I am having s sudden rush of creative energy, and drive to follow through on ideas and desires and I am getting my thyroid in order! All the chakras are connected, but the 5th (thyroid/throat) and the 2nd (pelvis/low belly) have a special relationship in their connection to creativity.

I’ve always been kind of suspicious of the world, anyway, so it’s pretty easy for me to live in my own little world.” – Meg White

“The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are. You trade in your reality for a role. You trade in your sense for an act. You give up your ability to feel, and in exchange, put on a mask. There can’t be any large-scale revolution until there’s a personal revolution, on an individual level. It’s got to happen inside first.” – Jim Morrison

“Creativity is not a diagnosis or a malady or a disorder.” – Jordan Hoggard

“If you can’t help me grow, there’s no point with you being in my life.” ~ Jill Scott

“All that matters is kindness and the capacity to recognize the existence of people other than you.” – Zadie Smith

“The role of the artist is to make the revolution irresistible.” – Toni Cade Bambara

“Friends and good manners will carry you where money won’t go.” – Margaret Walker

“When you take care of yourself, you’re a better person for others. When you feel good about yourself, you treat others better.” – Solange Knowles

“Laughter is the shortest distance between people.” – Victor Borges

“I always believed that when you follow your heart or your gut, when you really follow the things that feel great to you, you can never lose, because settling is the worst feeling in the world.” – Rihanna

When I started, they told me I only needed 3 chords and the truth… It turned out I could manage with 2 and some vague ideas. – Joe Strummer

“. . . An artist’s duty is to reflect the times.” – Nina Simone

“If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.” ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

“I feel embarrassed often… because I create often.” – George Kao

“Everybody says sex is obscene. The only true obscenity is war.” – Henry Miller

By practicing kindness all over with everyone you will soon come into the holy trance, definite distinctions of personalities will become what they really mysteriously are, our common and eternal blissstuff, the pureness of everything forever, the great bright essence of mind, even and one thing everywhere the holy eternal milky love, the white light everywhere everything, emptybliss, svaha, shining, ready, and awake, the compassion in the sound of silence, the swarming myriad trillionaire you are. – Jack Kerouac

“Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.” George Bernard Shaw

When the self is understood as relational, interdependent, even inter-existent, then it bleeds over into the other, and the other bleeds over into the self. Understanding the self as a locus of consciousness in a matrix of relationship, one no longer searches for an enemy as the key to understanding every problem, but looks instead for imbalances in relationships. The War on Death gives way to the quest to live well and fully, and we see that fear of death is actually fear of life. How much of life will we forego to stay safe? – Charles Eisenstein

Everything we do should have some thought for the pleasure of doing it. ~ Barbara Ehrenreich, Barbara Ehrenreich on Her Endorsement of Bernie Sanders and Why Socialism Should Be Fun

“Sexuality is a sacred ritual of union through the celebration of difference.” Anodea Judith, PhD

“Tantra is the sacred dance of reuniting duality—of restoring that which is separate into oneness again.” ~Anodea Judith, PhD

“The bigger the dream, the more important the team.” — Robin Sharma

“Where there is a woman there is magic.” ~ Ntozake Shange

“I heard someone from the music business saying they are no longer looking for talent, they want people with a certain look and a willingness to cooperate. I thought, that’s interesting, because I believe a total unwillingness to cooperate is what is necessary to be an artist — not for perverse reasons, but to protect your vision. The considerations of a corporation, especially now, have nothing to do with art or music. That’s why I spend my time now painting.” ~ Joni Mitchell

“Fuck shame, make art.” ~ Amanda Palmer

“The finest of pleasures are always the unexpected ones.” ― Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus

Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.  —Pablo Picasso.

“Pleasure is the point. Being happy in public is revolution.” ~ Oneika

“There is no way to repress pleasure and expect liberation, satisfaction, or joy.”
– Adrienne Maree Brown

Viz.: the man who thinks 30 seconds of foreplay is “enough,” the man who cheats on his wife, the man who passes women over for promotion, the man who steals his girlfriend’s credit cards, the man who keeps 19 guns in the basement, the man who tells his co-worker she “talks too much in meetings,” the man who won’t bathe, the man who beats his girlfriend’s dog, the man who takes his female colleagues’ ideas, the man who tries to kill his rich wife by putting poison in her shampoo. Every woman, whether consciously or not, has a catalogue of the hideous men she’s known. ~E. Jean Carroll

“We were together. I forget the rest.”  ― Walt Whitman

“All art is subversive.” ~ Therence McKenna

“You do have to prepare for age. And I have prepared by always doing creative work.” Eileen Kramer

“You deserve a lover who wants you disheveled, with everything and all the reasons that wake you up in a haste and the demons that won’t let you sleep. You deserve a lover who makes you feel safe, who can consume this world whole if he walks hand in hand with you; someone who believes that his embraces are a perfect match with your skin. You deserve a lover who wants to dance with you, who goes to paradise every time he looks into your eyes and never gets tired of studying your expressions. You deserve a lover who listens when you sing, who supports you when you feel shame and respects your freedom; who flies with you and isn’t afraid to fall. You deserve a lover who takes away the lies and brings you hope, coffee, and poetry.”
~ Frida Kahlo

“Turned on women will change the world.” ~Nicole Daedone⁣

“What I want to say is this: Whatever your life brings to you, respond with creation. If you are celebrating, create. If you are grieving, create. Only create. Always create. Constant creative response. This is the engine of resilience.” ~Elizabeth Gilbert

“It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

“What you may need is a more curious and mysterious sweetness. A wilder, stronger sweetness. A sweetness that pulverizes illusions.” ~ Rob Brezsny

“If you want to make magic, you better get familiar with Pussy.” ~ Heather Bleasdell

“Everyone carries with them at least one piece to someone else’s puzzle.” ~ Lawrence Kushner

“You are not what you earn or amass. You are what you feel about yourself as you do so.” ~ Chani Nicholas

“Admire as much as you can. Most people do not admire enough.” – Vincent van Gogh

“To say goodbye is to die a little.” ~ Raymond Chandler

“I barely knew I had skin before I met you.” ~ Sarah Waters

“I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naïve or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.” ― Anaïs Nin

“It doesn’t have to do anything. It just has to be there for the fierce pleasure we take in doing it, and the different kind of pleasure that’s taken in reading something that’s durable and made to last, as well as beautiful in and of itself. Something that throws off these sparks—a persistent and steady glow, however dim.” ~ Raymond Carver (on writing)

“The creative adult is the child who survived.” ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

What’s missing in your life? Are you lonely? Are you bored? In my world, boredom and lack of love are the only sin. Let’s work on it. Together we can do what we could never do alone! ~ Geordie Numata, Deer Spirit Reiki

“Be as curious about intimacy as you are about power.” – Rob Brezsny

“I know of a cure for everything: salt water…in one way or the other. Sweat, or tears, or the salt sea.” ~ Karen Blixen

“We live in a world where joy and empathy and pleasure are all around us, there for the noticing.” ~ Ira Glass

“When peoples care for you and cry for you, they can straighten out your soul” -Langston Hughes

“At the Chelsea [hotel], it was a pretty smart move to accept a painting in lieu of rent. The real question is — why in America is that no longer possible?” ~ Joe MacNeil, Make America Bohemian Again

“But I don’t believe that life is supposed to make you feel good, or to make you feel miserable either. Life is just supposed to make you feel.”  ~ Gloria Naylor

“You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.”― Jim Rohn

The most alarming of all man’s assaults upon the environment is the contamination of air, earth, rivers, and sea with dangerous and even lethal materials. This pollution is for the most part irrecoverable; the chain of evil it initiates not only in the world that must support life but in living tissues is for the most part irreversible. In this now universal contamination of the environment, chemicals are the sinister and little-recognized partners of radiation in changing the very nature of the world — the very nature of its life. — Rachel Carson

“Happiness comes from between. It comes from getting the right relationship between yourself and others, yourself and your work, and yourself and something larger than yourself.” — Jonathan Haidt

“Keeping your body healthy is an expression of gratitude to the whole cosmos—the trees, the clouds, everything.”—Thích Nhất Hạnh

“The dancer’s body is simply the luminous manifestation of the Soul.” ~ Isadora Duncan

“Permaculture principles focus on thoughtful designs for small-scale intensive systems which are labor efficient and which use biological resources instead of fossil fuels. Designs stress ecological connections and closed energy and material loops. The core of permaculture is design and the working relationships and connections between all things.” – Bill Mollison

“Creativity requires a state of grace. So many things are required for it to succeed.” ~ Magda Szabó

“We are told that people stay in love because of chemistry, or because they remain intrigued with each other, because of many kindnesses, because of luck. But part of it has got to be forgiveness and gratefulness.” ~ Ellen Goodman

“Permaculture is a philosophy of working with, rather than against nature; of protracted and thoughtful observation rather than protracted and thoughtless labor; and of looking at plants and animals in all their functions, rather than treating any area as a single product system.” – Bill Mollison

“For a relationship to stay alive, love alone is not enough. Without imagination, love stales into sentiment, duty, boredom. Relationships fail not because we have stopped loving but because we first stopped imagining.” – James Hillman

“We are challenged every day to say yes to the movements of life, to see it all through, without pause, staying in relationship to the music of life and each other, adjusting as we go, not knowing what will happen next.”  —Mark Nepo

“The actual trouble is that profit is identified entirely with money, as distinct from the real profit of living with dignity and elegance in beautiful surroundings.” ~Does it Matter, Alan Watts

“I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself.” ~ D.H. Lawrence

“Salmon are crucial to their coastal ecosystem like perhaps few other species on the planet. A significant portion of the nitrogen in West Coast forests has been traced back to salmon, which can travel hundreds of miles upstream to lay their eggs. The largest trees on Earth simply wouldn’t exist without salmon.”  – Eric Holthaus, “The Point of No Return, Climate Change Nightmares Are Already Here”, Rolling Stone

“Maybe some people just aren’t meant to be in our lives forever. Maybe some people are just passing through. It’s like some people just come through our lives to bring us something: a gift, a blessing, a lesson we need to learn. And that’s why they’re here. You’ll have that gift forever.” ~ Danielle Steel

“The war of an artist with his society is a lover’s war and he does at his best what lovers do which is to reveal the beloved to himself and with that revelation to make freedom real.”  ~ James Baldwin

“I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.” ~ Isaac Newton

“I don’t want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them.” — Oscar Wilde

“Everybody says sex is obscene. The only true obscenity is war.” Henry Miller, The Tropic of Cancer

“The true liberation of eroticism lies in accepting the fact that there are a million facets to it, a million forms of eroticism, a million objects of it, situations, atmospheres, and variations. We have, first of all, to dispense with guilt concerning its expansion, then remain open to its surprises, varied expressions, and (to add my personal formula for the full enjoyment of it) fuse it with individual love and passion for a particular human being, mingle it with dreams, fantasies, and emotions for it to attain its highest potency.” ~ Anais Nin from Eroticism in Women, Playgirl, April 1974.

“The bird a nest, the spider a web, man friendship.” ~ Walt Whitman

“In the sweetness of friendship let there be laughter, and sharing of pleasures. For in the dew of little things, does the heart find its morning and is refreshed.” ― Khalil Gibran

“Friendship is always a sweet responsibility, never an opportunity.” ― Khalil Gibran

“No human relation gives one possession in another—every two souls are absolutely different. In friendship or in love, the two side by side raise hands together to find what one cannot reach alone.” ― Khalil Gibran

“Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: ‘what you too? I thought I was the only one.’” – C.S. Lewis

“Those who can ask without shame are viewing themselves in collaboration with—rather than in competition with—the world.” – Amanda Palmer, The Art of Asking

“People are afraid of themselves, of their own reality; their feelings most of all. People talk about how great love is, but that’s bullshit. Love hurts. Feelings are disturbing. People are taught that pain is evil and dangerous. How can they deal with love if they’re afraid to feel? Pain is meant to wake us up. People try to hide their pain. But they’re wrong. Pain is something to carry, like a radio. You feel your strength in the experience of pain. It’s all in how you carry it. That’s what matters. Pain is a feeling. Your feelings are a part of you. Your own reality. If you feel ashamed of them, and hide them, you’re letting society destroy your reality. You should stand up for your right to feel your pain.” ― Jim Morrison

“What do you desire?” ~ Alan Watts

“It is true that those we meet can change us, sometimes so profoundly that we are not the same afterwards, even unto our names.” ~ Yann Martel

“You swam in a river of chance and coincidence. You clung to the happiest accidents—the rest you let float by.”  ~ David Wroblewski

We are each of us angels with only one wing.
And we can only fly embracing one another. ~ Lucianao De Crescenzo

“In a social environment that is ever crowded and impersonal, it is becoming increasingly important to reconsider the value of close personal relationships before we are driven to ask the forlorn question, ‘Whatever happened to love?'” ~ Desmond Morris

“Sex appeal is a wonderful, warm, womanly healthy feeling . . . it comes only from inside, it’s from nothing that’s manufactured. It has nothing to do with measurements or lipstick color. To me, it’s cleanliness, and youth, an effervescent desire to enjoy life.” ~ Jayne Mansfield

“In the orchard and rose garden I long to see your face. In the taste of Sweetness I long to kiss your lips. In the shadows of passion I long for your love.” ~ Rumi

“The only currency in this bankrupt world is what you share with someone else when you’re uncool.” ~ Philip Seymour Hoffman in Almost Famous

“Each friend represents a world in us, a world not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.” ~ Anais Nin

“The deepest craving of human nature is the need to be appreciated.
”   ~William James

“Let us be grateful to people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.”  ~Marcel Prous

“Managing the power of choice, with all it’s creative and spiritual implications, is the essence of the human experience.” – Caroline Myss

“From a spiritual perspective every relationship we develop, from the most casual to the most intimate, serves the purpose of helping us to become more conscious.” –Caroline Myss

“In general, if a couple cannot expand their original rules and boundaries to accommodate personal growth, the relationship disintegrates.” – Caroline Myss

 “Habits allow us to not think about what we’re doing . . . giving us the illusion of ease. When we are under the illusion of ease, not thinking about what we’re doing. Breathing the same old way, moving the same old way, thinking the same old way we check out of the present, out of happiness itself.” ~ Alex Levin

 “What if our religion was each other
If our practice was our life
If prayer, our words
What if the temple was the Earth
If forests were our church
If holy water—the rivers, lakes, and ocean
What if meditation was our relationships
If the teacher was life
If wisdom was self-knowledge
If love was the center of our being.” ~ Ganga White

“Accepting means you allow yourself to feel whatever it is you are feeling at that moment. It is part of the isness of the Now. You can’t argue with what is. Well, you can, but if you do, you suffer.”  ~ Eckhart Tolle

“We may think that when we have completed our study of one we know all about two because two is one and one. We forget that we still have to make a study of ‘and.'” — A. Eddington

“Every perfect action is accompanied by pleasure. By that you can tell what you ought to do.” — Andre Gide

“Ascetic spirituality is a symptom of the very disease which it intends to cure.” — Alan Watts

“Everyone you will ever meet knows something you don’t.” ~ Bill Nye

“It is said that each time we embrace someone warmly, we gain an extra day of life.” – Paulo Coelho

“You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.” — Plato

“A Revolution without dancing is not a revolution worth having.” -Emma Goldman

“Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.” —Anais Nin

“Sex is an affirmation of life. By making sex a prominent part of it – placing it on the top of our list of priorities – it helps us face daily challenges in other parts of our lives. No matter what struggles there are, we put them aside and establish a time and place to embrace desire and pleasure. We are less likely to fight over folding the laundry or the details of renovating the house when we feel sexually satisfied… Communication, respect, trust, and generosity that begin in the bedroom find their way into every aspect of the relationship.” ~Stanley Seigel

“My grandfather always said that living is like licking honey off a thorn.” ~Louis Adamic

“Humans are radically relational—the sacred is to be found in the spaces between us.” ~ author unknown

“The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances; both are transformed.” ~ Carl Jung

“My favorite holiday is Valentine’s Day because it’s the holiday that takes care of my taste buds.” – Seraphina, 10 year-old girl

“Female sexual pleasure, rightly understood, is not just about sexuality, or just about pleasure. it serves also, as a medium of female self-knowledge and hopefulness; female creativity and courage; female focus and initiative; female bliss and transcendence; and as a medium of sensibility, that feels very much like freedom. To understand the vagina properly is to realize that it is not only coextensive with the female brain, but it is also, essentially, part of the female soul.” – Naomi Wolf  Vagina: A New Biography

“ALWAYS LEAVE THEM WANTING MORE.” – Thelonious Monk

“Sex is kicking death in the ass while singing.” 
― Charles Bukowski

Header photo – Holly Troy

December 17, 2020
Flagstaff, AZ