Magically described fruit..

Yesterday i was on the farmers market and bought what seem tons of fresh fruit. Among them were these delicious fruits, blue berries and blackberries..I found a really beautiful article written on blueberries in Amulet magazine..Love the way they magically described this fruit.. 

Spiritually speaking, blueberries, not far from the color of your sixth chakra, or 3rd eye area, help awaken and deepen your inner senses including {in}sight.  Blueberries amazing blue allies this time of year- to prepare us for “night vision”, for the darker season coming up.  So we eat a hell of a lot of them now in all forms {plus freeze them for later} and don’t forget to make potions out of them {recipe in our mini blueberry recipe book!} to take during the fall and winter months to keep our 3rd eye open and “seeing” the expansive light from within while we travel into Darkness.

~Amulet magazine 

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Raining raspberry cookies...

Today is a 'raining all day' day..Autumn is really in the air.. This is what it looks like in our house after a day of making real life 'spider-man' webs and baking cookies, and painting faces into princess, pirate to cookie monster.. :-)

                                                                                                                                                                  

 Making his web more sophisticated..

 Lost in the web...

Hanging from the web doing his spider-man moves..mean while the princess is dressing up..

Then the two cookie monsters made raspberry cookies..Very yum!

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Disguised divinity

“In mythos and fairy tales, deities and other great spirits test the hearts of humans by showing up in various forms that disguise their divinity. They show up in robes, rags, silver sashes, or with muddy feet. They show up with skin dark as old wood, or in scales made of rose petal, as a frail child, as a lime-yellow old woman, as a man who cannot speak, or as an animal who can. The great powers are testing to see if humans have yet learned to recognize the greatness of soul in all its varying forms.”

― Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes, 
Book:Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype

Pixie says:
They show up as a boy with SPD, a neighbor fixing his car, bright eyes in the check-out stand, a young maiden about to be married, an outcast in black, holding a sign at the off ramp, as a broken woman with a broken baby and broken English...

Thank you Pixie

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Proud mama

My almost seven year old son came in the bathroom this morning to tell me his thoughts on the soul:

Mommy I was thinking: I think that our souls don’t have gravity, so  that means when our body dies it is not able to keep the soul  bound to earth anymore, so the souls flies away. Our body is like a box to contain our soul. And then he added: that also means that when our souls are still inside our bodies while we live we can’t really see each other. 

He blew me away again, like he does so regularly, with his brilliant mind.. 

Ps: After three months of psychiatric research to find out why he is showing behavior that is not accepted by society. Yesterday I heard the verdict. I was told what diagnose they found fitting his behavior by the psychiatrist. He got labeled with three disorders....None of which said brilliant mind, tender heart or sensitive soul...  Which he is clearly gifted with....

xxxProud mama

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Mantra chanting, what good does it do?

                                              

I have heard of mantra chanting before, maybe you have too. But never have i thought of this perspective to the chanting. It is so magical yet so logical that mantras effect us in this way, like Deva says in this video. It gives a whole new impulse, to me anyway, to try mantra chanting myself. And than there is the thing that they make it so easy to try, because on their website  these two warm hearted and lovely people put together a 21 day  program (for free), where every day is a new day with a new mantra to chant. What a beautiful initiative/gift from these beautiful people. You can find it and subscribe to it if you like here..

Auspicious journey

I love the word auspicious :-)

Painting by me of goddess Parvati

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Wild harvest part two, rose hips and nettle seeds

Today I discovered that there is a lot more in my neighborhood that can be harvested. And op top of that NOW  is the right time,  its harvest time for many pants and herbs right now.  So I am going to go with the flow of the season and with what I see around me. I’m curious what I can do with all. I found such good sites and blogs to help me along..like here and here.. The next thing on my list to harvest this week is nettle roots...  I will get back on what I plan to do with today’s harvest and with the roots in one of my next posts.

It’s all so interesting.  

Rose hips

 Nettle seeds

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Summer is over....

Today:
Changing my balcony painting studio into an indoors winter studio. :-( summer is definitely over :-(
Taking care of a child with cold
Picking new and loads of elderberries
Cleaning elderberries
Sorting elderberries (which takes ages)
Freezing elderberries
Making vegetable soup and baking french fries :-)
Finding beautiful words on my timeline, (thanks Pixie Campbell)


Sky of blackness and sorrow 
Sky of love, sky of tears 
Sky of glory and sadness 
Sky of mercy, sky of fear 
Sky of memory and shadow 
Your burnin' wind fills my arms tonight
Sky of longing and emptiness
Sky of fullness, sky of blessed life

~ bruce springsteen

Now tired and content and ready to go to bed...how about your day?

Goddess Kali 

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So that's why

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Medicine for the soul

Picture by Jan Saudek

This post is a bit hard to post, because for me its one of the hardest things to be open about. But as synchronicity wants it, i AGAIN stumbled across someone's loving words full of vulnerability about the issues she has with her own body. I was really temped to just NOT post it. But it touched me too much. and then i need to post it, because it may help others as well. and not only that when i post it, it goes deeper, i take it out of its shadow, i bring the thing i fear most into the light. So it is something i need to go through, its not to be ignored by me for enabling its medicine to help me and to flow through me.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

"your body knows what you are going through.  It understands and it's been taking care of you." That was the turning point for me, you see. That's where I realized that I've been neglecting my dear body, not by abusing it--but by completely ignoring it and thinking so hateful to it at times.  That's why I had to allow my hands to draw the belly and breasts that I usually are a shame of and keep trying to pretend are not there. Most of all, I had to connect again with this great wisdom--the wisdom of my body. The flesh and muscles and bones and organs that have been witness to all that I have been going through--and have just taken and taken and taken and taken so that I could serve my family, my students, my business.....but I've been suppressing their soft wishes to finally serve myself. The woman that began to appear in my painting had wings instead of arms and a heart so bright that it's illumination glows through her skin.  She's naked and vulnerable and scarred from a child birth that didn't go as planned. She's large.  She's fleshy.  She's full. She's alive. She's strong.  She's healing.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Here is what i copied directly out of her post. You can find the painting she made of herself and the whole written piece here

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Strength

 

Sometimes you don’t realize 

your own strength 

until you come face to face 

with your greatest weakness. 

~Susan Gale

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Beautiful talk about life

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Kitten update...

 whenever i sit behind my computer, our little cat, (kitten), climbs on top of me, and doesn't sit on my lap, like any 'regular' cat does. No she climbs as high as she can, and always finds a place to settle on my heart, literally.. 

 I could not resits to pick a few favorite pictures and post them. She is so lovely :-)

There is a lot of fighting since we have a cat, about who can play with her and when.. They are driving me so NUTS with this! This was a rare moment where they, or shall i say she, found the middle ground.. creating a rare moment of peace and unity 

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Living my truth

"That which can be destroyed by the truth should be."

- P.C. Hodgell

Stand on what you know. 

Don't be afraid to get the answer. 

Live your truth.

-Jada Pinkett Smith

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Elderberry synchronicity

We went out to find some elderberries this weekend. i kept telling myself they were already gone, that i was too late. But when i went out looking for them i discovered it is precisely now that its their harvest time. I happen to live in a neighborhood where we have a very huge amount of the trees they grow on.I am very happy we do because i am very fond of this tree.. i feel very pulled towards it somehow. It's very interesting to read about what this tree symbolizes by the way. Its a witches tree :-)

Anyway we found a lot of trees with a lot of ripe berries.. I decided this year i will be making a tincture out them. Elderberry tincture has been used for centuries to protect us from getting ill with the flu. When you feel your body is developing a cold you take some drops and it supposedly helps to not let the cold come up in all its glory. Lord knows we can use some help. We, my babies and i, were ill a lot last winter. I was terrible.  

This week elderberries kept coming up in my mind. And what do you know it just happens to be their harvest time.. I did some research on what to make with them before i harvested them and i already knew if i would find any i would make tincture out of them. And now that i'm writing this little story i see (yet again) how its filled with synchronicity..Love that so much..the flow of life going right through you..

If anyone would like to order a bottle of elderberry tincture with me, you can drop me an email at dissiones(a)hetnet.nl . But i will include the recipe in this post again so you can always make your own.

Here is the recipe

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Start a relationship with money

Clare Bowditch, singer and creator of the fabulous interviews 'Inspiration bomb' on her website Big Hearted Business

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Day of synchronicity

I don't know what synchronicity made this happen? But i am so happy it did! Today i stumbled across TWO not just one inspiring and empowering message about appearances. I normally am very reluctant about posting anything that has to do with how i look or how i perceive the fact that i look much like this anchor woman, body wise anyway. It's hard to even call myself what i am... But this morning i asked a question in my own heart, i did that very very silently so i could hardly hear it myself. I made sure of whispering this question because in do not like to address this issue with my self or anyone for that mater. The question i asked was, why am i not ready to be open and truthful about my body and the way my looks make me feel when i am able to be open up about many other shadow sides of myself? I just asked myself this but did not dare to give myself the answer.. And Boom!!! These two great, and most of all loving messages come to find me today.. Thank you universe!!

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The naked truth about the kind of economy we live in

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Scarcity complex?

“You pray in your distress and in your need; would that you might pray also in the fullness of your joy and in your days of abundance.” 

― Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

I accompany this post with this one of my paintings of apple trees. To me apple trees symbolize abundance. 

Actually fruit in general feels like that to me..

The concept that stuck with me most today while studying all of the 'Woman is a River' material is that we are taught to think in terms of lack of what we want and think we need instead of what recourses we do have available to us.  Today I am ashamed to admit I have started to ask myself for the 1^st time in my life in a real and honest way ‘why do I focus on the things that aren’t there’? What is the root of that way of looking at the world I am part of and surrounded with?  I am among the people that are the most lucky ones in the world, simply because I live in the West where there is no war, where there is freedom and where there is still all we really need, like food and water and roofs over our heads. Today one of the co-participants of this Woman is a River adventure brought to our attention this very interesting blog article that i will copy entirely in to this blog post. I do that because its angle towards the scarcity of abundance issue i think we who live in the western world (almost) all have is a very important one i think. Her theory sheds another light on this issue. I think that this is too a very  inspiring angle to look at it.

But fact remains that I am very well aware that we can only think or talk about this subject because we live in this abundant part of the world where we can afford to spend time thinking and writing blog-posts about this.

Is it scarcity complex, or a call to adventure?

If you tell someone with a bent toward the spiritual and/or self-help that you feel a sense of lack in your life, she might look at you with a faint hint of disapproval. She might tell you that what you put your attention on, grows, and we become what we think about most.

So don’t focus on the lack, she might tell you. Focus on abundance. Focus on enough. You have everything you need. You are exactly where you are supposed to be. This moment is perfect. You are perfect.

But what if that lack isn’t the symptom of a scarcity complex, but something else?

What if it’s your call to adventure? The beginning of your hero’s journey?

What if it’s your way into a richer, deeper, more meaningful life?

According to mythologist Joseph Campbell and depth psychologist Jean Houston, inside all of us is a longing for more. This isn’t the voice of the void but the cry of your soul, driving you toward wholeness and self-actualization.

Houston explains in this interview that The Call might start off as bland and generic: I want to get married, or, I want a new career. The “usual things”. But at some point there’s what Houston terms a second genesis, when another level of possibility starts to rise and you realize there’s so much more to you than you knew or suspected.

That’s when your life’s adventure begins.

And by the way, you are perfect. You are exactly where you are supposed to be – until life keeps whacking you with hints and reminders that you should really be on your way to somewhere else. (In storyteller’s parlance, this is known as ‘resisting the call’, and the hero will continue to stagnate, to live out a death-in-life, and life will keep poking and frustrating and disrupting her, until she’s willing to leave her ordinary world and strike out for the territories.)

Moving into your yearning is different from trying to fill the void through a hard or soft addiction. The latter leaves you worse off than before, wanting more but requiring ever more to achieve the same effect. What is addiction, in the end, but a spiritual quest pulled inside out?

To move into your yearning is to recognize and honor your needs. It is to move to the other side of lack, where you can start to remember who you are.

This piece comes from here

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What People Really Look Like

Picture source here

Okay, i admit i am getting really distracted from my Pixie, 'Woman is a River' tapes now now, but this article was really inspiring too and i could not, NOT post it :-)

*******************************************************************************

What People Really Look Like

Women have cellulite, men have silly buttocks.

I’ve been a massage therapist for many years, now. I know what people look like. People have been undressing for me for a long time. I know what you look like: a glance at you, and I can picture pretty well what you’d look like on my table. 

Let’s start here with what nobody looks like: nobody looks like the people in magazines or movies. Not even models. Nobody. Lean people have a kind of rawboned, unfinished look about them that is very appealing. But they don’t have plump round breasts and plump round asses. You have plump round breasts and a plump round ass, you have a plump round belly and plump round thighs as well. That’s how it works. (And that’s very appealing too.)

Woman have cellulite. All of them. It’s dimply and cute. It’s not a defect. It’s not a health problem. It’s the natural consequence of not consisting of photoshopped pixels, and not having emerged from an airbrush.

Men have silly buttocks. Well, if most of your clients are women, anyway. You come to male buttocks and you say -- what, this is it? They’re kind of scrawny and the tissue is jumpy because it’s unpadded; you have to dial back the pressure, or they’ll yelp.

Adults sag. It doesn’t matter how fit they are. Every decade, an adult sags a little more. All of the tissue hangs a little looser. They wrinkle, too. I don’t know who put about the rumor that just old people wrinkle. You start wrinkling when you start sagging, as soon as you’re all grown up, and the process goes its merry way as long as you live. Which is hopefully a long, long time, right?

Everybody on a massage table is beautiful. There are really no exceptions to this rule. At that first long sigh, at that first thought that “I can stop hanging on now, I’m safe” – a luminosity, a glow, begins. Within a few minutes the whole body is radiant with it. It suffuses the room: it suffuses the massage therapist too. People talk about massage therapists being caretakers, and I suppose we are: we like to look after people, and we’re easily moved to tenderness. But to let you in on a secret: I’m in it for the glow. 

I’ll tell you what people look like, really: they look like flames. Or like the stars, on a clear night in the wilderness.

~Dale favier, masseur 

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One of my dreams..

                      Respond to every call that excites your spirit. ~ Rumi

                                                 
Today i have time to catch up with my long list of 'things to see' and to research online. No kiddies running around until later today :-)

So on my list is to take all the time i need to listen to all the recordings Pixie made for the 'Woman is a River' e-course that begun last week and i am so so happy to be participating in right now.
On the one hand i did not have time to listen to all the wonderful things she recorded during the week, but i also recognize it wasn't merely a lack of time, it was more a fear of what i would be hearing. My relationship with money and abundance is a tight, a tense and fearful one..As i wrote in this post a few days ago. So to be fully present and fully participating in 'Woman is a River', is an experience for which i need solitude and room for my emotions to run where they need to run while listening to what Pixie has to say. So evidently that requires a day without kids :-) So i saved them all up for today. Sitting here by the computer with my cup of coffee enjoying Pixies words..What she has to say is so profound and immediately hits me home right it the core of my heart. She is a great teacher!!! And i am so blessed and happy to be able to call her 'my' teacher too..

But occasionally today i am distracted by other inspiring peoples work while i listen to Pixie..Like the work of Jen Lee. And when i get inspired like this i feel a calling to share my inspiration with you here right away..

This trailer gives an idea of what the film Indie Kindred is about. I love the theme, 'Creative work and connection'. Let them come together. I too have been experiencing the lonely feeling of making the things i make and feeling deep need of connecting with other makers. But when allowing myself to feel that need of finding kindred spirits i feel very alone at the same time i admit this need. Because it brings to the surface the anxiety of nobody speaking my language being there to connect with, or a bigger fear i have, that the ones i would want to connect with aren't interested in connecting with me. Life is all about connection, i believe for all of us. And one of the richest feelings of abundance is when you find the people that make you feel you and that make you feel part of a larger whole.

What i love most about the film is that Jen Lee is not only making the film, she is also doing something about connecting creative people actively. She travels through the US right now with the movie, while creating small screenings. At those small screenings creative people come to see the movie. They are people directly from that particular city, village or area. People that come to see the movie will feel drawn to the theme of it.

And boom! As a bonus to seeing a great movie they will meet and recognize each other at the same time. This way they are enabled to see each other as the creative people from that geographical area, and can create a togetherness and a community (if they want to) after such a screening.. I just love these kinds of beautiful initiatives.. so inspiring.

I would like to become someone who comes up with good ideas to do just this, connect creative people from a certain place in the world and form a community.. One of my dreams!!!

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Half lovin' just hurts

          

A few words of inspiring wisdom from Jada Pinkett Smith, i found on my timeline this morning..

When we say we love someone we should give all we've got, even if that means overcoming the parts of ourselves that keep us from the best parts of ourselves that deliver the promise of ecstatic love. Not only do we deserve to experience the best of who we are, but the people who we say we love deserve to experience the best of WHAT we are.

"Half lov'n just hurts."
- Will Smith

Jada Pinkett Smith

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We are stealing from future

The manner in which we're allowed to steal from future generations with the conspicuous consumption of limited resources has yet to be accepted widely as a spiritual error, or even bad manners. 
-Barbra Kingsolver

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Goodmorning

“Do you have the patience to wait until your mud settles and the water is clear?” 

― Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

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Shadows

        
What an inspiring story about healing, wow!! I have no idea what it must be like to hear voices in your head. I can only imagine how lonely and scared she must have felt.  The way she handled her journey towards the light gives me so much hope and inspiration in me healing my own shadows.

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Muesli bar’s in the making

Today we tried making muesli bar’s, it was our first attempt. They turned out more like cruesli, because they did not form a bar, the whole mixture  just falls apart. And I did use lots of ‘glue’.  You know,  honey and butter.  So I have no clue what happened.  But still it tastes good. It will be yoghurt with this delicious mixture in the coming mornings then. Except I don’t know about the butter and yoghurt combination, hope it will be okay..

Any tips on how to make the mixture more together are welcome by the way..

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Magical horses by Ulrika Kestere

These horses have captured my heart a while ago, i just forgot totally who made them. Some art-works just won't let me go..The beauty and the poetry of these horses stuck with me since i discovered them online!! I have been looking for the creator of these fabulous horses all morning. I am so happy i found out. her name is Ulrika Kestere.

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Wild harvest

Rose hips-Elderberries-Elderflower- Black berriesRose hips-Elderberries-Elderflower- Black berries

I had intended  to learn more and do more with wild plants this summer,  but somehow It got to the background due to life’s surprises for me and due to my alive painting mojo . I realized today I have let all the harvesting times slide by me..but looking around me more detailed when walking outside I now see it still isn't totally over, harvesting rose hips for example is still possible and maybe I’ll go and see if I still can harvest some of the last elderberries today. I found this really great site online where the owner gathered lots of different ideas from different people and put it together. All ideas great to do with ‘wild harvest’.

The site i referred to is to be found here

Some of my favorites i would like to try:

Elderberrie balsamic vinegar

Recipe here

Elderberrie tincture

Recipe here

 Elderberrie jam

Recipe here

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Amazing is art

                           

Art can be so amazing!!  And it's so amazing what people can come up with :-)

Each time the subway rides through the tunnel, the dog awakens..

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Blossom

And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom

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Cherry dream

I had a dream last night where I encountered a huge tree full of ripe and enormously big cherries. Dark red, shiny and juicy cherries. I picked a handful and ate them, they tasted so sweet and were as juicy as they looked. It was from a tree in my friends garden. I tried to tell her they were there but she somehow just pulled up her shoulders and did not really seem to care. I felt frustrated by her response and tried again to make her see what richness she had hanging from the tree in HER garden. But she kept looking the other way..

I forgot all about the dream until my daughter asked me this morning at breakfast if she could taste one of the elderberries we picked yesterday. When she tasted one she said ‘mommy, this cherry tastes like flowers’..

Then boom, like a light bulb the dream came back to me. It had been a very vivid dream, I remember the cherries into detail, their color, their texture and their taste..

I found out that cherries in dream have all sorts of very beautiful meanings...

It was a ‘cherry morning’.  It just occurred to me she had picked, (or did I?) her cherry blouse to wear to school this morning. It’s a lovely start of the day, I love synchronicity...  

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