Y3 – Day 79 – Spring 2015

The pink, climbing, absurdly fragrant jasmine has withered. Our pittsoporum box trees that attract literally hundreds of bees have also released their perfume and are now drying up their blossoms and forming papery enclosures to develop their seed pods. The camellias have come and gone. The azaleas are slowing down. This is our late January to early March customary parade of happenings you cannot avoid noticing nor do you want to. It is a pleasure to see gardens, different species and varieties take shape, return and show off.

But Spring has sprung as of yesterday and our landscape obeys the seasonal changes, usually. So I took some pictures around the yard with my macro lens. Here are just a few specimens.

DSC00184 Although geraniums are year round here, I thought this cluster formed a perfectly beautiful ball of radiant orangey red.

DSC00187This is a very small purple flower on a vine like bush we brought from our other residence 18 years ago. The plant is scattered with these humble, violet, tiny tokens of love.DSC00188 Freeway daisies always make me smile!

DSC00189This peachy snapdragon re-incarnated from the past because I have not planted any in a while. We call these recurring friends that just pop up “volunteers” in the garden world.DSC00190One of my favorites. The freesia that from a tiny bulb keeps giving year after year with fresh fragrance and fresh faces. We have white, pink, fuchsia, variegated, purple and lavender ones.

Tomorrow, more from the Stegerhaus garden.

Y3 – Day 78 – Experience

When I recently decided to teach yoga again, I thought I would be rusty but I was primed and ready to start where I left off +plus! In my absence I was not twiddling my thumbs and there’s just more and different aspects I can incorporate into the whole experience.

I am grateful to share my gifts. I love to teach with a theme. I interject lessons from the TAO or the Course or some other spiritual text. The yogic 8 fold path threads through the fabric of the class seamlessly. I get to share properties of crystals, scores of music, colors, poetry and the nuance of aromatherapy for our wellbeing. We dance and sit and meditate and pose. My own style of yoga is inclusive to all yet an introspective, personal experience for the practitioner.

It is an event. It makes me happy. It breathes fresh air into our lives.

 

Y3 – Day 77 – Chakras

Come join us for the 2nd in a four week session of Chakra Empowerment!!

Even if you missed the first one, we will catch you up. We have 4 spots left!!!

Chakra Wisdom

Tuesday, Mar 24, 2015, 7:00 PM

Location details are available to members only.

7 Seekers Attending

Chakras are the sacred energy centers that allow us to embody and experience a balanced lifestyle. This class will provide tools and techniques to find balance and insight on all levels. You will learn how to harmonize, strengthen and balance Your emotions and your responses to life by attuning to your inner body.Price $35/class with $25 material…

Check out this Meetup →

Y3 – Day 76 – Sound

Did you know sound affects every cell, tissue and organ in our bodies?

Because sonic waves travel 5 times faster through water than air, it moves through and resonates with our bodies quicker and deeper.

By chanting, singing, humming, toning, repeating affirmations and mantras, we heal.

By listening to instruments or music we enjoy or resonate with, we harmonize our souls and physical selves.

Did you know Pythagoras created the musical scales and coined the term “music of the spheres” around 550 BC?

Cannot wait for my Soulful Sound Therapy Class in April wherein we will be making music with singing bowls, voices and tones, chanting mantras and singing in Pali and Sanskrit. Starts April 13 – May 4. Click on link below for more info. I have 5 more spots left.

Soulful Sound Therapy

Monday, Apr 13, 2015, 7:00 PM

Common Ground Spiritual Center
550 N. Golden Circle Drive Santa Ana, CA

4 Seekers Attending

Did you know that through a mother’s soothing voice or classical harmonics, we can experience healing through sound vibrations? In this amazing course we will be utilizing our own voices plus listening to several different elements, sounds, chants and instruments, As you participate – health, wellness, and abundant energy will be created from using…

Check out this Meetup →

Y3 – Day 75 – Joy

Do everything with JOY today… Have the intention to move with purpose, to act with goodness, to think positively, to speak carefully, to write with care and to create an authentic life.

Even though your energy may be low today, circumstances may be upsetting or disruptive and people dismiss or perplex you, make the best of it, tread consciously and you will get through this.

I know this to be true even when I am feeling blue because…IMG_3837

 

Y3 – Day 74 – Law of Attraction

Successful, happy people who are always striving to reach their highest potential are like beams of light and attract an abundance of wealth, health and friends. They manifest positive outcomes and they live from a place of joy. They keep moving forward with confidence, determination and hope, no matter what. They re-invent, re-ignite and re-claim themselves. They empower, embolden and embrace others. They don’t limit themselves.

Successful, happy people are grateful, creative and energetic. They glow from the inside. They soar with compliments, ideas and encouragement. They generate higher wavelengths of vibration in a room. They know about potential, productivity and results. They know how to ask for help, bring in the right people and the value of collaborating. They use varied sources.

Successful, happy people visualize and realize balance in their lives. They nurture deep, personal relationships and weave harmonious souls into their textured lives. They cordially bow out of situations, occasions and events that may sap their energy, unless it benefits a loved one. They are balanced, centered and know how to revitalize when needed. They remember to breathe profoundly into their lives and exhale with gratitude.

This is an aspiration. By affirming you are already this person, you become it.

Y3 – Day 73 – Moving Forward

After an emotional, intense and grief filled weekend, we are picking up pieces and moving forward. I am sure in different ways and at separate times we will all experience moments of sadness and melancholy.

Service for Nana was beautiful, simple and true. Her two sons spoke and our daughter V and nephew F also eloquently and authentically spoke with candor. In their own way, everyone rose to the occasion.

My cup does truly runneth over.

Y3 – Day 72 – Curry and Wood

Continuing with Regionalism, Kristin sprinkled in some Curry and Wood as time ran out on our lecture.

John Steuart Curry depicts various religious groups that set up tents and convert people to their version of Christianity – a la “Elmer Gantry” the movie with Burt Lancaster which did a superb job of emitting this fever pitch power trip of a preacher with a huge ego.

This painting is called Baptism in Kansas, 1928. Notice the gentrified persons, the painted barn and standing windmill. Later on, with the drought that had changed the landscape and people’s lives, artists painted the same scene barren and unkempt.

Curry is close friends with Grant Wood who painted American Gothic.

Kristin told us the real story behind the famed faces in stoic poses. It seems Wood used his sister and the local dentist as his models. His original idea was to paint a father with his spinster daughter. The window and architecture of the house in the painting is American  painting Gothic style and his initial idea was to show what kind of people would live in that type of architecture.

American Gothic

“When viewing the painting, it is important to realize the extent to which Wood designed and conceptualized American Gothic.” – off the internet.

What Kristin explained and pointed out was the details. For example, the feel of the people is one of cautiousness, not welcoming on the man’s part. The pitchfork stands between you and the image. The lines of the farm tool are repeated in the man’s shirt. The woman’s head is egg-shaped to mimic the patterns on her dress and cameo brooch.

This painting is without a doubt the most parodied work of all time.

And with this, we headed over to WWII and Abstract Expressionism, the following week……

 

Y3 – Day 71 – Continue Bowers

Migrant Mother, 1935 photographed by Dorothea Lange of San Francisco. This compelling, beautiful, timeless representation of the Madonna and her children, is heart wrenching. This picture brought Lange notoriety and the woman in the picture and her children help. It also brought to light the suffering, like The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck did, to the plight of the farm workers.

 

In Tractored Out, Childress, County, Texas, Lange once again captures the plight of erosion; the abandoned and barren landscape of the midwest, the destruction from the prairie winds and how poor farming practices depleted and destroyed the land.

People started to turn inward, literally towards the center of the plains and away from the cities. Some tended towards xenophobia or fear of immigrants and became isolationists.

 

This work is by Thomas Hart Benton and is called, Self Portrait with Rita painted in 1922. Well heeled, well educated and well traveled, Benton painted this on Martha’s Vineyard. He believed art belonged to the Heartland and needed to be regional, far removed from the European influences of modernist abstraction. It now hangs at The Smithsonian Institution. He influenced the Regionalist movement that romanticized local and small town America. He also taught art and one of his most famous students was Jackson Pollock (who rebelled against him and created abstract art)

The Ballad of the Jealous Lover of Lone Green Valley

This is called The Ballad of the Jealous Lover of Lone Green Valley, 1934 and is a depiction from an Ozark folksong. In the forefront, the blond playing the harmonica, is a young Jackson Pollock. Kristin had us listen to the tragic song about an accused yet innocent woman stabbed to death by her lover and “in her snowy white bosom the knife was plunged.” Notice the swirling hills, the motion and movement which would herald the next era into abstraction.

In 1934, Benton was on the cover of Time magazine. They praised him and people loved that his works told stories. He wanted ordinary people who read “the funnies” or the comics in the paper, to understand his art and make it accessible. But he is very vocal, burns a lot of bridges and rejected the art world and homosexuals, openly. In the late 1940’s he falls out of favor.

 

 

Y3 – Day 70 – Bower’s Series Part 4

I was a little derailed and wanted to update you all on the last 3 sessions at Bower’s with Kristin Mihaylovich.

On 2/25, we studied Social Realism, Regionalism and the 1930’s and into WWII. Two major events mark this era and that is the stock market crash in October of 1929 and the Dust Bowl. People are questioning if democracy and capitalism is still a good way to continue. The country starts to look at Socialism, Communism and Russia. One quarter of the population is unemployed.

The government decides to provide artists with work as a form of economic rehabilitation. The Federal Art Project and the Works Progress Administration (WPA) begin to commission murals and sponsor artists. There is an inclination towards art in figurative context. Art is seen as part of the revival to benefit the whole nation. There is a collaborative nature to this resurgence and a new dedication to the arts. Murals of children at play in hospitals for example, are painted right on the inside halls.

Major political or social events are characterized such as in Ben Shahn’s The Passion of Saco and Venzetti in 1932. Shahn is a storyteller and is drawn to social injustices and paints 23 works on the same subject of the plight of the Italian American immigrants who were put to death (after 2 trials- same judge though) even though the people believed they were innocent and there was no conclusive evidence. Prohibition was divided along gender lines and he impresses that fact in 1934 when he paints Women’s Christian Temperance Union Parade and Parade for Repeal (where men are marching).

……Tomorrow – I will continue with Dorothea Lange and Thomas Hart Benton……and this fascinating era!