Mail's here.

This lovely postcard is from Carol. The large rectangle is textured wallpaper painted to look like copper and she added and beaded an embellishment made with a glue gun. She wrote about it on her blog (here) and also wrote up a tutorial using a glue gun (here). Carol's workmanship is wonderful and the beading is stunning. Thank you Carol!


Living consciously...

The opening sentence in today's reading: Your essence is your core, your body, and over it, as you grow, you learn to drape personas, the clothing that hides your true self. For practice, Hendricks suggests getting to know your various personas.

In bouncing back and forth between A Year of Living Consciously and A New Earth, I find that I'm more skeptical of Hendricks' approach and more in sync with Tolle's. So many terms... the persona, the mask we wear, the psychological clothing, the function, the role...yikes! Tolle writes: What really matters is not what function you fulfill in this world, but whether you identify with your function to such an extent that it takes you over and becomes a role that you play. Tolle also writes of temporary roles where you may act differently given a particular social situation. So, I could begin listing roles, whether it's mother or patient or customer or artist or, even, an adult, or I can do as Tolle suggests: Give up defining yourself - to yourself or to others. That doesn't mean giving up functions or actions - they can be performed for their own sake rather than as a means to protect, enhance, or conform to your role identity.