PBS

My husband Don and I let go of our Netflix and replaced it with PBS. What a great change that is! We are currently happily (and rather harmlessly) addicted to All Creatures Great and Small, an utterly wonderful series. It’s so refreshing to watch something beautifully made and acted, in a gorgeous setting, with wonderful characters and fun plot twists, with no violence or high-speed car chases or anything frenetic or intense. AT 53 minutes an episode, it’s the perfect length in the evenings when we choose to watch, and I still often have time to read afterwards. There’s so much more to discover on PBS. Nova, American Masters, and a lot more. For $5 a month, what a deal.

Perelandra

One of the Playmates in my Brilliant Playmates creative community recommended a book called Behaving as if the God in All Life Mattered. This is a very quirky memoir mixed with a bit of “how to” at the end about a woman’s discovery of how to communicate and partner with the nature spirits in her garden, which she named Perelandra. In a deeper sense, it’s about how to partner with Life in our heartfelt dreams, which is something that I teach in my Artist’s Way and Living Your Dreams classes. So I felt very inspired by reading this.

And it led me to re-read Creative Visualization by Shakti Gawain, a book I’ve had on my shelves for many years. Re-reading it, I am amazed to discover how much I have internalized and embodied these teachings in my own life and teaching. So much so, I didn’t remember all the things I may have learned from this seminal book or from others who learned from this book. Fun to revisit.

Great Music for Cheap

Getting CDs from the $1 bin at our local Clocktower Records. Don and I are hooked on this! We’ve gotten so many good CDs this way. And the occasional blooper doesn’t matter because they only cost $1. We just put it in our giveaway box. A couple recent favorites are: Tedeschi Trucks Band Everybody’s Talking and Ali Farka Touré and Ry Cooder Talking Timbuktu. Both excellent.

Community

I’m also super inspired by the Mighty Networks platform I decided on to host my Brilliant Playmates community (and my courses in the near future). There’s so much that’s possible on this platform, and it’s all focused around fostering real communities and connections. I’m really excited to grow my Playmates membership into a thriving, diverse community of artists of all kinds, supporting one another in our art and our heart’s dreams. Come check it out and join us!