I am truly inspired...

I had the pleasure of spending a day in a home that had beautiful paintings on the walls.  I studied them all day.
One I especially enjoyed was seascape impressionism in oil.  I admired the brushstrokes, the painting was done with a bristle flat, as far as I could tell.  Passages of color, expertly laid down.  Kudos, to the late painter, Alfred Wands. I will try to find a photo of that painting and if I do I will put it up.

Love Never Faileth....One year later

Today is the one year anniversary of my Mike standing beside me and marrying me last November 19th, 2009. Every day I love him more than the day before, every day he looks more like he did 40 years ago, to me. I love that! I still don't know why God kept us apart four decades before we reunited, except, speaking for myself, I had a lot to learn. It is as important in life to learn what you do not want, and what you will not stand for, as it is to comprehend the true desires of your heart and what you will fight for, even unto death. Mike and I had to grow up and we most certainly needed to heal from many emotional scars we already had when we met long ago and fell in love.
I have my prince, my lover, my sweetheart, my champion. I have the companion I thought I could never have in life. With him, I feel like my lonely days are over, in what time the two of us have together. I did okay alone for such a long time, in fact I had become quite set in my determination to remain that way. That was not the plan my Creator had for me. I feel enchanted, as if when Mike and I walk down the street, we are a miracle. We feel miraculous! I have talked about the possible reasons why we are so fortunate, and know that if we had listened to the negativity of some people instead of following our own passionate hearts, we would not be together today. Here is where I must thank those people who really care about me and about Mike, and who supported us and celebrated our opportunity to be together again. We were led to this day, shown a future that can be happier than any past ever was.... I am so glad that we are impetuous, that we plunged ahead with courage and a great deal of faith. Faith we felt strongly, because to have many years pass and then reunite and feel the same love, more even, than we did in our youth, and to feel like we had been apart weeks not decades, to have years of struggling without each other melt away.... it gives you a sureness in your heart. Relief in knowing there was a Masterplan for us, after all.
Seeing us together, my daughter and son laughingly said to each other that now they know what had been wrong with me all those years....half my brain was missing! And it's true, it does seem like Mike and I share a brain. (Which reminds me of our saying around here, that " Two half-wits, make a whole"). I'm grateful my family gets to see me this way. It is a gift to see your parent truly happy and in love.

UPDATE ABOUT ARTISTS UNITED FOR ANIMAL RESCUE (AUAR)

The group I founded, AUAR, is the sister group to the website www.petloverspromise.com and we are setting up individual pages for each artist there. My goal is to move the AUAR info to PLP, and be able to remove my website activity from the homestead site.

AUAR will be continuing to fund raise for animal charities both from the list on PLP and at each artist's discretion. If it is via eBay listings, and for a PLP/AUAR charity, then the acronym of AUAR and the charity's "hope code" will be in the title of the listing. These are listings for charities we have permission letters from. If we do not have the letter and the charity is hooked up with eBay's Giving Works program, then the Hope Code does not need to be in the title line, but AUAR does! If you as an artist do not put AUAR in your title line, you are not holding an AUAR supporting auction or listing.

AUAR requests that members show some indication of interest in supporting animal rescue via AUAR. If members do not respond to emails etc from me a couple times, they will be removed from membership. If we have an opportunity to have a serious exhibit for one of our charities, and members who are requested to participate, do not wish to do so, they have that option. I am hoping that a certain Sedona gallery may offer such an exhibit to us, and Actors and Others for Animals, one of our charities, is keeping this in mind as well, for possibly a California gallery. Stephanie, dear Stephanie, with AAO, is staying in touch with me about it. Any gallery exhibit of this type will have art selected for inclusion by me and the gallery director and will have to be very professionally presented (framed) or on gallery-wrap canvas and really good photography provided. We probably would go in together with both AAO and the gallery on putting a show display ad in Southwest Art magazine or another superior art related publication that covers the Sedona and California art scene. Cost per participating artist should be fairly minimal for such an ad.

Any artist in AUAR who wants to do an original that a charity can sell "tickets" for and publicize on websites is encouraged to do so. Everyone is struggling very hard right now in this economy. The charities, and the artists. Many animals are losing their homes due to foreclosures and owners not being able to feed their animals. We may not be able to do a lot, but we can do something, and think about what it costs to feed a few animals for even a day. Every dollar helps. Do you want to do something special for your favorite of the AUAR charities? Let them, and me, know. Thanks.

CONTACTING OPA MEMBER, LEE MITCHELSON

ARE YOU LOOKING FOR OPA MEMBER ARTIST LEE MITCHELSON?

Please visit the new website, http://www.petloverspromise.com/ or write to info@petloverspromise.com to
As an alternative, visit www.oilpaintersofamerica.com Lee Mitchelson

EMAIL THE ARTIST: leemitchelson@gmail.com

MY EYES AND HOW THEY HAVE RULE MY WORLD

A long time of experimentation with eye health as it applies to every moment of my life, not just as an artist. People, if your eyes are giving you fits, more so after computer work, don't accept it as normal. Go get tested at an opthalmologist office for dry-eye. I didn't. I suffered along with that for 1.5 years, and by the time I knew what was wrong, I had corneal scarring already. Then the experimenting began. Punctal duct plugging. Five attempts. Plugs falling out. Plugs getting infected. Blepharitis. Two cauterizations, weeks of healing, end result: Very good. Top ducts, not bottom. And the two bottom ducts, have smaller plugs that not only do not bother me but have not fallen out. Yet. I use Systane Ultra (NOT regular) drops. I will be using Thera tears night time liquid gel or ointment. I wake up uncomfortable. I have found that using even my pillow, when I am face down, back and forth over the area above my upper lids, below my brows, gently, stimulates my tear ducts and increases production. This is new info I am glad to know. I still have to wash my eyes carefully with T-gel shampoo every day. Just rinse well with splashing. Now, if I can get the right prescription glasses (close focus at 12-14" for artwork instead of the conventional distance) I think I will be doing pretty well. Then as soon as I can, I will do cataracts, if better glasses do not do enough to help me. All in all, this has been a four year long experience with still being able to paint. For the patience this has required of my friends, family and art collectors waiting for what they need and deserve, I beg forgiveness and express my endless gratitude. I am about to be able to go back to work in my life's work as a painter. And, for survival, I am using my licensed/certified status to enable doing home health care, I have just been hired by an agency for the first time -- I always worked private-pay in that field til now. I am not doing medical care, though. I need a break. And I welcome the support of an agency. It is Comfort Keepers, and I have to say, I am very very impressed with them! What a great company and the overall vibe of the people is just superior. Everyone I am dealing with there is delightful. I recommend them highly for an in home personal care agency.

ARE YOU LOOKING FOR OPA MEMBER ARTIST LEE MITCHELSON?

Please visit the new website, http://www.petloverspromise.com/ or write to info@petloverspromise.com to contact Lee.
As an alternative, visit www.oilpaintersofamerica.com , Lee Mitchelson

LOVE NEVER FAILETH

In September of 1967 when I was a very young woman with a little baby boy, I met a guy and fell in love.

We rode around Hollywood and up Topanga to the Inn of the 7th Ray and lots of places - on a Midnight Blue-pearl Harley panhead chopper, painted by the one and only Von Dutch himself. We were so reckless. I struggled with knowing I had to change things, a mom cannot be careless with her own life and with her child's future.

We had our jobs, we had four or so various places we lived, we hitchhiked up the coast, we had our horses -- my Gala from my childhood, his Appaloosa, Dolly. We lived and loved and fought and cried and then life just tore us right apart.

On the last day with him, as I drove away I felt a tingling sensation pulling out of my forehead, like something was physically being removed from me. It was some time before I came to know that the sensation was caused by seperating two people who are linked in ways beyond simple human understanding.

For forty years I have felt like a she-wolf howling across a frozen lake for her lost mate. Not a day goes by when I have not thought of him. Not one relationship or romance I have not compared to ours; Not one man's sex appeal I did not measure by how much I still wanted him. I reached out once. To let him know I had not forgotten. There was nothing back. I decided, I love someone who now feels nothing, I really should let this go. But I didn't.

I did still ride a chopper or two with other people, a few times. Big bikes are like a fever that has no cure. But I was restless, unsatisfied, it felt all wrong. It was too painful. Bikes without him? Such emptiness.
Follow along through the years. Two marraiges, but neither my mate. Two wonderful offspring, beautiful grandchildren too. I still look like me, pretty much. But how did I get to be this age?
I prayed, meditated, for answers at night. Why did I have to be alone? I hoped for some answer besides the one I always suspected. I was alone because I only wanted him, and alone was better than that peculiar loneliness of being with the wrong person, someone who does not even understand who you are. That is the worst loneliness of all.
Sometimes I would hear his voice in my head. A certain resonance to it, unlike any other voice in the world. I would remember his laugh, and my face would burn with how it made me feel. How could I be filled with so much emotion for someone, and not have them feel waves of it hitting them....even if they didn't know where it came from. Love like a drumbeat inside me, the heat.... so sweet.
I used to go to Orphans of the Wild, Gordon Meredith's place. I went for the wolves--- it was always about the wolves. My first experience with unconditional love was from a wolf. You don't forget that. Her name was Tammy, and she was a little silver-white slip of a thing -- my angel without wings. And there was one, a huge black male, named Shadow. He was tame enough to have lost his fear of humans, and so, the natural fear of men the wild ones have, in his case, had changed to lethal aggression. He would attack a man, anyone but Gordy, intending serious harm or even to kill. But not women.
He would fix his golden eyes on me, affectionately, and he would walk towards me slowly, like every step mattered. He actually moved more like a big cat, when he did that. Every time I went there and I visited with Shadow and watched him walk towards me, just that way, I thought of my beloved. One day when I was leaving, I climbed in my ancient VW bus, Ely, and got ready to roll down a hill and pop the clutch to start the old boy. But, rising from bass through alto to soprano, was a harmony of mourning. Swelling up from the wolves, beseeching me: Don't go. I laid my head on the steering wheel and I cried. I cried because in my whole life I don't know that I had ever felt such an honor bestowed upon me. It was my moment of worthiness. Don't go, don't go, baby please don't go..... a song from my time with him, began to run through my mind.

Last month after trying for 20 years to remember the last name of someone, it suddenly came to me, like getting hit in the head with a brick. I sat bolt upright, saying it outloud. I hurried to the computer and started looking for her. Within forty five minutes I had found contact information and I wrote. I asked if she was the Mimi who had a sister Jan... Mom, Lorraine.... and I said she might remember me with a different name, and my white horse I had. She wrote back, very soon. It was so exciting, I really had wanted to know how her life had gone, was she ok...all those things. And oh yes she did remember me. It was wonderful to talk to her. Even though she is a relative of my lost love, I wanted only to know how she was, because I had cared about her. And now she wanted to call me her unofficial 'Auntie', and that was fine with me.
I would make no attempt to reconnect with him. As far as I could tell, his past stayed well back where it started, he had moved on.

I have been using Facebook more. I check in. I click on my messages, dawdle a little, then leave. I did it that day, and in my messages, was one that started out, "I can't believe it", and it was from him.
Things have moved very quickly, how could they not, when I have heard him say he looked for me but had my new name spelled wrong and my high school wrong, and had never found me, that he wrote me a thank you note for what I had sent him once, but what happened to it? I never got it... and that every single day for forty years he had thought of me and still loved me as he has loved no one else.

First I had to get past the unfairness of why so much time had to pass with us both lonely for each other. How could this be? It made no sense to me. Then the sensation of living in a dream set in.... no this could not be reality.... I am the only person in the world who could carry a torch for 40 years. Aren't I? But no, it is not a dream. I will tell you what I think. God heard my prayers, and tasted the salt of my tears. I believe the universe, made by God, rewards the pure of heart. Once, a long time ago, maybe 1977, I had a vision after meditating. I was walking across a grassy high plateau, with Jesus. I know that it was Him, it was like seeing someone I knew. I could even smell the light, incense-like scent of his garments, earthy and pleasant. We communicated mind to mind; We didn't speak outloud. I had been asking to understand the "why" of something, and he came to answer me. As He showed me symbolically, while placing some stones, what the missing piece was that kept things from falling into place -- I heard the words, "This, then...is what we will do". The impact of the "we" was not lost on me. Off in the distance, was a city with exquisite golden domes. I never have forgotten the lesson learned in that experience. And now, as I have prayed and meditated again for answers, I have received reassurance.

A good man and a good woman want to be together, belong together, and God has placed them where they could create a future. Maybe people don't acknowledge that anyone in the last third of their life should be concerned about creating a future, but that is erroneous thinking. There is always a future. Now, and even later at the portal of life's end, when it becomes purely a spiritual matter. I hope to live it with someone I have adored most of my life, to be able to show him every day how cherished he is. I have waited so long. I am grateful for what has brought him back. The other half of my heart has been returned to me. But I have to wait a little while longer now. The big wheel spins, life always has it's details and struggles. I pray for his discernment in recognizing the motives behind the words of others, for his confidence, his certainty, his courage and perception. I have seen all these qualities in him. Truly he is one of the rarest people I have ever known. He dazzles me and delights me and makes my heart sing.

And so I have one more thing I pray -- that soon he will be able to walk to me, take me in his arms, and stay.