CherylAnnHillsArtist

 I wanted to write this fresh from my trip to Whitefish Falls in Ontario Canada. I booked my cabin early in winter and did some initial planning and research to prepare myself for the week away in Northern Ontario. Little did I know that this trip would result in a feeling of finding my place both in the world at large and within myself. There are other ways to get to Whitefish Falls, my choice was to drive up and along a route that borders Georgian Bay and Lake Huron. Once out of the rat-race that is the cities of Hamilton, the GTA and Toronto weaving through the 6 lane 400 series highways you come upon views that likely you’d only seen previously in paintings. Pushing past the popular area of Muskoka’s you can visibly notice the landscape change as you drive further and further north. When people talk about the Muskoka area and how much they love it, I will often comment “keep driving”. I too used to feel that area was the best it can be. Now I know, keep driving. (of course...

Bet you thought I forgot? I kinda did… here’s what happened: So, about a week ago I took a drive around on a nice Sunday afternoon to see what’s what. On the way back up the expressway hill I heard a pop and then my car got really loud!!! I called the garage the next morning to make sure they had booked enough time for my oil change next week because now I needed some exhaust work. So, for a week I decided not to drive it much to avoid doing any more damage, plus the weird stares from people on the street. Did you know that when you can’t have something or do something that had always been available to you, now suddenly your insane brain decides that thing you can’t have and is exactly what it wants?   I wonder if humans are the only species that think like this.   So, all last week I kept thinking, “gee if I could just go to…oh wait right I can’t”. I caught myself daydreaming about going to a waterfall one evening to do a painting. Oh yeah, right…the car! I had made lis...

Living in Canada I tend to take trees for granted because they are everywhere. Trees are a big part of the landscape and daily life of Canadians. I couldn’t imagine this country without trees. It would be simply a lot of rocks and water. I learned something interesting recently about trees; their roots do not go deep down into the ground like we often think. Actually, the roots are fairly shallow and spread outwards from the base often forming a network with other nearby trees. New research by a scientist also shows that trees communicate with each other through this network of roots. Kinda cool, but not surprising. Humans have for very long thought that they were the only living species that had the ability to communicate intelligently and to react to the world around us. As scientists continue to study our world and its inhabitants we learn just how intelligent many living things are, not just us. Perhaps what sets us apart from other species on this planet is the fact that human’s...

Its somewhat a tradition in spring to go through the stuff you’ve accumulated and make decisions on what to keep and what to sell, giveaway or discard. As I’ve become older there is often less things I need to discard because I’ve taken more care in what I choose to include in my stuff. Curating your own stuff is an interesting journey sometimes. Each thing may or may not have some sort of significance, a particular memory attached to it. Stuff that has no emotion attached to it is easy to discard. Stuff that has happy memories even if the thing is no longer useful might be more difficult to include in your spring yard sale.  But its just stuff. And in the end, none of it will be coming with us. An internal spring cleaning is also important for us to do occasionally. Sometimes we carry around ideas, beliefs, thoughts that once may have been true but now are no longer true nor useful. When we continue to carry around these untrue beliefs they will often bog us down from moving forwa...

Failure. It’s a word we’ve been conditioned to dislike. It makes us uncomfortable. For some it can be the source of sleepless nights and hours of therapy. Yet, failure is the doorway to progress. If we never fail we cannot grow, move forward, improve, and eventually excel. It’s a big topic. And it tends to draw mostly negative connotations but as noted, without failure there are no successes. Ask every single successful person if they’ve ever failed at something. The answer is always YES. Its not the failure that will hold us back, its how we respond to failing. Let’s read that again: Its not the failure that will hold us back, its our response to the failure. That’s the really hard part. Our natural response is to hide the failure. Cover it up. Put it into the back of the closet. If it’s a terrible meal you made, you throw it out. And tell no one! Those of us who are creators are told “only put your best work out into the world, never show your failures”. That’s terrible advice....

 Focus. “Pay attention to what you’re doing” is a common phrase spoken by parents, teachers, and employers alike. Their good intentions bent on ensuring the outcome meets their expectations. But wait! What does it really mean to be focused?? As a kid, no matter how much I would focus on the thought, I still could never make that thing go away. Focus, when presented as simply thought (obsession) and directed on a desire or wish can lead to anxiety. That is a non-desirable outcome. Applied to my own life right now, focus means striping away things that are no longer relevant or important to me. Focus, when practiced in a healthy way is an action not a thought. Removing belongings, habits, routines, and even people that get in the way of and compete with my attention on what is most important to me, right now is the best use of focus. It’s interesting to note that when we are young (under 40) we tend to want to do more. More is everything. More is the epitome of success and inner ha...

I reset my schedule back to a 5am wake up time so I could have the cats fed, my coffee made, my brain awake by a 6am start in the studio. Of course, you all know, because you read yesterdays post, that my first act of the day is to write. And even though this is day two of a commitment made merely 24hrs ago, there was resistance. But where does the resistance come from? Great question! It’s likely different for each of us and likely stems from something in the past; a parent, an employer, a coach….   Some of us have a stronger need to forge out own path and we also tend to have greater resistance to things that we can perceive as difficult, painful, or not worth doing.   But our judgements are based on past experiences which are likely not true in our present, yet we cling to them anyway because we haven’t been able to replace those ideas and emotions with anything better. Yet.  My own personal resistance most often stems from a false belief “what’s the point” and the a...