Category Archives: illumination

The Creative Epiphany – Sea Changes

Posted on by Jo Ann Brown-Scott

seachange      hawaii 008

If I had to go back over my life and single out the biggest, most life-changing epiphanies, they would number 10 or less. Of course I’m grateful for the smaller but much appreciated epiphanies and I don’t mean to discount them, but in the overall scheme of things they were not the cause of paradigm shifts. They were not on the grand scale of the ones that rocked my world, added wisdom to my years, and affected a “sea change” type of transformation for me.

The phrase “sea change” is frequently used these days. I like this description, in large part due to its origin. A century or more ago when men went to sea for long stretches of time, their women waited. They had no idea when the ship would come back and no dependable way of finding out. A year? Maybe much longer… They climbed the stairs to the “widow’s walk” at the top of their homes and stood there for hours searching the horizon for incoming vessels. When and if the men returned, they were often deeply changed by the adversities of the journey they had endured; their eyes had a permanent vacant stare, they spoke little of the things they had seen such as starvation and brutality. Their women referred to it as a “sea change”, a profound change brought about by the time spent at sea. I believe that change can be considered a change similar to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

But now the phrase “sea change” is being frequently used again, this time to describe a major life change, a 180 degree reversal of some kind, a  transformation, a paradigm shift. When you have a gigantic epiphany the result is often a permanent “sea change” – for you it has brought about a transformation, a realization, an illuminating discovery or a light in the darkness showing you a clear path. I can only hope that you have experienced this phenomenon, because you will be a better person for it. It doesn’t make you perfect, but it does make you a more authentic human being. What greater change could you ask for than one of the sea variety?

Visit the website at http://www.epiphanysfriends.com

The Creative Epiphany – Through the Mind’s Door

Posted on by Jo Ann Brown-Scott

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Mixed Media Collage titled Mind Migration, by Jo Ann Brown-Scott

In the introduction of my most recent book, titled The Creative Epiphany – Gifted Minds, Grand Realizations,  www.epiphanysfriends.com  I talk extensively about the process of creativity and our  mind’s ability to use or ignore the gifts it was awarded free at birth. It has always seemed to me, since I was young, that the door of our mind is opened wider and wider by one illuminating realization after another as we grow and change. An epiphany is often defined as a door in your mind being opened, a light coming on in the darkness, a discovery, a bit of brand new information being received, a missing piece to a puzzle. It is all of those things and more.

An epiphany can enter through the door of your open mind with a whisper or a shout.  An epiphany can take time to percolate up from the dark depths of your subconscious, then “suddenly” reveal itself and give you the solution to a long forgotten problem. Or it can overtake you in a stunning, life shaking event that arrives with such power it takes your breath away. It can even give you a call to action in times when you are in danger, revealing a way to save yourself or someone else. Epiphany is best friends with intuition; everyone has them. The two hang out together.

Some people, however, ignore  them both. But the information you receive in the moment of epiphany is always, without fail, useful to you. If you choose to ignore it, you might pay the consequences later. If you choose to listen and learn, you can only reap the benefits. You must live in the NOW, remain alert, listen to that inner voice and pay attention in order for epiphany to walk through the door of your mind. If you become epiphany’s friend, she will be your friend for life.

The Creative Epiphany – Moving Back To The Future

Posted on by Jo Ann Brown-Scott

path

Living creatively means always keeping your options open. It was Yogi Berra who said, “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”  See more of his “yogi-isms” at www.yogiberra.com/yogi-isms.html  After realizing he was often being quoted, he also said, “I didn’t really say everything I said.” Well I agree – neither did I.

As many of you have heard me say, I live in a very active 55+ community in Lincoln, California. This is an idyllic place, situated at the western fringe of the Sierras in northern California. We enjoy rolling hills and delicious scenery that feeds our souls and fills us up. San Francisco is just over an hour to the south and west and Tahoe is equal distance to the north and east. We have the best of both worlds and everything in between. Wine country and Yosemite are our neighbors.  The people here are intelligent, delightful, supportive, and for the most part enlightened about life and how it works. Many high-powered careers have settled down here. Wisdom comes with years and we live around a wealth of wisdom and insight. When my husband died two and a half years ago I could not have hoped for a better place to be to lick my wounds and recover.

But now I am planning a move. HUH? What? Why? AND WHERE? But you see I have a history of never choosing the easy, predictable path. Call me crazy, but do call me. I am “all in” this thing called life. 100%. Let’s get goin on the next part.

I am moving back to Denver, not where I was born but where I was born again when I arrived as a young woman to attend the University of Colorado in Boulder. For me, an Ohioan, the west was wide and free and full of promise, so I never looked back and proceeded to settle right in.  My mother, brother and sister eventually joined me. That  was the pivotal decision of my early adulthood. I have never regretted it and I am more at home in the Denver and Boulder area than I have ever been in any of the other five or six states across the country where I have moved for marriage and career.  The Rocky Mtns. are my comfort zone. My art career took hold there and provided me with the second most pivotal decision in my life, to pursue lifelong careers in various fields related to the arts.

So. I have decided to move “off the reservation” as we affectionately call our community consisting of 6,783 homes here in Lincoln. We also refer to ourselves as a campus, because living here does fit all the required criteria of a campus. We have many amenities, many avenues for continued education and pursuit of hobbies, umpteen  social events and sports available, trips to the city and local entertainment right here as well.  We gather, we learn, we socialize and we party. Life is full. Life is precious. Every single day counts.  We value time. Most of us would trade our most valued possessions for more quality time. We take nothing for granted,  because we see it all and we know that time is not to be wasted.

And as with any community we have our lovable eccentrics, our local celebrities, our tragedies, our celebrations, circumstances and stories. Have you ever been cornered by an enthusiastic “Viagra-ed up” 75 year old man who is determined to have you go home with him under the pretense of seeing his backyard waterfall? I will grant you that things move a bit slower here and yet they do still move – the same wild-eyed infatuations that you see in the eyes of testosterone driven sixteen year olds are evident everywhere – just a bit weathered over time. And you know you can out-run them if you want to. Conversely there are amazing specimens of physical fitness who defy the odds and continue to be all that they can be. We offer the full spectrum of human beings – don’t discount us because we are 55+.

Perfect strangers here will strike up a conversation with you in the check-out line at Safeway over any number of different personal subjects and ailments, offering lessons learned and warnings and pointers – how to prevent this and that and what to do for what, when some wierd new “thing” happens to you practically overnight, as things do when you are over 55. Everyone is eager to be helpful.

And then you notice in the check-out lane next to you that some elderly gentleman is handing out dog biscuits to anyone who will take one, announcing proudly and loudly that he has some great dog biscuits, pulling an endless supply out of his bulging pockets, nibbling each one as he extends his handfuls to virtually no takers. You just have to shake your head and realize that this could probably happen anywhere – it perhaps has nothing at all to do with Safeway being located in a 55+ community, does it?

I could go on – but I will just say that I am returning to Denver once again not for a love of my life but for the simple love of life itself. For me. I would like to live off-campus now. I would like to live among all age groups. I would like to not constantly be asked how old I am. I would like to blend in and make age a little bit more irrelevant. Instead of being a teacher of art, I would like to once again be a student of art. I have a lot I want to learn.

Instead of no one showing up at my door on Halloween, next fall I would like a couple dozen trick or treaters, because I usually have great candy to offer – no dog biscuits at my house.

And here are my marbles – I haven’t lost them.

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The Creative Epiphany – Be Careful What You Wish For

Posted on by Jo Ann Brown-Scott

recentfolder 013  Time Weavings, mixed media by Jo Ann Brown-Scott

They – whoever they are – say that our lives are shaped more by the prayers that are not answered than the ones that are. When I say “prayer” I use that term loosely – because I think of the word “prayer” as a visualization, a power of positive thinking, a goal strongly sought after, a long-term dream you have chased. But indeed it is a focused request to yourself, or to your higher power, and/or the universe or your soul for something you greatly desire. Well that is kind of a scary thought. Makes you start going back over all of your unanswered prayers, trying to remember what happened or did not happen after you realized that one particular prayer and probably others were never answered. I would guess that in some cases what came instead was a far better thing, and perhaps in other cases it was just a void. Nothing much seemed to take place. But at the time you had no perspective. You were so far under the mountain that you could not see the view.

But let’s just say that, lucky you, your dream sort of comes true. Maybe it isn’t the total 100% super duperest extra special perfect version of your spectacular technicolor  dream, but it is this —- close —- to the dream you always had. What are you inclined to do with that? Did you believe you deserved the absolute perfect answer to your prayers? Are you that entitled and that lazy in your requests to the universe? You must have the best, the very best, or nothing at all? You don’t return a gorgeous and rare rose because it has one split petal. Or maybe you do. Are you going to snub your nose at this gift and curse the imperfection? Or are you going to feel blessed that it came, even in a less than ideal form, inviting you to expend a bit of elbow grease and effort to mold it into the almost impossible version you wanted? Maybe it’s a test – because life does send us tests – to see how badly you really wanted what said you wanted.

By the time you are in the second half of your life, that life that has blessed you with many gifts and unexpected delights, you really ought to be able to look back and see the larger picture. It should be  obvious that if all of your wild-eyed, crazy-ass, howling at the moon prayers had been answered the results would not have been as blissful as you imagined. You thought you wanted this and then that. You wanted what you wanted and you wanted it now. The clock was ticking – you got impatient. When Where and How were your dreams going to come true? You asked for a person or a thing or a time or a place or a cure or a circumstance or a winning ticket. And you didn’t get it. What happened instead? If you made wise decisions based upon what you knew you could realistically have, rather than what you perceived as all the ways the universe had slighted you, I would be willing to bet the results were spectacular and satisfying. The weavings of time may seem enigmatic, but in time you see the threads are carefully woven for the quality of the entire tapestry.

The Creative Epiphany – What is a creative epiphany?

Posted on by Jo Ann Brown-Scott

80834_coverI was so fascinated with the creative gene and the creative process and the intuitive realizations that sometimes accompany them that I wrote a book. I was not only interested in the personal creative process, I wanted to know what types of enlightenment and inspiration and guidance creative people experience while trying to find their particular paths within their creativity. Creativity often tugs people in multiple directions and they find it difficult at times to know which area to concentrate on, or how to be successful at a selection of things without diluting it all into nothing of special significance. I invited dozens of people of high creativity who had actually experienced what I define as a life-changing  “creative epiphany” to contribute chapters. I interviewed dozens of people at great length, sometimes across states just by phone, who I either knew personally or who had been recommended to me as having particularly fascinating stories to tell.  My theory was that if they could tell me, in their own simple conversational vocabulary, without being preachy and arrogant, about a startling life-changing personal experience where they felt that a light bulb had been turned on in a previously dark corner of their minds that shed its light and inspiration, revealing a solution or a path to be followed or a missing piece to the puzzle of their creativity, then I would ask them to write a chapter for the book.

And it worked. Nineteen writers including myself wrote chapters for my second book titled “The Creative Epiphany – Gifted Minds, Grand Realizations” available on www.Amazon.com and through various other distributors. One story from a gifted southwestern painter, Randy Pijoan, who had a near-death experience followed by a major epiphany during his recovery and was forever changed not only in the way he painted but in realizing he was brought back to do something meaningful, tells how he proceeded to found a non-profit organization called VENTERO OPEN PRESS. Google that and you will see what he accomplished, and read about how it really happened in my book. Or a college graduate of CU in Boulder, Regan Rosburg, who was an extraordinary fine art major but had not the confidence or self-esteem to pursue that avenue, choosing instead to become a stripper in the Denver area. A great stripper! A legendary stripper. But still not an artist of the kind she wanted to be. Through an epiphany  – a sharp and instantaneous one awarded to her one evening – she realized she had to paint and would no longer compromise her gift. Google her and you will see just how far her epiphany has taken her.

The book is not just about artists because I believe that creativity is often manifested in simply an extraordinary life well lived, or in discovering how to creatively twist adversity into a life-long calling that will change other lives. There is a chapter written by a lovely and accomplished gentleman, now deceased, which explains a simpler way to read music. I edited the chapters myself because I did not want to call in an editor who had no personal knowledge of the writers and who might be inclined to edit the living daylights out of them, losing the personal conversational style and unique vocabulary of the people who wrote them. The men and women are from many fields of life all woven together with a common thread of gratitude for their creative gift and their desire and passion to consistently and enthusiastically accept the gift as they go through life. They are a fun and rowdy bunch.

Epiphanies can arrive with a whisper or a shout and all points in between. You see, some epiphanies need time to reveal themselves. They percolate up from the deep recesses of your mind through layers of your consciousness and gradually begin to arrive to the area of your brain where one fine day they are “suddenly” so very apparent. You wonder how you could have been so blind, but that is because you needed time to “know”. Other epiphanies happen like an earthquake – the sharp, loud ones that rattle your brain. They grab you, stop you cold in your tracks and shake you like an 8.5 on the Richter scale – they fill your mind with instant illumination as if a light bulb was just turned on, accompanied by a call to action. You have been struck with a brand new way of seeing things. Your blind spot is gone and you know you have just received a message from somewhere deep within your soul. And your authentic soul voice will never give you the wrong message – it has only your best and truest interests at heart. That’s why you need to keep those paths of communication open to your soul, and that is accomplished by paying attention and living in the NOW. By being aware. Be being open and at times quite vulnerable – but present. You must be present to win, as the saying goes. Life’s prizes go to those who are full participants. Showing up is half the battle.

To quote from the book, “A creative epiphany brings discovery, illuminaton or new understanding to your creative endeavors. It often provides a tidbit of vital information or an intuitive realization, delivered with a high degree of life-changing  power and strength that enables you to more clearly define and utilize your special gifts of creatiivty.”

In my Introduction to the book I talk at length about creativity – defining it as I see it, playfully personifying it, comparing it to other gene-gifts, and talking frankly about its positive characteristics and downsides. Yes it does have those downsides. But if you are a creative person who chooses to acknowledge your creativity – because everyone is born creative in some way – acknowledging that gene and acting upon the positive components of that gift is the part that takes courage and an adventurous, risk-taking kind of mind. It is not always easy to embark on a life-long gamble with creativity, but the rewards are well worth the risks. This book takes the time to ask about the process and inquire about the rewards. A Creative Epiphany will reassure you that in discovering your life’s purpose you will reach fulfillment and understanding; knowing without a doubt what your unique creative contributions must be in your brief lifetime here on earth.

Epiphany.

Read about them.

Recognize them.

Listen…

Have one.