Gratitude Schmatitude! by Tara Thelen

Gratitude, schmatitude – or so I thought. I’m not saying I was against it, or didn’t believe in it, but it was just that, as an artist who creates predominantly cheerful, positive, spiritual images, I figured I was already practicing some form of happy release by putting brush to paper so I didn’t necessarily need to put pencil to paper and write down the things I was grateful for .
I was wrong.
When Deborah initially asked me to create illustrations for this new Grace of Gratitude Journal she was writing, I basically saw it as just another project where an author (okay, granted, in this case, also one of my closest friends) was asking me to put visuals to words.
Something interesting happened in the process though.
Because Deborah gave me “carte blanche” to just create any images that came to me (which was a refreshing change to the usual routine where I have to follow strict guidelines from authors and publishers to create a specified image), I felt this whole new transformation take place. I found myself wanting to paint, paint, paint! Images flooded me and I created them as quickly as they flowed through. Then an interesting thing happened: Deborah then sent me the affirmations she had written and, who would have thought? They puzzled in perfectly with my images. Meant to be!
But that wasn’t all.
Now my appetite had been whetted to this “gratitude thing” and I realized painting was only part of this incredibly-transformative process, because there’s something about writing something down where real magic occurs. It’s like a tornado. It’s like taking all these emotions and experiences and insights that are just gaining intensity and swirling around in the soul’s atmosphere and then suddenly, BAM!, grounding them by writing them! The tornado touches down and, in a wonderful, positive way, it’s like this vortex of focused energy just spins through your life and it gathers speed and momentum and pulls to itself all good things on the path it rips through in your life!
Try it (you’ll see what I’m talking about)!