read this book & then go forth & make art

(bahamas 2009. really has nothing to do with this topic except it's pretty!!)

Wanna write a novel? Sing a song? Go to China? Finding it difficult to start? Well, check out this book, The War of Art by Stephen Pressfield.

It landed on my doorstep last night, a gift from above and beyond (actually, if we're being totally honest here--which we are--it was a gift to me from me, thanks to the jamazon that is amazon). As someone who has wrestled and fought and tortured myself for ye-ears about the calling I feel from my heart and its concomitant deathly terror, I can say that this book is manna from heaven, no joke.

The link above has the first few chapters below all the blurby stuff.

Do yourself a big, $10 favor, and buy the book. Fight the good fight, and then go forth and make some art. As Mr. Pressfield says, “Sit down and do it and don't quit no matter what.”

xo
hb


**Also, another book I love for lovely little reminders is Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg. Both of these talk specifically about writing, but just substitute whatever your deal is (golfing, painting, baking 2 foot tall zombie cakes, etc.), and it’s all the same.

Validation!

fun links

Rob Ryan

(some of this is old news, but it's still happy & inspiring!)

-Elizabeth Gilbert (author of Eat, Pray, Love) lectures on creativity and artistic genius

-After his trainer entered him into the competition on a lark, Stump, a 10 year old Sussex Spaniel, wins Best in Show at Westminster, as the oldest dog to do so, and after almost dying five years before!! Slideshow here.

-Always get back up!

-Okay, to balance out the pure mushery of the previous links, how about some silly things!

Paper cut-outs (yes, I said, PAPER CUT-OUTS (can you even believe that????)) by the amazing Rob Ryan.

Wild horses just might drag me away

yes, these are real wild horses, in their real wild horse territory in nevada!

Recipe for an overwhelming sense of peace, joy, and wonder, mixed in with a little bit of puzzlement as to why you live in a big city where it's smoggy and loud and crowded with concrete and glass and asphalt (when it would be so quiet (and possibly Wild Horse-ful) elsewhere...!):

-Dad's F350 to drive you anywhere

-lots of coffee-miles and miles of road to take you to the Middle Of Nowhere up in Nevada (which is really Not the Middle of Nowhere because it's actually Somewhere Really Special. I mean, really, how often do you see Wild Horses???)

-binoculars
-camera

-boots for stomping through the snow
-wild mules

-wild horses
-sunset
-your city sweetie who has never driven around the middle of nowhere in his life
-sandwiches made by Dad with turkey and pot roast left over from Christmas

Combine with a healthy sense of adventure, and enjoy!

You will probably be a few hours later than expected because you will probably go farther than originally planned, and you will probably stop a lot more than you thought. In fact, you might even stop to shoot cans with the .22 (something you haven't done since childhood), stop again to explore a cave, stop again to track wild horses (!), stop again for an ice cream sandwich even though it's 40 degrees outside, and stop again to admire the ceiling of the sky filled with stars when your day is over and you're finally headed back.
You might.

And you might feel pretty lucky that your dad knows everything about your home state and can do stuff like take you out to the middle of nowhere to see real Wild Horses. Yes, you are pretty lucky indeed.

Thanks, Dad.

okay, it's hard to tell from here, but, I think if you click & see the larger image, you'll see that those teeny weeny dots over on the right are horses! Also, this is pretty much exactly what it looked like from the window of the truck. We had to use the binocs to see better!

more little dots that I swear to you are wild horses. this is the same group, just a slightly different angle.

and the same group again, but so much closer!! We hiked from the road, up that mesa you saw above, and then city sweetie took the camera & tracked the horses to get these amaaaazing photos you see now (lol!).

another photo courtesy of city sweetie.

This is what Dad & I saw before we gave the camera to the resident Wild Horse Tracker. This is a different band of horses than the pics above, because this is actually on the mesa just to the left of the one pictured above. Make sense? Basically, two bands of wild horses in one day. Ya, that's how awesome Nevada & Dad are.

wild mule!

wild mule baby & mama!

okay, seriously

(This is a post written Friday, fyi.)

In regards to the natural beauty of this world, I pretty much a) always have a hard on, b) cannot get enough of it and c) love that it takes my breath away every single time I encounter it. It's my version of the hottest, most beautiful, kind, loving woman in the world (if I were a man, that is...). But it's our planet.

To semi-make up for the serious lack of posts of the last month (what can I say but "holidays, mass-layoffs at work, chocolate chip cookies "), I have a lot to post about. A. LOT. Tons of pics and fun stories. Have you ever read that poem called "Picnic, Lightning?" Well, my holiday vacation version would be "wild horses, target practice, 80's ski onesie." Uh huh. And, by the oh-so-circuitous way, I totally know that I could never REALLY make up for the zero % of posts that happened in the last six weeks. That's why I said "semi." It's okay. It's my cross to bear. I get it.

But it IS a new year, and god knows I love you guys. I have TONS of h.b. (heartbreakingly beautiful) sh*t to share. And we shall start with, as aforementioned, the Natural. Splendor. of Our. Planet. Booya. Pictures worth a thousand words, maybe?

This is on the drive down 395 (more on that later) this [Friday] morning. Sunrise as I descended from the mountains on my pilgrimage back to sunny LA from cold and beautiful Reno/ Tahoe.

Now y'all know I love me some clouds, and some sunrises, and you may have already guessed that, despite the occasional vulgarity of this blog, I am actually a hopeless mushy romantic. If I told you the number of times I cried about this beautiful world in the last 48 hours, you might lose all of the scant amount of respect you have for me. Therefore, I will not. I will only say that this holiday vacay was filled with heartbreakingly beautiful at every turn, and you know how I respond to that.

Okay, enough with the words. You want the pics. I know.

xoxox







ps thank you pb for the help with pasting. you are my current savior.
psps I know none of you understand that previous ps. It's okay.
pspsps blogger & my computer are still on the outs, but that's why we love the fact that I have a computer at work!!!

xo

more pics to tide you over b/c blogger hates my computer right now

holiday cheer

Given that Blogger and my computer, most specifically Microsoft Word, are on the outs and not so much communicating too well, and given that I wrote the newest three posts in Word and don't feel like re-typing them, you are gonna have to subsist on pictures for the time being.  I heart you so and am working to cure the communication issues between these intransigent toddlers.  Really.

xo

hb

To tide you over...