Regent Canal Islington

Life is a Life Poster

Recreating your life as poster sounds good, if you like being a poster. It's all in the IPhoto process, but you can do it with other programmes like Photoshop, and Picasa. It's all thanks to MIKE MATAS has a great idea, do your own life as a life poster, using Iphoto, or photoshop.
With just a grid pattern of photos of all you top moments, enhances the feel good factor. Pick all the brightest and best images, cut, crop, change, or delete the ones that don't make you look fantastic. Even this process of selecting and viewing your imagesof yourself at your best can have a wonderful effect, but it helps to follow through and get the print done.
However, I'm not one to run away from scissors and glue - the alternative, but by now considered old fashioned, method. I love a good cut and paste job. For years, I've been experimenting with PHOTOMONTAGE. I have large montage creations everywhere: on the back of my door, in niches, hidden away in boxes, or in front of me on the desk. Every so often I add or subtract, or paint over them. They represent toil for an image without paint on your fingers. But the life poster changed my mind. I have done others. But I never thought of doing a montage of myself. Most of the digital pictures I have only cover the digital age, the past few years. This means I have to scan all the pics from the pre digital age if I want this to reflect a true history of myself. Meanwhile, let's get started. More to come.

Still Life on Table

To be viewed simply without comment.

River Deep, Mountain High

I was at a Life Coaching Open meeting last night and one of the fun things to do in Life Coaching is the LIFE WHEEL. This is a circle with eight segments each marked on a scale from one to ten of how satisfied you are with those aspects of your life. Fine, I thought, but why does it have to be just geometry and numbers? This is a business person's way of thinking. Another idea is to draw this as a landscape of with a mountain range, or an image of Manhattan with skyscraper blocks competeing for height. Much more fun. Let's say the first mountain is 'My Career', the second is 'My Money'. Are they level or are they mismatched in height? When you compare the height of the trio of mountains 'My health', 'My friends and family' and 'My partner' is should some interesting similarities or anomalies according to where you are right now in life.

So, why not draw a mountain range? It's not a wheel, sure, so it doesn't flow as it's supposed to, but it's just as good for seeing your life in perspective and taking it from there. If you join the dots of the wheel, it becomes more like a wonky wheelchair, not moving you forward, but I prefer the mountains. If they balance each other they seem like a unified range, if not, then maybe they have some more growing to do to assemble themselves in unison. Try it...

Chocolate

One tip from a friend is: Add chocolate, cocoa or anything that smells good to your paint so can actually SMELL your paintings to tickle your olfactory senses. Thanks for the tip.
Yum. I might eat my latest painting when I'm hungry...

what this is not

Let me just say, this will all be from a gay perspective, no way round it. Also, that it is not designed to fill all the emotional gaps in people's lifes. Art is not a new religion, a stop gap for all the leaking stuff inside: writing, painting, creating are a set of methods with specific tools. Using them doesn't have to have such a purpose, they can be fun in their own right. But they might work a few patches on the bad stuff, if you try. Healing is a long and mysterious process whereby you deal with painful feelings over time. If you don't deal with the feelings, they often haunt you anyway, so it's a choice. Write the first story, or do a cut and paste life montage and see what happens. It's simple really.

Astrology

Astrology is also.... ' a healing art' , as Vogue says, if it helps us to understand ourselves and our relationships with others. It is something you either are open to, or are not. So, no need to bother with long-winded explanations as to whether it works. Either it does, or it doesn't, for you. If not, then try something else. The funniest notion of how we simultaneously believe/don't believe it came from Arthur C. Clarke who said, "I don't believe in Astrology: But, that's because I'm Saggitarian, and we're supposed to be sceptical."

Forget Sun Signs - that's all just magazine sooth saying fodder. The generic advice given is good for every day. If , however, there are knots embeded deep in your personality, blocking your forward growth, then you can bet that a locked aspect such as an oppostition or square might help explain it. Even worse is to have, like me, a grand cross of all the tough planets, causing me trouble. Also, to have Cheiron in my Seventh or Relationships House means that is where I have a sore spot.

If you have an argument with someone, isn't it better to know that it's because you can never see eye to eye with that person because they are your opposite sign. I just find that sometimes helps to defuse problems.

Cheiron, the centaur

Cheiron is the ruling emblem of this site. He was a Centaur and a teacher of the healing arts and a truly fascinating mythological figure.

Even as a healer, he could not heal his own wound. Hercules pierced his teacher's flesh with the arrows of the Hydra. The wound was poisonous and he couldn’t heal himself, even though he was a wise sage. He begged Zeus to resolve his dilemma as he could endure his agony no longer. Yet, because he was immortal, he couldn’t die. Who could bear such an eternal wound? Cheiron agreed to die, if Jupiter released Prometheus, also in agony from having his liver eaten nightly by eagles. So, Cheiron an immortal voluntarily died to free the spirit of genius in humankind.

The themes here include sensitivity to rejection, being emotionally wounded without possibility of being fully healed, the notion of being trapped between half instinctive animal and half reasoning human – and the ability to rescue sources of strength from our own life pain, to use this fruit to teach and help others with the wisdom gained. Healing is also an art.

Some Techniques

You might be asking how and why art heals wounds? We all thought love did that, right? First, I asked myself why do I have wounds in the first place? So you might start thinking along those lines. Where and what are these wounds? What if we feel we haven't got any? How do we know what is to be healed, if we don't even know we are wounded? Some wounds are so deeply hidden, we might have to unmask them, to tease them out of their shell a bit. That's where Emotional Freedom Techniques come in as energy meridian tapping can help to uncover the layers of a problem knotted within. So, it's slow and a sometimes blissful, sometimes painful, often totally surprising uwrapping process.

For me, it's mostly with writing, and an article on fast writing of psychological aspects that got me started on its benefits, but also painting and photography can produce a similar effect. If I were a musician, the healing effect would come through songs.

But I have none to sing for you today.... just a picture to show what I mean

A thought

Like Wayne Dyer "I'm realistic. I expect miracles".

They say time heals wounds, but art heals much better. Art heals the emotional wounds which are inflicted on us unthinkingly every day. Life is short but art is long. The quickest way to immortality is to cheat death through Art.Time is on it's way out. It's time I blogged on the landscape, so here it is. My very first blog. Here I will place all the items that have helped me along in life. It will be anything from news items, comments, to fiction, to images of beauty, to advice, travel lore, to links, to new yoga positions... anything interesting with links galore.

KJD