Welcome to my re-designed website!

It was almost exactly ten years ago that I launched my previous website. Then, due to technical difficulties, my website could no longer be maintained. That happened about two years ago. My website just sat there, frozen in time, since the program, I had used for its design, was no longer supported, became outdated. And besides, life was busy. Too busy for the treasured flights of creative fancy, and certainly too busy for re-designing a website.

A few months ago, like so many of us, I got all of a sudden grounded, the stay-at-home kind. So very unexpectedly, I found myself having free time, way more time that I had bargained for at this point in my life. Caught up with everyone else in the waves of dramatic change. Changes of historic and global proportions, unfathomable and irreversible.   

Slowly and somewhat tentatively, I found my way back to painting, to a rather different pace, position, perspective, and style. The joy, the love for playing, exploring, and surprising myself, the creative curiosity and enthusiasm are still the same, though! 

And then there was this neglected website issue, looming large, still. No more plausible excuse to not tackle it once and for all. So I did, huffing and puffing in the process. Technology moves fast and has become increasingly complex while I have slowed down and increasingly like to simplify. Also, squeezing my imagination into cookie-cutter templates with limited visual options proved to be a challenge, to say the least. I neither have much patience sitting at a desk, nor in front of a screen, and, most importantly, I like things to look a certain way ...! However, it turned out to be a good mental exercise and allowed me to re-visit my body of work as well. 

I am reasonably pleased with the content and design after all and believe that there are many reasons  "Why True Perfection in Love, Life, and Art is Imperfection", as I once wrote in a blog entry nearly a decade ago. With a benevolent stretch, this can be applied to a website, too! :)

As I am writing this, I cannot help but ponder how different this decade will be in comparison to the previous decade I spent painting and writing in a rather prolific and fearless manner about such a variety of topics, thoughts, feelings, and experiences. 

When I project into the coming decade, the word "resilience" comes to mind. 

About nine years ago, to be exact on April 3, 2011, I titled a blog entry  "Resolve, Radiance, and Resilience".  The pairing of words took me by surprise when I looked it up today. So much so, that I would like to share this entry with you here again:

The Lotus flower is a flower

that grows in the mud.

The thicker and deeper the mud

the more beautiful

the Lotus blooms.

Nam Myoho Renge Kyo

May there always be light for the Lotus

Sometimes, the wisdom of your past self nurtures your present and future self in very unexpected and powerful ways ...

Resilience feeds Creativity

Creativity leads to Resilience

In that sense, let the next chapter of the journey begin.