D-DAY - I promised a different kind of post but...

Soldiers, Sailors and Airmen...the hopes and prayers of liberty-loving peoples everywhere march with you.

General Dwight D. Eisenhower - D-Day speech

The Great Crusade

I watched a young man on the news last night, in Normandy with his great grandfather, overlooking the wide open beach and the impossibly rugged, tall cliffs of the Normandy coast, saying honestly, “I can’t imagine putting my life on the line to cross that beach under heavy fire…I don’t think many of us can.” And yet, if we can’t imagine it, how are we to remember it and to honor the courage and the sacrifice of the thousands who gave their lives for our freedom? 

Read more...on my WordPress blog for today http://seasonssongandspirit.wordpress.com/2014/06/06/d-day-we-must-always-remember-html/

Tuesday I will finish the series on living from the heart and that will be my last post for several weeks as I will be in the hospital or away at rehab and then unable to sit at the computer for some time. I will try to get a couple of posts prepared ahead and schedule them but I don't think that's likely with all else I have to do in the next few days for work. I hope you'll come back and visit and read when I am able to return. 

Are you "first rate?"

“You cannot be really first-rate at your work if your work is all you are.”

Anna Quindlen 

Mockingbird Have You Heard

http://fineartamerica.com/featured/mockingbird-have-you-heard-lianne-schneider.html

In case you haven't noticed, I've spent a good deal of time in this blog advising - myself more than anyone else - how to live our artistic lives with integrity and purpose. And not just our lives as artists either...but more importantly life in general. I've given a great deal of thought in the past few years to meaning and purpose...to what the point of it all is. At the beginning of the year, I began my commitment to this blog with intention and along the way, I've explored with you the heroic virtues required for our sacred quest for a good life, a worthwhile life. I've spoken about success and motivation and goals. I've even spoken about happiness as if I had some answers different from those the rest of you have arrived at on your own! In the last post, we had some great exchanges about burnout - whether it's possible to successfully market ourselves without losing our creative edge and purpose. Whatever your answer to the question was, one thing is certain - we cannot be "first rate" artists/writers if that is all we are. Even the most successful of us cannot eat, sleep, breathe and market our art all the time or I would venture to say, it soon stops being "art" and becomes "work." 

Which brings me back to Ms. Quindlen...or rather to Maria Popova's blog about Ms. Quindlen's beautiful little book about life - "A Short Guide to a Happy Life." Quindlen, says Popova, "considers the question of the self and what makes us who we are, what makes us worthy of being...Even those trying to find their purpose, even those engaged in fulfilling work, and even those of us lucky enough to have no separation between “life” and “work,” can get consumed by our modern cult of productivity. Quindlen’s words come as a vital reminder of what matters, what counts, what the true aliveness of life is." 

You can read the rest of Popova's blog post here: http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2014/03/11/a-short-guide-to-a-happy-life-anna-quindlen/

And then you might want to go out an buy Quindlen's book so you can reread her beautifully intuitive advice again and again. "Get a life," she says, "Get a life in which you are not alone...get a life in which you are generous... All of us want to do well. But if we do not do good, too, then doing well will never be enough." We won't find our happiness in being or having nothing in our lives that is more important than our art or our writing. We cannot be happy if art is all we are and all we do. I think all of us know that already...but in the push to be commercially successful artists, we may find ourselves on that slippery slope at the bottom of which our art has become work and our lives are consumed with productivity and marketing, rather than an expression of our very human spirits and our desire to generously share the goodness we see all around. To be happy is to share our dreams and our passions and to inspire others to share theirs and most of all, to be truly, gratefully present to every moment we are blessed enough to have. 

What will your verse be???

“Your sole contribution to the sum of things is yourself.” Frank Crane

Mighty Niagara

http://fineartamerica.com/featured/2-mighty-niagara-lianne-schneider.html 

The new IPad Air commercial uses this beautiful speech from the 1989s movie, Dead Poets’ Society –  

"We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering--these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love--these are what we stay alive for. To quote from Whitman, 'O me, O life of the questions of these recurring. Of the endless trains of the faithless. Of cities filled with the foolish. What good amid these, O me, O life? Answer: that you are here. That life exists and identity. That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.' That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be?" 

What will your verse be??

 

Honestly, the question isn’t just for poets or writers…it’s for all of us. We write our verses by the way we live our lives, by “writing” our own story with hope and optimism and not letting others write it for us. It’s called living with integrity – and it’s one of the tasks of a mature adult. The way we live cannot do “violence” to who we are at heart. Is your art, your writing, your life telling everyone who you really are? It’s ancient wisdom, immortalized in Shakespeare’s Hamlet when Polonius says, “This above all: to thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.”

Never doubt that your art, your writing, your sculpture is a valuable contribution to the human story. You may never achieve fame and fortune with your art but each word you write, each piece you create adds meaning and richness to the world around you. Mark Nepo, describing his search for beauty in the midst of suffering, said, “We need art and poetry to help us express who we are and stay in relationship to what matters.” Further, he eloquently asserts, "Poetry is the unexpected utterance of the soul…the life of expression is the tuning fork by which we find our way to the sacred." Each piece you create, creates YOU as the person you are becoming…you alone are in charge of who that is!

 

ANNOUNCING - The opening of a new art gallery -       TRILLIUM GALLERY

                                                                                               228 Main Street, 

                                                                                               Saugerties, NY. 12477

                                                                                               Phone: (845) 332-6525

Trillium Gallery Online is expanding to a physical gallery in the quaint and historic village of Saugerties, NY in the heart of the beautiful Catskill Mountains. The gallery is open to the public beginning Saturday, January 25, 2014 with a grand opening on Saturday, February 15, 2015 beginning at noon. Brilliant art coupled with good food, wine, music and more is the order of the day. No unsolicited art is accepted but you are encouraged to enter an art contest with the theme "Down on Main Street" - winner will have his/her art displayed in the gallery  for one month and will be offered membership in the gallery as well. Please see contest rules at the online site at

www.trilliumgallery.com or email the curator, Maureen Maliha at trillium@post.com for further details.