Canvas to the Imagination

Directions

This is the second in the collaborative series I started back in June with my friend Kai. She moved to China a few months ago and as a way to keep in touch I suggested we do a photographic collaboration. We take turns selecting the themes and also putting together the diptychs.

Kai is on the right Rachael is on the left.

Last night I was wandering around downtown with a friend when we came across a woman selling blueberries beside the Vancouver Art Gallery. Her prices were good but I didn’t have money to buy any right at that moment, so I came back later after a stop at a cash machine. They were really good blueberries, big and sweet, and I ate about a million of them while riding home on the bus. In case you’re interested, apparently she is at the corner of Robson and Hornby selling blueberries quite often.

Good things from yesterday:
1. Quality time with a happy little Yuuki.
2. Preparing for a weekend trip out of town.
3. Having a really productive Art Day.

Last night I finished reading Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. It’s a wonderful book about travel and self exploration, and it has inspired me to get moving on some of the neglected dreams I’ve been sitting on for far too long.

A paragraph in the second last chapter really struck a chord with me, given the thoughts burdening my head lately and a continued string of sleepless nights. The context of the words below is that the writer of the book traveled to a small island to be alone with her thoughts and work through the unhappy things that were going on in her life at the time.

The yogic sages say that all the pain of a human life is caused by words, as is all the joy. We create words to define our experience and those words bring attendant emotions that jerk us around like dogs on a leash. We get seduced by our own mantras (I’m a failure…I’m lonely…I’m a failure…I’m lonely…) and we become monuments to them. To stop talking for a while, then, is to attempt to strip away the power of words, to stop choking ourselves with words, to liberate ourselves from our suffocating mantras.

From Free Will Astrology:

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): “I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free,” said the sculptor Michelangelo about a statue he made. Let that approach be your guide in the coming weeks, Leo. Proceed according to the hypothesis that the beautiful thing you want to create is embedded in stuff that’s hiding its true nature, and your job is simply to liberate it from what’s extraneous.

Taken in the pond at Dr. Sun Yat Sen Classical Chinese Garden.