“To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.”
-William Blake
Category Archives: Sweet Breathing
Swimming in Warm Pools & Oceans
“What if you wake up some day, and you’re 65 or 75, and you never got your memoir or novel written; or you didn’t go swimming in warm pools and oceans all those years because your thighs were jiggly and you had a nice big comfortable tummy; or you were just so strung out on perfectionism and people pleasing that you forgot to have a big juicy creative life, of imagination and radical silliness and staring off into space like when you were a kid? It’s going to break your heart. Don’t let this happen.”
-Anne Lamott
Tree of Life
“And love is smiling through all things.”
-Terrence Malick, The Tree of Life
“It is not so much for its beauty that the forest makes a claim upon men’s hearts, as for that subtle something, that quality of air that emanation from old trees, that so wonderfully changes and renews a weary spirit.”
-Robert Louis Stevenson
“There is always Music amongst the trees in the Garden, but our hearts must be very quiet to hear it.”
-Martin Luther
lowercase art
This article from The Lewicki Agency’s website (http://thelewickiagency.com/uppercase-art-and-lowercase-art/) has the words to help explain the muse and the need for expression that I have passion for. I love bringing those expressions to fruition here on Sweet Breathing’s blog/website. It is purely personal. It may never be read or seen. It’s simply what I have in my be-ing that day as I connect inside and outside with the world – especially nature’s world.
My expressions in photography and words are not Art (although the quotes that I often pair with my offerings from the masters that speak to me about these wonders often are). My photos and words are certainly not “Fine” nor the “Uppercase Art” this article discusses. But they are indeed “lowercase art” in the very way this article describes.
This blog truly is an honest and raw dialogue, in pictures and words, about my world, my life, and my experience – my constant thread to wonder. It IS freeing, creative and often does (as the author writes) “reveal another dimension of my understanding.”
lowercase art.
Yes, it explains it pretty well. Thanks Andrea.
from Andrea Lewicki:
“There’s a difference between Art and what I call ‘lowercase art.’
Both are forms of creative expression.
Both are dialogues about our world, our lives, our experience.
Uppercase Art is fine art. It’s created in awareness of a particular domain of expression.
Uppercase Art has lineage.
The most important distinction of Uppercase Art is that its dialogue includes an external audience. Uppercase Art has a life outside the artist.
Lowercase art is created more in the insulated awareness of an individual’s life. It has a certain wild individuality. Lowercase art is an internal dialogue, within the artist. It’s personal, deeply individual. You invent the rules, the traditions, the standards.
You create and take apart and recreate all within the privacy of your own experience.
Both Uppercase Art and lowercase art are about creating meaning. Both can be inventive and radically new. In both Uppercase Art and lowercase art, you learn to improvise through obstacles, solve the unique problems that arise from your inventions, and reveal another dimension of your understanding.
But lowercase art is primarily for you. It’s your creative playground. What starts in lowercase art sometimes ends in Uppercase Art, but it doesn’t have to. Lowercase art can be messy and incomplete and still make perfect sense to you.
When you create lowercase art, you create your own creative shorthand.
Lowercase art is liberating, an activity of pure freedom, safe from external judgement.
It’s yours. It’s where you can be most freely you. There’s courage and connection here.
Lowercase art is good for your overall wellbeing.”
“Inspiration isn’t delivered on a silver platter to an idle or distracted muse. Inspiration is received by open eyes, open mind, & open heart.”
-Andrea Lewicki
The Gift
“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.”
-Albert Einstein
“You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. What you’ll discover will be wonderful. What you’ll discover is yourself.”
-Alan Alda
August
“The first week of August hangs at the very top of summer, the top of the live-long year, like the highest seat of a Ferris wheel when it pauses in its turning. The weeks that come before are only a climb from balmy spring, and those that follow a drop to the chill of autumn, but the first week of August is motionless, and hot. It is curiously silent, too, with blank white dawns and glaring noons, and sunsets smeared with too much color. Often at night there is lightning, but it quivers all alone.”
Natalie Babbitt, Tuck Everlasting
Butterfly Moments
We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever.
-Carl Sagan
What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.
-Richard Bach
“The butterfly counts not months but moments,
and has time enough.”
-Rabindranath Tagore
Chasing Butterflies by The Red Head Express (listen at link below)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=6HFiBb9eGok
Of Mountains…
Ah Mountains! Providing peace, sustenance, beauty and strength.
They bring a felt sense for me that is very powerful and deeply comforting. I am embraced and absorbed by them. Completely.
The mountains truly and always are a balm for the soul and provide a cleansing for the spirit. I do so love living amongst these sentinels of abiding serenity and power.
“We are now in the mountains and they are in us, kindling enthusiasm, making every nerve quiver, filling every pore and cell of us.”
-John Muir
“Keep close to Nature’s heart…and break clear away, once in awhile, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean.”
-John Muir
“The mountains were his masters. They rimmed in life. They were the cup of reality, beyond growth, beyond struggle and death. They were his absolute unity in the midst of eternal change.”
-Thomas Wolfe
“The greatest gift of life on the mountain is time. Time to think or not think, read or not read, scribble or not scribble — to sleep and cook and walk in the woods, to sit and stare at the shapes of the hills. I produce nothing but words; I consume nothing but food, a little propane, a little firewood. By being utterly useless in the calculations of the culture at large I become useful, at last, to myself.”
-Philip Connors
“The mountains are calling and I must go.”
-John Muir
“Mountains seem to answer an increasing imaginative need in the West. More and more people are discovering a desire for them, and a powerful solace in them. At bottom, mountains, like all wildernesses, challenge our complacent conviction – so easy to lapse into – that the world has been made for humans by humans. Most of us exist for most of the time in worlds which are humanly arranged, themed and controlled. One forgets that there are environments which do not respond to the flick of a switch or the twist of a dial, and which have their own rhythms and orders of existence. Mountains correct this amnesia. By speaking of greater forces than we can possibly invoke, and by confronting us with greater spans of time than we can possibly envisage, mountains refute our excessive trust in the man-made. They pose profound questions about our durability and the importance of our schemes. They induce, I suppose, a modesty in us.”
-Robert Macfarlane
“Mountains are not Stadiums where I satisfy my ambition to achieve, they are the cathedrals where I practice my religion.”
-Anatoli Boukreev
“Emerald slopes became so tall they touched the clouds, and showers painted diamond waterfalls that sluiced down cliff sides.”
-Victoria Kahler
“The mountain has left me feeling renewed, more content and positive than I’ve been for weeks, as if something has been given back after a long absence, as if my eyes have opened once again. For this time at least, I’ve let myself be rooted in the unshakable sanity of the senses, spared my mind the burden of too much thinking, turned myself outward to experience the world and inward to savor the pleasures it has given me.”
-Richard Nelson
Not All Who Wander (or Wonder!) Are Lost
Wandering and wondering. Two compelling ways of spending some good quality time.
Some sweet breathing time. Some simple pleasures time. Some deepening into all of who you are time.
Go out with nothing more to do than to be present with wonder, and wander freely, with open heart and mind. Sustaining and fulfilling this wandering and wondering…
“All that is gold does not glitter, not all those who wander are lost; the old that is strong does not wither, deep roots are not reached by the frost. From the ashes a fire shall be woken, a light from the shadows shall spring; renewed shall be blade that was broken, the crownless again shall be king.”
-J.R.R. Tolkien
The Middle of Nowhere
“I’d rather wake up in the middle of nowhere than anywhere else on earth.”
– Steve McQueen
I sort of live in the middle of no-where… at least many people may think so. And I’ve thought a lot about that.
But it’s always someone’s somewhere isn’t it? These woods with the tall trees are home to fox, elk, ravens, bear, coyote, wolf, and myriad wild 
flowers. Life comes and goes in its natural cycle. The days too are in sweet rhythm… the whole of this living system together is complete and vibrant and I feel that way amongst this radiant Life.
Living in the middle of nowhere to me is much like the concept that the Native Americans and this land were “discovered” by Christopher Columbus. As if they didn’t exist until they were told who they were by the newcomers. 
Yes, nowhere is always somebody’s somewhere. Somewhere special and unique and valued.
This particular No Where is my greatest gift.
Its quiet and wholeness help me find the essence of who I am.
“No matter how chaotic it is, wildflowers will still spring up in the middle of nowhere.”
-Sheryl Crow
“You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some of it with you.”
– Joseph Joubert