New girls

Earlier this week I mentioned that I sat down last Sunday and spent the day making a bunch of girls; they follow two themes so I’m grouping them as two sets of four.

Here’s the first set:

Clockwise from top left: receiving girl, faithful girl, worry girl, perceptive girl

Prints available in my shop now; I’ll share my other girls next week once I get my act together and get them listed for my shop.

Hope you all had a nice 4th of July; enjoy the upcoming weekend!

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Setting intentions, doing the hard work and letting go

So you may remember about a month ago I had a mini meltdown.  A confidence crisis.  A pity party.

And in melodramatic fashion, I featured a bunch of photos in that post of old, rustic doors to symbolize all the doors I felt closing.

And I almost made a cliched reference about keeping hope that “when one door closes, another opens” but I was feeling too raw at the moment.  Though wanting to keep hope, the sting of disappointment was preventing me from being overly cheerful.

But…the funny thing is that while I thought those doors were shutting on me, many more were in fact opening up in ways that I could never have anticipated.  And no one could have been more surprised than me.

While I initially thought my showing at the Atlanta Gift show was mediocre and that I was not cut out for licensing, I later learned that quite the contrary was true; my work was actually well received and several companies have since shown interest in my artwork.  Huh?  (this is why I wrote that post later that week about not making big decisions under emotional duress!)

And the many leads that ran dry on me previously have circled back into several new wholesale accounts in the past 2 weeks which means more of my work will be out in little shops and boutiques.

And then a TV personality whose shows I even DVR’d (squee!) has asked me to create artwork for her new product line.  Me?!  Really??

Where did this all come from when things seemed so bleak just weeks earlier? I asked myself.  I know intuitively that it’s from sending my intentions out to the universe, working hard and finally letting go.

I’m feeling overwhelmingly grateful (and a little embarrassed at my lack of faith and discouragement previously).  I’ve learned a lot of valuable lessons during this process.  Running your own business and being 100% responsible for your success or failure is hard work and a vulnerable place to be.  And with that comes high highs and low lows.

Setting intentions and offering up gratitude is a daily practice for me, like prayer and meditation is for others.  It requires repetition, discipline and faith.  But it translates into abundance if you believe that your goals are attainable and you work at reaching them.

But equally important is releasing it to the universe.  I’ve found that when I wish and hope for something too strongly and obsess about it, it just won’t happen as if to teach me a lesson in patience and faith.  It’s only when I send out my intentions, work calmly towards it and release it to the universe that it comes to fruition.

And in retrospect, I can see how this all happened.  I set my intentions, worked hard at my goals and then obsessed.  When I got too discouraged and my self-confidence began to weaken, I freaked out.  I thought I’d walk away from all the grand dreams I’d been working towards, lick my wounds and lower my expectations.  But the next day, after calming down, I found an incredible sense of peace and I…just. let. go. 

Whatever’s meant to be is meant to be I told myself.

And once I let go, once I found peace and contentment with where I was (and not where I had wanted to be), the abundance began pouring in.  What a powerful lesson.

Feeling incredibly grateful not only for the abundance but to have learned so many valuable life lessons in a short amount of time. ♥

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