Spring Ramble

Ooo I've been busy! Which is nice! I like to do things! :) As far as work-play goes, I made an Etsy shop for Eye's Gallery called Eye's Vintage. I took photos of cool vintage jewelry and modeled some too, for example this African pendant:

Love it! I just came back home from hooping and drumming with Daniel in a nearby park. Spring and summer are here in one warm bright shiny explosion! The other day I celebrated and purchased two used books: Ariel - Poems by Sylvia Plath and Tulips & Chimneys by e.e. cummings. YEAHH!! This is part 5 of cummings' "La Guerre":

O sweet spontaneous

earth how often have

the

doting

 

            fingers of

prurient philosophers pinched

and

poked

 

thee

, has the naughty thumb

of science prodded

thy

 

      beauty     .how

often have religions taken

thee upon their scraggy knees

squeezing and

 

buffeting thee that thou mightest conceive

gods

       (but

true

 

to the incomparable

couch of death thy

rhythmic

lover

 

        thou answerest

 

them only with

 

                         spring)

I met with Wendy Laudiak who's a yoga teacher and gourmet vegan chef. She's having a yoga and self-exploration adventure in Costa Rica in June, I made a yellow and to-the-point poster for her :)

Speaking of yellow, I've decided to always have flowers at home simply because they are so wonderful. There's a florist around the corner and their chrysanthemum bouquet is 4 dollars and you get free greenery with it.

That's Green Tara in the background, who personifies compassion.

I contemplated this for a while and concluded that flowers are one of the wisest investments one can make. Who is not brought happiness by seeing flowers? ??? ?? ?

Sylvia Plath, I guess. Her poem 'Tulips' is so touching and her word combinations are so crazy, you should read it..

I've been obsessed with decorating for a couple of weeks now. I love everything that's going on in the home decor pics above. A part of my obsession has to do with my new side-career as a painter. Yes, I was hired by a painter with life-time's experience to assist in the painting of Philly zillionaire's walls. When I started I had never even held a wall-painting brush and never paid attention to quality of painted walls but now after four days of painting, I can't stand the horrendous paint job at my apartment, or pretty much anywhere I go :P Yes I now inspect the walls wherever I go. !!?

Besides decorating, I've recently totally fallen in love with vintage stuff. Not just jewelry and clothing but some seemingly unnecessary things too. Like old wooden boxes, books, home decorations, frames, magazines... Check out this Life magazine from September 1968 that I picked up from my next-door thrift store's free box:

Did I introduce you to this lady? She sits on the window sill of our art/mess room and looks pretty with her Tulasi and Rudraksha meditation beads and (again) vintage blouse.

On her left side is my mermaid lamp :) And bunch of wallpaper scraps. I went to a wallpaper store to rummage through the scraps for art projects and Paul, the owner, gave me them for free so I can make collages and put them for sale in the store. How awesome is that!

Happy marching through March! Who knows how your life will change because of what you do today or tomorrow! Or the next minute! Words of wizdum from Bhakti the Easter Egg!

OMG Life Changes OMG I'll Live in a House

From the beginning of September I'll be living in Philadelphia at my friend Lex's house. (You might remember Lex from the Acrobatic Yoga post). This means I'll have a real bed to sleep in, a fridge, and a bathroom - after four straight years on the road, living in a van, this is hugely luxurious! :P Philip will keep traveling with an old friend of ours who's a monk and a scientist. He'll be in good hands. I just need a break. So if you're in Philly or nearby, be my friend! Let's hoop! Or hang out! Or both! And have kirtan! And fingerpaint! Play house! Or whatever! And if you're not in the area, come visit!

I'm going to have a wardrobe!! For years I've longed for a closet to hang my skirts and dresses. So I can look at them and go through them and figure out what to wear each day. Hee hee!

None of this means that I don't love to travel and do what I've been doing the whole time on the road -- I absolutely do -- but at the same time there hasn't been the balance I need in the long term. So I'm going for the balance now. And I know some of you might be concerned about me and Philip -- we're as close as we ever were, just taking a different direction.

I am also thus informing my mom Heini who is hiking in Lapland, my sister Minna who's rainbowing it out at the Gathering in the mountains of Italy, and my sister Kaisu who's in Finnish forest milking cows and baking fresh rye breads - I'm not coming home next fall, it's your turn to visit the US since now for once I'll have a room to accommodate you in. Just so you know ;)

Is this how my room will look like?

A Seeker's Journey :: From Lame Suiciety to Spiritual Inebriety

I promised some pics from Kaisu's gallery opening - they're coming! Meanwhile let me share with you Philip's life story :) He wrote it for another thing but I thought many of you friends might be interested to read it too. So from here on it's Philip speaking (or Prahlada, which is his spiritual name).
.

.
Ever since I was a kid (like as long as I can remember) I knew I wasn't part of this world nor liked it very much. I always knew there was more to life than what I saw on TV, the newspaper, and when I walked down the street or heard in school. I used to not be able to sleep due to thinking about eternity, time, other dimensions, life on other planets, God or if there was such a thing, consciousness, the power of the mind, blah blah etc.
.
I started avidly reading books about these subjects. At that point in my life I was really interested in paganism, witchcraft, natural living, Native American traditions and mysticism. I realized that politics are all lies and corruption and the people that really run the government are not the people on the television but the people that own the major companies of the world.

This lead me to start questioning things like my own thoughts - were they actually my own thoughts? Or thoughts that were acquired by me from the media, society, "friends", family, etc. Naturally the next question was what are my own thoughts, and who am "I"? I had no interest in college, and I didn't know what to do.
.
So I went on Grateful Dead tour. This is when Jerry Garcia was still here and it was still awesome. After traveling around the USA for some years with the Grateful Dead and going to Rainbow Gatherings, and spending my spare time with Earth First and other cool organizations, I realized the purpose of my life was to spread spiritual music, knowledge and food. Then came the question what the best "spiritual" was. After Jerry died and dead tour stopped, I spent weeks and months in libraries just studying religion, science, ancient cultures, mysticism, yoga, etc. After all my traveling around the country, experimenting with drugs, questioning priests on real spirituality, living at Buddhist temples and intentional communes, and reading so many books, I was frustrated because I felt that I had still not found the absolute truth yet.
.

..
At this point I met someone who just returned from South America and told me of a place in the rainforest I could go where there was a native tribe of people with a powerful mystic tradition still living in the Amazon. I decided to give up on so-called civilization (or as I called it, suiciety) and go there and find this tribe and live with them for the rest of my life. But I was a little scared so I figured I will go to Hawaii first to practice and see if I could really do it. So I lived there in the forest on the beach, just eating fruits and nuts that were growing wild, and meditated all day.
.
Just so happens down the beach there was another guy doing the same thing. Sometimes we would meet and share our realizations, and maybe a coconut that we had just climbed up a tree and picked fresh. He told me about Krishna and it was fascinating. So I picked his brain and learned as much as I could retain. I found that everything he said was everything I always thought to be true but just lacked the words to express it. He said it was all coming from these ancient books.
.

Ever since then (15 years ago) I have been traveling the country trying to share this wisdom with others.


.