Soul friends

I've been between books for a few days now (still recovering from Thomas Merton) and this morning I stood in the kitchen and realized I REALLY REALLY wanted something to read, to feed my soul.

I keep a collection of possibilities at the end of the telephone counter -- just for occasions like this -- and upon looking through it I discovered (or re-discovered) John O'Donohue's Anam Cara. It seemed a perfect match for my mood, so I picked it up and right off the bat found a PERFECT artist quote.

Since it had something to do with the dawn, and the colors over the lagoon were particularly beautiful this morning, I went out and took a few shots of the sunrise and put one of them on ECVA's Image and Spirit blog, pairing it with the O'Donohue quote (you can see the finished results here).

Which meant my brain was full of color when I sat down to meditate. And even though the meditation was interrupted by a text message, I was left with a sense of mission: for some reason, I just had to paint a soul friend (that's what Anam Cara means: soul friend).

So I set my buddha candle down on the dining room table, got out a pad of watercolor paper and some black paint, and drew the first of what I hope will be a whole roundtable of soul friends. It was fun -- she surprised me by looking a lot like my niece. I added some photographic touches -- and voila! I'm looking forward to seeing who shows up next. Stay tuned!