One Thing Leads to Another

To Jessica Pierose, life is a ride full of great turns and surprises.  Jessica is an artist with an electric feel of aliveness, she meets life directly in the moment.  We began in her studio in Santa Monica, one foggy fall morning.  I had heard a story indirectly about a skirmish with Rolls-Royce early in her career and wanted to hear the account firsthand.

The tale unfolds;  a friend who collects Rolls Royce’s asked Jessica to draw the car’s grill.  With typical intrepid directness, she marched into the Rolls-Royce dealership in Beverly Hills and asked to do research.  The helpful receptionist pulled a piece and showed it to her.  A little later, as she was close to finishing the drawing, a manager came by and inquired as to what she was doing.  After finding out, he told her to leave, informing Jessica that the logo was trademarked and that copying it would grounds for a lawsuit.  Yet Jessica persisted, asking to be allowed to draw it.  Finally the manager relented, and she was put in contact with the main office.  They asked her to prepare a prototype of her art work for consideration.

Jessica has hutzpah.  Eventually she won the executives at Rolls-Royce Ltd. headquarters over and received full permission to etch the car’s logo, informally known as the ‘Flying Lady,’ the car’s official logo.  Not only was it extraordinary that she was given the right to use the Flying Lady, she was commissioned to make 300 ‘coffrets’ or fancy boxes made of crystal for clients of the luxury car maker.  The boxes were all etched with the logo, formally known as ‘Spirit of Ecstasy.’ This was only the beginning of a lucrative career working with glass.

From etching the crystal boxes for the car, Jessica spent nearly five years with the Rolls-Royce company giving her ‘license’ to do as she pleased with the Spirit of Ecstasy in designing their trophies.  Jessica made their trophy with etched glass for the championship polo matches sponsored by United States Polo Association (USPA), and for the National Circuit Championship Series of the Swan Yacht races.  The Swan Yachts, I was informed, are premium yachts; mansions constructed of the finest wood and gold, that can power at high speed over the water.  To quote Jessica regarding all these commissions, ‘One thing leads to another.’

They do indeed.  One day she received a call from someone indicating that he’d heard that she did ‘out of the ordinary things.’  The client was interested in finding a way to set gold within double sheets of glass in his private jet.  Later in the conversation, he indicated that he was a representative for the ‘richest man in the world.’  Unimpressed, Jessica’s attitude was, ‘Yeah, what are the dimensions that I need to put together some prototypes?’  She negotiated $1200 to do samples to figure out whether or not she could embed gold within two sheets of glass without cracking the gold or the glass, or burning the sizing.

She got off the phone and turned to several friends.  ‘I just got a call from someone saying this ‘Saul Birney’ guy is the richest man in the world, ever heard of him?’  They stared at her, ‘You must mean the Sultan of Brunei, who is the richest man in the world.’  She paused, but only for a few minutes to take it in.  Then she set out to solve the puzzle of embedding gold within double sheets of glass to be placed in the shower of the Sultan’s private jet and for his second jet that he uses as a stable, to cart around his team’s polo players and the polo horses.

She had worked with luxury craft on land and water, now she began her work of bringing art glass to the air, starting with the Sultan’s palace in the sky.  A short time later, a well-known French aircraft company, Dassault Falcon Jet called; ‘I understand you do extraordinary things.’  Things ‘took off’ after that.

Jessica has done glass work for overseas clients, but in the United States, aircraft must use lexan as a substitute.  She has made a specialty of designing etched decorative bulkheads for well-heeled aircraft owners.  Not only is there a demanding quality to the requirements of making etched work for aircraft, because the industry is tightly regulated by the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA), there is a considerable amount of paperwork to be certified.  Jessica credits a female executive, heading up purchasing with a highly regarded aircraft manufacturer, with teaching her how to handle the business of working with aircraft companies.  A really strong woman and good friend, Jessica offered, “she ‘beat into me like a nun’ how to invoice aircraft companies and handle all the certification requirements.”

Jessica acknowledges that her business success has hinged not only on being able to handle this complex web of paperwork, but to balance these demands with the artistic skill of meeting exacting requirements within strict deadlines.  She has been applying her creativity with the aircraft industry for ten years now, and is certified by Gulfstream, Bombadier, Decrane Air, and Dassault Falcon Jet.  At this point she definitely knows her way around.

Waxing more philosophically, Jessica replied that she knows not to make too many plans.  In her career she has seen how doors open and she is given entree to the next avenue of expression.  She works hard and practices faith in knowing that she will continue to work.  For her, she usually senses that something is coming that feels ‘grand.’  She keenly recognizes that when she is bogged down and stressed, its hard to stay clear, and that the sensing of something expansively great does not happen when she is under duress.  So she has been learning to be dedicated, clear and direct with life.

In some ways Jessica’s life seems to have been charmed.  As a child she received positive affirmation from family, friends and teachers.  At family gatherings she was regularly invited to express herself creatively, and was acknowledged for her offerings.  Jessica has been drawing since she was nine and won awards for watercolor painting in school.  She grew up believing that she was creative and as she moved into adult life, she acted upon her interest.  From her experience she has come to know, “If you believe you can, you can.  You have to be persistent in life.”

In her early twenties she was introduced to stained glass when she was commissioned by an established glass artist to draw 100 fish and 100 birds for one dollar each.  When her father died, an inheritance allowed for time and space to explore her creativity without financial pressure, becoming part of a Malibu art community as she learned stained glass, etching, and then crystal carving.

Even as an established artist, she readily admits there are cycles of feast and famine.  Jessica refers to the ‘seasons’ of being a glass artist, acknowledging that even with all the flow in business, there have been times when there was hardship, even while working with a foundation of wealthy clients.

This is Jessica’s real passion, doing custom commissions, ‘with clients really willing to pay for art.’  For her, this is when she is most deeply engaged in the creative process.  When she is doing a commission, “I draw until I feel the piece comes alive.  Then when I carve, I can feel the work, there is spirit in it.”

Like many successful artist businesses, she has struggled between the decision to stay small and keep her work personalized and of high quality, or build a corporation with a solid reputation capable of producing a higher volume of work, but with a vast difference in focus.  So far, she has chosen to remain small, to hire assistance where needed and keep her focus on the art in her business.

Summing it all up, Jessica offered; “I have a lot of faith.  I know I’m a blessed person.  I have gifts and I’m able to live from using them.  I know something will always come around.”  Jessica Pierose lives as artistic testimony to the power of believing in the creative spirit and acting on it, whether through holding faith or solving puzzles embedding gold securely and beautifully in glass.

Months of Magnitude; More Wake Up Events

A line from John Lennon’s song is circling in my brain as waves of overwhelm wash over. Inside I hear “Nobody told me there would be days like these….” I watch pictures of the BP spill devastation—what it has done to maim and kill marine wildlife in its home, the ocean known as the Gulf of Mexico. Life has been spawned from the ocean water of the Earth and it should be considered sacred—it is truly the Mother Water of Life. With destruction levels causing increasing dead zones over larger and larger swathes of Earth’s global girth, the level of shock that is registering across the planet is its own agenda to attend to.

At the 911 event, we had human hatred aimed at one of the most concentrated zones of habitation and economic exchange in the West. In the wake of this chaos, lives were irrevocably changed from the ripple effect of shock waves moving out from Ground Zero in New York.

The British Petroleum Gulf Debacle is another marker of magnitude on the scale of human invoked devastation through carelessness. On April 20, 2010, corruption and greed converged to set up a system failure of unprecedented proportions, and tidal waves of oil began to plume out from deep within the Earth, despoiling the ocean and engulfing systems in ‘crude’ and toxic oil. While the eleven lives lost in the human realm compared to 911 is smaller in scale, this mistake is one of the most costly oversights recorded in modern history. This is a point of reaching a new Ground Zero, for this is an Earth Environmental Zero Point. Do we really need any bigger wake up calls as a human species than this?

The news is doing its best to tabulate the economic cost of mediating the mess, but it is the environmental cost of remediation that needs to be addressed most significantly at the present moment. We need these questions to move to the forefront of public exchange; “How much poison will we allow in our lives and the planet that is our home? How much more barrage of chemical toxicity can we withstand?” “Are we really going to stand by and watch the decimation of the ocean habitat for countless species of life on this planet due to the corporate drive to profit without responsibility? The Gulf already has one dead zone, now there are two. Why don’t we see this as an uncaring act of terrorism to blindly wipe out ecosystems, lives of many species and livelihoods?

The intelligent operating system that maintains a bandwidth to sustain life is disappearing in our lifetime. As well, our human immune systems are crumbling as evidenced by increasing heart disease and cancer rates that have become epidemic. Around the world we have systems collapse, with species die off from environmental and climate changes that are a result of the rampant and ruthless initiatives to exploit the Earth for whatever short term economic gain can be achieved without thought for any circle of life reciprocity and care.

In America, we are in deep fear of terrorism from foreign infidels. The root meaning of this word derives from terre, a word denoting earth. It is time to re-define ‘terrorism’ to be concerned with any life endangerment to the foundation of life—the Earth, including the other creatures that have inhabited this planet long before we stood upright as a species and began to wield new tools of power. We need to mobilize our collective focus on identifying actions that are destructive to life on the planet and putting our creative vision and passion to changing the direction of these sabotaging forces wherever they hail from.

We are moving toward a ground zero shift through this all. The status quo seeks to maintain its privilege at the expense of other forms of life—human and other members of creation that inhabit this beautiful blue-green globe. Amidst all that is opportunistically seeking to destroy anything in its path for greed and power, we have virtue in action where mercy meets misery. There are networks of activity that are acting like the immune system at its best, mobilizing in favor of life and engaging in an expression of compassion in action. These networks of light may not be holding sway in the news, but they are part of the quantum momentum that is expressing and building its own new paradigm. Those that are joining to act in favor of life, whether as an ‘everyday champion’ as some are being called, or quietly minding the networks of prayer and meditation like tiny diamond dew drops sparkling around the planet, all these actions express the virtues of soul nature, and are participating in the wave of light that is increasing to change the way of life in the direction of expanded evolution, interspecies cooperation and bringing peace to our planet.

While the tension of the opposites is reaching untold levels of pressure, new pathways are emerging even as life as we know it is continuing to dissolve before our eyes. It is time to forge in new directions and to awaken to the intelligent systems of design already inherent in our orb of life on this planet. It is time for the human species to recognize we are not alone, and we are not meant to be so near-sighted about our species or a very small number of those privileged with money and status to think any group can survive without preserving the very foundation of life support systems. It is time to remember these words in our democracy, “We the people…” It is time for those in positions of power to fulfill their oaths of responsibility to act in favor of life in a broader context than the very narrow interests that too many are enmeshed with. It is time to remember as well, ‘we’ as a collective are the planet, each and everyone of us is part of the grid that is meant to support and sustain life, not just take from it. Each one of us has a destiny to fulfill that comes from the soul. As humans, if we are made in the likeness of God, then we need to stand more upright in fulfilling our responsibility, and showing the true strength, vision and courage that we are capable of.

At its core, the Gulf crisis is about systems that have lost their focus on any substance and are operating from interests so narrow as to lack the ability to sustain life. It is time to move our attention to acting in favor of life through care and compassion. Through involvement in demonstrating our true nature, we will tap into untold forms of spiritual synergy that can transform any crisis into an opportunity for lasting change. The enduring power of creation to renew itself already exists, and it is time for us to learn to call upon these qualities in our lives and work with this deep sustaining power on the planet.

In the coming weeks I will highlight where there is ‘caring for a change’ in action, where people of the planet are fostering a sustainable way of living that embraces other species as having rights to live and flourish, not just a privileged few humans who would be willing to destroy anything for their addiction to power.

As Lennon said, “all we are saying, is give peace a chance…” This blogger would say that a fairly substantial number are fervently acting in some manner to give life a chance to be nurtured and flourish so that we really embrace the grace we are meant to know as a divine gift.

Cultivating New Ways to Enrich our Lives and the Earth

We are in a time of transition, a place of flux between outmoded ways of life and another’s fresh emergence. Collectively, we are beginning to adopt green as a paradigm for living, a new design map for how to make daily choices on sustainability, ways of being and behavior that honor the balance of living systems within both natural and human social communities. In sensing the new emergence, it is an opportunity to think more ‘resourcefully’ and to re-envision our lives and make the world anew, to join with others and with nature, and find the common ground of enduring bonds of mutuality.

Changing the paradigm to one of green sustainability underscores one of the most urgent issues of our time for we humans to accept that creative expression is our true nature. It is a major challenge of our times to use our creative faculties for the good of human life, and other forms of life on the planet as well. Our true nature is expressed as an urge to grow and become more fuller and refined versions of ourselves; in much the way a seed fulfills its own blueprint and becomes the inviting sun-infused lushness of fruit, the unforgettable fragrance of a flower or the stately majesty of a towering tree. We are all local sites of ‘creation.’ As sparks of the divine, we are all ‘works in progress’ with purposeful urgency to become true to our pattern integrity and to grow to our own full stature.

Visionary astrologer Robert Wilkinson has a term for hunkering down into what he calls a ‘narrow destiny.’ A narrow destiny might feel safe, but it won’t stop feeling cramped, nor will it ultimately satisfy, as it creates a penchant to live in a compensatory manner, rather than the satisfaction of doing what’s in us, and offering our real value to the world.

In a world undergoing vast metamorphosis at all levels and among all groups, we need to take our understanding of creativity out of its narrow designation as something an artist does and is, and begin to embrace a more fully faceted awareness of our authenticity in daily life. In the unfolding era we are entering, we should be identifying all the aspects of our creative faculties as a human group, and become fully engaged in realizing what is this true nature. As a testimony to the importance of developing this capacity in the current time, Orange County real estate developer of green and recycled centers Shaheen Sadeghi made a comment recently that “Creativity is as important as literacy” in the future that is unfolding.

Two facets of creativity that we need to readily employ include the ability to adapt to changing conditions in a way that is germane as our sensing informs us, and to think outside the box, in order to leave stale ways of seeing the world behind. As with any creative process, the greater the ability to be resilient enough to shift perspective, an aspect of design mind, is an indication of an openness to allows more possibilities to emerge.

While moving into the unknown can bring a degree of uncertainty and edginess, it also offers a fresh juiciness and an ability to claim our true citizenship as activists in authenticity. Like all artists in life, we are being called to engage with passion and purpose, meeting challenges of our times as creative opportunities to show the potency of being authentic in meeting the moment. We have the capacity to renew the world that we inhabit through the greening power of our creative faculties of imagination, ingenuity, curiosity, synthesis, innovation and intelligence. Although the times are precarious, there is also a promise of a new beginning, as we step into finding both the individual and group genius of being our best.

Here in the United States, we had a time during the challenge of World War I to plant Liberty Gardens. During World War II, it was important to plant Victory Gardens. We now have an opportunity to cultivate another form of victorious garden; one of free expression; by planting the seeds of our own individual and collective greatness. The greening power of expressing our pattern integrity has enormous capacity to transform our lives in ways we don’t expect and that can open new vistas of perception.

Like the flowers, it is time to bloom where we are planted, to join in the celebration of a world that we glimpse through participating in a garden form of life and developing more sensitivity and sensibility. A garden is common ground where interdependence among different species, a degree of harmony and beneficial relations may thrive. As flourishing members of the garden way of life, flowers can show us that we should unfurl our authentic nature, showing off the uniqueness and beauty that is ours to share for a while as we travel through form.

A piece from nineteenth century gardener and writer Celia Thaxter, who wrote a book called The Island Garden, expresses her profuse loving awareness of the plants inhabiting the garden. She shares her adoration of poppies:

To stand by the beds at sunrise and see the flowers awake is heavenly delight. As the first long, low rays of sun strike the buds, you know they feel the signal! A light air stirs among them; you lift your eyes, perhaps to look at a rosy cloud or follow the flight of a caroling bird, and when you look back again, lo! the calyx has fallen from the largest bud and lies on the ground, two half transparent, light green shells, leaving the flower petals wrinkled in a thousand folds, just released from their close pressure. A moment more and they are unclosing before your eyes. They flutter out on the gentle breeze like silken banners to the sun, and such color! (pgs. 83-4)

The flowering plants have been on the planet for more than 100 million years. They hold an enormous volume of evolutionary understanding that we may access as we engage more fully in realizing they are part of the community of life as much as we are.

Through exercising our capacity for imagination and synthesizing intelligence, while showing interest in developing new ways of perceiving the diverse natural forms of life, we are greening our current awareness and simultaneously seeding a future with more colorful possibilities inherent in widening our perception. As we acknowledge and honor the intelligence and beauty that we enjoy as citizens of Earth, we are cultivating a harvest of understanding to enrich and expand the kinship circle of life on the planet.

Coming Home

The blog begins with some reflection about what it is to come home.  My first book, Coming Home to Calm, has been the path I’ve taken, or it has taken me, to come to a place that I recognize as ‘home.’  As someone with Cancer astrology, I have been true to my crab-like astrological heritage, carrying from a young age, all the most important treasures around with me, because I always wanted them close.  As a child, it wasn’t the blanket, it was a book.  As an adult it has become a heavy carryall bag, filled with the most important prints of articles, magazines and the notebook of the most recent writing journal that I haul around and whatever work is in progress.

To me, ‘home’ has meant a particular connection of association with things I hold dear, but not as much, as I have aged, a particular house filled with domestic objects.  I still love having a sense of physical home, but I had a big house, with a lot of land (relatively) and it became too cumbersome to take care of, much as I loved it and ached from parting from it.

Now the ‘coming home’ is about moving into more authenticity.  I am refining my sense, with greater urgency as I age, to get on with it.  Admittedly, I have spent too much time bogged down in my own emotions.  Yet now I’ve resolved much that used to seriously sidetrack me for aeons of time, and I feel the calling to come home to who I am with a firey ferocity.  This urge to come home is now about living as closely to my true nature as possible, unfettered by distractions, obsessions, addictions and compulsions.  This ‘home’ is indeed cleaner and is becoming far less cluttered.  There’s more room for serenity, curiosity, being in someone else’s shoes, i.e., compassion, and there’s more room to breathe here, as the burden bags of what I’ve carried are surrendered.

While I celebrate that the heaviness of emotional and mental baggage is lessening, the bags of current writing and inspiration treasures are still acting as their own form of fitness workout, as I carry them up and down a hefty flight of stairs with my laptop at least twice a day.  Evidently some weight can be a good thing.

So what does it mean to ‘come home’ to one’s true nature, authenticity, purpose and passion?  This will be a subject that we will pursue in this blog, along with many others.

For now, blessings to one and all!