the dreaming Press.

stoke the fires of your *atlas* heart

A couple, {heck a few!} urgent things. I'll get to them most hurriedly, so you don't waste a single precious moment that you could be using to sign on for grand explorations and juicy adventures {that you so deserve}.

First, my friend Debbie wants to extend an invitation for you to go to INDIA.

Second,my beautiful blogging friend Lisa has a deadline to meet, so that she can go to MEXICO.

Third, my friend Tara is hostessing the best life-changing trip {trust me, I've done it}, to JORDAN.

Last,but certainly not least, I am taking a group of women through the Women's Travel Network to MOROCCO.

So, now with all of these updates your way...it's all up to you. Maybe it's time to pay it forward and give a little to see another realize the work of her dreams...or maybe it's that time to pack a suitcase with your camera, your journal and a couple of pairs of undies, sunscreen...and hit the road to realize your own sweeping and vast dreams.

I've prioritized the list according to time deadlines. Lisa will need your help within the next ten days. Debbie has room for you up until tomorrow only.

The other two are very important, but can be discussed in another upcoming post real soon. If I were you I'd head over to see the INDIA and MEXICO links first. Thanks friends, fellow adventurers and loving hearts. You are all cherished, deeply, each of you. xo

p.s. photo of the lovely blue doorway taken from a bumbling yet speeding van in the Middle East while driving along sharing cups of hot nuts and listening to this or something like it...in March 2010

Monday's magic of hearting things. {Or, how to *draw* things into your life.}

 
 
Do you write in a journal everyday? If not, you may want to start.

I write in my journals everyday! The subject matter isn't always epic, but it is the small details that make a life.  So I record my stuff down daily, and with that I usually illustrate the few odd points that my visual mind thrives on.  These personal & meaningful {not precise or perfect} ideas spring off the dusty shelves of my imagination especially if they've been sitting without attention for some time. They just need life themselves, these tiny *sprout-like* thoughts I have. Illustrations really give structure and shape to our thoughts.  They must be included! I also be sure to include my hopes & dreams in there.

I think of it as a kind of spiritual practice; placing whatever it may be from thought to paper henceforth releasing the idea itself and giving it wings. It is interesting to go back, not in a few weeks or in a few months even...but years back to read what was going on then.  You see the emergence of patterns, whereby YOUR thoughts become the things that are your life.

Six years before I opened my business, I drew a picture of a Balinese Buddha and above it the word "SPA".  Underneath I wrote a blurb about how I would open up a spa to focus on personal wellness & the health of beauty. {This was five years before I trained to be an Esthetician.} I put it on my cork board in my office, surrounded it with magazine cutouts of beautiful images of fonts, colours, people...and just left it. {Cue the Incan pan pipes...! The magic began at that very moment.  Like a magnet, the things I desired were made manifest in my existence. Wheels were turning, tides were ebbing & flowing and storms were brewing. All to make room in my life for the things I wanted.} What I never realized at the time was that in doing such a thing I had created an invitation for those particular things to come into my world.  I had created a vision-board.  YOU can do the same thing.  It isn't for one person, all of us can do this!

If you had asked me back then what I was doing pasting all those images and words and ideas on my office wall, I couldn't have told you.  I would have just thought I was making a pretty picture of an idea I had.  But it drew into my life just what I had asked for, every minor detail was present in my current life.  How it went from A to B is unknown.  I couldn't have forseen all the changes and undercurrents that had to flow all around me in order for this to come to fruition.  But that isn't my concern.  The thoughts went out, the dream came about.  Simple as that.  I love this kind of magic, because it thrives and gleams around every corner, every facet of YOUR life too. 

Journalling plays a huge role in dream creation.  Because by writing daily what you end up creating is a daily vision board. Pages in the instruction manual of your life. Now instead of wondering what will happen to you, you can attract it in on a daily basis.   Thereby consciously creating your entire life.  So when you sit to put words on paper, choose your words with care and proper thought.  Be sure to vent if you must but always always include on those pages what you do want.  Because you will be sure to get it.

Basic ingredients for journalling;

Blank journal; lined or unlined {your preference}

Coloured markers

Black pens

Stamps, glitter, glue sticks, images you love, ideas from your heart

 

Go to town!  Start today and see your dreams unfolding before your very eyes. You needn't write a novel either.  If you have a sentence or two to illustrate then do that.  If you have more to share then do that.  It is open to your personal interpretation and there are absolutely no rules! You do not need to be a professionally trained artist.  You were born an artist and your life is your work of art.  This is merely an extention of that gift.  This is like taking the steering wheel and driving as opposed to bobbing along the river and having no particular direction.  This is your compass & your map to creating your destiny.  It isn't art to sell.  It isn't art for your walls.  It is for YOU. It is a tool.  You will love it.  It will change your life! And like knowing the secret...it is free to use.  It is something you can do to create beautiful and positive change. 

Life will always be 20% circumstances and 80% how you react to those circumstances.  It's time you took control of your circumstances. ;)

xo

P.S. Calling all women in the GTA~! Our next Girls Night Out at the spa {yes, the spa of my dreams!} will be a creative journalling evening..."Drawing in your Desired Life"...sign up for our newsletter if you want to be part of this wonderful magic!

Date: May 26, 2011

Time: 6-9:30 pm 

Your investment: Bring your willing heart & brilliant ideas for what you would like to draw into your life!

 

All the supplies you will need to get started with this project will be provided, we ask only that you sign up for a seat when you receive the newsletter.  Come for a few hours to bond with like-minded women, enjoy some snacks & drinks, & leave with fresh tools to govern your own lives with! This first class is no cost.  Subsequent classes will be charged a small fee to cover the cost of materials.

Looking so forward to creating some magic with you!

Last but certainly not least, today is Free Love Day.  Draw a heart on your wrist to bring attention to depression and suicide issues.  It is our responsibility to create a world where everyone feels welcome, and feels as though they matter.  Join in the movement to better our planet.  Help is available, just ask.

 

"Listen a hundred times; ponder a thousand times; speak once." Turkish Proverb

 

Today is stretched before me with promise. I want to decorate pencil jars & create blog banners.  I want to shoot the forest and the lake and my children collecting stones.  I'm excited because I began this huge yet wonderful office re-do and I'm making the space my very own.  I will mix colour and light and green plants.  I want it to breathe chi in the utmost Feng Shui-ed way. 

Yesterday I did an angel card reading for myself.  I so enjoy that kind of thing really-and lo! up popped the "Ideas and Inspiration" card.  I almost started singing.  I highly recommend it-living soaked in inspiration and drenched in sunlight.  Get out, get living, and if you get outside of your own head-you'll really swim with the ocean current of your life.

Let me know if you want a card read for YOU.  I'll gladly oblige.  Also, what things are you doing today? Check out these delightful composition journals that will make your heart skip a beat with pure swoonage-and make you want to record every detail of your *one wild and precious life! {*a nod to Mary Oliver}

xo

The charmingest of balconies.

I captured this on my phone the other day while walking through The Beach area of Toronto, my friend Christina and I walked "The Underwear Affair" and our team of two kicked proverbial ass.  Indeed we did. 

I stalled briefly after accidently turning my phone off, I wanted a picture of a yellow front door that I saw...I have a thing for them because my front door is yellow.  Yellow doors are the happiest of doors to go through, you see.  But when my phone gave me a hard time, I gave up and we completed our walk amidst all the jiggly and some not so jiggly buns out walking for the same cause. I never got the picture. 

But the neighbourhood we saw on our walk was so cute, charming and full of life.  There was even a fat ginger cat sunning himself out on a dangerous ledge without a care in the world. It was Christina who noticed him, "Look at that cat!" she said laughing.

As we passed the homes, which we both fell in love with...I wondered to myself, who lives here? You know me, whenever I walk by charming cosy homes I'm just itching to walk up and bang on the front door...invite them out on to the porch to chat.  Small talk I think would work well.  Then we'd progress to something a little deeper, a little more meaningful.  I wondered what music was in the cd player here at this home, the one with the most charmingest of balconies? 

Do they listen to the Rolling Stones?

Do they smoke shisha?

Do they tuck or untuck? (Shirts and bedsheets) 

Do they feel happy or sad?

Favourite colour? Smell? Feeling?

How are things at work?

Are they in love????

Are they truly living?

I walked along with my friend, and wondered how she was coping.  You see we were walking in memory of her boyfriend, who she had lost in April of this year to cancer.  I feel for her going through this journey as she herself tries to live again.  She is the bravest and sweetest girl you could ever meet.  I looked back to myself at her age, and I had been with Julian already nearly three years.  Which is precisely the amount of time Christina had with Jake.  Several times while walking I had a lump in my throat.  Theirs was true love, cut short.  I'm usually pretty Zen about the cycles of life and death but I do not hesitate to tell you that they were both royally ripped off. 

Now I don't know about the charming home with the balcony, whether they listen to the Stones or not.  But Jake and Christina did.  She told me their song.  In particular, the line they shared: wild horses, we'll ride them someday.

Go live while you are alive. Sieze every opportunity, kiss everyone you love and tell them so, and please don't forget to listen to the Rolling Stones. 

xoxo

It dawned on me, there is no such thing as time.

Inside an old church they are restoring at the Citadel, Amman, Jordan. March 2010

I had the pleasure of meeting a fabulous woman through a vibrant and funny friend of mine the other day.  Powerful ideas and gifts were exchanged; simply through animated and open conversation.

I have to say I attract in the most brilliant and gifted people.  I'm so very lucky. Now as a result of this meeting, great things are going to happen!  Isn't life a gift? I'm so jazzed about it, that I'm scribbling notes..ideas..and thoughts quicker than my hand can write.

I sat in a "reflection" park today, amidst the flowers, underneath a giant pine tree that was strung with fairy lights and words carved in stone set randomly about {empathy, responsibility, integrity...}...and I simply journalled to my heart's content.  Don't you just love it when ideas flow through you like that, as though you were some divine vessel of the Universe itself?  Wait, I am a divine vessel through which the Universe speaks.  So are you!  You already knew that, I hope.

I love my little journal, it is from a small press and was a gift from a friend. In there I have story ideas, lists of things I need....BlackBerry...Macbook Air....paper lanterns...purple candles...cardamom tealights...white roses...you get the idea.  It is also full of reminders and poetry and quotes.  Journals are chunks of life in a small contained space.  Microcosm's if you will.

I'll leave you now with the most beautiful thought which I will get to after I set the scene; for 33 years I've had a close friend and just recently her classy and caring mother passed away quite suddenly.  We did the most incredibly honourable thing- we wildly scattered her ashes in a private lake side ceremony that was replete with skipping stones, picking flowers and reading poetry while mourning doves cooed at us directly overhead in the old tree by the water.  Children chased frogs, we cried and remembered, and suddenly I felt that there is no such thing as time. I was seven years old again, in the company of this funny and wonderful friend of mine. It is enchanting how symbolic it is to set someone free to the four winds, up the ashes fly and then they indeed scatter in the wind, very mystically. After a deep breath, "Mum go be free!" my friend cried, as she threw the ashes into the air.  Then later, "She would have loved that," my friend tells me.  I agreed.

Funny how a sad time can connect people together in such a poignant way. I felt so happy and honoured to have been included in their sacred and private occasion. To them I say...thank you. To you I say, that is all for today. xo

The garden doula and her pheasant feather.

If you love hands that refuse gloves then you'll love these.  Aren't they magic? They are attached to the life-giving arms of the garden doula herself...the woman who shapes landscapes into sacred places rich with indiginous plants, herbs and trees.

Butternut trees.  Sweetflag.  Pearly everlasting. White sage. Crowberry. Teaberry.

Out of plain grass she will draft and create landscape tapestries the Mi'kmaq would recognize.  Ripe with huckleberries, blueberries, gooseberries and currants.  Medicines and herbs will form from divine cultivations.  Pathways will lead through to a birchwood grove. 

And how appropriate...a gift from Mother Earth to the doula- a most exquisite pheasant feather, a symbol of resourcefulness and prosperity for the one who brings the land just that.

Wela'lin Jayme! 

(wela'lin=Mi'kmaq for thank you)

More on wondrous Nova Scotia coming right up....(also a giveaway...details on that to come too!) xo

Finally, awakened.

As of approximately yesterday...no kidding-I feel like I'm awake after a long, drawn out, foggy sleep.  Figuratively speaking.  These last few weeks held little if any promise at all.  I was trudging along just doing the required bare minimum.  Totally lacking "mojo".  I was "mojo-less."

I worried during these last few weeks how my mood was affecting those around me.  No one seemed to notice. Then I said something about it. Unbeknownst to me those around me were walking about in their own fogs of different calibres.  {We each have our own demons and our own worries that keep us awake at night.} In fact some people around me shared the same thoughts as I did, and when it was mentioned I heard a "Me too!", or a "I thought I was the only one!"

The 'no mojo' thing stemmed from having a lack of defined purpose. I suppose it was always there, but don't we get blind to things that are "everyday" sometimes? Funny how purpose plays into our lives.  I recently rediscovered mine.  It is a neatly packaged gift that I deliver to those around me each day.  It's in the meal preparations.  It's in the sharp tuck of a bedsheet.  The windows get thrown open and fresh air spills into the room.  It is a simple phrase or a gentle encouragement. 

I rediscovered it. Thank goodness! {And for awhile I think I was looking too hard for answers.  Solutions.  Magic bullets.}

The answer came when I...let go.

I dropped my expectations. {Letting go produces a myriad of results.}  The answers pop up where you least expect them.  Then dawnings of thought occur when sitting still within the quiet moments.  As well, driving the car {alone!} produces a nugget or two of wisdom.  {It is times like these when fingers can't scrawl fast enough, pencil on paper too laborious. It is then that a small recording device would come in handy. It is also much safer for other drivers on the road~!}

Which brings us to today.  Today O fetched the mail.  She hands me a beautiful flowered silver envelope.  Postmarked from Santa Monica.  A delightful and hilarious surprise spilled out and made me laugh for a good five minutes.  Blessings fly in like owl mail sometimes.  When you least expect them to.  Which is the way it happens...because as we discussed looking too hard for things makes them not come. It's kind of a Murphy's Law of sorts.

So keep on not looking for your happiness!! 

It's bound to drop through the chimney at some point.  Then and only then shall you laugh yourself silly knowing that the Universe has bigger plans for you than you know.

xoxo

Keep up the dreamin'.

 

Get lost...

...in a book.

Forget your dishes.  Your bed needs to be made? So.  So what I say.

Grab that book.  That tome.  That special edition hard cover.  That fourth in a series of five that you can't put down.

Embark upon a grand adventure.  Live vicariously through the words of others.  {Squeeze every drop of its succulent fruit.} 

A little disengagement is required of us anyhow.  For if we go uninspired-then how will future books get written?

xoxo

p.s. I was honoured to be asked to guest post on my passions at Relyn's blog, come sit by my fire... 

Tea? Why, yes please....

If I invited you in for tea, would you accept?

Would you offer my child a sweet?  Ask him his name?

Would it matter to you that my second floor was absent? Waiting patiently for the second generation to build and move their family in, according to tradition....?

  
Will your children understand the level of patience and calm that our children afford them- in the face of no video games or television to distract them....?

When you stop to breathe in our landscape, will you allow us our space? That in which we have not built up in the name of commerce or gain?  We have precious things to offer the world that don't involve competing with larger cities or countries....!  We hold our own, thank you.

Would you join us for herbal tea?  Perchance in places where famous people were taking steps in their own journeys?  Tea with mint never tasted so nice!  Oh and beautiful Israel is just 15 feet away.  However, do not veer off the provided path, for land mines are located any which way, and cameras are trained on your every step-so going off the path could mean any number of troubles for you!  We are in a military zone, you see. (It is for your own protection, dear friends.)

My goodness the river is cold.  COLD.  See page 157 of the April 2010 National Geographic to see just exactly where a certain group of travellers stood, not three weeks ago.

If you feel enough at home then please accept our hospitality.  We'll be insulted if you do not. 

So-one lump or two? It would seem that in Jordan, sugar in your tea is the norm.  It is expected.  So if this sounds like your kind of place, do visit and stay for tea.  You won't regret a single moment of it.  xo

As usual click to enlarge the photos.  However, the shot of the little girl at Petra was out of focus, but she was so cute I couldn't stand not posting her, so forgive the photographers blunder. :)

Mezze at Lebanese House

Welcome!...of course I have to take you out for lunch..won`t you join me....

Call whoever you need to now, before we start...you won't be getting up from the table until it's time to roll you out... 

I do hope you are hungry.  We are having a typical Middle Eastern meal called a 'mezze' or 'mezzeh'. 

Among the fresh olives, lemon mint drinks & grilled meats, we have hummus, tabouleh & roquette salad...

Of course there are plenty of fresh baked flat breads and things I can't pronounce or remember the names of.

 
 
Oh and just outside is a spectacular view...terraced farming is practiced by the Jordanians due to the many hills and mountains that make up the geography.

Just outside is a bevy of blooms...Jordan seems bursting at the seams with life and we were there to catch it all.

 

Should you happen to look up, you'll notice as I do the many lamps and lanterns the beautify Lebanese House. 

So sorry to distract you from your delicious mezze.  Please, enjoy some more food why don't you...there is plenty...

If you are a tried and true North American and simply can`t get through a meal without it, well....here is your Arabian ketchup.

  

When in Jerash, Jordan visit Lebanese House for the most delicious meal with a stunning view. Perhaps if you are lucky enough to join Ms.Tara Bradford on her next `Journey to Jordan` then you too will eat lunch at this famous restaurant.

Jordan, Jerash
Tel Fax: 00962-2-6351301