Blog

There is only one success, to be able to spend your life in your own way.

Hi Friends,
If you have not heard from me in a bit, it is because I have been down and out with Covid. After 20 months of wearing a mask, vaccine cards, restricted travel, and socialization, I finally got Covid. At the end of the pandemic!

Unfortunately, I did not get the easy case of Covid. I did not struggle with breathing but had difficulty getting out of bed for the first week. After that, I struggled with brain fog and insidious exhaustion for about three more weeks.   Honestly, the brain fog was the worst symptom. I would lay in bed at night and struggle to remember spelling the simplest words like "quiet." The correct letters would not come together. It was very disturbing.  

I spent a lot of time in bed or sitting in my favorite chair in the sun. And of course painting. The first week was hard, but I would stealth away in my studio and create between naps. All of this quiet time brought me back to thinking about the "why" in what I do.  

It seems like the pandemic has brought many people to think about the "why" in what they do. Maybe this is the same as trying to decipher the age-old question of your purpose in life.  

Many people seem to live under a "spell," doing what society or other people think they should do and ignoring a deeper calling to spend their time doing something else.

If you have that nagging feeling that you are not happy in your current life and want to make a change, then take some steps in that direction. So much misery in life comes from not trusting your own judgment. But when you find that "purpose," you cause things to happen in your life versus just letting your life be the effect of something happening to you.  

I was under the same spell for a long time. I called it being stuck behind the White Picket Fence (it is also the reason for the name of my Studio). I had a lot of wealth and the outside appearance of success, but I lived with a big hole inside. For years, maybe my whole life, I yearned to paint. But I let the other things in life pull me away. There was a misalignment between my thoughts and my actions in my life.  

If you struggle, be open to examining your current beliefs and be willing to adopt new ones that might work better for you. Integrity comes from aligning your words and actions:  It happens when you do what is truly the most important to you (not society), even if it contradicts some of what you did in the past.   

The more choices you make that follow your heart, the stronger you become. And the happier you will be.

And in making these new choices, you have to let go of the past. You can't regret or dwell on the choices you made yesterday or last year, or 30 years ago. Be confident that you made the best decisions that you could at the time, given your feelings and development in life. But let those choices go and move forward. All you really have is the present moment.

Even though change is hard, in totality, my life became easier when I listened to my heart. The yearning to create won't be appeased unless I spend a few hours in my studio. So I have no regrets in deciding to devote myself full-time to painting - a different life for most of us is just one decision away.  

Back to Covid and my little birds - during my struggles with Covid, I returned to images of birds as I thought about what I wanted to create. Who doesn't love the beginning of spring when the early morning sweet song of the birds returns? Or maybe they symbolize the end of the cold winter of this pandemic. Or maybe I just like birds?  

Here are the first two.

The Masked Bandit                                                   The Western Tanager

These will be on display at The Bunnell Family Cellars in Woodinville.  

Really truly,

Jamie