Booda Dog - Frankie Lee's Artist Studio, Venice CA

This entry includes the awarenesses your gypsy spirit will want to know to pack up your life, set yourself up powerfully to go on the road and be FREE to be where you’re most meant to be in the world. It contains a number of guiding principles I’ve garnered over several year-long excursions, along with my April 4, 2011 re-entry to being on the road full-time. And it is inspired by all the lovely people who are reaching out and sharing your enthusiasm to follow my example. It is my desire that making some of what I see visible, will ease your way.

Launching oneself on the road full-time after being settled for a period of years, is a bit like getting ones sea legs. There is a different movement and pace, and it’s good to accept right off that you may be a bit wobbly at first. In 2004 when I set off for South Africa, starting with a three-day stop over in the UK, my second night out I was sleeping on a trundle bed – the kind with drawers underneath. About three or four in the morning I woke up thirsty, and half asleep, totally forgetting I was in this really high bed, fell splat on the floor. There I was, just me with me in the dark, lying on the floor laughing. Suffice it to say, the material world holds many unfamiliars.

Good-bye Bathtub Hello World!

CIRCLES UNITING is a global humanitarian project designed to direct consciousness to our essential Oneness, by empowering people everywhere to create their own circle projects and link them together as one continuous celebration of life. What we make of it will move us into our higher destiny as human beings, conscious co-creators with Creation itself, one family of the Earth.

The Spirit of CIRCLES UNITING has been growing in and as us for millennium. For me, it was what birthed A Circle of Women and The Art of LIVING Coalition, the Great Sun Circles and annual International Women’s Day events that we as an extended wisdom community co-created across greater LA from 1991 to the present. And it is the message I've carried with me these last six years, living in over 60 places in five countries.

The image I keep seeing and would like to share with you, is that of a circle within a circle.

The smaller circle in the center is the “me” or the small “we” - which represents anything we ordinarily associate with ourselves individually and collectively in terms of our day-to-day existence, our family, our work, our community, basically our comfort zone, what we see as the “what is” of life, our dreams and schemes from the stand-point of having to make things happen ourselves.

“We don’t see many Americans on the train,” says Mr. Dawie Breet, the burly Afrikaans train manager who serves as my host for the 26-hour trip from Cape Town to Johannesburg called the Trans Karoo. No surprise, considering the 10,000 mile distance from my home of the last 25 years, Los Angeles. I am happy to be the eyes for my friends at home, privileged. It is a big world out here and too easy to become myopic within a big country such as the U.S. or, according to Mr. Breet, a small country set so far away like South Africa.

I am asked many questions on the train about being an American, by Mr. Breet, by the all black staff in the dining car where I spend much of my time looking out through the large picture windows, by the two couples who are traveling in the coupe next to mine, on their way to Krueger National Park - one of whom, it turns out, know Beth and Charles Hutchinson, the parents of my friends Annie and Lesley who I spent the previous month living with, between their homes in Cape Town and Saldanha Bay in the Western Cape.

an artist of life:

1. behaves daily in ways that support and enhance life
2. plays a pro-active, creative role in sculpting his reality
3. is courageously dedicated to being herself
4. “walks his talk,” and willingly accepts responsibility for his thoughts and deeds
5. lives her dream
6. has a rich and fulfilling existence
7. is fully present in the moment
8. loves himself and acts out of what is best in himself
9. passionately infuses love and vitality into everything she does
10. is grateful to be alive
11. measures his success by a balance of the personal and professional, societal and spiritual
12. thrives on change
13. assesses situations in terms of challenges and opportunities rather than problems, and works to find viable solutions
14. is resilient and open to more than one “right” way of doing things
15. is authentic and honest with herself and others
16. embraces differences while affirming our essential connection
17. treads softly on the earth
18. honors and respects the freedom of each individual
19. extends compassion to all living things
20. is committed to doing “the best he can” to live these principles
21. teaches by example