your story

First Impressions

| Bonnie Kelso

Iam

The first time I saw you I knew you were the one. The one I was meant to meet. The one I was meant to spend the rest of my life with. I knew there was no turning back. It had happened. I saw you. You were clear and real, not a fuzzy vision from a dream. I had been working so hard at life, I had forgotten that I was here to find you. In that instant, the way you smiled, the way you carried yourself, the way you shimmered and sparkled like the stars in the deep moonless night, I knew Continue reading →

2016: Intentions for the 9 Year

| Bonnie Kelso

2016: Intentions for the 9 year

It seems that even Pantone is on board with my 2016 themes this year. Their color picks of the year are Rose Quartz and Serenity, as sampled in my illustration above.

2016 is a NINE year (2+0+1+6=9). This is exciting to me because 9 is MY FAVORITE NUMBER! I am a nine, and my personal intention for this coming “9” year is to experience completeness of self. The 9 in our 1-9 annual numeric calendar system represents the completion of a cycle. For me, this past cycle has been a time of being still with myself. Eight years ago, after years of searching for truth and answers outside of myself, I consciously began the search for truth and answers within. After several years of travel, I chose to settle down here in Las Vegas. It was not an easy adjustment… this becoming still and shifting inward. It revealed to me feelings of restlessness, discomfort, anxiety, and entrapment. At times, I experienced myself at my worst. The inner-strength that I had always relied on throughout my life suddenly seemed to expire and I found myself weak and utterly broken. Continue reading →

The Importance of Your Creative Pursuits

| Bonnie Kelso

The Importance of your creative pursuits

The US Declaration of Independence states: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

November 7th begins National Pursuit of Happiness Week.

Are you enjoying your unalienable rights?

I believe your Creativity is an unalienable right. There is nothing that can take it away from you or deny you access to it. It is every one’s birthright and something I so often see neglected, unappreciated, and undervalued. Today I want to share a family story with you about this very topic. This right to your creativity is very tied to your life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, because you need to allow yourself the freedom to explore it without fear of judgment or criticism. When you pursue your creative life you are pursuing something that will bring infinite happiness to you. That is just the nature of it. If you feel your creative life is not bringing you happiness, then it’s probably time to look at it from a different perspective.

This is a very personal story and one that will explain perfectly why I do what I do. It’s also a story that reveals part of the truth about who I am as a creator. It is my intention to only promote healing by sharing this story, and to stress to you how important it is for you to nurture your creative life before the empty hole there begins to devour all your happiness.

About nine years ago, I chose to change my life plan. I was in the midst of my informal self-study graduate program of exploring the world. I had been traveling for a few years, collecting experiences, and living my ultimate dream of a completely free life. All of a sudden it seemed, I wanted to create… Continue reading →

Thinking Freely About Your Most Creative Beliefs

| Bonnie Kelso

ThinkCreatively
Today is the unofficial national holiday: National Freethought Day. No offense to the scientifically minded Freethinkers out there, but I just had a thought that came to me freely through my intuition. I’m going to give you a Creating Exercise today.

“What makes a freethinker is not his beliefs but the way in which he holds them. If he holds them because his elders told him they were true when he was young, or if he holds them because if he did not he would be unhappy, his thought is not free; but if he holds them because, after careful thought he finds a balance of evidence in their favor, then his thought is free, however odd his conclusions may seem.”

– Bertrand Russell, Philosopher

For your Creating Exercise I would like for you to consider a belief. Choose one that you had when you were very young. Pick a good one. The more unbelievable it is, the better. It may even border on the magical… for example:

When I was eight years old, I believed that I could hold my breath underwater for as long as I wanted to without struggle. I would lie in bed at night in my room and practice this talent. I would sometimes count when I did it, then eventually just get bored and stop counting because I could hold my breath forever. I would pretend my room was sealed like a fish tank and full of water. I would imagine myself swimming through my room. Continue reading →

Do You Want to Hear a Story?

| Bonnie Kelso

“Y’all come around here, and listen to a story!” This I have heard. This I have said. I spent my early childhood from age 4 – 8 living in a small town in the Appalachian Mountains. When I look at my young kids, I realize how important those years are for developing your imagination. I often make up stories on the fly with my kids, too, much in the same tradition as I was raised. They love it. They love throwing in parts of the story as we go and totally changing the direction of it. It is my responsibility, as the storyteller, to somehow bring it all together at the end AND deliver a moral of some sort.

This weekend is National Storytelling Weekend. It’s always on the first weekend in October. It all started in 1973 with a highschool journalism teacher named Jimmy Neil Smith. The event began modestly in the small town of Jonesborough, Tennessee with a few dozen people sitting around on hay bales telling stories. Well, it started a storytelling revival of sorts and is now a national event drawing over Continue reading →

My Relationship with Food: A Love-Hate Story

| Bonnie Kelso

…or  “How I ‘Smoothied’ My Way Back to Good Health”

love smoothieI’m sure everyone has at some time in his or her life had at least a “strained” relationship with food. After all, our relationship with food is a life-long one and a pretty important one. Food is a basic necessity of life; one that is often taken for granted. So let’s hear it for, food, right? I mean, come on, food is amazing!

Food activates my senses in a way no other thing can. The smell of a favorite childhood food can send me plummeting back through time in a split second. There I am again, taking a huge cheesy mouthful of my Mom’s lasagna and feeling satisfied and loved beyond my wildest dreams. The sight of ice cream beginning to drip off a cone automatically propels me into forward motion as I go in for the lick! It’s irresistible to me. I don’t even care if it’s not mine. I’ve been accused of licking my kid’s cones many times and I freely admit I may have a problem, especially when it comes to ice cream.

Food is an integral part my daily life. I need to eat. I indulge in food choices several times each day. The moment I wake up and feel that first pang of hunger or the caffeine headache starts to kick in, my mind becomes focused on putting food in my body. Which foods I consciously choose to put in my body does matter. I am now very aware of that. It wasn’t always like this, though.

For the greater part of my life I have struggled with body image issues. Part of that I toss up to just being a female. Even when I had nothing to worry about, it seemed I worried anyway, because the girls and women around me were Continue reading →