Joy to You

May your day be filled with Joy!

Building Joy

Growing up I lived in many different places, city and country. We had modern tract homes, lived in Victorians, run-of-the-mill city homes, apartments and out-of-the-way hovels with treehouses. We lived in a tent one summer, and a lean-to another. Our family built a log house from scratch, and we lived many years there without water or electricity.

We moved at least once a year every year of my children, many years we changed residences several times. This had a lot of effect on various aspects of my life, and it really impacted my creative urges. I take great joy from the re-modeling, renovation or creation of a dwelling. I love to make a place my own.

Many times in my life I have dreamed of creating a home from out of the earth, a more roundy, eccentric amorphous earthy green-energy based structure. I've seen it in my dreams, visited it in visions, and held that I would actually live there someday. It has much the feel and look of the house built by Simon Dale for his family in Wales. I just look at those photos or photos of the Hobbit homes and I am nostalgic for my dreams.

Several years ago, my good friend Jeralynn bought a place with a bunch of acres on the Consumnes River. She shares many of the same dreams as I when it comes to building practices and being gentle on the earth. I get the great joy of staying in the guest cabin with a cob stove for New Years. Our band, Souls Journey, is going to play and lead a Kiirtan/sing-a-long for whoever shows up to celebrate. Building joy in community.

The Joy of Simply Painting

I have been working for awhile now with Melissa Dinwiddie and Cory Huff in the inner circle at artempowers.me, and now I am working further with Melissa in her Creative Ignition Club. A lot of work.  Empowering, expansive, creative, simply joyous work. I've completely redone my website. I've done a lot of emotional clearing, strategizing, conspiring to create, and inner examination. I am now conducting my art business as a business.

An art business focused on serving up my art makes me my companys biggest asset. Suddenly, I owe it to my business to take care of me.

And now I paint. Before, I was working 12-16 hour days, and hardly allowing myself the opportunity to paint or do my own creative work at all. I kept putting off what I really enjoy until some day, when I would have the time. Then, I woke up to the fact that that day would never arrive unless I declared it so. Even more important to my business is that if I don't paint, we run out of assets. 

With that realization in mind, I joined the Creative Ignition Club, where I would join with others on a similar journey and receive encouragement, coaching and tools to change my day to day operations to support my art business. In the club I have dedicated myself to a minimum of 15 minutes everyday to pure joy painting, making the time happen, carving it out of the seemingly uncarvable. So far, it has really meant at least an hour, and more often several hours a day. Oh, joy of joys!

Functioning Site - What a Joy!

I've heard it said that if you want God to laugh, tell him you've got plans. Well, a comic by nature, I did just that. I have been re-building my website one page at a time for quite some while. I was being painstaking because I wanted to make it better than ever before, as I changed the focus from what I can to do to what I absolutely love to do.

I completed the project a couple weeks ago, and was quite pleased with the outcome. Except for one point. The blessed thing just loaded way too slow. Turns out I had far too many sites on one hosting account, so I purchased a bright and shiny new one with more whistles and bells etc. (joyfulnames.com)

Therein arose the laugh, loud and clear!  Parts of my site are on wordpress, and part just pure html. It was my plan that I would just migrate this whole site seemlessly. HA!  When you are dealing with data bases, and 50+ image-rich pages,  it is a little more work than I planned, to say the least, yet I was persistant. Eventually, I was able to get the entire thing completely mirrored on the new host using a different domain name, re-configure where the original domain was pointing, and make it work great. Then I pushed the one button required to rename the old host domain so the other sites on there would be taken care of. Ooops.

I guess I did that too soon. There suddenly arose many little things that I had not done in the most kosher way threatening to either be corrected or they would stand out like a sore thumb! Weeks, months of work gone totally awry!

The Joy in all of this is that it is now all corrected, and even better than before. The parts function, and I can return my focus to what really makes my heart sing. Yay!