Category Archives: accomplishments

78 and counting…this morning I woke up singing

Posted on by Jo Ann Brown-Scott

This morning I woke up singing, grateful for a new day, a new chance, a new hope and a bright future. I am going to try to never look back on the past four years and dwell there, because, at my advanced age, I have learned that if you drag too much baggage with you, you will miss the train. I much prefer to travel forward.

I am re-inspired and filled with anticipation after yesterday’s monumental Presidential Inauguration celebration here in the United States of America. We needed that! Our favorite leaders gathered in one place, able to smile and even laugh together while the newest among them is sworn into office was a sight for sore eyes. Democracy has revealed her fragility in this first month of our 2021st year. It is not the first time for that nor will it be the last. We have come through a firestorm of hot-tempered violence resulting in death and destruction at the very end of four agonizing years of holding our breath with a dangerously wrong leader at a vulnerable time in history. But we overcame and we learned from it. We have learned volumes of lessons, and the difference between cabbages and Kings.

There are always silver linings that reveal themselves long after a storm. Perspective teaches us.

This time we found one of those silver linings almost immediately.

We have a new poet laureate, seeming far too young for such wisdom and eloquence, but it is often the young who see things most clearly. She will be forever etched in our hearts and minds and when we seek inspiration and the correct words for any spectacular occasion we will look to Amanda Gorman, Youth Poet Laureate 2017. She asked us to seek the light, in her speech titled THE HILL WE CLIMB.

See it in its entirety on UTube.

To the rest of the world we have seemed like an immature foolish young nation as we endured the past four dangerous years, and we are. America is a mere adolescent in the overall scheme of things, plodding along at democracy; an awkward, stumbling, inexperienced, gullible rooky at this democratic experience. A poor judge of character, desperate for an insane quick fix is exactly what we have been, in our youthful desire to prove our maturity. It has only been 245 years since we declared our independence from Great Britain. Not even a nano-second in all of time. We are so very young but it nearly cost us our democracy. Thank god for the Constitution of the United States of America as our guiding light and some courageous leaders to follow it.

America’s faults are many but some reside in dreaming big, because that is what youngsters do. We are often impatient to get things right and yet at other times we are far too patient when we should act quickly. We often lose focus on the bigger picture, and we are indeed a huge picture to focus upon with 3 time zones and many regional lifestyles from sea to shining sea. We are proud to be multicultural. We have dialects. Our country is vast and diverse. We have a dense, rich history of immigrants and dreamers and we value that. We are still trying to incorporate all of those components and more into one cohesive whole with liberty and justice for all and for the most part we succeed. Sometimes we stumble, but people do look up to us for our earnest hope to be better, do better, and offer more with our vast opportunities and resources and our warm and welcoming nature. Everyone but the worst of the worst wants America to be successful in doing that. We try to be worthy of the world’s admiration. We seek to succeed at things we have been led to believe are undoable or practically impossible but our hope is to be the shining example. Some of us kid ourselves into believing that we have our problems under control when we certainly do not. We are still very much a work in progress, and we are not afraid of hard work and dedication. We want to mature into the dreams we have for ourselves.

How History judges us will be determined in time, but in my time, and your time here in the USA I hope we remain determined to do our best, the very best we can possibly do, to be part of the solution instead of the problem. We have an admirable new president now, eager to make positive change and bring us all together, but the responsibility cannot be placed on just one man…..let us all do our part and keep the dreams alive. There is no time like NOW.

Jo Ann Brown-Scott, author and artist

Art – http://www.artistjoannbrown-scott.com and ETSY at JoAnnBrownScottART

Instagram at The Creative Epiphany

Novel A CANARY FLIES THE CANYON on amazon and kindle

Non-fiction THE CREATIVE EPIPHANY and YOUR MIRACULOUS, TIMELESS CREATIVITY both on amazon and kindle

FaceBook – Jo Ann (Rossiter) Brown-Scott

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The Risk Taker

Posted on by Jo Ann Brown-Scott

 

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I was told recently, in an insulting and accusatory voice, that I am no longer a risk taker…..

The sting of that remark has prompted a great deal of thought.

Is it true? If I have changed, is it due to my advanced age of 77 or have I simply turned into a chicken? I believe that anyone who knows me well – almost anyone, apparently – would find the offensive statement that I am no longer a risk taker to be false. I live a full life. I am a moving target.

There are many  definitions of being a risk taker, depending on who you ask. In my peer group of seventy-something adults the risk taking most of us do is probably way below the level it was even just 10 years ago. We are perhaps a bit slower, a lot wiser now and we prioritize what is important and what is not worth the effort of getting stirred up about. We weigh things. Do I feel like jumping on a plane to Madagascar or am I content with driving down the Big Sur highway with a person I enjoy? Is someone going to accuse me of being a chicken if I choose Big Sur?  Yes. But I am just prioritizing how I want to spend my time. It’s a big ordeal to fly to Madagascar.

Growing up on 8 acres of country in the hills of southern Ohio, I roamed and wandered freely all over that acreage and well beyond, alone and gone for hours and hours at a time. I was fearless and independent even as young as seven years old. I climbed trees much taller than our pitched-roof house, making my mother gasp and my father proud.  I road horses and one particular insane pony who bucked me off repeatedly and might have easily broken my skinny neck as I landed on hard ground. I was quite confident,  although some people who barely knew me might have decided that since I was pale of complexion and blue-eyed, petite, soft-spoken and intelligent that I must be a scaredy-cat, afraid of life.

I made the highly contested decision to go west to college instead of staying close to home because I could not stand the thought of never leaving Ohio. After arriving in Boulder, Colorado I realized I belonged in the west and basically made all my decisions from that day forward in support of that plan. I had places to see and things to do. I wanted to broaden my horizons. For the next several decades circumstances offered me and my new family the chance to live in at least a half-dozen different states and I knew that every move we made was an adventure to be welcomed. I loved to explore and meet new people.

During the time I  was raising my children I ended a chapter or two in my life and began others. It took courage and a high degree of risk taking to begin a new  life again, and then again, and again several more times in new locations and on my own. I did not come away from those experiences unscathed. I have been battered and bruised, learned some valuable lessons and kicked some butt, because when rotten things happen to me I rise above and take action. I have taken on battles with insurance companies, social security, moving companies and various negative people who were not truly my friends. I was, at one particular period of time, so defeated that I took the risk of emotionally exposing myself 100% to a professional person I trusted who gave me enormous help and peace of mind with the realization that the simple, honest things I was expecting out of the relationships in my life were normal and deserved. After learning that lesson, I chose to remain single rather than push for the security of being married.

 I am an open book. I have expressed my deepest thoughts in art and in print, gaining a degree of notoriety with galleries showing my paintings, an appearance on national TV resulting from a letter I wrote, authoring 4 books published on Amazon.com and being quite vocal whenever I get the chance. It requires intestinal fortitude to write down on paper and publish, for the world to see, the gutsy little thoughts in your head. Any person who paints or writes from the soul opens herself to criticism and judgement.

I have traveled rather extensively, halfway around the world in both directions, sometimes alone, and become a better person for it. Traveling opens your eyes and broadens your gratitude. Traveling is not the biggest risk – living a narrow life can be the risk that takes you down.

These days I am most happy doing the same things I did when I was a young girl growing up. I hike alone in the mountains outside Denver, I paint and write, I travel and I meet new people whenever I can. I am not afraid of getting older. I am not afraid of new relationships. In my mind, largely  unchanged after decades of time, I feel like I am 10 years old climbing a high tree. I take great joy in celebrations, giving gifts, surprises, cupcakes, Mexican food…..and meaty conversations.

I laugh a lot and when I can no longer do that with a person in my circle of friends then I know it is time to move on. Any melancholy person, any sad soul is probably not going to be taking many risks. It is a joyful thing to be high on life, and the enormous risk in life is if you enjoy living! because life can be taken away at a moments notice. RISK is the bottom line to everything, down through decades of time. Living fearlessly, with confidence and faith, for all of your years on earth is risky as hell.

NEW NON-FICTION BOOK  Your Miraculous, Timeless Creativity, the care and feeding of your creative gifts, Amazon and Kindle

WEBSITE http://www.artistjoannbrown-scott.com

NOVEL http://www.acanaryfliesthecanyon.com

NON_FICTION The Creative Epiphany, Amazon and Kindle

INSTAGRAM  The Creative Epiphany

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Bone Tired But Happy

Posted on by Jo Ann Brown-Scott

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The above photo is representative of the scramble my mind has been experiencing all day today. Actually it is the paint-splattered floor from my classroom at Denver Art Students League.

Hi. In my absence of the past couple weeks I am sure that issues of vast importance were solved and enormous progress was made with dozens of worldly problems, but in my little domain it was plenty enough that I managed to move to a different residence in the western area outside Denver (at the very base of the bumps that begin the Rocky Mountains) and my book is almost at the printer – thus out of my hands for the first time since it began itself over a year ago. It actually did begin itself, almost without me – I sat down one day with some thoughts that I was intending to call little personal essays. I began writing and one thing led to another – every thought needed expanding upon, every direction I took had to have the back story explained, then pretty soon I was dividing all of it into chapters…no one was more surprised than me. Life sneaks up on us, does it not?

Now I am exhausted and beaten up from the physical task of moving, which I did not sit by and just supervise, and mentally from the great challenge of trying to find the best words to use in a 516 page story about the life of a woman artist. Life came at me from both sides – the mental and the physical, with my deep muscle aches and my bruises and my mental so-tired-I-cannot-even-eat-or-sleep fatigue. What was I thinking? Why didn’t I time this better? Two huge things at once. I must be nuts.

Then there is the new website – the one about the book – which I was all ready to publish today and proudly guide you to. You would not believe the mess, the 3 hour mess, that a super-human Prince of Patience over in India helped me unravel so that 48 hours from now I might have my lovely new website for the book available to see. It was a marathon of communication he and I had on the phone; I have never experienced anything like it. And while it was in progress the company we were dealing with had a system-wide failure (probably my fault) and we had to repeat the same complicated procedure about 4 times. It was also a lesson in acceptance and faith, (just give it up to the universe) because I was hoping beyond hope that I would somehow manage to be helped by a person I could understand and vice versa – and my experience with him was beyond great. Hurrah for Aman in India!! Wish I knew him better.

Perhaps tonight I will sleep more than 4 hours. Perhaps I will not. As soon as the website goes live, or the book is finally published and listed on Amazon.com, you will be the first to know. We are in the final countdown for my novel A CANARY FLIES THE CANYON….

In the meantime, I will be unpacking…