Saturday 25 May 2013

How is your brain behaving itself today? We know it is the source of our relating style and the 'animal' that shows our love/relating face to the world. How does this work? It is rather complicated but simplistically....this is what psychologists have told us...

The amydala is a transmitter of signals in our brain. It alerts us to danger in terms of how it was wired in our early years. Any situation that echoes an early threat experienced by us, will trigger our defences. Thus we attack, duck for cover, avoid, shut down or throw accusations at our perceived opponent.The flight response sends us looking for a cave....a place to hide....bottle of alcohol, drug addled view, new love, new house/shoes/jewellery/magazine or food. Our fight response swears, hits out, punches, smashes, abuses and destroys whatever is the closest thing or person at the time.

Often the original threat is now redundant, but our responses remain poised to act.
Apparently we can rewire this pathway and stop over-reacting if we aspire to work hard and be unrelenting in our disciplining of the delinquent fuse.
 We must penetrate to the cellular level and restructure the threadwork in there!!
How?? There are people who know.....it is not for the meek....has anyone had any success with this?
I would love to hear from you.....check out the work of +Marilyn Gordon.www.marilyngordon.com/.../train-your-brain-to-let-go-of-habits

But...we can prepare our brains for change by regularly accessing our creativity....

Wednesday 22 May 2013

softly, softly ...a gentle but insistent boom, boom, boom...time for a different drum...

Hey, let's change the world today! Let's creep around and move the furniture, straighten the pictures.
It's time we got serious about what is going on with the next generation of Australian teenagers. The current batch are about to discover that the Baby Boomers are reworking the middle-age exit plan and being as reluctant as they always have been to follow their predecessors. There is no way they will sit and be old when it is their turn. The horror of aging is not about plumping up the flesh for today's 50-60 year olds, but about not being heard. Our teenagers are very noisy themselves, but they don't know what to make a noise about. There is not much left to begin. They are left simply to reinvent, to recycle or in many cases to destroy.
ADHD,ODD,ADD......deficiencies, destruction, devaluing, defacing, desperate and downward....
How to get them to be creative?
How to give them hope that deconstruction is not their only lot?
Is there any merit it telling them to go back to 'truth to materials'?
I think it must all begin with going back to respect for the 'temple'...the physical body.
Friends and I were looking at photographs of ourselves in our 20's. someone commented on how 'wholesome' we all looked. (That's the attraction of Mad Men, isn't it?)
Yet we know that we were subject to eating disorders, depression, cancer, anxiety and mood swings BUT not at the age of ten, eleven or twelve. And it didn't define us.
Our youth are no healthier, smarter or psychologically fitter than many children of the Third World.
And they have a far less savoury regard for education, family values or their elders.
So let's start to fix it. How? Start the dialogue people. Begin to push back. Warmly, gently, quietly.
Grandparents.... redirect the values of the young...maybe, just maybe if we stop fussing about clothes, wrinkles, bunions and grey hair, bake something wholesome (get rid of those damn trans fats!!!)and turn off the news for a while, we can get them to stop comparing themselves in a frenzy of Australian Idols and just be kids.

Tuesday 21 May 2013

Loving London & all things Borough

I can't believe this was 2 years ago this week...

she'll be apples if I just keep painting...

a draft in acrylic wash
then work areas with the heavier acrylic with some flow medium
start to establish the relationships between the parts


alter egos are a great way to create pseudo realities...
 
Rachel returned to the arbor in the garden with a strong desire to assert her influence. She was frustrated by her sense of inertness. The stumbling block to her moving forward as always was taking a long time to shape itself in her mind. She sat concentrating hard on the feeling that weighed her down. It was like a concrete block in her upper abdomen, a rock pressing against her ribs and dragging her consciousness toward her very core.

“Oh what?!” she demanded of herself sharply. “Just finish pruning the poor bloody roses and get on with the day.”

Addressing herself was a common habit of Rachel’s. Since her peculiar detour from the sane, self-contained woman she had been in her thirties, to the anxiety-driven and panic-attacked train wreck of her mid-forties, she had allowed such indulgence.

She knew that she had to get moving or the tightness that swelled within her intestines would give way to cramps and gripping pain.

 
Sometimes making art makes art all by itself...or maybe making art makes one crazier all by itself. It was raining... the old bit of white sheeting on the floor of the car was slightly damp and held a pattern from where I had cleaned the roller after a lino print.I liked it as much as the print itself...perhaps even more....