Sometimes that can be the hardest part for the creative, especially when you grow up not believing in your ability to create art.

Marketing is nothing but talking about your project.

But if you don’t talk about it, does it even exist?

So, in an effort to get comfortable with sharing creative endeavors, I’m turning to this space to post more about my projects & cultivate a portfolio.

Like a living, breathing resume of creation.

This particular song started out as a remix of a Glass Animals song, Cocoa Hooves. Then, In my digital clean up efforts, I moved their stem files and the next time I opened the project it was only my instrumental. No Wavey Davey vocals.

Originally disappointed, I began to enjoy the song more as an instrumental and considered it one of the better creations I’d been cooking up.

The file was originally ‘cocoa hooves remix.mp3’, then ‘cocoa hooves remix but not really.mp3’, and finally it became ‘but not really.mp3’.

You can listen to it HERE.

Much like the evolution of humanity has always fascinated me, the details of the evolution of each little created concept also fascinate me.

For the album art, I took a picture of me and manipulated the fuck out of it.

Mostly in the MirrorLab app and then took the fractal image into Canva to add the words that converted it into album art.

voila!

Made this little video project for the recently released audio project.

The Alan Watts audio was from his lecture on Space and Time that I came across a few months ago at this point, and it is a massively impactful concept to embrace. “You see when you find out that all this Universe depends on you, you’ve got to be very careful at that point not to go crazy…” I was the experiencer that went crazy and got frightened and got cocky – sometimes all at once, sometimes in ebbs and flows of encountering other energies around me.

This healing journey is a spiritual journey.

All learning is a cognitive and spiritual journey.
And healing is a journey of learning to know yourself.

It all intertwines just as we all intertwine in this magical, beautiful orchestra called “existence”.

I scoffed when my mother told me a year ago that what had helped her was finding “faith” – I remembered the church experiences, I didn’t believe I could find faith in a church. It wasn’t until a few months later, while I sat in meditation, that I realized the faith I needed to find was within me.

So began the most important journey into my psyche & my soul…

Finally I am adding the practice of consistently sharing the journey. I teach my kids that “sharing is caring,” and I haven’t always lead by such an example.
I’ve often overshared in the past as well, giving others too much of myself and leaving myself in a place of being taken advantage of. There is a balance to all things; every concept a double edged sword.
Without understanding this and knowing yourself you will be easily swayed by all of the external noise. It is so much easier to avoid our own needs when that is all we ever knew.
Monkey see monkey do; until monkey learns different and then behaves different.

This monkey has been reading A LOT, is now putting creative projects together more consistently, is finally embracing social engagement again, and working on a coaching program that I would have signed up for years ago; one that would have altered my course in life much earlier. Trial and Error (an homage to this blog’s title over a decade ago) has always been my favored way of experiencing & learning, however it seems like many of us (self included) let perfectionism stunt our growth in a myriad of ways throughout life. I could probably attribute this to our education systems, but that’s a topic for another day. Point is, there is no growth or learning without making mistakes. Our mistakes are just as much a valuable part of the journey as our wins.

There are bits and pieces of prior life experiences stored in our memory for that rainy day puzzle we plan to put together someday…

New pieces are gathered throughout our days; news paper headlines, movies, words from friends or family or bosses, logos, song lyrics, facial expressions, and the feelings we hold on to.

They are each a little piece of the puzzle that makes up our perspective of life.

As individual beings, we are each a piece of the great puzzle of life.

Everyone sees things differently because we all have different past experiences. It is the past that colors our perspective, or view, of the present. We’ve even discovered in more depth how our parents and grand parents experiences are stored or encoded in our DNA. It doesn’t stop there, some of us have encoding going way back to ancient times.

Those old souls who experience a deep knowing without understanding where it comes from.

I heard recently that when knowledge exceeds understanding, it becomes imagination.

I’ve always been highly imaginative and high spirited, but I had no idea what that meant. Recently I’ve been spending much time wondering how understanding finally comes about…

For example, the saying “monkey see, monkey do,” we always use in reference to children copying each other. Now I understand why it felt right, as a child, to call everyone kid. Including, and especially, my father. I am one of those old souls who had a strange knowing about what was right or wrong from very early on in life. That doesn’t mean that I was exempt from the very human workings of the mind and learning from observation. I’ve made an extraordinary number of mistakes and wrong doings by following the ways others operate and holding onto the negative self beliefs taught through churches and schools and even the judgements of friends and family.

Emotional intelligence or EQ is a concept I really started learned about within the last couple years and it really began opening my world up to a deeper understanding.

You see, if you grew up with emotionally immature parents, you likely learned a lot of behaviors that hindered your own ability to maintain healthy relationships in adulthood. This is true for a shockingly large portion of the population, which you can see represented in part by the rising drunk driving cases, drug addiction, and the skyrocketing suicide rates that point to a mental health crisis going on.

The evidence is everywhere.
We’d rather run from hard conversations than face the truth.

The truth hurts.

But only until you move through it.
On the other side of the pain you fear and avoid is the peace and love you’re looking for.

Fortunately, I have a high pain tolerance, because the hard conversations have only gotten started.

So, without further ado, I’d like to introduce the project that has been rolling around in my head for the last few months. It’s gone through many adjustments as to how I felt I should share but no consistent execution. Perhaps I still held on to some lingering limiting beliefs or maybe I was just letting the angry little voice in my head talk me into quitting before I started because that’s what it’s good at; keeping us in a place of familiarity. And getting wildly vulnerable on the internet is NOT familiar, it’s kind of terrifying! And exhilarating. And freeing. And, for me, it’s necessary. There is a gentler voice that I can hear again that has been urging, “it’s time…”

Liv Laud will have the first episode dropped later today.

This blog I will also be changing around to be creative project focused – more of a personal portfolio of the visual & audio projects I am working on, while Liv Laud is a deep conversation about what it is to have a well-lived life and how we honor the good, bad, beautiful, and ugly of all we see, as well as how who we are effects what we see.

There’s levels to this shit.

On the surface, I was just excited to see an eclipse for the first time.

My older two children had the opportunity to travel with their father to see the last eclipse, and truth be told, I had wondered if I still harbored a tinge of jealousy.

It was a silly mind-chatter moment brought to me by the anxiety inducing excitement of waiting until the last minute to rush around and prepare the bag of snacks, the bag of camera and lens, did we have enough water bottles… Who’s got the blanket?

But as we approached our spot,
chosen blindly,
eyes turned toward the sky,
the sounds changed,
the air stilled,
the energy shifted

We stopped, we sat, and watched

Under the surface, I shifted.

Back to those layers… Jealousy is a simple admission that someone else is experiencing something you want to experience. However, it becomes a block when you can’t find it in yourself to be happy for the other person. For this reason, I know I did not harbor any jealousy over my children being able to experience such an event before me. I could not have manifested my own opportunity to have such an experience if I did.

On a deeper level, I was letting go of the outcome, and setting intentions with the new moon in Aries.

The new moon is a blank slate. A fresh drawing board.
A chance to ensure your actions are in alignment with your values.

I had recently fallen back out of my rhythm.

I’ve now learned that this is just something I do. Something I was always meant to do. It is simply a part of the creative process.

Without a thriving creative career, I always struggled to embrace my value as a creative being – growing up with the commonly thrown around “starving artist” concept kept that struggle growing into a formidable foe.

I discovered the truth of the source of creativity within all beings about 8 months ago and had dropped all pharmaceuticals prescribed for the depression and anxiety I’d been diagnosed with for years. Ever since that illuminating moment I’ve been playing a game of hide and seek with myself.

Now, when I fall out of rhythm, I know that it’s just a time signature change…
The song is switching up the melody to deliver a new message, a new feeling

Musical lingo aside, I now know how to feel into the underlying messages in a way I didn’t know I possessed. I didn’t know all beings possessed this ability.
The ability to take back control of your own mind.
The ability to heal ourselves.

At my core level, I was preparing to clear out a wound so deep, that on the surface I didn’t even know it was there. It took another week for it to emerge.

One moment, everything is good and the next you’re experiencing a suspicion you thought was only a suspicion years and years ago but now is an experience in your recorded memory banks.

You’re three years old again and terrified.

Can’t breathe or speak.

You try to scream but no sound comes out.

“You’re in between worlds,” said the woman at the metaphysical shop. It was later on the same day this root trauma came to light.
I was feeling a little washed up from a shipwreck, but also so good. So appreciative of the goodness in life, so grateful for this understanding, so blessed to finally see clearly: I have good people around me.

The only thing that ever held me back was my own self doubt and indecision.

Tale old as time

We are limitless if we believe it.
When we truly believe in ourselves,
the real magic begins to happen.

XO-Liv

Directions:

-Start by turning your T-shirt inside out.
-Cut the sleeves off, including the shoulder seam.
-Chalk line a straight line just below the neck seam and cut it off.
-Removing the shirt’s bottom hem is not a necessity, but it added a little length which was useful for what I had planned to do.
-Draw straight lines from the top corners to the bottom corners and cut off the sides. Now it looks more like a skirt.
-Pin the side from the top to about half way down. (No need to pin and stitch all the way to the  bottom.) Measure up from the bottom 10-12 inches; this part will be cut into strips, so I marked the skirt with tape so I’d know when to finish off the side seams. *Note: You can refer to this image if you need help understanding how to do the blanket stitch.
-In order to keep the strips in this final part clean I suggest using a rotary cutter. To make them even I used some Scotch tape as the measurement for the strips.
-Turn your upcycled t-shirt skirt right side out and try it on! Now you can make it your own with some funky buttons, or thread some beads onto your grass strands, or rollover the top and feed through a braided drawstring made from other t-shirt scraps. The possibilities are endless!

I’ll post the finished photos of the upcycled skirts we’ve been making for the Beans & Olives shop soon as my Bean returns with her pile of re-vamped tees. Until then, you might as well take a look at the Beans & Olives (edit: Renewed Remnants) blog to see some of the other finished projects or drop by our FB page for even more projects and sneak peeks.

Apple pies baked inside of an apple.

This ingenious idea I originally saw here @More Design Please, and the recipe was linked over to here @Testado, Provado, & Aprovado!, who was inspired by this food blogger @Paper Plates and China.

I’ve actually made this twice now, so I’ll post the photos from each batch.

And here are the photos from last night’s apple pie making expedition…

I much preferred to using the largest granny smith apples I could find to the smaller apples I used previously. As you can see, the bowl ends up so much deeper than it does when other apples are used. For the 6 green apples I made into pies I also added a red apple to the pie filling mix and, surprisingly, ALL of the filling fit in the apples. For the first batch of pies I didn’t add extra filling but still had tons of left-over filling to make spiced apples with.

My little helper wanted to get silly with the crusts this time, she was having fun with our new cookie cutters. :) Next time I plan to weave lattice top crusts instead. Also, when using so much juicy filling, more flour needs to be added to thicken the filling. I added more to account for the extra apple, but it just wasn’t enough. Thinking about it now, using a bit of the corn starch would have helped fix that.

Note: Using cold water, instead of an egg, in the crust also works out when you’re in a pinch.