Find some joy in your life

A couple of weeks ago, we watched 'The Bucket List' starring Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman, about two men who escape from a cancer ward and decide to complete a list of tasks before they die. Of all the things that they did, the one that struck me the most was 'find some joy in your life'. The Jack Nicholson character, whilst being fabulously wealthy, was a fairly unpleasant character who was estranged from his family, and finding joy was one of the things that he couldn't buy. It made me think of some of the people in my life who have been through some terrible things recently, but manage to stay positive. My husband has often been known to call me a duck (i.e. gliding along on the surface of things but paddling like mad underneath) and there is a tendency to dwell on all the hard things in life when you are feeling a bit out of control, but probably what we should do is focus on the happy things, however tiny. Like this morning for example, when my five year old crawled into bed in his stripy pj's, all warm and soft, and covered my face in kisses. With a start like that, it doesn't matter how bad the day gets, that little boy will make me smile all day....

The background is acrylic paints, water soluble crayons, oil pastels. The pennants at the top are hand-drawn on 7gypsies 'catalina' paper, the letters are magazine clippings. The images are from lisa' altered art and the leaf shapes are from Stampin' up, stamped onto pages from an old german paperback.