Linnie Aikens Arts and Letters • HeART Haven Studios

Stearns Wharf, Santa Barbara, CA

My daughter and I used to love coming out here to eat breakfast on the wharf at Moby Dick’s.  The original owner, recently passed away, loved Mireya and would carve her these little white whales and place one on her table every Saturday morning with a balloon attached to it.  Today I sit alone, marveling at the beauty, the fresh hope of a new day as I watch the fog burning itself off over the Mesa, where I live.  What a gift to have been able to live here these past 36 years.

There’s something so peaceful about being up at the break of dawn, sitting out by the ocean and watching the sun break through the fog, highlighting different spots in the city, sunbeams like giant spotlights, all serving to remind me to stop and look.  Stop and look at the beauty of each moment, each sight.  As fog burns off, the impressionist landscape and seascape begins to define itself, and color becomes more saturated and distinct.  All of this is done so gradually that the viewer is forced to stop and take notice at each stage, appreciating.  How can one NOT appreciate this?!  Yet we do.  We get busy in our very busy lives, doing our very important tasks, solving very important issues....or so we feel at the time.  But during a Saturday morning respite with a view such as this, one is forced to put our lives in gentle perspective.  It always reminds me to breathe....taking the fresh salt air in as deeply as possible, over and over until I feel the tension of my life ease away like the gentle lapping of the waves against the pilings below my chair where I now sit.  I must learn to live more fluidly, be more conscious, live more in the present.

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Sunrise over Leadbetter Beach from Santa Barbara City College

A new year, another inspiring January sunrise, and with it comes reflection.  Sometimes a picture really does say it all.

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"Lotus Aloe Walk" Pastel on Canson Paper, 25" x 29"

For me, art both heals and demands courage.  It gives voice to that which is felt but unspoken, either out of choice or necessity.  It gives one freedom to stretch beyond one’s own experience or condition.  I am continuing to enjoy “painting” in chalk pastel.  Lately, I gravitate to the Canson Papers in neutral tones; sand, oatmeal, stone, taupes, slates and charcoals.  Living on the coast, so often blanketed in mist, I have a special appreciation for the stages of color revealing itself through the gradual burnoff of the fog.  It feels like such a metaphor for my own life perhaps.

I was in the middle of a Lotusland Series when I went to Cambria.  I am torn to want to rush passionately into painting my impressions of Cambria, from the many sketches and photos I took, but I want to finish this series.  Then again, Lotusland isn’t going anywhere!  I love this garden for it is uniquely beautiful, not in the delicate softness of an English garden, however.  Lotusland extolls the beauty of strength and courage and agelessness, with its millenia-old cycads and broken aqua glass stones lining the pathways, its stiff, prickly aloe that climb one upon the other like a self-multiplying single-celled organism... and yet, from those grow the most glorious of flowers, standing tall and proud in their flame-colored plumage.  Like phoenixes arising from the impossible.

I find affinity with this garden and the aloe in particular.

Cambria, CA

This photo is actually one taken in Cambria.  Again, the Aloe flowers reach into the fog like bright beacons in a grey day.  I love the paradox that the plant, while off-putting with its protective thorns serrating the edge of each “leaf,” within lies the healing juices of the aloe, long used medicinally by natives and our cultures alike.  I love life’s ironies and paradoxes.  They aren’t for the weak of heart, nor for those who only live upon the surface of life.

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Mesa Beach, Santa Barbara, CA

I want to love more, give more and truly see and appreciate each blessing and lesson in life.  I want to live transparently, openly, authentically, not from fear but out of hope and confidence in the woman God is continually creating in me.  I am comfortable acknowledging my mistakes and learning from them, and I will not be afraid to pursue my dreams and callings nor listen to the voice of fear or self-doubt due to age or expectations I perceive others place upon me.  I choose to live from my heart and out of the strength and creativity from which I was created.  I am utterly grateful for this new day...this new year.  May my presence in it only bring love and light to others.

All photos and text used in this blog are copyrighted by Author of this website, unless otherwise indicated, and permission is required to use any image or text.

 
“William Hearst Memorial Beach,” (previously known as San Simeon State Beach), CA

William R. Hearst built his glorious castle upon the hill above the cove established in his memory in 1953, as well as the dock leading out to sea from this cove in 1957.  We had grown up with the “Patty Hearst kidnapping” and all that followed being lived out in our time, so we were all familiar with the name. I had visited the castle when I was in my teens, traveling the hour-long journey from the coast inland up to his hilltop mansion.    There was, and still is, open land or ocean surrounding it for miles in all directions. I remember feeling overwhelmed at the ostentatiousness of luxury, and even more incredulous to discover that the inside of the pool was inlaid with 24 karat gold.  Why?  Were there not enough starving children to feed in our own country, much less around the world?  Even before cable and satellite T.V. and the internet (we still had one of those tube TVs built into a wood console!), we knew that there was a whole world in need out there. 

Today I sit in the cove: “William Hearst Memorial Beach,” and I look up at the blind of towering Eucalyptus trees he had planted there before I was born--trees over 60 years old at least.  These trees, with their elegant pale trunks stretching almost sensuously into the sky....nothing at the castle would ever rival their beauty.

Eucalyptus trees remind me of my mother, BJ.— slender and graceful, masking an indomitable will and strength, yet illusive in spirit as the breeze that blows through their tinkling coarse leaves.  They, like my mother, are a paradox.....and undeniably, art in motion.

She and my father used to love coming to San Simeon State Beach, and today I understand why. 

Hearst was only added to the state park name in 2007.

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San Simeon State Beach, CA

I watched a TED Talk today by Amy Cuddy about the power of body positions and body language.  I need to be more conscious of my own body language.  I can see so many applications to my work situation with parents and administration especially.  "Fake it til I become it" is good advice, but tempered with living from my heart.

In the past, I often closed in on myself when someone expressed him/herself in a loud, forceful or aggressive way....why, I don't know---well, I know that counselors in the past have attributed it to PTSD, but I also chose not to let myself be labeled and defined by that.  Being different was a choice.  This past week I learned that while there are still some triggers in me, I easily recognize them as such and I don't let it sink in too far and let them govern how I feel about myself.  It shows me that I am right in choosing to live differently and not falling back into old habits that don’t serve me any more.  

I choose to live more effectively, openly and warmly, no matter how others respond to me.  It is important to put back my shoulders, smile and exude confidence....yet live from my heart.  Walking where there is a Big Sky, reminds me to open and embracing without holding tightly to people or situations....allowing others to be who they are, for good or for bad, without letting them change how I feel about myself.  It makes me more effective, giving and loving, or so it is my hope.

All photos and text used in this blog are copyrighted by Author of this website, unless otherwise indicated, and permission is required to use any image or text.

Moonstone Beach, Cambria, CA

The landscape and seascape are breathtaking for their subtleties in color, sound and mood today!  Much like a moonstone.

There's something about fog and overcast weather; it partially obscures what you know to be there, both in line and color, leaving you that time and space, which hangs in abeyance between total obscurity and clarity...that moment where you can allow yourself to dream, to imagine and ponder the meanings and possibilities.  For my writing and art, it's often where the magic happens.

Perhaps this is one of the things I most love about living on the coast.

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Fiscalini Ranch Preserve, the bluffs in Cambria, CA

My sister invited me to join her for a quiet retreat in Cambria.  Within an hour of the phone call, I was packed and on the road!  I stepped  out onto the boardwalk along the bluffs the next morning and was confronted with the wide open expanse of the Preserve and sky above that rivaled only the openness I experienced in Montana or the Highland moors of Scotland.   I felt myself exhaling for the first time in perhaps months.  Until that moment, I don’t think I realized that I’d been more or less holding everything in, trying to keep it all together for months now. 

How quickly we can fall into stressful living!  It creeps in like poisonous gas seeping through the cracks, insidiously stealing the very air we breathe, tightening our lungs and back and jaw.  Stress brought on by feeling discounted, disrespected, ineffective or expendable.  Stress intensified by fear and feelings of often being misunderstood and under attack no matter how hard you work, how well you perform, how much you’ve contributed over the years, nor how good your intentions.  Our society does not honor individuals for their experience or any wisdom or integrity gained from that experience.  I have come under duress to a realization that it is true; in our country older people are throw-aways it seems, and I am beginning to feel my years in that regard.  Paradoxically, I don’t feel like I’m old.  Far from it!

So where do I go from here?  Miles of open sky, air, land and sea await me, offering me the space and time to figure out how I am going to proceed, for living a life of stress is not doing anyone any good, least of all me.

All photos and text used in this blog are copyrighted by Author of this website, unless otherwise indicated, and permission is required to use any image or text.