Morning walk brought to you by a very tangled barbed wire fence!

Tangled up in Blue,
Beauty or a beast?
Attempts to protect what is on the other side,
Safety from within or without?
Holding together with any means necessary,
Reflecting chaos that binds
discomfort & fear, to beauty & wellbeing.
Holding it all together with woven barbs
Lovely to look at, but impossible to grasp.

I love old barbed wire fences with their character and intention. Somehow they reflect feelings of beautiful brokenness and pain within. These fences mirror one’s internal struggle to protect vulnerable feelings through barbs that deflect approaching threats. Spiney Cholla and barbed wire are perfect companions with similar methods to defend and guard from intruders.
What can we learn from this?
Our internal barbs push away trespassers of our comfort zone within. We meet very ‘prickly’ people and have a bad impression of this type of response, but in actuality, they are in protection mode and require grace and understanding. Pain and hurt lie at the core of their discomfort and this is the mechanism to stay safe. I do that, you do that, cactus, bees and barb wire do this.
The lesson is to respect and acknowledge those barbs as a beautiful protection of our vulnerabilities and go forward with compassion and forgiveness.

                                                                Time to smell the….Irises!!!

For all those struggling, working hard to ‘figure it out’, feeling lost in the muck of ‘it all’, no hope to anything getting better…..

Find comfort in your senses…get outside in nature, hang with your pet, watch a favorite movie, go to a museum, cook your grandma’s favorite recipe, listen to your favorite music, make art…..
It may not be the cure all but we are in it for the long run and need comforting routines that carry us from one step to another. The senses ground us in the present so weave them into daily self care and allow their ‘aromas ‘ to sink deep!
Art on ya’ll
Art Heals!!!

 One of the most important skills for those struggling with PTSD and mental health is resiliency, the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties and continue to function.
Society places high expectations to be perfect, which results in an ambush of our true self and a tangle of pressure to be something no one can obtain… perfection. This dynamic leads to shame, guilt, remorse, anger and a lifestyle of beating ourselves up over actions deemed mistakes.
I suggest one cure is to learn to love our mistakes as a growth step and view it as tool for creative healing. In practicing making mistakes, we learn our resiliency, humility, and core truths of our brokenness which then can be embraced in forgiveness and growth. Mistakes allow us to choose different behaviors that support our truths, thus creating better self-esteem and a clear slate of compassion to walk forward with.
Invention is often born from mistakes. The arts and creativity can act as a workbook for identifying and solving alternative methods and perspectives through making, process, materials manipulation and reworking intention. In art, if one doesn’t like what is seen, creativity provides the conduit to redo and provide a different path toward the agreeable completion of the work, thus resiliency is practiced and learned. Making mistakes is very freeing to the constraints of always being perfect and right allowing one to embrace the beautiful brokenness of being real and a human. Art is an excellent teacher for making mistakes beautiful.
My advice….go make mistakes and give yourself a pat on the back for breaking out of self-jail and needing to be perfect!