But how can that be, you ask. It’s your story! It’s what you lived – it’s a memoir!

Sure, I lived it. I even took notes. I can tell you what happened when. And sometimes I can tell you the whys. But that’s not the same as knowing what the story is. What it means on the inside.

Oh, I knew it was about how I got into art and why it became my life’s passion. I saw how it changed me, and how it changed the way I saw the world and saw myself. And I knew that it led me to a particular mind-bending, mind-altering awakening that took years to fully understand.

But what actually happened???

Well, I told myself to keep writing. Just keep going with it and see what came out. Because I knew that Surrender happened, in larger and larger ways. This surrender was the opposite of giving up. The kind I’m talking about brought me deeper inside. It was more like allowing myself to be guided by an inner voice that took me beyond the ego. It was like I had to find myself first—through painting—and then I had to let go of that dearly won Self—in order to find my Soul.

That’s sort of it in a nutshell. But it was the story behind the story that I needed to understand and find a way to communicate.

I knew the process had to do with ascension. I spent a number of years writing blogs and doing a radio show called Art and Ascension. I think I was hoping I would come to a deeper understanding of what the two had to do with each other. Art was my life when I transcended my life, (if that makes sense) so naturally I thought that art had done it for me. But now that I’m writing the story, I see that art was just the particular medium that I was working with in those days.

What I am seeing now, is that the bridge I had to cross, the gap I had to leap across, was none other than my very own neck. Those five inches or so between my head and my torso—or my head and the place where my heart was located. What was in the way was the passage through my neck.

Or shall we say, the fifth chakra. The throat. The Voice.

As long as I was drawing or painting I could bypass the throat, bypass speaking, because visual art is a silent medium. It all happens inside.

I’ve told the story of why I was mute in my

first memoir. Now I’m writing about what had to happen in order to find that connection between heart and mind. A connection that led to bridging the gap between body and soul.

It’s interesting how every day brings us new stories as well as the continuation of the ones we are already familiar with. But there is always only the one story that matters, the one that stands out, the one that we came here to live. For me it started with bridging the gap between heart and mind.

Tuesday, March 27, 2012 BRIDGING WORLDS WITH POETRY

LINK to SHOW - 

Pegasus (watercolor 11x14) by NW

Continuing “Bridging Worlds” on Blog Talk Radio (Feb. 21, 2012) LINK to Show Feb. 28, 2012)

In the physical world of 3D if we want to get to another place we can jump. We can stretch. We can ride an elevator, take the lift, climb atop an animal or step into a vehicle, boat, plane, or even a rocket ship.

But what do we do when we want to go to an invisible, unseen place?

Well, we can go to sleep, have a dream, but we will remember it as a dream then, and it won’t seem quite real. It won’t have happened in our waking state. We can also simply close our eyes and have a vision. Visions are wonderful, especially when we can bring them through into our reality.

Others take a pill, a drug that will transport them to another world, and that’s certainly an option. But drugs are an artificial inducement, and no matter what the insight they provide, the source hasn’t come from our own being, or our own being-ness in the world. It is not something we have earned through our own efforts. And that does make a difference.

It starts with dreams. Dreams are our first gateway to the inner realms. I’m not an expert, but I know there are cultures who value dreams much more than we ever have—ancient cultures, and indigenous peoples have known how to use dreams to enhance and expand their waking life. It is a type of experience that can seem very odd and foreign to technologically advanced, right-brain societies.

Dreams can often be frightening, especially to children. I remember a dream I had at the age of two, and another one at the age of eight, that had such a profound effect on me that I’ve not only remembered them, but I’ve managed to incorporate them into my life-story, the memoir I call The Nancy Who Drew. I believe these dreams were messages from my soul, instructing me on who I really was, or who I was above and beyond this particular life in this particular body. And I believe that part of my mission in this life has been to connect the dreams to my experience here, and further connect them to an intuitive knowledge I came in with, was born with.

Creating from the imagination, whether it’s writing stories or painting pictures, is very much like entering the Dream World. When I was little I used to tell stories to my younger sister and brother at night when the lights were off. I made them up as I went along, and never wrote them down. But when I was thirteen I decided to write something down. I story I hadn’t told anyone yet. I didn’t get very far. I think one of the reasons was because my father was a writer and I felt intimidated by his vast intellectual knowledge, never feeling I would ever be able to catch up or know as much as he did, or write as well as he could. But the other reason was the story itself. I could only go up to a certain point of the action, and then I had to stop because I didn’t have a clue as to what came next.

This is how it began. There was a boy and a girl taking a walk down a path. The boy was named Andy, the girl was Andrea. They came to a house. They went up to the house and stood at the door. Now here is where the problem began. Should they knock? If they knocked, would anyone answer? What would happen then? And if no one answered, would they try the door knob and see if it was open? What if it was, what then? Or maybe it was locked. Would they leave then? I didn’t know where to take the story, where to take Andy and Andrea. So they stood there, paralyzed on the threshold, and that’s where I left them.

Door Under Water, oil on canvas by NW 2009

I’ve always felt bad about that story. It seemed to mark a creative failure in my young life. A lack of imagination. The door carried great significance in my dream-life, and would soon become very significant in my waking life. And maybe some part of me knew that. And that was why I was frozen. Frozen at the sight of the door. Frozen at what to do with the door, whether to open it or not. Should they go in or shouldn’t they?

To hear more, tune into Blog Talk Radio: LINK to Show, Feb. 28, 2012

Twenty-five years ago I had a vision of a bridge in consciousness. I had taken the leap across, and now I was back. An inner voice prompted me to build the bridge, so that others might see it and make the crossing.

I knew I possessed the tools to build this bridge. I was a full-time artist, living in a studio filled with colorful paintings. Many of them were quite large. I’d had to learn to build stretchers. So the first thing I thought of then was my hammer. It had been given to me by a friend when I’d inadvertently left mine at a gallery when I was hanging pictures. This new hammer was old and beat up, but bigger and heavier than my original one. When I thought of this hammer in connection with the bridge, I was also thinking of the song, If I Had A Hammer. I knew the song well. It was a protest song, a freedom song. It begins with the hammer, and then it goes on to if I had a bell and then a song. But it starts with a hammer. The hammer for smashing things and breaking them apart, or nailing them together.

As a painter, I had done more than my share of putting things together. Aside from stretchers, four pieces of wood with slats at the ends that fitted into one another, making a frame for the canvas to then be stretched upon with special pliers that gripped the cotton or linen so it could be stapled to the wood, I had put colors together. Forms and shapes together. I had cut and ripped things apart to make new things – always images in my case – by sewing or gluing.

But this hammer,  this hammer was a tool for a builder. A carpenter. A creator and destroyer. When I thought of how I was going to build that bridge, I didn’t think of a brush, holding a brush in my hand. Or one of my palette knives. I thought of the hammer, perhaps to hammer the message home. Home. That’s where the bridge was leading to. It was leading me home.

Home was nothing less than Heaven, of course. It was a place far away—or at least it had seemed far away until that day in 1987 when I had reached a crescendo. Now I felt I was sort of there. Here, but not here totally. I was between worlds, actually. Between dimensions. And now this inner voice was telling me to construct the path. Build the bridge across, not only in order for it to become more solid and more real so that I would be able make the crossing at will, but so that others could see it. So that I could say, here—here is the bridge. Let’s go!

But first I had to build it. And this did not mean make pictures of it. Though Art is certainly a bridge to realms in the non-physical world, making pictures was all I had been doing for a decade. This time I had tried to write about the pictures. From time to time I would sit at my typewriter and compose poems or prose poems, explaining what the paintings meant. But they always came out very abstract. I didn’t think much of my writing skills. And yet this inner voice, before it told me to build a bridge, it told me to write how I got to this place. It said I had painted enough, and now I had to write how I got here. To this heavenly place, which was still my studio, still New York City, exactly as it had been the day before, and the day before that, and yet now it was different. Now it was alive. The air was pulsing with energy. I was pulsing with energy.

Yet at the time I was very confused. Imagine, you are going about your life as you always have, and suddenly things change. It begins with feeling more alert, more sensitive. You find yourself reading meanings into what people say. Everything you hear seems to have a special meaning that pertains to you. Words have become symbolic. Even the letters of the words are now symbolic of something else. You find you don’t know what anything means anymore because it all seems new to you. You begin looking words up in the dictionary, even the most simple words, because you don’t know what anything means anymore. The dictionary helps, because now you are breaking things down, taking words apart, and you feel you are getting closer to the crux of the matter. But how can you, because you don’t even know what the crux of the matter is at this point. All I can say is that I had suddenly stepped out and away from where I had been, and I didn’t know where this new place was.

I had a couple of large houseplants in pots on the floor, and the pots were in baskets, one wicker, one cane. When I was thinking about how to make the bridge, aside from looking at my hammer, I was also looking at the green plants. They had both been given to me as gifts. One had been a cutting from a larger plant that I had nourished lovingly, and the other had been delivered to my door, robust and healthy, fresh from the florist. They both had big, waxy leaves. The leaves on the cutting had solid, unbroken edges. It was a sturdy plant. It was this one my attention was now focused upon, because it had come from a woman in the office I had worked at some years before. The boss was a man named Greenspan. Greenspan. The color green, and the word span, as in a bridge. A green bridge, that was what I was thinking. Something green, spanning the gorge or the gap.

I was fixated on the color green, on plants, and on spanning, or bridging the gap home.

The gap appeared to me as a break at the horizon, a tiny, almost invisible crevice—or visible only to one who was aware of it in the first place—between earth and sky, or sea and sky. A crack in the normal appearance of things. I knew it was there. I had been there already, sort of. It gave me an inkling that all was not as it seemed. And another world lay just beyond this one.

            The people who have been there in the place in themselves where words, patterns, order, dissolve, will know what I mean and the others won’t. But once having been there, there’s a terrible irony, a terrible shrug of the shoulders, and it is not a question of fighting it, or disowning it, or of right or worn, but simply knowing it is there, always. It’s a question of bowing to it, so to speak, with a kind of courtesy, as to an ancient enemy: Alright, I know you are there, but we have to preserve the forms, don’t we. And perhaps the condition of your existing at all is precisely that we preserve the forms, create the patterns…”  Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook

Watercolor by Nancy Wait 1987

The other day I posted a painting on Tiferet Journal representing sort of the ultimate in balance. I called the picture Portal because I have found that when I am in perfect harmony – or as close as I can get to it, another door seems to open. It’s like I have to come into complete harmony and balance with something in order to be ready to move onto the next level, the next thing. In other words, being in balance with myself and the world around me, even if it’s only my apartment – or a room in my apartment, clears the way for the next step. And there’s always a next step. 

Today, however, I am seeing the importance of being off balance from time to time. When I am off balance I tend to see with new eyes. I tend to see things fresh.

I used to become very unbalanced when I fell in love or become fascinated with someone. My whole being felt upended. I hardly knew who I was anymore, and sometimes I struggled to think where I was. This was understandable, as strong emotions have always sent me into another realm.

I am thinking about this now because the other day I became obsessed with – a gadget! I didn’t want to go to sleep until I figured out how to use it. 

Staying up all night or not getting enough sleep, straying from my ‘healthy’ routines, upsetting my status quo – these are the things that can put me off balance. But sometimes this is good! Eating dinner in the morning instead of breakfast – anything to mess up the schedule. Because it’s when I’m off balance that I make new discoveries. A little more light might filter in from unexpected places. I know from experience there’s a price to pay if I stray too far, but with the passing years I seem to have grasped that law.

Nowadays, I take care to make sure everything is in order before I retire for the night. I put things away and hang up my clothes, don’t leave dishes in the sink, make sure the cats have full bowls of food. Because how do I know how long I’ll be gone? How do I know where I’ll take off to? And how do I know who I’ll be in the morning – or if I will even be the same person? Because tomorrow – what is that? 

These are perhaps the things someone does who is a little unbalanced – and knows it. But I know from experience that when my psyche – my soul – thinks it’s time to move to another level, it will put something in my way. Love, or maybe only a new gadget, but I will have to change somehow – and find a new balance – to accommodate this new thing. And that’s why it’s good.

This painting, Balancing in the Moonlight, is for sale on my art website or as prints or cards. LINK

Watercolor by NW 1987

The mindless place. Oh, I know it’s all Mind, but off with our thinking head, because we are going to the Inner World. The inner world of thought and being and intuitive knowing.

Inner knowing. Poetry. Art. A different patterning of words and images that catches us off guard. Takes us past the barriers of conditioning, of programming, to see differently. Hear differently.

Inner awareness. Meditation. Dancing.

3D moves along particular tracks – the grid of the physical plane. Our minds are the exception. Our minds are free from Time and Space. Inner Knowing enables us to Jump the Tracks of the Known.

I created this painting many years ago, and at that time, I was off in my head a lot. I think that is why I gave the diamond in the center so much heaviness in the lower half, and left the higher half lighter. I needed to stay in my body. Have that awareness of being in my body. Use my intuitive inner bodily knowing.

Some paintings are created for the viewing public, others for a client. And some, as this one was, are created for the artist herself, as she needs to see what the idea might look like, should she attempt to make it into an image.

I wanted to get out of my head. I began with a photograph of myself standing in a stream, and I cut off my head with some scissors and placed the head in the stream. A year or two went by, and I found myself painting this image of a head cut off. It was one way to tackle the dilemma of thinking too much – picture it! And while I was at it, I also pictured an enormous diamond shape right in the center of the body, which was certainly a reminder to stay centered, and possibly also a reminder that my riches were in my ability to stay centered. Headless, maybe, but whole, all the same.

This watercolor is part of a series I am in the process of posting to a new website. I will keep this blog updated as to when the new painting site is ready.

Does the battle never end? Do the fears ever stay away permanently? Have you ever wondered if, in this imperfect, impermanent life, you will ever be released from the fears holding you back from being all that you can be?

Whether you work on your fears or play with your fears or read about how to let go of fear or attend workshops or pray or plead to the powers above, fear is something that can be overcome, and in all sorts of ways—or not overcome, but lived with, dealt with, as best as we are able on any given day, from moment to moment. It is up to us.

F for Fear. F is the 6^th letter of the alphabet. How does fear relate to the sixth sense? Take away the F for fear and we have the word EAR. All we need is a T-H at the end for it to spell Earth. Is Earth the fear-planet? Or is it the Love Planet? What does your EAR tell you? What does it say to your sixth sense? The word EAR – when you add up the letters in numerology, equals six. All these sixes! Hmmm…..

And six, what does the six mean? In the tarot it’s the card for the Lovers. It’s the card of Union. Divine Union, union of lovers, union with self. Three plus three, the Divine Triangle come together with itself. The Holy Trinity coming together with its earthly reflection.

How can love overcome fear? By opening up the heart, opening the heart chakra, we rise above the solar plexus where the ego resides, where the power of the personality resides. There’s a reason why the lower three chakras are located below the waist, and why the heart, throat, third eye and crown chakra are located above the waist. Above and below. We live in a world of duality of Above and Below. Of Night and Day, of Fear and Love. A world where energy rises, and the sun rises, and the moon rises. A world of openings and closings and endings and beginnings. Of new and old and everything in between. Because it’s all impermanent – in this world of matter in time and space and 3D.

We also live in a world of ritual and ceremony. And now, as we move into the calendar of shorter, darker days, and into the festival of lights, let us take a look at our fears. Let us dissolve them, even for a moment, or only in our imaginations, and set the tone and pace for the new year ahead. Dissolve them, love them, own them, let go of them. See their value. See if they have outlived their value, or not…

On Tuesday, December 6^th on my blog talk radio show Dancing in the Shift, we are going to look at the ‘f’ word, F for FEAR. I invite you to submit your fears to me either publically in the comments box below, or privately message me. Because I am going to read aloud the list of fears we know so well, and then I am going to burn them in a symbolic ritual.

'Floating' by NW 1985

‘Willingness to Shift’ is the title of my blog talk radio show today, (LINK) and these are the paintings I have chosen to illustrate the Shift. They are all watercolors. The first one I did back in ’85. I remember the feeling of being ‘cut loose.’ Being free to float. Feeling myself unanchored, in a new space. An unbelievably rich new space!

The second and third paintings illustrate the sense of shifting from one plane to another, or shifting to different planes,

watercolor by NW 1989

spaces, states of mind. I was very intrigued by angles at the time, and what angle I was looking at a thing or judging a thing or perceiving a thing. I had the sense it was all about invisible yet very real angles of perception. I felt ‘out of time,’ out in space—a new kind of space.

Then, just as suddenly as these images appeared to me, they disappeared. Shortly afterwards I got pregnant by choice, and entered into Time again. The kind of time that all expectant mothers and new mothers enter into, counting days, weeks, and months. Then counting breaths, then counting and measuring baby’s progress.

watercolor by NW 1990

But a few years after baby popped out, I popped out again too, into the Timeless once again. Into the more Universal sense of Time and Space I had become used to as a painter. I spent the next dozen or so years trying to meld the two states, Local and Universal. It wasn’t easy being ‘here’ and not here. I tended to go off somewhere and get a bit lost at times.

I see now that I was going through the integration process, integrating the different energies within, in order to clear my passage.

Living the dichotomy of being ‘here’ and not here can be tricky. It takes practice. And most of all it takes a willingness to receive directions from one’s co-pilot, whoever that might be. The designated driver, as it were. Someone outside oneself, or a being within. Or it can shift between the two.

I’ll say it again. Gaging the layout of this new land can be tricky. There isn’t a map, or at least not the kind we are used to. I think we have to create our own. Through expression of where we are now, where we are now. Now. And then let the moment go….

Listeners? That would be my blog talk radio show, Art and Ascension.

Readers? That would be my memoir called The Nancy Who Drew,  published last summer. I read some excerpts on the air HERE.

Now I am writing the sequel. And for some reason, best known to the gods of story-telling, the narrative begs to be told out loud.

Episode One begins tomorrow, Tuesday, October 11th 2011 at 5pm EST.

The words refuse to sit quietly on the page, and indeed have refused to come to me in anything that resembles freshness and frankness unless I am going to be speaking them into the ether, into my microphone, perhaps even into your ears.

Perhaps this particular narrative needs my expressive story-telling voice, with relevant music breaks, much as in the beginning, the story refused to reveal itself other than by mute but expressive and colorful paintings.

You see, as much as I feel that this is my story, the story has a mind of its own. The creative impulse must be obeyed, lest it dries up, packs up shop and goes home.

Episode One is ready to go tomorrow. Episode Two is almost finished and I’m looking ahead to the third. My goal is at least two, and perhaps three episodes a month, for as long as it takes. At the end, I will publish the text, and I’m sure I will be very glad to. Meanwhile, I intend to enjoy this process of letting the river flow in the way the river wants to. It’s the only way to keep the words coming. Trust me on that!

Meanwhile, thank you in advance for listening, for reading, and for any comments you might care to share. I can only hope that your experience is as enjoyable as mine as been, preparing these shows for you.

When I first began drawing from life, it was about expressing, showing, telling, what was before me. I was happy when the drawing of my ceramic coffee pot actually looked like my ceramic coffee pot. I wasn’t very good at flowers, but I drew vases and cloth dolls really well. And then I went to my first Life Drawing class at the Art Students League. I was twenty-eight, but it was still a shock in the beginning to have a naked person to draw from. What a giving of themselves! What generosity! And for peanuts. Sorry, I mean, for art.

The newness of it wore off quickly. Right away there was an intense need to focus. To match what the eye was seeing to what the brain knew, and send it out through the hand, through the stick of charcoal, and onto the newsprint pad.

First came the one-minute Gesture Drawings where we all warmed up, then we had several five-minute poses, then the twenty-minute poses. It all took a bit of getting used to. The studio was large and full of students, some of whom were quite marvelous artists already and were just there to hone their skills. Only a few were just beginning as I was. So I found myself fairly intimidated when I went around looking at other’s work as we all did during the breaks.

Then something amazing happened. The second day of class, or maybe it was the second week, I realized I was picking up the model’s feelings. I could feel the model. Just as a psychic or an empath might feel someone’s emotions or be able to read their thoughts, I could feel this woman’s body. It was in the line that I drew of her back. A curved line. Oh, there must have been other lines on my sheet of newsprint. I was probably in the middle of the drawing. But all I remember seeing was this one line. One line is all it takes, you know. One curved line that told me everything I needed to know about this girl, the model.

My first reaction was astonishment at this unknown power I had. The next time I went around looking at other’s work during the break, I couldn’t help noticing that however beautiful and accomplished the drawings were, most of them looked like a generic female form. It could have been any number of women they were drawing, not this specific one. The instructions, or the task we had, and it was very clear what we were supposed to do, was to get the pose right. And then the shadows. The instructor never asked us to feel what she felt like. In fact his paintings, charming as they were, were practically all the same. Pastel colors of his vision of the female. He obviously didn’t care who the female was. She existed only to allow him to portray his own personal vision. Which is fine, of course.

But what I was seeing in my own work was something different. I saw that I was picking up her feelings. I didn’t know much about vibrations then, and picking up energies and so on. And I didn’t have to know consciously, because it was happening naturally, and all I had to do was to continue to let it happen, continue to translate the energy into charcoal lines on the newsprint paper before me. Drawing then became a form of excitement for me. I was still some years away before I started to paint my own feelings—painting figures from my imagination, but when I did I was so moved by what I saw – what I was able to express (finally!) that my life was turned upside down.

We all know that saying, The truth shall set you free, and I can attest that indeed, it does! The one truth that there can be no argument over – the truth of my own feelings.

And yet, you might be surprised at how many people tried to argue with me. “What is that?” or “You can’t paint that.” Or “That’s not right.” Excuse me? What’s not right? In your mind?

I had to leave art school when I realized that the instructors were more interested in having my work be what they thought it should be rather than what it actually was. And then over the years I was more fascinated by my own renditions and what I could create, than in making them ‘saleable’ pieces of art that someone else might like to hang on their wall. Painting my ‘truth’ was the only thing that mattered, for I had begun to see. And I saw that I spoke in a kind of sign language. A visual language of form and color that expressed my feelings more than words could ever do.

The trouble was, no one else understood, really, what I was trying to communicate. People would complement my colors. “Oh, that’s a nice blue,” someone said once. I was devastated, because I wanted them to see what I saw. To see what I’d done. But no one saw. Then I tried to write about what I had done. But my writing was totally abstract and vague. It was poetic, but vague. And this again was a great disappointment. In order to convey my thoughts properly, I had to actually give up painting and drawing and go back to school to learn how to write, which is a different language with different rules, but eventually I saw that writing had an equally great power all its own, which indeed could be mastered, for now I was learning how to create a picture in someone’s mind. The reader’s mind.

There are words and there are pictures, and underlying both is a vibration. A series of vibrations, and that is what we are called upon to pick up and align with and feel. In our very bones.

Available on Amazon.com

I replayed the show the other night, but fell asleep during the gentle soothing tones of  “Kristina,” by composer Michael Kowalski. Today I listened to the rest of the recording, this time not only on my feet but walking around the neighborhood doing errands. I often get my best thinking done when walking to the grocery store. Somehow my mind feels more free to roam without the pressure sitting at the keyboard. Or maybe it’s just that new ideas really are floating around in all that space outside, but only if I’m not particularly looking for them. Outside I have to be more awake, more alert. Listening to the show at my leisure, without the pressure of having to look at clock and switchboard, chat-room and Skype, I heard the phrase “geo-physical imprints and memory bands within the auric field.” It had completely passed me by the first time.

watercolor by NW 1985

I became very excited. Especially as it came after another comment Carol made: Mentally, we want to stay in the comfort zone, but the soul is always lurking to take us into those deeper places.

Hadn’t I devoted years to painting my journey into those deeper places? I called the series Journey to the Deep, and wrote some lines to go with it.

Someone is calling me, down to the depths / I’d rather stay in the day, in light and finite time / Then go exploring, where there is no bottom / No end, or return / But someone is calling me, down to the depths / A voice heard in ancient dreams, beats  / I plunge.

(Detail) oil on canvas by NW 1987

Eventually, after 5.5 years, I accessed a soul memory I could work with. I could have written ‘five and a half years,’ but you see the painting that completed the series happened to be of a building on Madison Avenue. 550 Madison Avenue. (We don’t count the zeros in numerology) The building that was the corporate headquarters of AT&T at the time, (AT&T – the very god of communication itself at one time!) with an enormous statue of Hermes behind the plate glass. Specifically behind the numbers 550. Hermes, also known as Mercury, the Messenger of the Gods, had a message for me. Or at least it seemed that way, though I didn’t realize it until I had painted the building from a dozen different angles. (You can see the series HERE.)

And now I must cut to the chase, because this after all is only a blog, and the story I need (yes, need!) to tell will easily fill a book. (In fact I’m writing it now, a follow up to The Nancy Who Drew ) So here basically is the short version.

Though I realized I had to go into those “deeper places,” those depths, I hadn’t a clue how to do this. Carol Lamb mentioned how we might travel to certain places on the globe—maybe just going on holiday somewhere—and immediately feel a powerful resonance.

But the place I was drawn to was at the bottom of the sea. The ocean floor. I don’t know that you can get any deeper than that other than by drilling through the earth. But I had painting. I allowed my brush to take the lead. I guess I can say I resurrected my geo-physical imprint with oil paint and canvas and a handful of bristle brushes. Maybe that’s what Art and Ascension really means, for me anyway. Using art to reach in, bring buried soul memories to the surface. A past death really, more than a past life, but still hidden away in a memory band of the auric field, out of reach by the mind, yet sensed by the intuitive heart.

Actually, there is no shortcut, though there is a chase often enough, chasing dreams,

painting by NW 1980s

chasing memories. Answering the call. And when it comes,

taking

the

plunge.