New Year – New hope – New Life !

 

Don’t I love this activity of going through the agenda of the year ending and preparing for the new year!!

It is a ritual that I adore and if I can’t find time to do it before Jan 1st, I feel I am late somehow and cannot start the year properly.

Today I took 2 hours to please myself and go through last year’s entries and record thoughts and events from 2017.

Our trip to Australia, to be detailed later in my travel journal, my new incursion into the FODMAP way of eating because of years of problems, several notes and details about our little grandchild growing and becoming a little person with his brilliance, his quirks, his sense of humour and mannerism, his own take on the world already! Only two he is but so much to give to the world already, I hope he never doubts it, I wish happiness for him forever!

So I am ready for 2018, copied important thoughts and entries, got all the important birthdays in and am already planning the exhibitions, vacations, painting projects, challenges and explorations.

I wish everyone an inspired and artistic new year. Art is not only about painting, writing or performing arts; we are all artists that create our lives from day to day. We need to follow our instinct and intuition. We need to be open to the world, to ideas! We create our reality and we must decide to be the Main act in what is happening to us while respecting our loved ones as well as others.

For many years, I felt I was going with the flow and we must be able to do so because of what life is throwing at us, but we must also make up our minds about who we want to be, who we want to become, what we want to create in the physical world and in our spiritual world.

Be kind to yourself

Love yourself

Love your neighbour

Happy new year 2018 !

Hopefully by being the best we can be, the world will be the best it can be!!

With Love

Suzanne

 

 

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Best wishes !

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The influence of a mother

A few days after mothers day, add to this the excellent blog from Upwitscreek https://upwitscreek.wordpress.com/2015/05/13/swinging-the-bat/

and this morning the non-fiction prompt from “The Time is Now” ‏coming into my in-box with this statement:
In The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde remarks, “All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s his.”

 

It then goes on to ask us to think and write about some reminiscent traits (patterns of behaviour or little quirks reminding us of our parents or guardians) that still impact who we are today.

I have decided to write about my mother. I must say that as much as I never wanted to be like my mother while growing up, rejecting her lifestyle, her devotion to my father, her obsession with cleanliness and order, I changed my mind and tried to be exactly like her once my children came into my life. I always thought she was just perfect especially because of her happiness and acceptance of who she was ! Optimist, loving, always in a good mood! A super housekeeper with a perfect routine she was able to stick to, our house was always in perfect order and “spic and span”. Secretly, I envied the life she and my father had built, the way they seemed so in love even after 25-30 years of marriage.

Growing up, she was able to build a perfect nest of love and comfort, where you could always turn and feel safe, for my sister and I. I loved my mother with all my heart. At adolescence, I revolted against her agreeable disposition, of what I perceived as weakness, of the way she would shy away from any argument, preferring to keep peace with everyone. But it was hard to stay upset with someone that could give you everything and accept everything I did.

When I had children of my own, I tried to be perfect like I thought she had been with us. I loved, cared and fought for my children’s wellbeing fiercely, shielding them from the things I judged as bad in life for as long as possible, also creating a world, a nest of as perfect a love I could give them.

I admired my mother very much and no matter how hard I tried, I never felt I was quite as good as her. For one, I went back to work after my first child. Thirty years ago, this meant I wanted to be at home when I was at work and at work when I was at home, the guilty feelings slowly eating away at me.

I was not able to keep up the house like she used to, bake pies and cakes, nor did I want to really, but I thought I should and could not make my days longer than they were. I was not able to feel and stay joyous, to start singing while I cleaned, to smile all the time, more guilty feelings. I wanted to be perfect for my family. I was missing the crucial element of self-acceptance.

Is our happiness and our sense of accomplishment as mothers linked to our perception of how perfect or imperfect our mothers were? As a young mother, my aim was to become my mother in the eyes of my children and my failure to attain this goal left me feeling inadequate and depressed me. I totally refused to consider I was different and could not, really, become like her. This feeling stayed with me for many years, I am sure affecting how I treated my own children and influencing how they perceived me while growing up. I asked a psychologist one time if it was bad for my children that I was unable to be joyous and happy deep down inside, to be able to transmit optimism and love of life like I thought I should. She suggested I go into therapy which I didn’t do at the time.

My mother, as much as she listened to us and opened her arms to envelope us with love every time we needed it, did not share a lot of herself, her deeper self with us, at least I don’t remember it. It was always about others for her. She was a very giving person and when we started school she threw herself into volunteer work with the same enthusiasm she had displayed at keeping up her love nest, and still kept it up too.

Still today, more than 30 years after her death, I miss my mother, I miss her unconditional love, her wisdom, her optimism, her reliability, her voice.

http://www.suzannebelair.com

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Love

What to say about love?

Love of life, love of children

Love of friendships

Love of a sunny afternoon at the beach?

What are we looking for exactly?

Everyone wants to be loved

But who wants to love enough, to appreciate enough

Everyone wants love but not many

Are ready to sacrifice enough

To get it and keep it

To feel it deeply

Love of oneself often translates into selfishness

All theories…

What do you love?

Take a moment to meditate on this at the start of the day

In order to align your life with what you love

Do something you love today

I will paint

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Believe you make a difference

In today’s world, we are confronted with a lot of anger and dissatisfaction about everything. This creates so much anxiety and unrest in everyone that comes into contact with this anger whether through the evening news, newspapers or by being confronted with this despair right under our eyes.

Personally, we are going through a trying time, having just found out another friend got stricken with cancer and once again, I realise how life can change in an instant or even end abruptly. We all know we live as ticking time bombs but some of us are wasting so much time just being anxious, afraid or angry. And what does it change except that we are losing these precious minutes that have been allotted to us at the start of our life?

This morning, as I am trying to cope with the news, packing because we are moving soon and struggling with the fact that I don’t have enough time to paint and prepare for some upcoming exhibits, I decided a good way to bring back some peace in my life would be to read a couple of verses from the Tao Te Ching. And I fell on the 54^th verse which says:

The Tao is everywhere;

It has become everything.

To truly see it, see it as it is.

In a person, see it as a person;

In a family, see it as a family;

In a country, see it as a country;

In the world, see it as the world.

How do I know this is true?

By looking inside myself.

 

This speaks to me of understanding and tolerance. This speaks of our role in transforming our lives and how this transformation creates a ripple effect that spreads to our family, friends and acquaintances, to our community and to the planet. This tells us that our life is important and that whatever animates our bodies and our thoughts (Tao, God, Life) in our inner silence, it is present and significant, we do make a difference. And this difference should go towards making this planet a better place. We have to realize that we can consciously make a difference for the better of humankind and that each gesture, each thought have an effect and change something. We have to strive to make that change positive and kind, and to achieve that change not through violence and aggression, but through patience and understanding, with love.

Everything we think eventually becomes reality, extends outward in some capacity and therefore has the power to affect the future, our own and that of the universe. We have to live our lives with this awareness and remind ourselves each and everyday of the importance of living and treating others with kindness. This kindness must also extend to ourselves. We have to feel this knowledge in our core and live accordingly.

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Should we believe only what we understand ?

My blog today was triggerred by a conversation, a brief sentence uttered last night.

“Believe in what you don’t yet understand”. Je viens de lire cette phrase et pour moi, ça m’a parlé de jugement, d’idées préconçues et de regarder plus loin que notre nez. Pour mon fils ça lui a tout de suite parlé de religion.

« Croyez à ce que vous ne comprenez pas encore »

Qu’est-ce que ça veut dire? Au-delà de l’aspect physique, qui fait partie de la vie même s’il est impossible que tous le comprenne, par exemple, si on ne comprends pas le fonctionnement du cœur qui fait circuler le sang dans nos artères et nos veines pour oxygéner le cerveau et le corps et pour maintenir votre vie. Est-ce que ça veut dire qu’il n’existe pas? Bien sûr que non.

 

Il y a l’aspect spirituel et tout le monde des sentiments, des intuitions, de l’instinct.

Est-ce possible de dire que l’amour inconditionnel n’existe pas parce qu’on ne comprends pas ce principe? Est-ce possible de dire que l’amour d’une mère pour son enfant ne fait pas partie de son univers?

 

C’est pour moi la façon de regarder cette phrase. Nous vivons dans un monde d’inconnus, inconnu du lendemain, inconnu de ce qui est vraiment dans le coeur, dans la tête de notre conjoint, inconnu des raisons profondes qui nous animent nous-même. L’inconnu du futur, du passé, du temps qui passe. Toutes ces choses qui font partie de nos vies et des vies de nos amis, de notre famille, de nos être aimés.

 

Je ne comprends peut-être pas la motivation qui pousse une certaine personne à agir d’une certaine façon mais ça ne veut pas dire que, pour elle, c’est la seule façon d’agir logiquement. Le fait de ne pas comprendre quelque chose ne veut pas dire que cette réalité n’existe pas dans la vie de mon voisin.

 

« Believe in what you don’t yet understand »

 

I believe in love

I believe in peace

I believe in the order of nature

I believe in the good in people I believe I am part of a universal body that is linked somewhat,

I believe we all live in unison and that we each have a role to play that very often, we don’t understand

I believe everybody can improve themselves and their lives

I believe you have to follow your intuition and it will get you to a better place

I believe in my kids

I believe in myself, that I can overcome anything.

I believe in the power of the brain and of the mind

 

All these things I believe in and there are much more but I don’t understand them.

I believe in the power of creativity

Where do ideas come from anyhow?

I believe in the force of ideas, that these ideas come to us for a reason. The only problem is we lack the time to listen to our internal voice and follow its whisper. So I believe in my internal voice and that everybody has one.

I believe some people have it harder than other and I have been looking for reasons for this and I cannot find them

I believe I love people and the universe and sometimes I feel so connected, it’s uncanny.

 

All these things I believe in, and yet, I don’t understand them.

Life is all about things we don’t understand. Going through life and growing through life I should say, we understand more and more as we grow older. And it is this learning process that is so much fun. It is true that it is scary to think about believing in things you don’t understand. I guess religion has been taking advantage of this for centuries because people need to believe in something. People need to know that life is not that bad after all and that some supreme power will help them out of their situation.

 

But the only person that can help you is yourself and that is a perfect example of the belief in what you don’t yet understand. You have to believe in yourself even if you don’t yet understand where your strength will come from. You have to love and believe in yourself, that you sill succeed that you will attain this goal that seems today so far.

 

It is in believing in what you don’t yet understand that you get the courage, the hope, that spark, that lights your road and that makes you reach for something else, for something better.

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