Art Journal Peek, Part II

In my last post, I shared the first half of the art journal I created in the beautiful book created for me by Janet Plant in a long-ago swap.  Today, I'll share the rest of its pages.

The journal is filled with positive messages and quotations, many of them from Patti Digh's book Life is a Verb.

I was still stamping "YES" on all the pages through the second half of the book.  It was rather cathartic, I remember, to stamp the word with its energetic exclamation point over and over again!  Almost defiant in the face of what felt like an overwhelming "life NO."  (It was last November, and happily, with the rose-colored glasses I wear when I look at the past, I don't even recall what was weighing down on me at the time.)

Ah, more reflections on that perfectionism that never leads to perfection. 

And more flaps!  This time, the paper lifts to reveal an image from a magazine I enjoyed (along with another quotation and a moo card I taped into place), and I journaled on the back of the flap.

I didn't add any writing to this spread in the journal, but found a number of fresh, green, garden-ish images, along with another moo card taped in and a tiny envelope I received from F.M. in one of our swaps.

I created another flap from a light-weight piece of green fabric, almost like an organza (says this fabric non-expert).

More YESes, more quotations from Patti, more collage pieces from my stash. 

Patti's book gives the reader lots of food for thought, to be sure.

And here we are at the back cover, with images of dance and meditation.

"We are fools whether we dance or not, so we might as well dance," says the Japanese proverb.

And from Natalie Goldberg:  "Our task is to say a holy yes to the real things of our life."  So appropriate for this journal filled with YES.  I feel like it gave me a solid, positive push into this new year, where I am refusing to fritter away my time, focusing instead on the better things, the real things, the lasting things.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

If you are a reader of romance novels, or simply indulge one from time to time as a guilty pleasure, I want to tell you about a newly available book you can download to your Kindle (or the free Kindle app on your iPhone) for only 99 cents (while the sale lasts!).  The book is called Found in You, written under the pen name K. L. Ruse.  The author, Kim Russo, is the parent of a little girl in my daughter's gymnastics class.  As we chatted one day in November, she shared the news that her book would be released in January, the first in the Lost and Found series.  Please consider supporting this emerging author by purchasing Found in You!  [Please note that there is another book available that is also entitled Found in You that is a pretty hard-core erotic read.  If you want, purchase that one too, but make sure you also get the one by author K. L. Ruse!]