Of Values and Vision

This weekend, Iyanla Vanzant told me this:

"Your talents, skills, and abilities can only take you so far. They can’t sustain you. What sustains you is your character, your values, and your vision"

furthermore she said,

"And those parts of you were undeveloped."

It Hit Me
and caused me to immediately write it down in my journal.
And since then,
it’s been on my mind......

What is my character?
What are my values?
What is my vision?

I have some answers from the last time I went on a quest to determine what I wanted my vision of my work to be,
but this time,
any answers are only starting points.

The weekend was good: productive, relaxing.
That extra hour was kick-ass.
We forgot and fed the cats a half hour late which turned out to be half an hour early.
Ha!

This weekend I also proved out something to myself
and arrived at this:

Advice for those who say things like I used to, specifically "I WISH I could draw."

Draw.
:)
Yeah, my advice is Draw.
Seriously.
You don’t have to WISH you could draw,
you can just do it.
You have the equipment most likely.
Even if you don’t, many people work with what they have to accomplish something they really want.
You can make your own wish come true
by simply doing what you wish you could!
Especially in this case,
not much money is required.
Time,
but time you can find
much more easily than you can find money.
Sometimes we are the only ones who are stopping our wishes from coming true.
Is that true every single time our wishes don’t come true?
Even when it has to do with money????
(beware of the rabbit holes there)

Anyways,
I was in the line of a woman who worked at the cash register at Walmart.
She spoke of how yucky (my word not hers) she felt toward people on Facebook who talk about the crafts they made,
because she claimed to not have time to do such things.
Her opinion is valid to her experience.
But I question her claim about not having time.
People, including me, waste time all the time.
I bet I could follow you around all weekend and come up with time that is wasted on other unimportant or less important stuff that you are stealing from what could be used to make your wishes come true.

We get super, SUPER easily sucked into dramatic-emotional voyages to nowhere.

Such as being upset with other people for living their dreams......
when if we were living our dreams,
we probably wouldn’t have time to see them living theirs
or time to be envious
or even the desire.

Being happy in your particular life is a CURE to many, many problems.

 

Perhaps the time you spent looking at people’s Facebook stuff talking about their crafts could be spend making your own crafts if that’s what you really want to do.....
And honestly,
I WOULD BET A LOT THAT YOU DO.
;)
I speak from envious-experious.
That’s a spell that’s easily fallen under by those who are looking at someone else’s yoga mat.

I am learning to keep my eyes on mine,
even when it gets lonely
because I must be about the work of my life,
not about what you are doing that’s bothering me.

Extra hours go by.
Flow by.
Mindlessly adventuring in some virtual world where gun play is okay, but you still apologize to computer simulated people whose body parts are missing because you Blew Them Away with your shotgun when they popped out around a corner trying to kill you.
But in real-life you catch bugs in a plastic container and put them outside in the cold where they die......
Wait,
should I have killed it myself?
Is that nicer?
Than letting it freeze to death?
Oh, these are the white rabbit questions that jump into ethical rabbit holes.
No, no rabbit, I’m not following you.
I’ll just tell them what you said.

Anyways, I’m starting the work week by exploring my character and my values and my vision.
I encourage you to either find out what those things are in your life
or to re-state to yourself what they are because you already know.

And do the thing you keep saying "I wish I could **blah**"
Diana Nyad would say, ‘FIND A WAY."
She’d also point out that achievements sometimes take a lifetime to arrive at.

And sometimes they require a weekend of on again, off again drawing like a swimmer works-out.

So, over the weekend, I created 26 beings.
And today I’m stringing together these words and images to celebrate that and to learn from it.

I value that Art is a wide and varied expanse
that will stretch out across my life.
Today is only one part of the building blocks that will create that expanse.

Same is true for you.
What will you build?

~magick~
Meliss