I just discovered this FREE telesummit that runs through Nov 11 (replays are still up!). It looks amazing and I thought you’d like to know about it!
You should check it out now! http://www.FindYourWingsAndSoar.com
So, I bet you think you know what a Chameleon is, but this is a chameleon like I haven’t seen before. A club where the 22 year old who rents a room in my house is singing tonight with a band named MERK. He is a very good singer and the band is great, for a heavy metal band. It is not my favorite genre, but I am one of those people who supports friends even when it means standing in a line in the rain on a side street in Lancaster. My life a series of BIG artventures!
Leaving Arizona meant that I am really on my home. I am taking the long way through San Antonio, Austin and Dallas, but I took Houston off the list to save a day. I have been told that was a mistake, but I will get there again. Now I have Texas and Nashville to look forward to before I have to go back to a reality which I was not enjoying before I left for this Big Artventure. And, because of my devotion to my family, I never would have gone on a big artventure if my son hadn’t decided to go to school in Los Angeles, CA. It is the same devotion that wouldn’t allow me to put oldest son on an airplane to fly off to the other side of the country all by himself. Being able to spend almost a month with him out there let me know that he really was now an adult and could take care of himself and an apartment. His roommates and friends enjoyed me be around, partly because I had a car and partly because moms provide a security that most of them were without for the first time in their lives.
Now I have ME time. Something I had never taken much of while raising five children. While I am not finished, the time has gone by so fast. I will never forget when my son was three and we had just moved to Colorado Springs. We were having lunch in a park one day when Pierce said, “I want to be healthy and happy, not sick and sad!” Profound words for such a young boy. I am thankful that he is living out those words and working on living his dream of being a shoe designer and professional skateboarder. I will miss finding the skateboard parks at every stop, but will have more time for art exploration. Sante Fe will be my first night couch surfing by myself. I am staying with a single mom with two kids. I can certainly relate and imagine I may get homesick to see my children that stayed at home with their grandmother and stepfather. By not going home sooner, I missed my youngest daughter becoming homecoming queen. She said that she understood and it was OK with her if I didn’t get back, but everybody else gave me hell. I don’t think most people understand what I have been through getting divorced after having five children, having cancer and now in the midst of a second divorce. I have been discovering who I am since my cancer experience began and I am finally giving myself permission to be an artist again. This trip has been symbolic of the freedom I am gaining. And it is forcing all kinds of fears to fall away.
We were finally able to go to Sedona. My friend’s sister said that we had to go through Jerome on the way, so we did. The back country roads in the west are so much more spectacular than in the East, at least from my point of view since I have spent most of my life in the East. It feels different. There is a freedom and a question that continues to arise in my mind. “Who says the earth is overcrowded?” Nobody lives here!
We went up a winding road and our first stop in Jerome was a big old school that had been converted into artist studios. The first studio we visited belonged to Robin Anderson and his wife Marguerite. He was out painting somewhere and she was minding the studio which was 25,000 square feet of paintings, pottery, stained glass done by another artist and it was a great place to explore. We could have stayed in Jerome the entire day! When we were getting ready to leave, my friend offered the women a hug. When the woman hugged her, she asked my friend if she knew anybody named so and so. I don’t remember the name, but my friend knew someone with a name close to it and asked the woman if she was intuitive. She answered “yes” and offered a reading. My friend was very excited and encouraged by the woman’s words. She held a ring of mine and also told me some interesting things. It was different than the palm reader in Santa Monica who didn’t really tell me anything that I didn’t already know, but verified that I was headed in the right direction and encouraged me to be even more creative as if I needed that kind of encouragement. She said things about the important book I had to write (not this one) and people’s names and a vision of my surroundings in the future. It was quite interesting. I will watch for signs, but more likely will know it when I see it, but wouldn’t expect to be able to find it if I looked for it. 
The main area of Jerome had a number of galleries and shops and was nestled on a hillside overlooking a beautifully colorful mountain range. On the day we were there, I could have just sat on the hillside looking at it, preferably painting it, all day. It was a magnificent scene the folks living there probably take for granted. There was more we could have seen, but we had to get to Sedona. We enjoyed yet another beautiful drive.
If Colorado, Utah, the Grand Canyon, the Coastal Highway, Mesa, Apache Junction and Jerome weren’t magnificent enough, Sedona certainly was. Approaching the red rock formations I had a feeling of being protected. They promote areas they call vortexes, these are areas where there is supposed to be spiritual energy that flows through multiple dimensions . When I passed through in the late 70’s, my parents said it was a one block town. Now, it was highly developed and yet still looked natural, as in many areas of Arizona, the homes are designed to blend into the surroundings. We stopped at the visitor’s center to find out where the vortexes were. We didn’t think we had much time before sunset, so we picked the one that was said to be the strongest. There was actually a chapel built there. We stayed there taking pictures for at least an hour. We drained all my camera batteries that day and ended the day taking pictures with my iphone. It didn’t matter, I have gotten some great photos with my iphone. There was an interesting effect that I didn’t remember seeing on any of my photos the rest of the trip. We thought it may have had something to do with the energy there. It may have, but after looking through my pictures again, I did see it on some other photos from Malibu, CA and Boulder, CO and I can attest to the great energy in those areas also. I have to take some time to look at my file names to see if all the photos with that effect were taken on the iphone. Maybe it was an angle of the sun that caused it.
We had a great time seeing figures in the rocks and hanging out at the vortex watching the sunset. I cannot say that I could feel the energy in an obvious way. But, I did not want to leave. I would like to go back again and spend an entire day hiking around each vortex. The sunset was incredible. The art in the area was incredibly unique as well. One gallery owner told us that things were just beginning to pick up again after their perfect storm of road construction keeping Sedona less than easily accessible and the economy with high gas prices keeping people from traveling anywhere. We left shortly after sunset to get back to a Halloween party. This may very well have been my favorite day of the trip!
Hoodoos in Sedona
I spent an enjoyable week in Arizona with a friend who moved there recently for health reasons. The weather was perfect. Not too hot, not too cold. It was the end of October. And it wasn’t too hard for my friend to talk me into staying for Halloween.
I arrived on Tuesday and we spent Wed and Thurs touring local art attractions and on Friday we were going to go to Sedona. Since it would be about a 2 hour drive, I decided to get some granola bars out from behind the passenger seat under some other stuff I collected on my journey. The granola bars were in a clear plastic backpack and when I pulled out the bag it wasn ’t zipped. I noticed a piece of snake skin in the bag and thought, “I don’t remember picking that up anywhere.” I pulled another bag out to see if there were any different types of bars and it was filled with snake skins. I am not the type of person to panic, so while my friend was already sitting in the front passenger seat, I walked around to the other side of the car and opened both doors. She wondered what I was doing and when I didn’t answer right away she asked, “Should I get out of the car?” I replied, “Yes,” not knowing if there might still be a snake in the car. The night before I had left the sunroof open but didn’t think a snake could get out that way.
Of course, I have no idea how or when a snake got into my car to begin with. Could a snake get into my car through an open door? I may have left a door open when I was unloading the car. Other than that, when I was traveling from California I stopped a lot to take pictures. The scenery was beautiful and I stopped quite a lot. I would pull off the side of the road and get out of the car, leaving the door open behind me, just to be sure I wouldn’t accidentally get locked out of the car. I would leave it running, so I wouldn’t think that a snake could sneak into my car behind me or would even try with the car running? I guess that I am just glad that I never saw a snake and somehow never reached back for the bag of bars while I was driving. Can you imagine reaching behind you for a snack bar and ending up with a snake instead? And, if I let my mind race, I could think of all kinds of scenarios that could have resulted in an accident or worse a trip to the hospital for a snake bite. I have no idea what kind of snake was in my car. The skin lined up on the ground measured over 4 feet and I keep remembering a time when I thought I heard something rattling and turned off the radio and the air conditioner to listen for a potential engine problem. By this time, I was traveling alone and even though I have a cell phone, the last thing that I want to happen aside from an accident or snake bite is a break down! So I turned everything off and listened and it stopped. I assumed it was a car near me even though I wasn’t necessarily aware of a car near me at the time. Could it have been a snake rattling in the back?
Well, to be on the safe side, especially since my friend was completely freaking out and NOT going to get back into the car if a snake might be in there, we unloaded everything out of the car. We took everything out of every box and every bag to be sure there wasn’t a snake hiding anywhere. We looked in the trunk, under the hood, under the seats, and under the dashboard. Once we were convinced the snake had moved on to its new home in Mesa, AZ, we packed up the car again and instead of heading to Sedona, since half the day was gone by now, we went to Scottsdale, which was much closer.
When we were in Scottsdale, it seemed to me that I had been there before. I had traveled West to Las Vegas with my parents when I was 16. It had changed a lot in 30 years, no surprise. I hadn’t seen so many galleries all in a row anywhere that I had been yet. And bronze sculptures were something I hadn’t seen yet either. The galleries had not only beautiful work, they had incredibly expensive artwork. There were paintings there priced over $50,000! We went into a gallery where the artist who created the work on the walls was manning the gallery and I asked, “What would you recommend to someone who wanted to be a famous artist?” His reply was, “Kill yourself!” I have been accused of being blonde under my haircolor which covers my gray hair and this was one of those moments. I replied, “Why? You don’t want any competition?” I expect I’ll never run into that artist again outside Scottsdale and if I run into him again and continue to play “dumb” he won’t know the difference.
Other conversations with gallery owners indicated that the economy was definitely hurting business there. While there were many galleries, there were also a lot of empty spaces. Arizona was one of those states with the highest foreclosure rates. Because my friend’s sister was in real estate there, I found out that many people were letting foreclosures happen just as an investment strategy. Why continue to pay the mortgage on a million dollar home which is now worth half a million, when you can now get a two million dollar home for a million dollars?
We had an especially unusual experience on the way home, too. Or, I was continuing to be blonde that day. The moon looked quite unusual in the sky, like a bright orange ball. I have seen a bright orange moon before, usually lower in the sky. But, as we got closer, it seemed to have a white light at the bottom. One thing about Arizona, the Pheonix area that is, it seems that they planned it from nothing in the desert, so this large area has a perfect grid of streets. It makes it very easy to get around without losing your sense of direction. You can follow the same road for miles. That is my explanation for what I am about to reveal. As we got closer and closer to the moon, which you also don’t usually do in a car, it looked more and more unusual. Turned out, it wasn’t the moon at all, but a large balloon floating over some store to promote some special sale.
We obviously had a very long day, snake or no snake and all. It is getting closer to the time I will had to begin home again and I am NOT looking forward to it. Maybe I can get my oldest daughter to come here to go to college. Maybe I can convince my parents that this weather would improve my father’s health. Maybe I’ll move here and drag them all with me. It’s a good time to buy real estate here. It is only six hours from my son in Los Angeles.
I had seen a magazine called Arizona Highways years ago and saw beautiful pictures of Arizona. But, pictures are nothing like being there. It is absolutely beautiful! The terrain is beautiful. The way that the homes blend into the surroundings is beautiful and I believe what my friend says about the energy of the area being different somehow is so very true. Maybe it’s the sunshine, maybe it’s the mountains? I cannot wait to go back. A week was simply not long enough.
The drive from Los Angeles, CA to Mesa, Arizona was one that prompted many stops for photos. That’s when I began to think again of the magazine I had seen years ago. It was a little scary when I stopped at rest stops. They had signs that said, “Poisonous snakes and insects in this area. They had a special area for people to take their dogs. I don’t know what made that certain area safe for dogs and the rest of the area not safe. I made lots of stops along the road and jumped out of my car to take pictures leaving my car running and my door hanging open and never saw any snakes or insects.
I stayed with a friend in Mesa and we went into downtown Mesa, Tempe, Scottsdale, Jerome and Sedona. It was interesting to see how each area was different. Arizona is one of the states with the highest foreclosure rates, so the arts were definitely affected there, but it wasn’t all grim. While there weren’t too many galleries in Mesa, there was a fantastic Arts Center which had well attended classes and events. IN Tempe’s Center for the Arts, they also have a very nice store and a selection of classes available. They weren’t too far away from each other, there is a much larger population in these areas than you realize just driving around.
I heard that Phoenix has a very nice 1st Friday also. I could attend a different 1st Friday in almost every state. There’s a goal!
If you look at a map and you are from an area like I am from, you cannot picture the way that Phoenix, Tempe and Mesa blend together. Even Scottsdale is part of that blending at this point. I am sure there was a time when they were more separated, but today it is one big interconnected area. The sights and shops are endless. Even when you get to the outer edges, like Apache Junction, the views just get better.
And as far as Apache Junction goes, I highly recommend a little place called The Hitching Post. We enjoyed a few evenings there. I danced with a real Apache Indian in Apache Junction. Actually, I stepped on his toes because I don’t know the 2 step. It is something anybody traveling in the West should know! I guess I’ll have to learn for next time. They also made the news because they put a big chicken on their roof without a permit, but they were good sports about it and quite a friendly gang!
I planned on seeing my cousin, but I didn’t know ahead of time how things were going to work out while I was in LA, so we didn’t have it all planned out. I called one day and she said, “Can you come today?” So I did. It was a 5-6 hour drive to San Jose and when I pulled into her driveway, I saw a bobcat. A little bit of a surprise, but I figured the cat was more afraid of me than I was of it. I even thought I may have been seeing things since it was dark and I had just driven a pretty long way. But, they live on the edge of an area that is full of wildlife. I got to see quite a few deer in the next couple days.
I stayed with her 2 nights and it was very nice to connect after not seeing each other for so long. I look forward to spending more time with her in the future.
The day I left was the day that I spent in heaven and I have a picture to prove it!
I drove the Pacific Coastal Highway back to Los Angeles from Santa Cruz. It was absolutely beautiful. This trip was full of breathtaking scenery! I thought that Colorado, Utah and Arizona had so much of it, but I definitely vote the Coastal Highway as my favorite drive of the entire trip! I stopped frequently, like every 100 feet, to take pictures. That might be a slight exaggeration, but not a huge one. There was a thick fog that day. Even at 2:00 in the afternoon. 
I am never up early enough back east to get pictures of fog. The entire day had a covering of fog. There were only a few spots that I was able to see the ocean that day and the only reason I was glad I didn’t know how high above the ocean that I really was is because of how nauseous I got looking down into the Grand Canyon. I never had that experience with heights before. I won’t admit that it could be age.
If I wasn’t driving alone, I would have pulled over at sunset and slept under the stars and drove again in the morning. But, I had to be concerned about safety since everybody else was worried about me. I hated having to miss scenic views driving in the dark. I am looking forward to doing this again!
