Seems we cannot live without art making.  Creative expression is our love, our solace, the treasure map to our dreams, our divine purpose, our most trusty companion.  So we understand Yoko Ono when she says this: 
"Art is a process-oriented tool.  With the help of this tool, you can better understand life's complexity."

"If humanity does not opt for integrity we are through completely. It is absolutely touch and go. Each one of us could make the difference." -- R. Buckminster Fuller

“Have the courage to say no. Have the courage to face the truth. Do the right thing because it is right. These are the magic keys to living your life with integrity.” -- W. Clement Stone

“If everyone were clothed with integrity, if every heart were just, frank, kindly, the other virtues would be well-night useless, since their chief purpose is to make us bear with patience the injustice of our fellows.” -- Moliere

“Integrity has no need of rules.” -- Albert Camus

Quite early this morning we found ourselves dreaming -  we were climbing to the very top of a very tall ladder which was tethered to the wall (for our safety) by a strong chain.  Our task was to get this beautiful collection of glassware from the topmost shelf, drawing them down past a shelf filled with folded tapestries which was at our eye level.  As we reached the top and began to hand down the glasses a studio audience watched from above.  With our right hand we held onto the chain and with the left we delivered the glasses to people down below waiting with their hands outstretched.

"We love what we believe to be unique personal aspects of our individuality - memories, character traits, opinions . . . We like to think of ourselves as extremely complex, with burdens and challenges and destinies of mythic proportion. That's a lot to carry. Weed out as much of this as possible and focus available energy on actual obstacles, not seductive cul-de-sacs and dead ends. The danger is that psychological self-study becomes an ego game, a goal in itself - an endless tail-chasing device that locks one into the idea that the person can be fixed, that it needs to be fixed before moving forward. It becomes a reason for procrastination, a reason to refuse freedom, a reason to hold grace at bay. "I am not yet worthy," we protest, and fend off God with all our might.

Move in any direction, and the way you live and act will quite naturally come into alignment with that direction. This does not need to be taken on as a separate task. The key is direction. Choose wisely, set your sights on the furthest point in current view and move out smartly."
- All from Bart Marshall's Nothing Is Necessary via WhiskeyRiver.  To read the whole, darn, brilliant excerpt, go to the source:  http://whiskeyriver.blogspot.com/2008/07/most-expedient-method-for-dislodging-id.html.

You may recall your dear Citrine is a lady Virgo who only believes in one wild poet astrologer, Rob Brezsny.  Here is his brilliant advice for us (and anyone wanting to manifest anything, really) for this week:

'In Terry Pratchett's book Wyrd Sisters, there's a passage in which he talks about how the sun conspires with the forest to pump millions of gallons of sap hundreds of feet from the ground up into the sky. And it all happens "in one great systolic thump too big and loud to be heard." That's the kind of activity I recommend for you in the coming weeks, Virgo. Collaborate with the source of all life -- the physical sun, if that's your preference, or God or Goddess, if that works better for you -- to pull off a huge movement of lifeblood that brings sustenance from below to above.'

To get your little slice of cosmic brillance, head on over to his site - FreeWillAstrology.com.

xo - C
 

'Works of art are of an infinite solitariness, and nothing is less likely to bring us near to them than criticism.  Only love can apprehend and hold them, and can be just towards them.  -- Decide each time according to yourself and your feelings in the face of every such declaration, discussion or introduction; if you should still be wrong, the natural growth of your inner life will lead you slowly in the course of time to other perceptions.  Let your judgments have their own quiet, undisturbed development, which must, like all progress, come from deep within, and cannot in any way be pressed or hurried.  It means everything to carry for the full time and then to bring forth.  To allow every impression and every germ of a feeling to grow to completion wholly in yourself, in the darkness, in the unutterable, unconscious, inaccessible to your own understanding, and to await with deep humility and patience the hour of birth of a new clarity: that is alone what live as an artist means: in understanding as creation.

There is no measuring by time there, a year there has no meaning, and ten years are like nothing.  To be an artist means: not to reckon and count; to ripen like the tree which does not force its sap and stands confident in the storms of Spring without fear lest no Summer might come after.  It does come.  But it comes only to the patient ones, who are there as if eternity lay in front of them, so unconcernedly still and far.  I am learning it daily, learning it through pains to which I am grateful; patience is all!' -- Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters To A Young Poet

We offer you this juicy tidbit about enlightenment from David Lynch's Catching The Big Fish:

'A Tower of Gold

Just as a mirror shines bright once it has been cleared of dust,
so those who have seen the Self shine in mind and body.
They are always and forever filled with happiness.
UPANISHADS

How does meditation get rid of negativity?
Picture it this way: You are the Empire State Building.  You've got hundreds of rooms.  And in those rooms, there's a lot of junk.  And you put all that junk there.  Now you take this elevator, which is going to be the dive within.  And you go down below the building; you go to the Unified Field beneath the building -- pure consciousness.  And it's like electric gold.  You experience that.   And that electric gold activates these little cleaning robots.  They start going, and they start cleaning the rooms.  They put in gold where the dirt and the junk and garbage were.  These stresses that were in there like coils of barbed wire can unwind.  They evaporate, they come out.  You're cleaning and infusing simultaneously.  You're on the road to a beautiful state of enlightenment.'

Dearest Citrine-ites.  Quite obviously summer is upon us and, since you know us to be lovers of travel and leisure, it was inevitable that we would take some time away.  Clarence Day once remarked, “The ant is knowing and wise, but he doesn't know enough to take a vacation.”  And we, fair readers, will not be ants!

So tomorrow we will bid you adieu as we embark on the serious business of a playful sojourn.  We were planning to blog from afar whilst enjoying our journeys, but then decided it would be far better to load you up with fantastic posts today - a stockpile of truth and beauty - so to fully and deeply enjoy the vacation and ensure our refreshed return late next week, when we'll surely be raring to go again.

So keep your eye on us today, as we have many lovely things in store for you.  Tomorrow we're off - hopefully enjoying the kind of vacation Lars Von Triers enjoyed when he said, "I'm having a vacation, and it's so beautiful, and maybe I'll never get another film idea in my life”.

'When Sabina crossed the street, she nourished herself upon the gallant smile of the policeman who stopped traffic for her, she culled the desire of the man who pushed the revolving door for her, she gathered the flash of adoration from the drug clerk: "Are you an actress?" She picked the bouquet of the shoe salesman trying on her shoes: "Are you a dancer?" As she sat in the bus she received the shafts of the sun as a personal, intimate visit.  She felt a humorous connivance with the truck driver who had to pull the brakes violently before her impulsive passages, and who did so smiling because it was Sabina and they were glad to see her crossing their vision.' -- p. 110-111 of Anais Nin's A Spy In The House of Love.

We cracked three fortune cookies in quick succession this afternoon and behold their sunny predictions:
1.  'You will be successful in your career.'
2.  'Happiness is around the next corner, wealth down the street.'
3.  'Others appreciate you more than you think.'