Calling All Angels

Calling all angels
Calling all angels
Walk me through this one
Don't leave me alone

Calling all angels
Calling all angels
We're tryin', we're hopin'
But we're not sure how this goes.

I heard this long first on Six Feet Under last year. It's stayed in my head and today refuses to not be heard. As the song was sung by the characters on Six Feet Under it was poingnant and raw. This version is absolutely smooth as silk and no less powerful.

Whoever you are, reading this blog today, maybe you need to hear this song too. It's comforting and uplifting and truly beautiful. The artist, Jane Siberry, has made it available as a free download from her store. Go listen.


Calling all angels, six feet under, Jane Siberry

Inside the room of your soul

I saw this fun thing on another blog somewhere, I don't know what the heck the photo is all about, but it's a fun blogthing anyway. Eerily, relatively true!

What Your Soul Really Looks Like

You are a wanderer. You constantly long for a new adventure, challenge, or eve a completely different life. You are a grounded person, but you also leave room for imagination and dreams. You feet may be on the ground, but you're head is in the clouds. You believe that people see you for how you are, not how you look. But deep down, you know that's not exactly true. Your near future is all about change, but in very small steps. The end of the journey looks far, but it's much closer than you realize. For you, love is all about caring and comfort. You couldn't fall in love with someone you didn't trust.

Inside the Room of Your Soul

Weekly Tarot - 06/24 - 06/30 - King of Cups

King of Cups
Sharman- Casselli Tarot

This weeks influencing card is the King of Cups. This King represents an opportunity to successfully take a risk on something that resonates emotionally or spiritually within you. He represents an awareness of an wise advisor who will serve as your guide if only you ask. He won't volunteer, but he is always there, waiting to be asked.

This King could be a person in your life whom you trust for advice. He's experienced in the world and is your rock. Always showing you the way by example, not lecture, in quiet assuredness. He may be an older male figure, a spiritual leader or an educator. He is deeply concerned with humanity and feels all the sorrows as well as the joys, but he keeps his distance and that allows him to make wiser judgments. He's a romantic, restless, an idealist and often, a dreamer visionary.

Within yourself you also have this king as an inner advisor, waiting patiently for you to call on him. He watches and waits, often giving you a small hint of his presence in unexpected insights or inspirations. Remember one of those genius thoughts you had and then let slip away? Try remembering next time and let this wise King begin to speak. Your inner self has connetions to all the wisdom of the universe and wants nothing more than to help you be enormously successful in your spiritual and emotional lives.

Give yourself permission this week to spend a few moments quietly allowing that wisdom to come to your consciousness. Consult with a trusted ally on the questions in your life. Look to your dreams to give you ideas about how to solve a dilemma or enhance an already positive situtiation. This King can guide or teach you by example, not words, how to become more compassionate, patient, and calm to fully commit emotionally to your goals or ideals. It's time to move forward with something you have been mulling over for a long time. No dream ever became reality without mature commitment and passion, all gifts this King brings.

Tarot

Names

This post is a part of the Absolute Write Blog Chain, Round 2. I am following Peregrinas, which is always an interesting read. In fact, all the blogs in the chain are . I hope you'll spend a lazy afternoon wandering through the chain.

Anyway, from the blog ahead of me I was intrigued with the idea of names. Probably because I have an unusual given name, Wendelynn. Until the past years of the Internet explosion, I had never come across another Wendelynn. Even in the early days of the Net, I was pretty alone. Today if you Google the name, you get 618 entries, many of them are me but there are really lots of Wendelynn's in the universe.

My version of Wendelynn came about because I am a first child and my father is Wendell. The story goes that there was a weather girl that one of my parents especially enjoyed on TV and her name was Lynn. So I am named for an unknown TV weather broadcaster in Lincoln,NE and my dad. That's a funny combination. Oh, by the way, it's pronounced Wen-Duh- Lynn, not Wendy- Lynn and no one in my family ever called me by it. My dad was always called Wendy and I became Wendy Jo, finally an acknowledgement of my mother's contribution to my full name!

One day I came across this great numerology site with thousands of names in their database, but no Wendelynn. I sent them an email and they calculated my name. The opening sentence of the report on my full given name was "This is a name that should never be given to anyone?"

I usually go by Wendy, always feeling that Wendelynn was too intimidating. Just this last year or so, as I turned 50, have I become comfortable with it as a name. Wendy is an interesting one too, most people thinking that J.M.Barrie made it up for Peter Pan. Not so, says another Wendy.

You'd think that having grown up with an unusual name would have led me to naming my own child something unremarkable like Ann, Jane or Cathy. Unfortunately, the unusual name thing must have a magnetic pull on me. My first choice for my daughter's name was Cyan, after the color. My husband lived in fear that I actually was going to insist on that! We actually named our daughter Kira, after an unforgettable heroine in Ayn Rand's We The Living.

She has carried on the naming quirk too, having named one of her furry catkids, Turtle!

How do you feel about your name? Does it suit your personality? Have you ever seriously wanted a different name but still use your given name? Do you know how your own name was chosen?

Next up in the chain is Madderblue. Enjoy!


awchain

Scrapping The Past

I've been working on a themed digital
scrapbook project at the Digital Scrapbook Place. It's a multiweek project utilizing primarily one set of design kits to create an album. The colors are soft pinks and greens, they just screamed wedding to me!

This is my grandparents wedding picture. Their names are Clara Tollman and Archie Anderson, Married in 1932.

I tinted the photo to blend with the overall scheme and recolored a couple of other elements for the look I wanted. Full credits are on the gallery page at DSP if you see something you just have to have for yourself!

The wedding photo is the second page in the series for me, but when I assemble the album it will probably end up to be page 3 or 4.

Here's a page that will come after the wedding one. This is a picture of Clara & Archie's first daughter, my mother at age 2, I think! This one has the state of Nebraska incorporated and the little pearl indicates where they were living in 1936. I wish the focus was closer to her face, but I'm guessing it was a very basic camera and people always stand too far away when they take pictures, even today.

I'm enjoying the challenge of using the same elements repeatedly to create something new each week. If I can find a wedding photo of my mom & dad, I'll do a page for them in this series. My own wedding anniversary is this week, I think I'll do a page for myself too.

Scrapbook

Tag, You're It -AW Blog Chain

So, I've been reading all the blogs in the chain this week, wondering what on earth the topic was going to be like when it got around to me, the last player. My task is to relate this rambling to the previous post by Chaos and also the the very first post by Towerkel. All the prior writers had done a really good job, but I was sweating it a little with the 2 posts in play. At last, I got the Tag, you're it notice.

I should have this much luck in all the other areas in my life! Yippee!! I'm doing the Snoopy happy dance about this combination. You see, I have the soul of a gypsy and there is not much I love more than taking road trips. Get in the car and just go.

Chaos tells us about trips with her father and seeing her first oil rig in Oklahoma. I've been through lots of flat, brown places too with lovely, but deceiving names like the Painted Desert. After a while you'll stop at anything, even a huge meteor crator in the middle of nowhere, just to see something that's not flat. It was still rocks and brown, but it wasn't flat! We found the crater almost by accident as we were leaving Winslow, AZ, which had been the focus of that day's mileage. How could a die hard Eagles fan be in AZ not go to Winslow? By the way, do not blink or you will totally miss it. The rest of that trip for another day.

So how does the oil rig get into this story? Well, I saw my first oil rigs in Oklahoma, just like Chaos. It was on a trip which originated in Odell, NE and ended up in Mineral Wells, TX. There is a whole bunch of nothing between the two places, but you will see some oil rigs as you pass through OK. Everytime I see a tall one, I can't help but think of the Beverly Hillbillies. I am a child of the 60's, after all. They should remind me of my grandfather, whose life was dramatically changed after an oil rig accident in the 1920's or even of the ultimate Texas oil movie, Giant. But Hillbillies it is.

I have a new association with oil rigs now. Since I have lived in TX, they aren't so unusual. I was unaware of the distincitve noise that can be associated with them until one night on my first cemetery after dark ghost hunt. No one told me there was an oil rig pumper jack near by and the noise, coming out of the total darkness, really freaked me out!

I'll bet you're wondering how this is going to end up back at Towerkels blog entry, about Dunkin Donuts and MA? I'm getting there. It really is a small world, and this blog project is so much like a PBS show of the past, Connections.

Here goes.... I was in the noisy haunted cemetery with Blue Texas, who is a AW writer and my daughter. She led me to AW where I have joined the blog chain. The blog chain started with a post about Dunkin Donuts being everywhere, which they are in New England but not in Texas, and about drivers in MA. I grew up in southern CT, lived in NH and commuted to Lowell MA for a number of years. I can testify first hand that MA drivers are the absolute worst in the US. And that Dunkin Donuts will beat Krispy Kreme every time, especially when you get a DD cup of coffee, which by the way, in MA will be with cream unless you specify otherwise. And to get right to the point, cause you've all been bored long enough now, yesterday I was working on my digital scrapbook project, and came across some photos of The Kid sitting in front of the famous seafarers statue in Glouseter... you guessed it, MA.

And that is how this blog entry completes the circle.

awchain

AW Blog Chain

At the Absolute Write forum, we're having a bit of summer fun with a blogging circle. It's the internet version of the telephone game, where one person writes a post, the next one incorporates one element of that blog post into their own, and it continues on.

I'm the last on this round, so not only do I include something from the previous blog, I have to bring it on home by touching on something in the very first blog. That should be interesting!

Here's the players in round 1. Pay a visit and leave a comment. It's a great way to while away the afternoon...day....week.

Towerkel
TemlynWriting
Blue Texas
Forbidden Snowflake
Sury
XThe NavigatorX
Peggy
MadScientistMatt
Jen.nifer
KellyC
Quidscribis
chaostitan
Wendelynn

awchain

Envelope Art

At Scrap Artist last week, the altered art challenge was envelopes. How could I resist? I am a long time altered artist, long before the art form had that name, I was doing it as Mail Art and before that as a kid, I was just totally incapable of mailing a naked envelope.

I did three envelopes and keep having ideas for more, but I'll move to the next challenge along with the group. This week it's tags. I've never done a tag, so we'll see what happens. The Imagination envelope is called DaVinci Meets Einstein, as the quote is Albert's and there is a definite DaVinci inspiration going on here.

The envelope to the above is called Mystery Mail. I've wanted to do something arty with a Ouija board for a while, and this is what came out. I think my favorite part is the letters floating in the background and the first line of the address...Whispers in your heart...makes me feel like there are spirit whisperings that maybe I'll hear one day.

The theme was envelopes and I did an ATC on the theme too. These are all real Civil War images that I "borrowed" from Civil War antiquities sites. Ever since I first heard it on Ken Burn's Civil War for PBS, I carry the Sullivan Ballou letter in my heart and it keeps popping into my art, as it did here, inspiring this piece. Not an altered envelope, but envelopes just the same.

It's been a pretty stressful week for me, lots of difficult family things happening that are out of my control at this point. I'm going to have to deal with the issues soon and it's not going to be easy. I read a book once about Vincent Van Gogh by Irving Wallace. One of the themes, heck maybe it was even spelled out in the book!, is remembered by me as " out of pain, beauty". I always find when something is very difficult in my life, my creative side explodes! I guess that's happening this week too.

Want to see more of my art?


ATC, Scrapping, Altered Art, Digital Art

Weekly Tarot 06/10 - 06/16 : Ten of Wands

Ten of Wands
Hanson Roberts Tarot

Been a rough couple of weeks hasn't it? Feeling like you've been carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders and it's getting heavier all the time? That's the feeling of the Ten of Wands. Too much to do, too many decisions to make, too many things on your "To Do" list and you are the lynch pin holding everything together.

Whoa.... sweetie, you'd better lay down some of those wands and take a step back. See that fairy tale castle in the distance, you are never going to reach it if you continute to let yourself be the only one shouldering the load. Yes, you do have to keep going, and yes, everything is important, but you have to remember to take care of yourself as well as taking care of everyone and everything else.

Have you ever wondered why flight attendants say that if you are travelling with a small child, put the oxygen mask on yourself first and then tend to the child? It's the same thing this card is telling you..... you can't perform at your best for anyone else unless you are at 100%. So whether it's making sure you can breathe so you can help the child or making sure you stay strong and healthy so you can take care of all the other things clamoring for your attention, this card it telling you to evaluate your priorities!

Not staying sane about what you can or can't do, how much of the burden you can reasonably carry alone will lead you to overeating, depression, substance abuse, anxiety and all sorts of other stress realted issues. So, take some time this week just for you. Decide where you really need to put your focus and ask for help to manage the rest. Go watch a movie!

tarot

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