I’ve been kidding myself for a while, I think. When I say a while I mean a long time. Life has a marvelous way of shaping you, whittling away through experience. It’s like you’re born a lump of fresh clay and experience shapes you into your final form. Life itself is an artist making a piece.
Life has taught me many valuable lessons, some of them very hard to learn. One of them, is that fear is what holds us back, and it can disguise itself, so you don’t even realise you’re afraid. And you can make decision based on fear and not even know it.
The depths of our decision making and thought processes are much deeper than we realise. There is much at work. Past experience, trauma, emotional ties and reactions not settled. Everything that you experience creates a reaction that we must handle, and how we handle it, what we do, determines our options in our inner and outer worlds. Something you experience years past, can still have an affect on how you perceive the world and what choices you make for years to come.
I’ve come to believe that we have more control in this than we’ve been made to think. That the key to a happy life is one full of love, of curiosity and discovery. Each day is a gift. We wake, alive on a beautiful, dynamic world full of shape and movement and colour. Full of emotion and feeling, full of experience. A walk in the woods, foraging for blackberries, the sweet gift of nature there just for us. Simple, natural things. Our role in all this is to tend, and create. We are inherently creative beings. Our interpretation of experiences serves to channel our own feelings and help others channel theirs. Understanding, evolving, expanding together. One beautiful cloud of consciousness expanding, much like the universe.
Things have been derailed by industrialisation. Money. Wealth. These are things that are taken, stolen, exploited and kept locked away from others when this earth is meant to be shared, enjoyed, experienced and cherished. We spend our hours working to survive, too tired to acknowledge the happenings around us, too tired to create, to process. We are mostly all overflowing bottles, fizzed up and ready to burst. It has been a cruel turn, but I do believe people are starting to wake up to this and things are changing for the better. Look for signs and I think you will see it too.
Our time here, and our legacy will never be determined by how good we looked, or how much money we had. We will never be known for having a nice house, or a big car. These things will turn to dust like everything else. Our real legacy lies in what we take with us when our soul moves on, and what we leave for others, our ideas. They will continue to shape the world. The way we treat each other, our care for the world and for those around us.
I think I was kidding myself when I started Birdy & Bright. I had a good mission in mind, but I went about it all wrong. I wanted to connect with people through art. But doing that via an ecommerce website with a print on demand service with designs I had created on Canva. That wasn’t the way. There is a disconnect there that doesn’t work for me. And I’ll be honest with you. On reflection, I realise I did it because I was scared. Scared to put myself out there as an artist. I’ve had a poetry site for over 10 years called Sonderful World. I didn’t talk about me. I created Birdy & Bright and started talking about me a bit, but I still hid behind a brand I’d created. A disguise, I think in case people didn’t like my ideas. And I didn’t even realise I was hiding.
The truth is I set this site up and it was the right path, and I got scared, and started something else. This is just one example of the many times I’ve done this. It’s ok. It’s ok to reflect and change course. Trying, experimenting is what life is about and it’s how we learn. I think perhaps, our most difficult challenge is being able to accept we’ve made a mistake and change course, but we all have the power to do that, at any moment.
Being your truest self is really, what I think we are all aiming towards. Being at peace with every part of you. Being unabashedly whole and open is us in our most happiest place, with no fear on how others perceive you, or your ideas. And to do that you have to have conviction, and that comes from understanding why you made decisions, make mistakes, took choices, and how you have used that to learn and make changes. It’s all a part of who you are and our journey through experience.
So, now it’s time to step into the the light. To put myself out there for real. Hello. Here I am. A woman with a river of ideas that flows through her day and night to the point it is unbearable. Someone who struggles to process because life is so damn demanding, and scrapes moments at midnight to create a small painting or a short poem whilst my family sleeps, because that’s the only time I can find. A soul who is messy, chaotic, makes mistakes but learns, and is desperate to share those learnings. I am blessed to have experienced a lot, good and bad, and I’ve got much to share that could be helpful to others.
I’ve got work to do. I’ve got lots of ideas to get out to you. I’m going to take down the Birdy & Bright website and move anything of authentic value over to here. I don’t need a business. I don’t want one. I want a space where I can share my art and ideas. There is no ‘buy’ button. If you like something send me a message and let’s talk.
Here I am. Standing in the light. And it feels brilliant.
Bernadette Pamplin Art & Poetry 