Persephone's Smile

After looking the other way the past two years, Persephone is smiling on central Texas as she emerges from the underworld. Demeter’s tears of joy at the reunion with her daughter are filling our almost dry lakes. The multicolored cloths of their picnic are scattered on the hills in ever changing patterns.

We cherish spring in the Texas hills because we don’t have it every year. The past two years Hades has tried to follow his part time lover and been stopped here where he has decided to fume and wait for her until mid October. It has gone from winter to 80 and 90-degree days in March and has gotten hotter as the summer has worn on. Our lake levels have been at record lows and our summer temperatures have been at record highs. We were even betrayed by El Nino` last winter when he sent us no rain.

Now spring is here and seems to be sticking around long enough for us to become reacquainted. We are extremely grateful.

Ten Thousand Villages

“Do you know what “wisdom” means?”

I looked up from my seat on the floor. I was counting rocks. The were imported from India and each has a word carved into it….Joy, Peace, Love, and Wisdom. (We were out of Strength.) They had to be inventoried and to do so, I was sorting them so that I could count the rocks that had each word on them.

She had asked is she could read the words on the rocks. I had said that of course she could. She had spent a few minutes looking at them and announced the there were many Joys. We agreed that we could certainly use more Joy. She giggled and left to examine some of the store’s other treasures.

I did not realize that she had returned until I heard her question. I looked up into her six year old face and had to think about how to answer. “Yeah,” I said, then paused a few seconds. “ It’s like being smart,….and knowing how to use it. Does that make any sense to you?” She is very solemn for a few seconds. “Yeah,” she said with a smile.

With her long straight hair and inquisitive expression, she reminded me so much of my daughters when they were that age, which only seems like a few days ago. She was one of a dozen or so people who had taken refuge in Ten Thousand Villages from a furious rainstorm.

It is spring break and in Austin that means South by South West, a music conference that draws people from far and wide, as well as the state basketball playoffs and the rodeo. Ten Thousand Villages has a great location on South Congress in an area known as SoCo. Once an inexpensive hippy hang out, the area is now terminally trendy and is not to be missed by our ever increasing horde of tourists. I have been volunteering there for a few weeks. It is a nonprofit organization which brings fair trade art and décor to market from developing countries. There are Ten Thousand Villages stores all over the country. Most of the workers are volunteers. The Austin store has two full time and one part time employees. You can see the Ten Thousand Villages website to see if there is a store in your area.

Law Of Attraction

I have been busy applying the Law Of Attraction to all areas of my life. I have been amazed at how fast it is working. One of the things I most want to attract is more joy in my life. Guess what? I took a craniosacral class last weekend and, wouldn't you know it(?), one of the other participants was a woman named Joy. She really lives up to her name,too.

The class this not only was at no monetary cost to me, it also fulfilled some requirements for certification with the Milne Institute that would have been much harder for me to get otherwise.

One of the biggest material things that Stephen and I have been wanting to attract recently is a three bedroom, two bathroom house with all the modern amenities that we don't have in our current home as well as a big, fenced back yard for Lani. We will be moving into that house in the next two or three weeks. Not only is it the 3/2 that we wanted, but it has been completely redone on the inside and looks and feels like a new house. It is really better than a new house because all the landscaping is already done. We were very specific with our manifestation practice about this house. We had a set price for the rent we would pay. The other day I named a number $200 less than we have been talking about and said' "wouldn't it be great if we found a house for $.....'. Stephen found this house a few days later. It is in our current neighborhood. It has as wonderful room for me to work in. This Law of Attraction stuff really works.

I have also been concentrating on having enough private clients that I will have no need to work for anyone else. I just got a new client today who will most likely be an every week appointment. I am concentrating on attracting at least $800 per week every week with very little effort on my part. I feel that I am on my way to getting there and that it will happen very soon.The hard part of all of this is just staying in the flow. I have had as few weeks of almost nonexistent business.

I have to confess that I let that get to me more than a little bit. I have had to do a lot of segment intending to keep from getting in a place where I would be attracting lack. Sometimes all I need to get back into the flow is for a little something that I have wanted to have or to happen come my way. This time it was a quartersawn oak buffet that Ii found on craigslist for $20. It needs a lot of work but I have a friend who is a fantastic furniture maker and who is very excited about my find and will do the major part of the repair for me. I have been spending a lot of time on line looking at Stickley pieces. These are very expensive and it is easy to let the daydream become a fantasy(feeling like you'll never have it). The segment intention that I used was, maybe I can have one little piece like this before too long. My piece is not Stickley bu it looks a lot like it and that is all I really want. The big beautiful Sticklely type dining room furniture is close by, I just know it.


Life is Good.

I'm rich,rich, RICH!

Richer than I ever thought possible. I am talking about US dollars here. I am in top 0.001% in the world of income attained in 2006. How did this happen?

I have been reading the Abraham-Hicks books on the Law of Attraction for the past couple of weeks. I first started reading about these books on Christine Kane’s blog.
Then I saw referenced to them in several other places, including Joe Vitale’s e-book, Spiritual Marketing. It has become my practice over the past few years to pay close attention to anything that is presented to me multiple times. So after seeing a dozen or so references to these books, I ordered one.

As soon as I began reading Ask and It Is Given, I began to feel happier and happier. I was smiling all of the time. Stephen came home in a grumpy mood because of a situation at work and I could not ever bring myself to feel bad for him. I knew that he was feeling bad and I did sympathize but I could not feel bad with him. He is smarter than your average bear so it did not take long for him to figure out that I was on to something. He went to the Abraham-hicks.com and began to read. Then he ordered another book and several tapes. In just a couple of days, he was able to put positive intentions in his mind about how he intended for his days a work to play out. Each day has played out pretty much the way he has intended.

Like almost everyone I know, we want more prosperity. We have been practicing that intent for years now. Intent can be a tricky thing. Attention to anything attracts more of that thing. You have to be careful or you will be paying attention to not having prosperity than you are paying to having it. You also have to be careful about what you perceive to be your reality. This is where the rich part comes in. I just checked the Kiva.org website to see if I needed to edit any loan profiles. On the home page, they feature a lender. The featured lender when I checked was a woman who made a reference to the global rich list. It sounded intriguing. I went to http://www.globalrichlist.com/ and found that I am the 107,565 richest person in the world! And that I am in the top 0.001% of the richest persons in the world. It would be very hard to feel impoverished knowing that you are in the top 0.001%. Therefore, my reality is that I am very wealthy by world standards.

This Law of Attraction stuff really does work.

Epiphanies

I went to my first meeting of my first writers group yesterday. One of our assignments was to write fro 10 minutes on an epiphany or awakening we had experienced. Here's mine:

Most of my life had been spent doing what needed to be done, almost all of it for someone other than myself. I went to work every day so that my children would have a roof over their heads, food in their stomachs, clothes on their bodies and all the other things that kids need.

Than was the only way I knew to live. Everyone I knew went to work every day and fit all the rest of their lives around their work schedules. All of my family did it. All of my friends and acquaintances did it. I had never seen any other life style.

Then in 1988, I went to the Kerrville Folk Festival. Everyone lived in tents at the festival. It was impossible to tell who was a highly successful business person and who just barely got by at first glance. I made friends from all walks of life and never knew what most of them did "for a living."

The first few years that I attended the festival, I made no attempt to make contact with any of these friends outside of the festival. Each year I would wonder who I would see from the year before. After a couple of years, several of us formed out own camp and I started getting notes a few weeks prior to the festival letting me know what to bring. Gradually, I began to spend non-festival time with some friends that I had met there and began to see all the kinds of ways in which they live.

I was fascinated. I told one friend that I thought it was brave of her to make here living writing and singing her songs. She replied that she considered it much braver to go to work at the same job every day.

Home Sweet Home

I have to concede that my last post was more than a little snarky. (I have lived in Dallas so I am not all that apologetic.) At the risk of luring even more people to our already over crowded city, here are the top ten reasons I live in Austin:

10. Town Lake with all the hike trails right downtown

9. Ribs (with live Music)

8. Live Music

(Stephen Taylor)

7. Tex Mex

6. Live Music

(Eliza Gilkyson)

5. The Moon over Town Lake

4. Live Music

3. Hamilton Pool

2: Live Music

1. All my friends live here. Well, not all of you, just the biggest concentration of you in one place on a more or less permanent basis.

It was not easy narrowing it down to ten. I could have gone on and on. I left out the veiw of the capitol from South Congress Avenue, the historic buildings downtown, Mt. Bonnell, breakfast tacos.......... and of course, whatever makes up your top ten.

I Am Where I Am

The number 1 reason that I live in Austin.

This pic was found at fhttp://devoted.to/fineart