Grounded
11 x 14 on canvas board, paper and acrylic paint

This was going to be my painting for Illustration Friday last week, but I just now finished it. I would love to be sitting in a place like she is, right  now.

I am feeling the need to keep myself grounded these days. With all the possibility of the new year in front of me, I feel a bit overwhelmed with not getting it all done. I feel like sometimes, my creative energy is too fast and furious.  I feel ideas come to me and they start building up, and up until I feel like I might explode and I feel this incredible urgency to do something with ALL of them. Other times, I feel like there are no ideas at all.

I should let them flow through me instead, picking only things that feel really good and right. Maybe, it wouldn’t seem so up and down.  I have to constantly remind myself to take deep breathes and just do what I love.  I will still thrive, even if I don’t get everything done.

true.love.forever

Acrylic paint on heavy weight watercolor paper
Hung with an old hanger from the thrift store.

Thrive (verb)
1. to prosper; be fortunate or successful.
2. to grow or develop vigorously; flourish
Synonyms: advance, arrive, bear fruit, bloom, blossom, boom, burgeon, develop, flourish, get ahead, get places, get there, grow, increase, make a go, mushroom, progress, prosper, radiate, rise, shine, shoot up, succeed, turn out well, wax

I have a really good feeling about this year.  Something just felt off last year. It wasn’t bad, I just felt a little off my game for some reason — can’t explain it.  This year though, I have a really good feeling about.  It feels full of possibility and greatness.

I knew what my word for this year would be on December 31st.  It just jumped right at me and I felt an, “oh yeah, this is it” feeling. I want to thrive in my health, in my creativeness (blog and shop), my family, friendships, my garden…in everything.

This year I will be 40 (in two weeks, actually) and I am really excited about it.  I’m going to NYC to celebrate with my hubby and I have plans to do something fun and funky with my hair (not too crazy – I have a conservative dress code to deal with). I’m not letting that age thing get me down. I think it has only been getting better.

Anyway, I’m just feeling excited, hopeful and full of possibility and wanted to somehow translate that into a bright, cheerful painting in my art journal.

Have you picked a word yet?  I’d love to hear it.

“How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.” – Anne Frank

“You don’t face your fears, you stand up to them.” – Brian Clark

“You must give up the life you planned in order to have the life that is waiting for you.” – Joseph Campbell

“If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid.” – Epictetus

“It takes but one positive thought when given a chance to survive and thrive to overpower an entire army of negative thoughts.”- Robert H. Schuller

“Cheerfulness is the atmosphere in which all things thrive”- Jean Paul Richter

“A garden requires patient labor and attention. Plants do not grow merely to satisfy ambitions or to fulfill good intentions. They thrive because someone expended effort on them.” -Liberty Hyde Bailey