Ah, to Be Young and Talented

I feel very inspired by this young makeup artist, Stephanie Fernandez, who uses her own face as a surface for her unique creativity.

Some of her work is dark–think zombie film–and some is more abstract or flowery…but all of it is stunning.

http://www.stephaniefernandezart.com/about-me

Sometimes Those Good Things Do Not Happen, But Other Good Things Do

I had one of those days today.

You know…those days when something very simple is expected to happen, only it doesn’t happen, and the simple thing not-happening means that those grand things that would have made your life so much brighter are also NOT happening.

And still the sun shines, and the flowers bloom, and the children laugh, and a guy named Mike publishes a blog post called Welcome to Blue Sky, Rhode Island. Population: One Totally Plibbed-Out Sixth Grade Girl Who Goes by The Name of None-of-Your-Beeswax-if-That’s-Okay-With-You-Mister-Flibbertijeepers and it surprises the heck out of me with its creativity, widening my eyes and possibly my horizons. (When you read Mike’s post — because you must read it — be sure to notice the tags at the bottom.)

Life is beautiful, even if you are hiding in the closet and feeling plibbed-out.

~ACS

Charmed

Charm is the quality in others that makes us more satisfied with ourselves.

~   Henri Frederic Amiel (1821-1881)

A charming person has a natural talent, a gift for elevating others from the inside out.

Do you have someone like that in your life?

Failure, Smailure

If you have been knocked down by life, and you need some help pulling yourself up, how about this motivational video?

click here

In a Minute There Is Time

Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse 

~T.S. Eliot, from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1919)

*   *   *   *   *

Sometimes we forget how much we can accomplish in a short time. A minute doesn’t seem very long – and yet it is long enough.

Make a decision. Make a revision. Improve your life. Improve the life of another person. It will only take a minute.

In a minute you can invest in a small business, solve a problem, tighten a screw, compliment someone, water a plant, wipe the kitchen counter, or even create a new life!

In another minute, somewhere on Earth, a business will fail, someone will receive an insult, a screw will be loosened, a plant will dry up, a counter will become sticky, and someone will most definitely die. In fact, across the globe, these things will happen many times over, and some of them may even happen to you.

Do not be discouraged.

The Universe changes with every moment. So do we.

Make a decision. Change something. Make something better than it was. If you act, perhaps your act will be reversed in the next moment, or perhaps it will not. Either way, if you have acted, your decision to act, and the act itself, both existed in that moment.

You were changed in that moment. The Universe was changed in that moment.

Go ahead, disturb the Universe. I dare you. It will only take a minute.

*   *   *   *   *

A Simple Philosophy

“If you don’t get what you want, change your mind.”

I heard this from an art teacher approximately twenty years ago.  As a philosophy it has served me well — both in art and in life.

The next time you feel frustrated, think about changing your mind.  Try looking at life from another angle.

See where it takes you!

A Peek at a Blog Called “Life With Lindsay”

In times of chaos, looking at images of organization, simplicity, and beauty can help inspire us to find these qualities in our own lives.

I recently came across photographs of the home of a blogger named Lindsay Meyer.  What impressed me is that Lindsay’s home appears very organized, open, and simple, but it still has a personal and comfortable look to it.  The link below will take you to Lindsay’s post, so you can be impressed, too!

sneak peek: my little marina studio «.

Looking around at the chaos of moving boxes recently, I found a fragment of beauty and simplicity, a spot still untouched by moving preparations.  Instead of looking at all the boxes, I chose to look at this…

The cymbidium orchids are from my mother’s garden.  They last quite a long time, so I expect to be able to take them along when we move.  I won’t have a mantle available to me anymore, but there will be a place for flowers no matter where I go.

My last blog post, Lessons From a Life on the Move, was unexpectedly featured on Freshly Pressed, and I received a large number of views, comments, and also new subscribers as a result.  I want to give a very warm welcome and thank you to all of my readers for visiting, commenting, and subscribing.  I appreciate the community and the support, right now more than ever.

Henry David Thoreau: Wise Philosopher or Ugly Skulker?

Once upon a time… during the year 1845, to be more precise,  Henry David Thoreau — following the excellent advice of his best friend, poet Ellery Channing — set off to build himself a tiny house in a quiet spot near Walden Pond, in his home state of Massachusetts.

He intended to stay there alone and live in harmony with nature, wishing to experience the stripped-down essence of life, and to accomplish some serious writing.

Fulfilling his intentions, Thoreau wrote a little book called Walden, about his experiment of conducting life in a simple, natural, and self-reliant manner.  He advised his readers to simply, and to reduce whenever possible.  In America’s current sad economic state, and in our modern, wasteful and multi-tasking culture, this is good advice indeed.  However, I suspect it to be something that happens more often through necessity than as a result of philosophical design.

In my high school Literature class, this account of simple living was required reading.  Interestingly, I don’t remember all the volumes I was asked to read for school, but I do remember this one.  Looking back now, I recall that as I read through the book, I observed Thoreau’s timeless wisdom and his clear practicality —  but I also found Walden to be one of the most (ironically) long-winded and boring things I had ever read in my life, up to that time.  Many of the included details felt completely unnecessary to me.  For example, I did not yearn to know the price of the lumber he used to build the house, but I think he devoted an entire page to it.

I have very recently been thinking of giving Walden a second look, a second chance to win me over.  I enjoyed some of Thoreau’s other material, and in fact I found his essay Civil Disobedience particularly inspiring.  I wonder if perhaps Walden might resonate more with me, now that I have more life experience.  What does a teenager know about solitude, simplicity, and frugality?  Answer:  Not very much!

This is not Walden Woods, but I once found it to be a good "thinking spot."

Now, instead of being a teenager myself, I am a parent of one teenager and two preteens.  Life has changed, or to be more accurate, I have been changed by life.  I certainly spend far more time thinking about simplicity now than I did when I was younger, and I even write about it.  I regularly search for ways to make life simpler and more efficient, not to mention less expensive.  Sometimes I even use up my free time in pursuit of creative ways to create more free time.  I admit, there may be something wrong with my math in that equation…

“Our life is frittered away by detail,” Thoreau wrote in Walden.

So true.  How many details are frittering our lives away?  This statement may be more true now than when it was originally written.  Personally, I feel pretty frittered.  How about you?  So you can understand why I started thinking, “Hey, maybe old Henry David Thoreau wasn’t so dull after all!” 

The man was called worse things than boring during his lifetime, I have learned.

If you look up Thoreau on Wikipedia as I did, you will find an early photograph of him (an 1856 daguerreotype) that suggests he looked a bit like Ellen Degeneres with a neck-beard.  There are also some quotes to be found from Thoreau’s contemporaries, many of them very emphatically calling him “ugly.”  I would like to note here that the image in which Thoreau seems to resemble Ellen Degeneres is by far the most flattering image of him that I have seen.

Although Thoreau was not as popular in his lifetime as he has posthumously become, some supported his writings and his actions.  One of his more notable benefactors was Ralph Waldo Emerson, who befriended Thoreau and took him home to tutor his children and perform other helpful tasks while living with the Emerson family.  Emerson employed him for years, spoke well of him, and also made available to him the land on which he lived for more than two years while writing Walden.

Others were not as generous as Emerson, and certainly not as friendly.

Robert Louis Stevenson considered Thoreau to be a “skulker“, and suggested he was not only very ugly, but also effeminate, anti-social, and humorless!

I suspect that Stevenson had a personal grudge against Thoreau, as the majority of quotes about him are more positive, save for the general consensus that he was ugly.  Thoreau’s lifestyle choices were unconventional enough that a few other writers believed it would be more appropriate for him to get a job and act like a civilized person, instead of living alone in the woods like a savage heathen — but many others seemed to find his thoughts interesting.

“If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.” This quote from Walden suggests that Thoreau understood the negative perception others had of him, and was more concerned with being true to himself than with improving his public image.

In reality, whether or not Thoreau was ugly, whether or not he stepped to the music of a different drummer, he was neither lazy nor savage.  He studied at Harvard university for some years and spent much of his adult life working in his family’s pencil factory, where he involved himself in upgrading and modernizing the facility.  I found this last piece of information surprising.  I am having difficulty envisioning Thoreau working in a factory of any kind, after reading his work.

“If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. “

~ Henry David Thoreau (from Walden, 1854)

I don’t think he was a skulker at all.  I think he was a dreamer.

Thoreau has long been a famous success, praised by many writers and other great minds.  His writings have influenced important leaders like Ghandi and Martin Luther King, Jr., his works have been assigned in public schools, and his philosophies are quoted across the internet. 

Take that, Robert Louis Stevenson!!

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The quotes and information summarized above (along with further information) may be found on these pages:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_David_Thoreau (life, critiques of)

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Henry_David_Thoreau (further quotes by, and quotes about)

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Walden (Walden quotes)

When Your Home Runneth Over

While watching a video about clutter management, I heard a woman describe her family’s habit of bagging up all of their clutter and hiding it whenever someone came to the house.

They hid their reality in a room named: The Overflow Room.

I can’t stop thinking about this phrase.  (To see the video, click here.).  Keeping a room available for hiding sacks of chaos is not a good use of living space, will not solve the problem, and — let’s face it — will most likely encourage more clutter.

If a glass is overflowing, we stop pouring and tip the glass to remove the excess.

If a home is overflowing, the solution is the same.

Obviously, this takes time and commitment, and we can’t actually tip our homes like we can do with a glass, but the solution still applies: stop pouring and remove the excess.

This year, in addition to the new adventure of writing this blog, I started a small business to help people simplify and declutter their lives.  I have always found it a rejuvenating and satisfying experience to make something better and simpler…but not everyone does!

Some people are so resistant to this kind of activity, they can hardly believe that anyone would enjoy it.

You enjoy doing this?

I do enjoy it!      

Shortly before I officially started the business, I helped a friend make her long abandoned home office usable once again.  She felt so uplifted by the result that she wrote a blog post (One Day My Soul Just Opened Up) about the experience of clearing out her office, and why it made such a difference in her life.  Months later, I also helped her with her closet and she created some video blogs, both from before the process, and during and after the process.

Organizing and simplifying are completely normal activities for me, but there are so many people with Overflow Rooms and other much more serious problems who struggle with it every day.  It can be a very emotional experience for people to face up to these kinds of issues.

If you have a problem like this and you think you need some support to deal with it, get support.  If you are too embarrassed to ask your friends or family to help you, hire an organizer.

Start now.  Make space for your life!

_________________________________________________________________________________

P.S.  You can contact me privately through acleansurface at gmail dot com if you need help in the San Jose, CA area, or even if you just need to talk to someone.

* The fabulous photo above is a close up of a framed Marilyn Monroe portrait I have in my home.

What Remains Shall Be Beautiful

The sculptor produces the beautiful statue by chipping away such parts of the marble block as are not needed – it is a process of elimination.

~Elbert Hubbard

Likewise, when our lives and homes are simplified — when the unnecessary clutter and pointless tasks have all been chipped away — we are left with the essential beauty of life and of ourselves.

Be the sculptor of your own life, chip away the parts not needed.

What remains shall be beautiful.

The above photograph, and those that follow, were taken during my trip to Prague, where I was fascinated by the unique surfaces on some of the buildings.

The designs on these walls were made using the technique of sgraffito, a method of etching away plaster to reveal another color under the surface.

Amazing isn’t it?

 

To learn more about sgraffito click here… and to see more sgraffito examples from the Czech Republic and other countries, click here.