My Next Online Art and Creativity Class Goes LIVE Soon!

I am pleased to gently remind you that my next online class, once again in collaboration with the Jeanne Oliver Creative Network is still open for registration, and will go live on August 19!

If you are on my mailing list, you’ve already received an email announcement. If you aren’t on my mailing list, just shoot me a quick email with your email address, and I will consider that as my permission to add you. I will be working hard in the months ahead to bring my email list the very best in soul-nourishing spiritual and creative encouragement - beyond even what you’ll find here on the blog. So thank you for signing up.

Here is a description of this upcoming class, titled “Middle Makers - A Blueprint For Late Bloomers”

"The Middle" is less an age-range, and more a state of being.  The "middle" can feel like simply being scattered;  you experience the pull, in all different directions, of this relatively new digital lifestyle.  The middle can manifest as an unsettled feeling, a vague sense of dissatisfaction.  There is often a degree of emotional pain, such as depression or anxiety.  The result of these stresses common to midlife can be a whopping case of creative inertia.

The act of making physical things in the physical world is a powerful tool in your toolbox, for the care and maintenance of your midlife soul.  After all, when your soul is well tended, you are better able to tend souls well.  This world desperately needs women (and men!) in the middle, showing up in their full creative form, wielding their energy, sharing their wisdom, and revealing who they are and how they have been gifted.

We need you, as you, and with a flourishing soul!

Whatever your age, if you've encountered a little bit of "stuck-ness" in your middle, this course is for you.  Through a series of spacious story-telling and doable art-making, Middle Makers will unfold a blueprint for blooming.  This class is for the women who, for whatever the reason, may have put their creative lives on hold.

Until now.

Sheila Atchley is one who has known many of the deep challenges related to midlife.  After a 20 year career in church ministry, home making, and education, she picked up a paintbrush for the very first time as a means of processing transition.  The results have been breathtaking, in terms of the life and health that sprang up in her own soul.  Her art is now found in every state in the United States, and most of the countries of the world!  Teaching art has also carried her far and wide - as far away as Italy, and as wide as the coasts of the US.

She has had to overcome overwhelming inertia to be sharing her stories, and more than that, imparting a sense of luminous possibility to the other artists and creatives she encounters.  Sheila is a firm believer in the fact that midlife women, after going through a seemingly isolated season of transition, can emerge as new, more creative than ever "Middle Makers"...

...and then we all somehow find one another.

So whether you are a stark beginner or a seasoned maker, this course, with its encouraging and informative writing, as well as the art techniques taught in it, can be a powerful blueprint for your blossoming as a creative "difference maker" in midlife.

One last time, here is the link:

https://jeanneoliver.com/middle-makers-with-sheila-atchley-registration-open/

I cannot wait to see YOU in class!

just a silly selfie - hoping to show you how delighted I’d be to connect with you, and coach you a little bit, in YOUR middle…

Hot Days, Hot Girlfriends, and The Middle of the Middle of the Middle

It’s Wednesday. Not only is it Wednesday, it is June 15th. It’s the middle of the week of the middle of the month of the middle month of the year.

Today is the middle of the middle of the middle. It’s the middliest of the middle. In my mind, this is significant.

The “feels like” temperature was over 100 degrees this afternoon. The purple basil, once flush with fresh leaf and blooms I had to pinch back every day, is looking a bit wilted and bedraggled. I hear my grandkids outside my office window, bouncing a basketball in our culdesac as The Preacher cheers their attempts and the sun sets.

In the hot, tired middle, we who are in it need retooling, desperately. After all, we have probably experienced sickness, difficulty, even betrayal, and our wide-eyed innocence is as wilted and weak as purple basil in a hundred degrees. I don’t know about you, but I have gotten older and wiser, and I’m just not mature enough anymore to shrug off cynicism. I have to avoid it. I even have to push back on it, everywhere I see it trying to languish my joy.

The tiniest consolations are as big a miracle to me, now, as walking on water. This world is so rife with strife and war and pestilence, that a glass of iced tea with an Alabamian friend, the snaggle-toothed smiles of grandchildren, or field flowers in the scorching sun, all alike are tender miraculous mercies, not to be taken for granted. Noticing something small - granular, even - something centered in the day I am actually in, pulls me back from the abyss of apathy that so many others in their middle seem to have fallen into.

Today has been as hot as the hinges on the gates to hell, but the birds are still singing out there, delighting in the blue hour. Wildflowers thrive, and wildly so, because they’ve become acclimated to the weather that is, not the managed outcomes of greenhouse conditions.

The Preacher picked up some Chinese takeout for our supper tonight, because I had a magazine article deadline. (I can’t feel upset about this, when I’ve waited all my life to be able to say it!). Of course, I went for my fortune cookie, first. It said:

The one who knows enough is enough, will always have enough.

So, on this middle day of the week, in the middle of the month that is the middle of the year, I stop to say to my soul, “It is enough.” Every ordinary day is crammed with glory, springing up even from roots set in parched, hot earth.

And because “I am not an adventurer by choice but by fate”, tomorrow I leave for Birmingham, Alabama.

Van Gogh said that, and I partly believe it. Because something akin to “fate” crossed the paths of The Preacher and I, with these friends - Mark and Jennifer, pastors of Life of Faith Church in Birmingham. It all began with them being “friends of a friend”, but now I don’t know which friend is the friend of a friend, them, or the couple who introduced us. I reckon we are all each others dear ones, now.

And because I hate travel, and never engage it without a good reason, you could say I’m an adventurer by fate, not choice. Whether it’s Italy, Nashville, France, or Birmingham - it’s all the same to me. I’d rather stay home, but the love of God compels me.

As does the laughter of a good, southern preacher’s wife.

Me, thinking about 18-wheelers on the interstate

I’ll be back, come Monday.

Have a beautiful, middle evening. And then a beautiful weekend, this sweet middle-month.