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"Know you what it is like to be a child? It is to be something very different from the man of today. It is to have a spirit yet streaming . . . . It is to believe in love, to believe in loveliness, to believe in belief; it is to be so little that the elves can reach to whisper in your ear; it is to turn pumpkins into coaches, and mice into horses, lowness into loftiness, and nothing into everything, for each child has its fairy godmother in its own soul."—Francis Thompson Please do not use them for any reason without my written permission.
How did I spend my time as a child? I daydreamed A LOT. I think a lot of artists do that and many artists could benefit from a little time apart from the business of doing art and selling art and worrying about how to use art to help them eat by getting back to the heart of it all... enjoying one's life, letting one be enthralled by the wonder and beauty of the world we live in, allowing the mind to wander and the imagination to be set free.
Lately, I've been so caught up in the business of life—I have a new book out that I'm trying to sell, I'm developing my artist website, trying to spread the word about my spiritual counseling practice—that it's been hard to take time out even to slow down enough to plan more than a few feet ahead.
Daydreaming now? But I know I need to. Relaxing, being with my own thoughts, allowing things to slow down to a reasonable speed. Last week I chose to take a little time just to dream and it changed things. I guess that's why I've been so busy lately. I started imagining a possibility I hadn't considered before. Things that weren't even on the horizon until I took a step back and looked around a bit. And that got me so enthusiastic I flew into action.
Dreaming is the first step on the way to manifestation. Little kids do this naturally. They know that just pretend games help them feel into what they might want to be and do. It's the first step of deciding what you want to be when you grow up. You imagine it first. And that's something artists do, too. Imagine the future and then try it out.
That looks like fun—let's build a fort out of snow, throw snowballs at each other and have a war. Ow! That one hurt! I didn't like snowball fights one bit. But I did like building the structure we had the fights in. I liked making the snow people who guarded our fort when we weren't in it and I liked figuring out how to decorate and dress these watchpeople most of all. Some kids don't like that part. They just want to dig into the snowbank, pack it into a ball and throw it.
Today I spend much of my time being an artist. I don't like to throw things—I create them. I make things. I design them. "Each child has its fairy godmother in its own soul." Each adult does too. That's what visioning is about. It's how we get started in being who we want to be when we grow up. And it's how we get started in making our dreams come true.
The drawing of the child above is available as a matted and framed archival quality print through Imagekind by clicking the link below:
It's also available on a variety of products and clothing items (especially for kids but for adults as well). Click on the examples below or go to my Cafepress giftshop to see the whole line.
