Artist Date and Morning Pages

Flower painted in Painter using a Sumi-e blossom brush

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Yesterday I took my artist date for this week. For some reason I'd not really been looking forward to them in general - I think I'd got into a rut - stopped being inventive enough and I was fooling myself that just because I spend so much time alone I didn't actually need a date with myself to look forward to - it was reading that phrase in Finding Water that clued me in to where I was going wrong.

So before going to sleep on Tuesday night I decided to take my date the next afternoon and see what the local shops looked like with fresh eyes... so I borrowed Jim's camera which is compact and went out to see. This was also partly inspired by having wished I'd got a picture of the elephant to show you from Tuesday's list - so here it is:


This pub is covered in rather strange butterflies, presumably inspired by its name:


In the toy shop children are being tempted with this enticing promise - to fly!


And one of the charity shops has this unhappy animal in its window:


Look closely at its label and you will see the poor thing is only a standard tiger:


One of the outcomes of taking my inner artist child to the shops though is that she gets a bit keen on buying toys... in another of the charity shops I bought all these for a total of £3.30. The volunteer at the counter said she had only just put most of them out:

The four bugs are a bee, butterfly, wasp and ladybird; plus there is a little cow and a gosling.

So my inner artist child came back very happy!

This morning I woke up from a strange dream about morning pages. A man who is a friend of a friend, not someone I know well, was in the dream and he was complaining vociferously about having to write morning pages - in fact he was being very eloquent on the matter so I suggested that instead of mouthing off about them he wrote it all down in them... but instead he turned into two children - his inner shaman (he is an apprentice shaman) and his inner child - and we collected up all the soft toys in the dream to make a totem pole!
In my dream it was possible to get them to all sit on top of each other vertically but of course here I just got them to lie down in a line...

Five (more!) lovely things:

1. I looked in Cotswold Life magazine and fell in love with a house... worth three times what we could currently afford but the stuff that dreams are made of!
   
2. I put on a new CD and danced to a couple of tracks for the first time in ages.
   
3. I had a lovely bath with my favourite rose scented body wash... mmm...
4. I heard from a friend who had been away for 3 months - it was great to know she'd returned and was in one piece - it was also a surprise as I thought she wouldn't be back until Saturday.
5. My valentine roses are still going strong and looking gorgeous.

Hope your week has been going well!