Meri's Musings

I am  a closet romantic  morning chai drinker bibliophile connoisseur of the ordinary sacred

Sometimes we get so wrapped up in our perpetual way of seeing things, we lose the ability to see potential, to open to surprise, to find a new way of interpreting what is. We become so comfortable with the stories we tell ourselves about our lives and the way things work and why things happen and who's to blame that we forget they're just stories. If the old ones don't fit, we can create new stories. "A View from Above" © 2009 Meri Arnett-Kremian What things in your life do you need to see through new eyes? Now's the time. Happy New Year.

In case you hadn't gathered, I'm drawn in so many ways to mixed media art. "Memories in Bits and Pieces" - copyright 2007 Meri Arnett-Kremian. I love studying mixed media pieces to see what new tricks I can learn. I relish collecting pieces that speak to my heart. I'm drawn to putting little bits and pieces together in ways that no one ever dreamed they'd be combined, until the whole is greater than the sum of its parts and the bits and pieces are unified. Collage is a life metaphor, in my worldview. Myriad scraps can be combined in limitless ways, each one unique. A paper fragment a splash of paint just a touch of metal leaf, something for texture, all integrate to form a new unity. In collage, you play with possibilities until you find the exact arrangement that speaks to your soul. "Dreaming of Immortality" copyright 2007 Meri Arnett-Kremian. In life, you take the experiences you're dealt and create meaning, overlooking the jagged edges and ...

Delwyn of "A Hazy Moon" and I had a conversation this past weekend about details and how hard it is to establish a consistent balance of happiness when you haven't fallen in love with the little stuff (especially if you make a career out of dissatisfaction with the little stuff). When you get right down to it, life amounts to a whole lot of details added together. Individual moments, strung on the threads of our lives, like pearls. We experience delight and dismay moment by moment, reacting to what's here and now, being present to what's occurring unless we're all wadded up in what happened in the past or what we fear might befall us in the future. Love hinges on a whole lot of details, too: seeing some and celebrating them; ignoring others. To maintain equanimity in life, despite all the ups and downs, requires a deep knowing that all things pass, regardless of how desperately we want to hang on, no matter how intense our fear that things will never chang...

Sometimes  when we're smack dab in the middle of life, caught up  in the busyness  of living, we lose sight of  the significance of what we're doing  and how it affects the multi-hued tapestry  of our lives. "Reflections" - photograph copyright 2009 Meri Arnett-Kremian Only upon thoughtful reflection does the overall pattern become clear, the disparate pieces come together. Sometimes story lines are parallel, sometimes things intersect in surprising ways, all colorful, all part of the whole, the   Bayeux tapestry of our lives.