson

The same lesson

The Same Lesson

We have no books to study, no exam, no school, no bell, no specially built building to congregate and confrontate in. We have no teacher save our Self. We learn by experience. We learn by not doing. We are a paradox. We are balance. We can divine the present more certainly from the past. We do not encourage future thinking. We want the now. We need the NOW.

We do not proclaim our allegiances or our hatred: our voices cannot be heard. Today is tomorrow is yesterday is today. We are all the same. We do not strive for differentiation because there is none, but one. This is not a religion. This is not a manipulation. This is a dream, and this is reality.

We are moving much faster. We will be all, and all that will be, is all we are. We do not speak out. We are silence, deafening. There is no curriculum to follow, no requirements needed, no applications being taken, no pay at the end of the week, no fee for knowledge.

We do not practice hate, but acknowledge tolerance. This is not a manifesto of the Aquarian Age; this is the truth. Truth is ambiguous. Time is a concept like reality is created.

Dimensional shifts are not real, but reality is. Chairs have feelings, buildings feel pain, and Earth is packing her bags to leave US.

Assuming time as linear, your time is gone. Over. This is a wake-up call for the world; this is an alarm clock.

We are not threatening. There is no fear, and there is no death. You may clutch your concepts and cradle your fear, but we have no regrets. We will not “do” your feeling for you. We have our own. We have yours. We are the Everything. We are ALL.

We are not an organization. There is no entry fee, no blue ribbon, no special recognition. No hordes of fans sleeping on your doorstep, no required worship or most preferred deity. No rewards except One. We do not know what it is. We have no answers. We welcome questions, hope for clues. We encourage puzzle solving. We believe in mystery.

Color is felt, food is thought, touch is sacred, and words are to be unraveled. Dreams are reality; reality is a dream. We believe in polarity and balance. Singing is worship; as you sing your breathe energy in to heal soul, to Heal the Soul.

This is no manifesto, no declaration, no constitution of belief. We are not negation. We are Light and Love. We have no names. We have One.