Whether the subtle sensing of intuition
or the sparkling active energy of attraction,
‘woo’ is my personal word
and favorite feeling.
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Woo
Tag: Vision
The Suggestion
Yesterday I went to our neighborhood laundromat for the first time.
During the little banter you do at the counter, I asked for the bathroom key, and as he handed it to me, the owner told me to look out for the ghost in there.
With a straight face.
The act of suggestion and creating an image in another mind is a powerful energetic exchange. If you only knew how your words really affect and create all around you!
You better believe I THOROUGHLY searched the room for anything out of the ordinary. This restroom was a little larger than a bathroom, and the motion control light at the door was at a distance from the seat.
You would have this picture playing in your head when the motion sensor turned the lights off while you were in the room.
He couldn’t know that when I was 11 and away at camp the counselor scared me with a story so bad I was afraid of bathroom mirrors for years.
But as a grown @$$ woman I sang, laughed, and twirled the key above my head all the while I was there – and in leaving, asked if there was a ghost or unwanted energy, to leave the building and go in peace.
When I returned the key, the owner asked me if anything had happened, and said.”when the light goes off. the ghost grabs you by the throat” and made the gesture.
Did he believe there was a ghost? Was this a game? I can only have my impression of the interaction: he had a serious expression through it all.
But it was transmuted this time by my intention not to play along. I thanked him for warning me about it so I was prepared.
Interesting watching his expression change. I think I spoiled his fun a little. Or exorcised the ghost. Both situations are ok with me.
Look at the stuff that scared you when you were a kid in the light of day. Look and keep looking to reduce the energetic ‘hold’ it has on you. No shame if you need to have a blanket to peek from! But see it, laugh at it, demystify it.
And be free of it.
To Your Ever Abundant Health, Dorothy 
The Beauty Way
In beauty I walk
With beauty before me I walk
With beauty behind me I walk
With beauty above me I walk
With beauty around me I walk
It has become beauty again
Today I will walk out,
today everything negative will leave me
I will be as I was before,
I will have a cool breeze over my body.
I will have a light body,
I will be happy forever, nothing will hinder me.
I walk with beauty before me.
I walk with beauty behind me.
I walk with beauty below me.
I walk with beauty above me.
I walk with beauty around me.
My words will be beautiful.
In beauty all day long may I walk.
Through the returning seasons, may I walk.
On the trail marked with pollen, may I walk.
With dew about my feet, may I walk.
With beauty before me, may I walk.
With beauty behind me, may I walk.
With beauty below me, may I walk.
With beauty above me, may I walk.
With beauty all around me, may I walk.
In old age wandering on a trail of beauty, lively, may I walk.
In old age wandering on a trail of beauty, living again, may I walk.
My words will be beautiful.
Dorothy Perry can be contacted here.
Independence Day
Wherever you stand, be the soul of that place.
~Rumi
Dorothy Perry is a Chicago portrait photographer specializing in custom family portraits, modern headshots, & personal branding for women and executives.
Contact her studio for commissioned work here.
The Albatross
The stereotype of the drugged, drinking or skirt chasing artist personality creates a ‘buzz’ and sells tickets, but actually creates formerly creative people that struggle to imagine and create to push out artwork: to “phone it in” and burn out.
Truth be told, it’s hard enough to find time, energy and artistic inspiration and create without also having the albatross of addictive behaviors around your neck.
The creative impulse is impulsive, and the ‘golden hours’ of activity and creative flow can get hijacked in bad habits and drugs, sometimes never to return.
My message to other artists is that success is not all it seems from the outside. To be successful in you have to turn off the phone, be physically healthy, spend time alone to know your mind, be independent of the crowds and fashions of the time.
To know your mind is to accept yourself, warts and all.
To accept yourself, you have to be in your body, to know when you are happy, tired, engaged, on auto pilot, or fully 100% here. And in time, to be grateful of the subtleties and beauty of your life more and more of your day.
Perhaps that will be what matters most: becoming a person that can experience and enjoy the steps of your journey.
Dorothy Perry is a photographer and a smiling happy warrior of awareness. Contact her here.
Portraits That Do You Justice
To do justice: to treat or show (something or someone) in a way that is as good as it should be.
When we are active in our busy lives every day,
we don’t think about the photographs that ‘live’ after us.
But consider: what photos will family remember you by?
Amateur photos and selfies don’t always do us justice.
Have portraits with vitality and energy to choose from.
Meet someone that values and captures your personality.
My images of families and dynamic couples are calming, inspiring,
and beautifully displayed in elegant albums and framed art.
An amazing energetic now, for valued memory later.
Of you, your loved ones, or your life’s passion.
Images to do you justice.
Dorothy Perry photographs sensitive people and intimate events. Contact her here.
Eleven-Eleven Alice
The art of photography is the continual practice of observing things with a unique vision. But expanding and refining that vision is a creative challenge as well.
We go about daily life distracted by our phones and internal chatter, and mental filters created by our pre-conceived ideas of reality and what should be in it.
Our eyes function with the help of a sensing device called a reticular activator: it picks out the things that we have chosen (or have allowed ourselves) to see.
We all have had the feeling of suddenly noticing things that have been around us all the time – when we allow ourselves to see it, then we can. Instruct your reticular activator to pick out yellow trucks, and they will seem to be everywhere. Rare or uniquely colored objects might take longer, but then your eyes will ‘pick them out’ in advertisements, signs, and packaging.
It also excels with misplaced objects, giving hot/cold feelings or images that ‘suddenly’ guide you to the location. Instead of saying that you ‘lost’ something, say, “I’ll find it’ instead. This encourages your sensing to locate the object that much faster.
And in some cases, it can actually set in motion and create what you desire.
My favorite memory of using this Manifesting skill was the decision that I wanted to own a specific type of car – a vintage Volvo 240 GL.
It happened so rapidly, that the process of seeing to owning that exact type of Volvo took 48 hours, start to finish: a perfect storm of coincidences and circumstances.
I walked out of the Brown Line train station at the moment that this very type of car drove past. It had a “For Sale” sign visible in the side window. The driver got gas at a station across the street. The price was an amount I had available in the bank.
I got to witness this cascade of coincidences in action, and had the exact type of car I desired by that evening. And it was the first in a series of terrific Volvo 240s I have owned – my latest has its own Instagram page! https://www.instagram.com/volvocago/
Creativity energy creates the space and circumstances for success to happen. And to keep my inner eyes working, I shift between different types of perceptive techniques regularly so I have a neutral state of mind that can exist for creative focus, letting go, or just enjoying ‘no mind’ itself.
I call this “Eleven-Eleven Alice”, because I do it at 11:11 and it uses a picture idea from Alice in Wonderland, the illustration of her expanding in a small room.
I also am going to do imaginating (mentally picturing an object in all five senses) to briefly step outside the box.
Before the start, sit quietly, and gently relax your lower jaw. Relax all the muscles descending down your body. Settle down into its weight.
Feel the top of your head touch the ceiling: feel your hair against the ceiling. feel the texture of the trim, the coolness of the paint. Get big so your cheeks, ears press against the windows.
At the same time, expand your body and lower torso. Feel both shoulders widening and filling up all four corners of the room. Feel the smoothness and coolness of the painted wall against your skin. If there is furniture, feel its material as you expand. You are as wide as the room and growing.
Move your vision to other rooms, your lower torso going down several floors. I imagine my feet touching the ground three floors down, my head above my building, slowly looking around. Feel your immensity.
Gaze around as though your body is gargantuan: a full buildings’ tall. Take giant breaths. In this state, be grand as you feel this gigantic self.
Then come back slowly, gently back down into your body. Stay neutral, eyes soft focused. If you can, let more time pass and feel this nice vibe.
Expanding and enlarging the self allows you to step out of your mind and daily worries, calms the chatter, and is something you can enter and re-enter in different circumstances. Widen yourself when you are sitting on a bus or in a car, practice in public when you are sitting in an office, be BIG when you are talking to someone.
There are times I do combine it with an intention to let things go, or to send out an energy of happiness to everyone in this surrounding vicinity.
But most often I feel its usefulness in creating a fluid, more creative state of mind –
and 11:11 happens twice every day.
If ‘Eleven-Eleven Alice’ becomes a favorite for you, I would love to hear it.
Dorothy Perry photographs sensitive people and intimate events. Contact her here.
Photos for Feelings
The image was a beautiful moment in the ceremony, deep within the photo, taken by a guest in the wedding party.
The groom is a photographer friend, and I know so well the axiom that “the shoemaker’s kids have no shoes,”
and how a photographer may sometimes never own any decent photos of their own important life events.
I saw another moment within the image – to be ‘brought out’ and brightened, so that it can be seen – and felt.
The difference between retouching and my creative ‘caress’ is that I use a quieter, more intuitive eye to see the newer photograph inside the original one, not just a cropping. I wrote another post about the technique in a June 6, 2020 post, Finding A Something More.
So happily honored to see that the bride posts this as her profile photo online. I wish Daphne and Jeff Happy Anniversary, and many dances together to come!
Dorothy Perry is a Chicago portrait photographer specializing in custom family portraits, modern headshots, & personal branding for women and executives.
Contact her for commissioned work here. Thank you.
Cartooned Culture
Anyone who knows me knows I love cartoons!
Some make me laugh, and some make me go “ahhh,” with tears in my eyes.
This cartoon is “Les Triplettes de Belleville,” by Sylvain Chomet. I saw this with a friend years ago in a Chicago theatre, and it remains one of the very few movies that I have viewed more than once.
It is a poetic animated story with very few spoken words. Imagine a plot that brings together cycling, a small family, and three quirky sisters who are part musicians, part muses, and, when necessary, molls familiar with the darker sides of Belleville/Parisian nightlife.
There are some picturing of rougher things of life, so it is not a movie for children, but perhaps saved for when they can appreciate it: the story, characters, and lovingly drawn details create a world that stays with you long after the cartoon is over.
The emotion of amusement also creates access to consciousness, a powerful way to allow the ‘firing of the synapses’ that lead to fresh new ideas and thought patterns.
Do you have any favorites that have this evergreen quality? I’d love to see them!
Keep laughing – watch cartoons!!
Dorothy Perry is a Chicago photographer capturing the closeness of todays’ urban families. Contact her here.
Putting It Out There
The most valuable lesson I have learned from my mentors is that
A portrait has to be framed.
so your children can grow up
seeing their lives celebrated in picture form
in art they see around their home.
Dorothy Perry is a Chicago photographer of family portraits, modern headshots and personal milestone celebrations. Contact her here.
