Follow Your Bliss

 

Bill Moyers: 

"Do you ever have this sense when you are following your bliss, as I have at moments, of being helped by hidden hands?"

Joseph Campbell: 

"All the time. It’s miraculous. I even have a superstition that has grown on me as the result of invisible hands coming all the time—namely, that if you do follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. When you can see that, you begin to meet people who are in the field of your bliss, and they open the doors to you. I say, follow your bliss and don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be."

Whenever I disappear from creating blog posts for an entire week..trust me, I am following my bliss. I am actually sewing, designing, creating, and doing. 

The energies are powerful, swirling and twirling around me as I seek to be different, to walk a different path than others might choose for themselves, and to try to use colors, and objects, and materials in new ways. Friends and family often do not understand my intent,  or they find me too eccentric, or unusual in both word, and deed.

I loved Joseph Cambell back in the day when he first wrote, and was published, and his books were not yet popular and the concept of following your bliss was yet to become mainstream. But the intent and how it manifests in one's life is just as bliss filled as ever though I often have to travel through narrow passageways and tall and stony caverns to get to where I am meant to be. 

So, this quickly made little art quilt is an example of going against the stream with different and more unusual energies.  This is a tiny and simple example, but it is colors and materials that most of you would not choose to use in quilting. And I am not embarrassed when my lack of sleep and use of bent needles makes my handquilting  lines off kilter or my beading threads show a lot ;) 

It's my path, my bliss..not someone else's and that's the point you see.

Just creating something tiny when all the free time I might have is tiny. I can still make and do..something that is fun for me to make and used materials that are available to me at home!

However, this past week I went fabric shopping for the first time this new year and in both Salem and Portland. I bought 26 yards of burlap, 8 yards of osnaburg, and two pieces of  non-quilting fabrics.

Anyone want to guess what I am doing?  And the clue is...they all go together somehow..and involve change and transition and the following of one's bliss at the end of a new journey.

Now, close your eyes, place your hands near the computer screen above my tiny little golden bronze and ombre variation in this fanciful little piece....and see if you can feel my bliss across the miles! 

Then, just for today....fill your heart with the peace that passes all understanding.... amidst any and all judgment....and follow your own bliss!



Shown above: 
 "Follow Your Bliss" a tiny little 8" x 8" art quilt using various fabrics of for a challenge where we were asked to select favorite colors that most people would not select. I secretly adores all shades of colors from antiquity..think of paintings by the old Masters, the power of the art work in the Sistine Chapel..old bronzes and golds of gigantic old masterpiece frames for art work.  

Follow your own bliss this week and don't be afraid to be different than others and create things you love that may not be just like every one else's!


Michele Bilyeu blogs With Heart and Hands as she shares a quilting journey through her life in Salem, Oregon and Douglas, Alaska and all of her AAQI Quilting. Sharing thousands of links to Free Quilt and Quilt Block Patterns and encouraging others to join in the Liberated Quilting Challenge and make or donate small art quilts to the Alzheimer's Art Quilt Initiative (AAQI) Help us change the world, one little quilt at a time!