Whole and Free

What is your image of your future? For that matter, what is your idea of yourself right now: your self-esteem? As a child of an emotionally abusive unhappy mother, for decades I had chronically low self-esteem. Nearly everything my mother noticed about me was met with disapproval so I began seriously hiding. I shared nothing. I stuffed my feelings as best I could. When this became both painful and nearly impossible, I drank. I drank too much. My liver isn’t strong enough for that to go on very long. I found myself in Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. At one AA meeting, another attendee shared that she realized that she had low self-esteem and she’d started to address this in various ways. I recognized immediately that this was my problem too. When did we stop dreaming? Not the dreaming that bridges deep sleep and waking but imagining while you are awake. In the book  Oh, the Places You’ll Go”  Dr. Seuss says, You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. ...

Love and joy empower success. My father was a commercial artist. When I was between 3 and 5 years old, artists actually drew the pictures in advertisements. That’s what my dad did. He had an art studio in our home. One day, when he had a free lance assignment to work on, he set me up in the studio with some brown paper, a paintbrush and some gold paint and let me play. I was around 3. I swished the paint around and then stopped.  Cherub My little 3-year-old mind saw that I’d accidentally made a picture that looked like the face of a cherub, a baby angel. I stopped  it to my father. He got very excited. He thought he had an artistic genius for a daughter. That’s what inspired my lifetime of practical art education. My father began teaching me but my mother didn’t want him overpowering my style, whatever it might be, so he searched for instruction outside our home. When I was 13 years old, I sold my first portrait. It was done in pastel and showed ...