Spice of Life

Above you'll find my latest art journal entry: Spice of Life, inspired by The Sketchbook Challenge's November theme of the same name. This piece feels particularly art journal-y to me, more than perhaps most pages I've yet done (I'm quite new to this art form!). This time of year lends itself to many spices featured in yummy holiday foods; hence, the challenge theme. When I considered how spices add flavor to food, I began to ponder what exactly adds flavor to my life. Before I knew it, I had a rack full of bottles I dip into regularly to season my existence.

Home

The holidays are quickly approaching, and that has many of us thinking about home. Do we go home for the holidays? Do we invite others into our homes? Maybe for some of us we're in transition, and we're asking ourselves where home even is!

Home can represent our internal "dwellings" just as much as it represents the houses we live in. I contemplated this idea a bit while creating the art journal pages above. I created these pages in line with an assignment from the online art class I'm taking. This project gave me a timely opportunity to consider how I've moved in my heart from the existence I had been living to my current life full of color, growth, mess, joy, love, laughter, and more. I felt stretched and freer as I cut, decoupaged, painted, stenciled, and outlined. My art is becoming more wild, and I've become at home with wild!

"Coincidentally," I've found myself hooked on the song "Home" by Phillip Phillips. The words fit with the idea of physical home as well as the home of our hearts. If you'd like to listen to it, here's a YouTube video of it with the lyrics:

Perspective

Here are pictures of another art journaling page I recently completed: a leaf study. I enjoyed sketching these beautiful, petite leaves from different angles. As I look at this painting, I see one picture that makes the three leaves look like one leaf and another that doesn't look like leaves at all but more of a fire. Perhaps some truth resides in all of these angles.

I frequently have to remind myself of this truth. I can hold onto one way of looking at something, or I can explore additional perspectives. This is especially true when someone disagrees with me. I so badly want to be right! Yet probably more often than not, I hold a piece of the truth, and the other person holds a piece of the truth. Can we each be curious about the other's perspective? Can we hold our pieces together to make a bigger, more beautiful, more realistic picture?

I'm thinking about this quite a bit today, Election Day in the United States. This tends to be a divisive day for us, with people being equally passionate about "their" candidate and about their view of the outcome. Either we are saved or we are doomed. Can we somehow be open enough to consider each other's perspectives and have hope, whatever the outcome?