Art Karma

I reject your reality and substitute it for my own.

--Adam Savage

I love serendipity (even the sound of the word). It is defined as "luck that takes the form of finding valuable or pleasant things that are not looked for." Is it coincidence? Probably not  -- if Serendipity is a form of your spirituality. Here's what serendipitously happened recently.

I've been reading a novel with a subtext about an elephant sanctuary, and that contains a lot of really cool elephant information, primarily about elephants and grief, as well as elephants' famous memories. For instance, the main character states:

I once saw an Asian elephant in Thailand who had been trained to do a trick. All the schoolchildren brought to meet him at the reserve where he was kept in captivity were told to sit in a line. Then they were asked to take off their shoes, and these shoes were jumbled into a pile. The mahout who worked with the elephant then instructed her to give the shoes back to the children. The elephant did, carefully weeding through the pile with her trunk and dropping the shoes that belonged to each child in his or her lap.

(Jodi Picoult, Leaving Time)

I'm sure this instance is based on fact, and there are a lot of examples in the book like the one above.
So I've been thinking about elephants a little bit, wondering how I can use some of the novel's information in my artwork...

Also, last weekend, a friend and I went to an Ashram for a yoga retreat, with an emphasis not only on yoga as a physical practice, but also the spiritual, social, emotional, and intellectual aspects. We learned a lot about  the man who started this form of yoga as well as the history of this particular retreat.  He, not surprisingly, was from India. A fair amount of elephant imagery was around the community, including 2 elephant "sentries" at the entrance to a religious temple there.

Before I had left home on Friday, I remembered a beautiful necklace that this same friend had given
me as a gift for my birthday last year. I hadn't seen it in a while because my younger son had rearranged my jewelry drawer. Before leaving for the weekend, I kept thinking about the necklace,
so I found it and put it on.

Electronic devices were discouraged at the Ashram, we were all better off to unplug for the weekend. At one point Saturday I went to the car to check my phone in case my husband had called with something about the kids. I noticed on my email that I had sold a painting on etsy.  I went to my etsy shop to see which one.  Can you guess?