Rainbow Dreams and Art Blog

It’s a warm, breezy, summer evening, the kind of evening that feels like it will go on forever. As I reflect upon the week just past, I am grateful for the many opportunities that I had to connect with others…my students of all ages, my friends, and my family. It was truly a week of ups and downs, of losses and of gains, of reminiscing, and of learning and looking forward to new discoveries.

This week, while the losses got me down, I rejoiced in the new connections. While I grieved for my cousin who died this week, and for her family who will miss her, I found hope and joy in being reunited with relatives separated by time and distance. While I felt the loss of a favorite supervisor leaving, I was met with the promise of bright, new opportunities ahead of me. It is all life; of beginnings and endings and in betweens.

The Dog Days of summer continue, even as I know they are coming near to an end. Each week, I enjoy my kids in the YMCA Day Camp, and I get to know them better, to watch them grow as they create amazing things. Often there are new faces, or the reluctant kids join in when they see the fun we are having. This week’s them was Jungle Safari, and on a whim I decided to try our hand at the same Animal Finger Puppet project I did with my teens in our home school group. It was a great success, as the kids came up with the most creative ways to express themselves with clay and the many goodies I brought with me. It was interesting to watch how they learned from each other and began adding accessories to their animal puppets, such as hair, capes, hats, guitars, bows, and cups. Very cool!

Here are some images of our art. Click on thumbnail images once or even twice to enlarge!

On Thursday afternoon, we did a fun yoga session where we began with a Seashore Warm-up, and ended up crashing our boats on a Jungle coast. We each had a favorite jungle animal and we made up our own tale using those animals, and inventing poses for our animals. Of course we included some old favorites too, such as cobra pose, lion’s pose and crocodile pose. We had a great time - the kids have such great imaginations! We ended with an activity for meditation that the kids really enjoyed. I brought in fabric, and we created Yoga Animal Flags. It was a lot of fun to come up with symbols for our flags, and show the animal friends we wanted to represent on our flags. We simply used permanent markers on fabric, and the results were very nice. This was a project that seemed to appeal to all ages and to boys as well as to girls. As always, the time seemed to go by way too fast.

Finally, as the week came to a close, I truly enjoyed my adult classes on Thursday. We have so much fun in our Thursday evening class at the YMCA, and it feels so sincere and heartfelt that we not only learn and grow together, but we share so much of ourselves in the process. It is the most joyful yoga class I have ever taught. I leave there feeling so uplifted that it stays with me, and I think again and again how lucky I am to be there. We have a recent Gulf War veteran in our midst, and it brings to my heart how much this person was willing to give for us all, and how he now needs to be cared for and to feel safe and that he can at least relax. When you see first-hand what war does to our bodies and minds, it makes you realize how precious is PEACE. In my heart I dedicate my classes and my teachings to this man, to my cousin Audrey who died a week ago, and to us all, that we can at last know peace.

May we all know peace,

Lisa

Tags: Art, Art activities, Personal Storytelling, Storytelling, Yoga //