Awakened is the latest of my recent paintings. The subject matter is a red poppy with stars rising in a blue mist from the center. Characteristic of this series, the backdrop is starry space, this time also featuring a small moon.

The poppy is lush and sensual, bathed in divine light, and holds a great energy. In this work, the poppy itself represents the awakened goddess. Her petals are partially transparent, showing the stars beyond the flower.

The blue mist of radiant stars rising from the poppy evoke memories of the creation of our souls, a song of joy rising in the vast expanse of both outer and inner space. If we were to directly witness the creation of souls, we would hardly be able to contain the incredible sound of joy that brings them into existence.

From the upper right corner comes a beam of violet light that awakened the goddess. The colors in this painting are particularly rich with blues, purples, and reds.

Lexi Sundell’s acrylic painting Awakened, 48″ high by 46″ wide with painted gallery wrap edges, and limited edition prints are available at RiverStone Gallery.

Copyright © Lexi Sundell 2009. All Rights Reserved.

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Awakened, an Unusual Poppy Painting

Night Lightning

Our souls walk the night skies in our dreams. If we are fortunate, we may wake and catch the vision of those magnificent starry expanses inviting us to merge with our souls.

An apt symbol for the passion of the soul as it flows through time and space is the horse, which often has been used to represent human passion. Great swirling energies dance in the mane of the horse, electric colors of lightning enlivening our beings when we least expect it.

The head and neck of the horse hold a profound stillness, the signal of the void. The void is not a space of nothingness, but instead contains the full potential of everything, all possibilities not yet brought into form. The void glitters with a quiet aliveness that awaits myriad creative choices.

After the lightning of the soul strikes our hearts in the night, we move into this void where we discover our own new potentials. If we rest in deep stillness, we will emerge restored and refreshed, suddenly inspired with dreams newly discovered.

Then let us touch our lives and create those dreams from the lightning inspirations of our souls.

Lexi Sundell’s painting Night Lightning and limited edition prints are available at RiverStone Gallery.

Copyright © Lexi Sundell 2008. All Rights Reserved.

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Our Souls Walk the Night Skies

Starwings, 48"w x 36"h

Doesn’t everyone yearn to be loved into magnificence? Isn’t love what sustains a caterpillar as it goes through the unimaginably strange process of dissolving its bazillion legs, indeed, its very identity, into an unknown goo with the potential of one day flying?

What caterpillar ever dreamed of flying as it happily strolled along leaves, selecting the tastiest parts to bite and consume? How solidly anchored to earth do all those legs make a caterpillar anyway?

As the stirrings of change disturb the caterpillar, it retreats into a chrysalis, seeking safety and comfort. Safety it may find there, but comfort quickly flees as the stirrings of change become a full fledged assault on the caterpillar’s very being.

So how would love sustain a caterpillar through the transition from the known to the utterly unknown? The chrysalis in its shimmering colors holds the world away from the chaos within it. Seeking love from the world outside the chrysalis is not really an option.

As always, love first arises from within the self. Love directs the myriad processes of transformation, creating amazing and unanticipated beauty from humble beginnings. So it is for the caterpillar, as it becomes something it never even dreamed for its future.

Eventually the goo has morphed into a new form, still unable to fly. The new being is folded, crumpled, and crammed into the tight confines of the chrysalis. Eventually the claustrophobia is too much and this new being breaks out of the coffin of the caterpillar.

The miracle of transformation continues as the wings slowly unfold like a flower gently opening in the dawn light. Liquid pumps through the veins of the wings until they stand straight and graceful, needing only time to dry before the maiden voyage.

The wings of a butterfly sparkle with the memory of stars. After all, the matter of our familiar and beloved earth is the leftover remains of stars long gone by. So the butterfly sits, drying, the remnants of stars coursing through its veins and forming its being.

When ready, the butterfly opens its wings like a heart in surrender to divine love. At last, in holy ascent, the butterfly takes flight, delicate, fragile, and somehow timelessly enduring. So may we all.

Lexi Sundell’s painting Starwings and limited edition prints are available at RiverStone Gallery.

Copyright © Lexi Sundell 2008. All Rights Reserved.

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Loved into Magnificence

My most recently completed painting, Transcendence, is acrylic on canvas, 36” wide by 46” high with painted gallery wrap edges, featuring two dahlias in a still life. It has been interesting watching people’s response to the work as they key into my painting intention from their own individual perspectives.

The concept that dominated the painting process was that of becoming a transparent vessel filled with divine love. This is one of those pretty concepts that can quickly turn into a quagmire when attempted in real life.

After all, what is involved with becoming a transparent vessel in the first place? Most of us would be mortified to walk down Main Street without any clothes, and becoming a transparent vessel requires an even more rigorous nakedness.

Everything in the heart that has been hidden from others has to become visible. Worse yet, everything in the heart hidden from oneself has to become visible. This is not a task for the faint hearted at all!

The other part of this equation is filling the transparent vessel with divine love. That love is what illuminates all the hidden uglies in the first place. It cannot co-exist with them in the same space however. One has to heal or transmute everything that was hidden so that divine love can fill its space.

The process can be quite intimidating, inspiring the urge to turn and run from the whole affair. At that point it is helpful to use discernment in how one views the hidden unpleasantness.

The crucial issue is to recognize what is one’s true essence and what is merely wreckage and debris from the untidy process of living in the physical realm. Once that distinction is clear, the hidden aspects are not as disturbing and can be allowed to dissolve in the light of one’s true essence.

As the transparent vessel fills with divine love, entire galaxies of being may be discovered within it. The goddess may emerge, radiant with symphonies of color.

Spirit blooms in an explosion of light from the divine as the earlier fears of being fully seen dissolve and fade away.

The painting is available at RiverStone Gallery.

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Transcendence

This painting of nine poppies dancing against a fresh spring green background was created for a book to be published later this year. Acrylic on canvas, it measure 58”w x 34”h.

Celebration of the Goddess evokes the divine feminine, which resides in all of us regardless of gender. The creative expression of earth energies is shown in the delicately graceful poppies, which are at ease in the light from the divine.

The restoration of reverence for the feminine is needed in women as well as in men. If women do not regard the divine feminine as being of value, why then should men?

It has been a long path for humanity to try to discover the intrinsic beauty already created within us. Too many layers of distorted perceptions and judgments color our view of ourselves. To fail to look beneath the everyday surface reality is to fail to see the divine beauty always waiting discovery.

It is time, not only to look and see that deeper reality, but also to celebrate daily by living it with compassion in all our words and deeds.

The painting is available at RiverStone Gallery.

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Celebration of the Goddess

I found myself alone on a high mountaintop, surrounded by sheets of rippling white fire. I was alone with the divine, the solitary path of the soul no one else can walk for another. I felt my spirit begin to soften, a surprising gentleness in this colossal furnace.

I have been casting gold and silver all week, for many years in fact, and never realized the metal might feel softness as the heat consumes its form. The intensity of the burning would seem to override softness, but that is not so.

The gold first is bathed in the light of the torch, changing color but not form. It grows red and then gradually loses its shape as it slumps into a glowing yellow molten mass. That molten mass becomes more brilliant, and then flows and moves like quicksilver.

When the torch is removed, the molten, easy flowing metal is centrifugally thrown into a prepared flask, a cavity that creates the new transformed shape the metal will cool and hold.

But now I know from within the divine fire itself that the spirit softens as form begins to burn away.

I offered everything I love the most to this all-consuming fire. This was no casual surrender, not my earlier surrender of that which I love to divine service. Divine service can leave the forms intact, but this required total surrender.

I yielded all that I love and silently watched as it grew incandescent in the fire and the forms dissolved in the light, changing forevermore, the old forms never to be seen again.

The fire, too, was consuming me. I became running quicksilver, a new creation of spirit, my form still only known to the divine heart.

The true meaning of Pluto in Capricorn caught me. Pluto is annihilation or transformation and frequently combines them in unimaginable power. Capricorn is traditional structure and form.

I am annihilated and I am transformed into a new form not yet created, a form still held secret in the molten fire, a gift from the divine heart itself.

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Surrender to the Divine

While the weather remains mild, I know winter is coming. The garden is filled with small poppy seedlings that will not survive the winter. I look at their green leaves peeking through the litter of mulch and wish I could see the flowers they promise in their full glory.

But, as I said, winter is coming. I shall have to wait through the snows and wind for new seedlings, ones that were not as precipitous as these, to see the next season of poppies.

So I shall undoubtedly paint poppies this winter. I think I must come by this great enthusiasm for poppies quite naturally.

You see, my grandfather, Otto Lanshaw, painted the scene at the top of this article. That is the original Lanshaw homestead in Michigan as it looked when my mother was a little girl growing up in the poppies.

I also grew up there, but the poppies were mostly gone by then, overcome by the grasses and thistles. Sometimes a valiant little plant would burst forth with a determined bloom, but only occasionally.

I have more than made up for their loss by growing thousands of them every summer here in Montana. These delicate blossoms open at dawn and show their incredible fresh colors for a short time before the breezes take the petals wandering.

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Poppies Yesterday and Tomorrow

Errant pixels strolled across my computer screen and vaporized without a trace, perhaps taking a few stray html tags with them. Notes on assorted scraps of paper teetered beside the monitor, threatening to slide onto the keyboard or floor.

Sometimes this room has been so crowded I felt more like I wore it than entered it. The current level of chaos has made it an ill-fitting garment indeed.

But, at long last, the rebuild of the RiverStone Gallery website is up and running. I sit here in the litter left behind, feeling both exhausted and relieved.

More than 200 pages complete with slideshows of artwork, cross links, a brand new attached blog, page redirects, and god knows what all are online at last. The process of creating them took so long I forgot I might someday emerge from it all back into real life.

A light dusting of snow on the ground announces that fall has disappeared during the project. So I sit, as the shortened day slips into night far too quickly, and wonder what I will do next.

Chasing gremlins with a broom through the website took two or three weeks before their havoc subsided. I have dreamed of html in my sleep.

Perhaps tonight I will dream of cold snow against a black sky, and in the morning pick up a paintbrush dipped in deep red paint.

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After the Massive Project

Have you ever dreamed of wearing neon red trout shoes to a party? Somehow it had not crossed your mind? What could inspire such an outlandish concept?

Poetry, for one thing. Yes, poetry.

My husband Bern wrote a poem to his sister some twenty years ago. She saved it and then forgot about it. A few months ago she ran across it and once again read the line that refers to “neon red trout shoes.”

The oddest things can be an epiphany for Linda, and this was a big one. She realized Bern absolutely had to have a pair of those shoes for his birthday this summer. Her husband Greg agreed and they embarked upon on online search for trout shoes.

It is astonishing how great a lack of trout shoes exists in the fashion world. The category is an overlooked niche for sure.

Undeterred, Linda decided she had to create the neon red trout shoes herself. She purchased a pair of Converse shoes in her own size as the test version. She explored materials and a variety of design concepts and then transformed the plain shoes into a spectacular pair of neon red trout shoes.

Inspired by the success of the initial experiment, she bought a much larger pair of Converse that would fit Bern and set about creating his birthday shoes.

Bern’s birthday party was held at the Beartooth Fly Fishing Lodge near town. Fortunately Bern’s brothers, sister, and other family members were here from all over the country so they were able to join our friends for the party.

Linda kept her own pair of trout shoes hidden until she gave Bern his present. The shoes were a total surprise as Bern did not even remember the poem that started the project.

Bern and Linda both posed wearing the fabulous footwear. The fishing guides who attended say they expect to see him on the river fly fishing in those shoes.

So, just out of curiosity, what might you offer for such an incredible pair of neon red trout shoes? Obviously Bern is not going to part with his special shoes, but it could be fun to hear what unique barter ideas you might have.

This post is part of the Problogger group writing project. You might have a great time exploring the other submissions!

Copyright © Lexi Sundell 2008. All Rights Reserved.

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Wildest Party Shoes Ever Created!

Rick, I would say that you and I are both by nature mentally driven. Anyone who is having an existential crisis and pauses to list a host of creative ideas certainly fits that category. Not that there is anything wrong with a host of creative ideas, I find them a blast myself.

However, the clue is that you are trying to think your way out of a hole created by thinking in the first place. Notice it getting deeper?

The mind is a great tool, but that is just what it is, a great tool. Handing the steering wheel of one’s life to a great tool has some severe drawbacks, which you have been noticing. The steering wheel really belongs in the hands of one’s own heart centered awareness.

Does this mean being squishy emotional? No. The heart accesses a wider range of information in a different manner than the mind. As such, it is in better position to choose a path that is holistically satisfying.

This does not mean the heart ignores the mind. The heart is informed by the mind as the mind does what it does well. But the heart is informed in other ways as well. The mind is only one tool, not the be all end all.

By now your mind may be looking around wondering where the heck this heart centered awareness is, or if this wacky lady is just talking through her hat.

Our culture is heavily slanted towards developing a mentally driven approach. Those with sharp minds easily embrace it. An integrated mental/emotional awareness is lost in the process.

Different things can hinder opening a heart centered awareness. Massive amounts of stored pain certainly hinder it. If one looks at one’s heart and sees a thorny thicket of pain, the first inclination is to slam the door shut on that direction.

Diving into the thorns can lead to wallowing in pain and misery, an unattractive path indeed.

Sometimes we just need a large machete. Leap into the thorns and go straight through them to experience and clear the stored pain. A gritty process, but one that leads us past the pain. What lies beyond is a grace filled heart centered awareness, to state the obvious here.

In other cases, the heart does not appear to be a thorny thicket of pain, but maybe is simply elusive altogether. No skills have been developed to work with it and it is missing in conscious action as a result.

In any event, get out the machete and deal with the thorny thicket if necessary. Then discover how the heart works and how to access the wisdom it can provide when retrieved from the thorns or the closet into which it has been stuffed.

Honor your mind but learn to keep it within its appropriate tasks. Honor your heart and learn to listen to it.

Only in your own healed and fully functioning heart will you find a sustaining motivation and direction for your life. Rick, I wish you well in the adventure of changing an unsatisfying pattern in your life. May you access your own deeper wisdom and joy in the process!

Copyright © Lexi Sundell 2008. All Rights Reserved.

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How to Get Unstuck from a Long Term Pattern in Life