Category: Land Of Anne


100 Days Of Awe: Day Sixty Three – Soggy Saturday

Day 63: Soggy Saturday

IMAG4556My rain battered glass shield

There have been days of deep, focused immersion.  As I mentioned previously this week I am unravelling. Choosing to  consciously follow this uncoiling thread I become mesmerised in my internal world; I am delighting in the treasures I am finding here in the caves, my creativity is bubbling up and I forget about the external world, hiding away from it even in this studio of curiousity.  My thoughts are drawn to what I want to write about today, what I find awesome, when I am stunned into awareness by the loudness of thunder and the verdant leafy greenness outside my wind, boisteriously being ruffled by brother wind blowing in big fat drops of rain.  As Stan Phillips puts it so well from his vantage point in Waterford, Ireland today:

Summer comes slow this year.
Shyly,like young and undeclared,
She loves me, she loves me not,love.
And this morning is grey,still,overcast,and cold.
The sky is the colour of lead.
And even the birds who once hurried and scurried around and about the garden,
Are reluctant in the branches. Peering out as if to test the day for possibility of rain by stretching a tentative wing to catch a small drop.
Could birds use brollies?
Silly thought!
The sort of thought that flies into that void twixt the ending of Spring
And the hesitant start of Summer.
Which comes slothful upon the unseasonal and tedious year.

It feels good to be hidden away while Summer struggles to assert herself, to be peering at the world through my rain battered glass shield.  But not for long – I am about to pack up my spear, my amulets and my iron clad underwear to venture to the training fields of Surrey and William Whitecloud‘s Creative Warrior training; 4 days of shaminic immersion and no doubt some magical awe-some moments.  I feel like I am travelling between two or three different realities at the moment smudging the edges of each, dissolving and reconstructing.

100 Days of Awe is a playful project I set up to bring my attention to awe in my daily life. I see awe as wonder, a mixture of amazement and respect.  I expect the experience of awe to be about perception shifting awareness and that demands a reframing of some sort.  I am excited to see what will awe me on this journey.

Anne K. Scott is an imagination technologist, her work to teach, facilitate and deliver innovation for individuals and business.  She is the creator of FindYourMojo a FREE iPHone productivity app. If you are interested in what intuitive coaching can do for you please do contact me.  I support clients all over the world.

100 Days Of Awe: Day Sixty Two – Empty Hands

Day 62: Empty Hands

Booklet1Click on the photo to Download the Empty Hands album

A little background: I am a member of the Million $ Book Club Community, created by William Whitecloud author of The Magician’s Way and The Last Shaman, intuitive master, shamanic teacher.  This club is not so much about money but about engaging the true gold of your creative genius to write books that ‘electrify your audience and position you as a master in your field or genre’.  I attended William’s inaugural course in Los Angeles in February and met twenty other warrior souls.  We learnt through the weekend how true vulnerability is the key to writing that transforms and touches hearts, we also learnt how our smaller self, our ego, is dedicated to sabotage and how our individual sabotage patterns play out.  Fortunately it didn’t end there and we learnt about will and the keys to staying on course to our end goal.  We left with girded loins and continue to support and inspire each other to keep going in this unknown territory.

The reason why I tell this story is because awhile back, Fred, one of my hero partners on this writing journey, posted this link to Nimesh ‘Nimo’ Patel’s free Empty Hands album in our writer’s group.  I don’t think I would have checked the link if it wasn’t in our writing group but I just knew that Fred would only share something of value.  I downloaded the album not expecting much.  I mean it is free after all and ostensibly a rap album not my favourite genre of music.  I played it in the background while I pottered on with my writing.  Within minutes I was stopped in my tracks; yes this was rap but the heart, the passion, the love, the truth just oozes out of the songs.  I had to check out who this Nimo guy was.  He tells his story so much better than I can but sufficient to say he has taken the road less travelled; from great achievement, Wall Street and music success to the Gandhi ashram in India.  He let everything go, stepped into the unknown, pouring love into the small things.  And then four years on this music just started coming through and now I am telling you about it.  Nimo’s story is not about worldwide recognition rather it is about all of us; about you – the spark you have inside you, the love you have to give and your unique genius that is waiting to be awakened.

Thank you to Nimesh ‘Nimo’ Patel for following his heart for Fred Pockrass of Transcendentist in Berkley, California for spreading the word and for everyone out there who is brave enough to step out on the soul journey.

I would love to support Nimo to play his music around the world, if you are interested in offering support in UK or Ireland in November 2014 please let me know [email protected]

100 Days of Awe is a playful project I set up to bring my attention to awe in my daily life. I see awe as wonder, a mixture of amazement and respect.  I expect the experience of awe to be about perception shifting awareness and that demands a reframing of some sort.  I am excited to see what will awe me on this journey.

Anne K. Scott is an imagination technologist, her work to teach, facilitate and deliver innovation for individuals and business.  She is the creator of FindYourMojo a FREE iPHone productivity app. If you are interested in what intuitive coaching can do for you please do contact me.  I support clients all over the world.

100 Days Of Awe: Day Sixty – Unravelling Me

Day 60: Unravelling Me

Do you know when you have a knot in a thread or fine gold or silver chain and it you have to keep worrying away at it until at last and often all of a sudden it loosens up?  I have had one on those knots in my consciousness about being me.

Now I understand the rational concept of being me and I admire the exhortation to be me.  In fact I champion the cause for everyone to be themselves but today I realised that it this is going to be a life time’s work.  What brought me to that realisation was having that sudden loosening of the knot today and slipping from one layer of consciousness to the next.  It was the same place but deeper, like slipping down (or should that be up?) the Fibonacci spiral.   I can’t tell you, precisely what happened, but I believe it is the chipping away that does it.  There are times when that chipping away has a flow, feels productive and satisfying and then there are times that the chipping away is like taking a puny screwdriver to an RSJ seems like an impossible task.  I have been having a time of it recently feeling stuck with regards to my purpose, productivity and frankly my ability to create money.  In fact I have started to slide backwards – commitments being called in, house repairs, clients ready to be in the world on their own.  I have been sweating under the metaphorical collar, tossing and turning at night, questioning, analysis, alternating bouts of optimism with desperate pessimism.

Fortunately I have a tool box I can use to look under the hood of what is going on in my unconscious mind and I have colleagues that will support me to do the same.  Along side the drama I have been chipping away intuitively but I could feel the tension of that drama like a dog with a bone, hanging on for dear life.  Until this morning.  This morning’s chip loosened something, I wasnt sure what, but there was a loose thread something I could go deeper into.  I felt that concept of being me, moving from my head to somewhere just below my collarbone, my heart perhaps and as it landed I was flooded with the emotion of pleasure.  The pure pleasure of being me.  I cannot tell you how expansive that felt.  William Whitecloud* talks about emotion as the secret weapon and before William, Neville Goddard wrote a little pamphlet called Feeling Is The Secret – I got a taste of that today and a whole new level of joy from one of my favourite every ditties from Cat Stevens and made famous in the cult movie Harold and Maude.

William Whitecloud is delivering his last 2 day Meet Your Genius training in London on 31 May & 1 June.  Tickets are his complimentary gift as he is choosing to hand training over and focus on his writing and film creations.  If you are interested please claim your free ticket at Secrets Of Natural Success.

100 Days of Awe is a playful project I set up to bring my attention to awe in my daily life. I see awe as wonder, a mixture of amazement and respect.  I expect the experience of awe to be about perception shifting awareness and that demands a reframing of some sort.  I am excited to see what will awe me on this journey.

Anne K. Scott is an imagination technologist, her work to teach, facilitate and deliver innovation for individuals and business.  She is the creator of FindYourMojo iPHone app. If you are interested in what intuitive coaching can do for you please do contact me.  I support clients all over the world.

100 Days Of Awe: Day Sixty One – To The Polls

Day 61: To The Polls

IMAG4670Polling Station at St Francis Church of England Church, Dalgarno, London, UK

My voting ward has been reconfigured and I have a new polling station, instead of the Dalgarno Community Centre it is the local Church of England church of Saint Francis.  This made me smile when I received my voting card; in Ireland, my home country there is so much uproar about the interference of the church in state affairs I just could not imagine the reaction – not to mind the reality – of a proposal to use a sacred Catholic Church as a place to host polling for secular, read heathen, state affairs.   This was my outing today voting after an administrative side trip to my doctor’s.

Wild Bill Hickok was rallying his steers in the sky as I prepared for my 2.30 Doctor’s appointment, I managed to outrun the big fat rain drops and was grateful for the delay at the Doctor’s while this tantrum raged outside.   The sun was shining as if nothing had happened when I saddled my trusty steed and headed up to St. Francis’ church, in the freshness of the light and the pinkness of the paint this could have been an adobe walled chapel in the wild west on a lazy Sante Fe afternoon. This lovely idea was taken further when I discovered that in 1998 after the church was closed due to declining numbers ‘the Bishop approached Rev Justin Terry from St Helen’s Church, North Kensington to undertake mission to the Dalgarno Estate and try to restart the church‘.  Can’t you just see it – padres heading out in their somberos, flapping cassocks in the wind, spurring on their horses with the silver spurs of divine calling.  St Helen’s Church is all of a 10 minute walk at a stretch from St. Francis. I can but dream.

I realised as I picked up my papers I had no idea who to vote for.  I was here doing my duty by my suffragette ancestors who fought for this right, the right for me to vote to have my say.  I choose to ignore that part of my that feels I have not done enough research or paid enough attention to the electoneering campaigns and that is, in hindsight, a little guilty for recycling the various pamplets and leaflets that have come through the door.  No one seems to bother knocking the 40 flats at Coronation Court so I have no idea about the individuals standing for election.  I like to think that anyone who steps into the field of politics feels called on some level and even if misguided is willing to stand and speak for something that they believe is greater than themselves.  My choice to look at what the candidates are standing for.  When it came to the local elections Labour was calling me but looking at the European paper it was Green that was jumping out.  Sadly there weren’t any Green party candidates for the local elections but I was a little surprised; I am not usually quite so alternative, am I become more of a tree hugger or are the Greens perhaps become more practical and pragmatic?  My urge to recycle and compost is telling but I do think that the gap between the dreams and idealism of Green party politics, and the reality that people want to live in is being closed.  This is partly to do my knowledge of Grace O’Sullivan, standing for the European elections in Ireland.  Grace was with the Greenpeace’s Rainbow Warrior when it was sunk in Auckland by French Intelligence on my birthday in 1985 and she has campaigned for local environment since she returned to live in Tramore, Co. Waterford.  I see her committed to practical action and ongoing learning.  When she was asked to stand her response was ‘No, I couldn’t do it. Thank you but I’d have to compromise my principles too much.”  I would have voted for Grace if I was in Ireland.  Fingers crossed for the results.

100 Days of Awe is a playful project I set up to bring my attention to awe in my daily life. I see awe as wonder, a mixture of amazement and respect.  I expect the experience of awe to be about perception shifting awareness and that demands a reframing of some sort.  I am excited to see what will awe me on this journey.

Anne K. Scott is an imagination technologist, her work to teach, facilitate and deliver innovation for individuals and business.  She is the creator of FindYourMojo a FREE iPHone productivity app. If you are interested in what intuitive coaching can do for you please do contact me.  I support clients all over the world.

100 Days Of Awe: Day Fifty Nine – Tree Lime Fluff

Day 59: Tree Lime FluffIMAG4661There is a tree in Little Wormwood Scrubs that stands in a carpet of the softest of cashmerey fluff.  Creme caramel cotton wool it is a divil to photograph; invisible but not invisible, substantial but insubstantial, amorphous yet a plethora of individual fine fibres.  An etheral substance, an angel’s blanket, fairy fur, stuffing for the cushy settees of elfin living rooms, the raw material of ear muffs and bed socks, the fleece inner lining of pajamas and hooded capes, the angora rabbit of the Woodland World the Spring time bounty for trolls and goblins.  This stuff, this fluff, is so wonderful I am sure it would have been written about.  I was sure that the internet would be awash with the folklore of it, the multiplicty of uses from magic potions to well – upholstery.  I have worked out the tree in question is a Lime Tree, Tilia x Vulgaris according to the Little Wormwood Scrubs (West London) management plan.  Not of the citrus fruit kind mind, but of the sticky bane of urban motorists as Tilia attracts aphids that gorge and then excrete the sap from the tree as a sticky mess that hardens like shellac on anything underneath it.  In the park there is not hide nor hair of aphids or their excreta.  Just the soft cashmerey blanket which I could find nothing about not even when I typed in ‘Tree Lime Fluff’.

100 Days of Awe is a playful project I set up to bring my attention to awe in my daily life. I see awe as wonder, a mixture of amazement and respect.  I expect the experience of awe to be about perception shifting awareness and that demands a reframing of some sort.  I am excited to see what will awe me on this journey.

Anne K. Scott is an imagination technologist, her work to teach, facilitate and deliver innovation for individuals and business.  She is the creator of FindYourMojo a FREE iPHone productivity app. If you are interested in what intuitive coaching can do for you please do contact me.  I support clients all over the world.

100 Days Of Awe: Day Fifty Eight – If I Were The Ocean

Day 58: If I Were The Ocean

I would be the Mickey Smith kinda ocean from the Dark Side Of The Lens

I imagine myself as the ocean bouncing up against the shore.  Choppy in a happy sort of way, splashing and spraying up against the rocks, like the ocean at the foot of Muckle Flugga lighthouse in the Shetlands, like the ocean up against the cliffs of Moher in Ireland, raging against the land, against it’s immovability.  I would go out to sea and come roaring back in again throwing myself delightedly against curmudgeon land. Reverberating as the world turns over, my moods and energy flowing and radiating out, stretching fingers into the depths and out to the horizon for the full expression of my emotional handbag.  Rippling like a jelly, long slowing looping vernerations in sync wtih myself.  I gawp in awe and wonder at the diving gannets and the endless sky.  I tickle the bottoms of lollygagging boats and play tag in the underwater forests of kelp and dance with a myriad of creatures; monstrous, mythical, miniscule from mermaids to minnows, mackerel and mako sharks. Full and replete with places to go and explore, nooks and crannies, coves and harbours.  Lying back I can enjoy the bristle of jet skies and power boats and the assured stroking of sleek racing yachts or languish awhile with seals and dabble with octopi.  I would go quizzical about the business of ship wrecks and drownings; sad at the impact of my angrier moments or the inadvertent damage of my boisterous tug and play.  My favorite moments are when I am in the full of my power and the mavericks are out surfing my wild flowing locks, I am cavorting across deep chasms and rushing up steep inclines to a crescendo of orgasmic pleasrure,  The ocean goes everywhere, is everywhere.  It is malleable and flowing, gently holding each salty drop in the tension of the whole, yielding into the yearning pull of the Luna’s moony magnet, at home to conflicting emotions and the pain and sorrow of it’s destructions.  Like a giant puppy powerful and gentle all at once.  I love the oceanic blue and fresh wild freedom of the ocean, ruffled by the wind and sozzled by the sun, big, blowsy, joyful celebratory, embracing.  I would be the ocean in the full of its majesty and magic.

DSCN0086-001Tickling the bottom of sail boats in the Sea Of Cortez, Mexico 2002

My story of the ocean was inspired by a newsletter from Susannah Conway of Blogging From The Heart and Journal Your Life ecourses, among others.  That newsletter extended an invitation to imagine myself as a body of water; what would it be and why? I answered that invitation a number of months ago but stumbled across imy notes today in my meanderings.

100 Days of Awe is a playful project I set up to bring my attention to awe in my daily life. I see awe as wonder, a mixture of amazement and respect.  I expect the experience of awe to be about perception shifting awareness and that demands a reframing of some sort.  I am excited to see what will awe me on this journey.

Anne K. Scott is an imagination technologist, her work to teach, facilitate and deliver innovation for individuals and business.  She is the creator of FindYourMojo iPHone app. If you are interested in what intuitive coaching can do for you please do contact me.  I support clients all over the world.

100 Days Of Awe: Day Fifty Seven – The Dandelion Clocks Are Out

Day 57: The Dandelion Clocks Are Out

IMAG4642The dandelion clocks are out! The dandelion is a fascinating plant, edible, medicinal, noxious and a secretor of natural rubber of all things.  It’s name, a corruption of the French Dent-de-Lion refers to the jagged edges of its leaves which are also the source of the name that I was familar with growing up – piss-in-the-bed – derived from their strong diuretic properties.  The seed heads are full and ready in early Spring and legend has it that the number of breaths that it would take you to blow all the seeds off the head would tell you the time.  A tedious kind of timepiece to have today, not least because they are not available all year round.  They are reputed to have magical properties and to enhance psyche abilities.  I captured this little family on a late afternoon walk up on Wormwood Scrubs.  Their saturated folklore is reflecting the light in straight rainbow lines.  Not something I saw when I was taking the photo.  An espresso shot of magic to notch up another day on the trail of awe.

100 Days of Awe is a playful project I set up to bring my attention to awe in my daily life. I see awe as wonder, a mixture of amazement and respect.  I expect the experience of awe to be about perception shifting awareness and that demands a reframing of some sort.  I am excited to see what will awe me on this journey.

Anne K. Scott is an imagination technologist, her work to teach, facilitate and deliver innovation for individuals and business.  She is the creator of FindYourMojo iPHone app. If you are interested in what intuitive coaching can do for you please do contact me.  I support clients all over the world.

100 Days Of Awe: Day Fifty Six – Love Hearts

Day 56: Love Hearts

IMAG4617-001I never know what is going to surprise me on any given day.  In fact many days I don’t expect anything to surprise me and I can find myself part way through the day experiencing a knot of anxiety in my gut as I realise that I have made a commitment each and every day for 100 days to be open to awe.  On this journey I have become aware that my default position is not one of open receiving but rather of focused survival.  When my attention is locked in on the minutae of getting through the day awesome passes on by.  I see myself then like one of those comedic movie characters engrossed with grappling with some inconsequential knot while all of life’s pleasures, serendipities and synchronicities sail on by in the background.

The beauty of this project is that it reminds me to stop and observe what is going on; I recognise the anxiety, I can observe myself as the observer and I can choose to suspend my need to know and to breathe.  In those moments there is space for the gasp of surprise like when I opened a long forgotten sketch book and saw this page of crayoned love hearts dancing in the fluid swirls of dawdling drawing.  It is naive and simple, unstructured and free, it made me smile and the innocence of it filled my consciousness.

I am reminded of the food I have prepared for a friend who has just had a new baby.  I am excited about my expedition to the burbs of Isleworth to see them, their new home and the new addition to their family.  And I am reminded of my meeting later with my friend Sheila*, Sheila who has opened me up to vibrancy of raw food and foraging without any of the dogma or drama, Sheila who loves life and all of what it has to offer; whether it be a smokey nip of whiskey or a raw kale salad.   My focus goes to the end result of honouring the arrival Amy and Sheila’s recent big birthday.  Time to get my ass into gear and the show on the road to step into the adventure of life right now.

*Sheila Gibbons, Wholestic Wellbeing at Kalikalos Holistic Holidays in Greece from 24 May to 6 June 2014 – spaces still available!

100 Days of Awe is a playful project I set up to bring my attention to awe in my daily life. I see awe as wonder, a mixture of amazement and respect.  I expect the experience of awe to be about perception shifting awareness and that demands a reframing of some sort.  I am excited to see what will awe me on this journey.

Anne K. Scott is an imagination technologist, her work to teach, facilitate and deliver innovation for individuals and business.  She is the creator of FindYourMojo iPHone app. If you are interested in what intuitive coaching can do for you please do contact me.  I support clients all over the world.

100 Days Of Awe: Day Fifty Five – My Trusty Steed

Day 55: My Trusty SteedIMAG4586 In 1993 I came back from gallivanting around the world determined to be self-employed.  I got an IT training contract in Wimbledon (south west London) but I was living at the time in Hornsey Rise (North London).  My investment into my self employed status was to attend a number of the courses free of charge and then co-train before I could step out and earn a living from delivering them.  For a number of months I had to be creative about money, I worked in Camden Market at the weekend selling aromaptherapy oils and incense sticks and I made an investment in my Diamond Back companion to minimise my transport costs.  I remember determinedly cycling across London dodging articulated lorries and braving inclement Summer weather during the leanest times but as soon as I my earnings regularised I was back on public transport and eventually purchased a car.

My bike, however remained a part of my life.  Although it was infrequently used it has been by my side for over twenty years; in fact I feel a coming of age is due sometime soon.  Strictly speaking it is not the same bike I bought way back in 1993, I learnt to my chagrin that any part of the bike not locked up was a temptation to passing opportunists.  At some point I lost both the front and back wheels and two saddles before I permanently padlocked it to the bike frame.

Diamond Back was kept under shelter and in cosy indoor hibernation during the Winter months until I moved into the first (and only) flat I have owned in 1996.  Since then s/he has endured outdoor living without even a decent saddle cover though recycling plastic bags does feel quite worthy.  Until 3 years ago, when I forfeited my car, the routine was a bit of TLC every Spring and gentle Summer usage in the neighbourhood but now we have moved into year round usage.  Venturing to the edges of the Borough and even on occasion across the River, rarely a day goes by when I am not off to Portobello Market or popping down to yoga or pilates and even when I am using public transport I will hop on my bike to expedite the 15 minute walk to the Tube station.  Since I have started my 100 Days Of Awe project travelling around on my trusty steed has given me the pleasure of being able to observing and stop to capture the smallest of details like Micro Magic.  It is indeed time to honour my trusty steed with gratitude for 21 years of unstinting service.

100 Days of Awe is a playful project I set up to bring my attention to awe in my daily life. I see awe as wonder, a mixture of amazement and respect.  I expect the experience of awe to be about perception shifting awareness and that demands a reframing of some sort.  I am excited to see what will awe me on this journey.

Anne K. Scott is an imagination technologist, her work to teach, facilitate and deliver innovation for individuals and business.  She is the creator of FindYourMojo iPHone app. If you are interested in what intuitive coaching can do for you please do contact me.  I support clients all over the world.

100 Days Of Awe: Day Fifty Three – The Little Red Door

Day 53: The Little Red Door

Scuffed and dirt weary the little red door of the Concert Artistes Association, Club For Acts & Actors on Bedford Street in Covent Garden is a portal to a throw back world of 1980’s bedsit land; gloss layered wood work in time muted cream, there was a feeling of vaudeville in the air, the open, friendly greeting somehow quaint and of a bygone time.  There is none of the sophistication of The Ivy or the cache of The Groucho Club but there is a certain je ne sais quoi; a layer of distortion that magically attires the guests in collar pointed shirts and crimpilene, momentarily I thought I too had been been restyled when I passed under the lintel into this in between world under the oxter of Adventure Bar. I wondered if Quentin Crisp perhaps was  holding court somewhere in the ether.

The bar is upstairs, the stairwell lined with faded, corner curled and wear torn flyers and posters for every possible play.  I was enthralled in a voyeuristic kind of way and the headshot lined walls of the bar pushed me over the edge of incredulity.  I didnt recognise any of the names or the faces, the smiles and the faces were shiny, happy people belonging here but from a different time and place.  I wasnt sure if I was the living visiting the world of the dead, or not yet born in a different slice of time.

I had been invited to a concert by Phyllis MacMahon actress and writer of Divorcing God? an autobiographical play about her life as a nun in Ireland in the 1960s and her escape to the bright lights of London.  She lives still on Charing Cross Road in the heart of theatreland and the CAA is a familar haunt.  Phyllis is a character with the energy and lifeforce of a firelighter – a spark of a fire, a party, a get together and she is up to burn brightly.  The concert was being run as a fund raiser for a yearly pilgrimmage to Lourdes by the student volunteers from Newman House, which provides accommodation for Catholic university students, in London.  And what a jolly talented bunch they proved to me; from a rendition of Michael Jackson’s Heal The World, a couple of original songs, piano and trumpet, classical and the piece de resistance in my eye’s Father Stephen Wang in his collar playing Aint Misbehavin’ on his tenor saxophone.  He was at pains to explain that misbehavin’ wasnt something that the students were encouraged to do.

100 Days of Awe is a playful project I set up to bring my attention to awe in my daily life. I see awe as wonder, a mixture of amazement and respect.  I expect the experience of awe to be about perception shifting awareness and that demands a reframing of some sort.  I am excited to see what will awe me on this journey.

Anne K. Scott is an imagination technologist, her work to teach, facilitate and deliver innovation for individuals and business.  She is the creator of FindYourMojo iPHone app. If you are interested in what intuitive coaching can do for you please do contact me.  I support clients all over the world.