Have you been trying to find your purpose in this life?
Until this pandemic, I think many of us thought that meant getting out there and hustling and grinding to get up some corporate ladder of achievement. Yes, we need to make money to live, but isn’t money also just energy? When did we normalize just working, paying bills, and then dying?
If you live your “purpose,” you live “on purpose” in alignment with your values and beliefs. Things are easy there. You can hear the still small voice and respond to the call. Or, as Sharon Belknap says, you can hear the invitation from Spirit. Sometimes it is through a person. But mostly Spirit.
Some of you may have seen her art on the sands of Cardiff. Maybe you picked up or were given one of her Tidbits of Love (www.tidbitsoflove.com).
Perhaps you found yourself in her loving gaze as you passed by. This woman exudes Love.
Recently, there’s been some good press around the sand mandalas she’s been creating at low tide throughout the coastal county. I think that is great, but I wanted to delve into the woman and how she came to live a life filled with passion — truly divine in all aspects. She most definitely has a soul on fire.
I asked Sharon what her purpose was in life. She answered, “To rediscover and heal a love within me. A way of being that is original to my essence. It’s unique to me. To be in the world, witness and participate with awareness, alignment even with contrasts. Embracing all of it.”
I asked if she felt she was living her Divinity. She answered, “Divinity is my finger held up to the wind. I see which way the wind is blowing, and I trim my sails in flow with the joy of feeling the Presence. It is my essence.”
What’s up with the sand art lately? “It is an expression of my divinity motivated by how my heart feels.”
Can you dig it?
The interview went on like this, so I told her that, you know, Sharon, not everybody I run into talks like this. How did you get to this place of seeming eternal bliss?
Like many artists, Sharon was born with a gift to draw, mostly a pencil or pen on paper. Leaving college with a Fine Arts degree, the segue to illustrate and use graphics came with a computer. This took her away from her soul as she began conforming to societal norms looking outside herself to find herself and her art.
Although she found “success” and still does work for large companies, creating designs, logos, and websites, her clients these days are more in alignment with her core values.
Identifying to herself deep within that something was missing, she ran into someone with a sketchbook in a local coffee shop six years ago. Inspired, she reclaimed her Love for sketching. An ember was lit in her heart, and she returned to her first love. Pen and Ink.
She started an international online class that encouraged her to step out of her role and rigid expectations around being an “artist.”
This time she yielded to the burning desire to simply draw again and reawakened her heart spark.
She started sharing some of her Facebook images and joined an online challenge to post sketches for seven days.
Tiny, easy drawings pulled from her imagination; a ladybug, a hummingbird, a smiling sun, a wave. She used watercolor, a medium she hadn’t dared play with before but again, listening to the gentle urges within. She began sharing them on a global sketchbook artist site, and the response was enormous.
People began to ask for them, and she went to the next level of manufacturing and packaging and marketing, and Tidbits of Love were born. The sand art is just a larger version of the Love that is left behind with each offering.
I lured Sharon away from Cardiff and got her to do a piece this last weekend in Oceanside at the Carlsbad border. I was the invitation this time. She said yes. And Spirit, as well as her son, who passed away recently, most certainly showed up.
As Bill Withers sang Lovely Day, people slowed their stroll while the sun set in the background and tried to read the letters scribed within the mandala. One couple started dancing. A child went inside the heart and posed for a picture. People began to talk to one another as they gathered around the art. They smiled and were touched by the whimsical Love infused design.
They beamed Love and appreciation. It was an unexpected surprise in nature—Love in Action. It was something to behold.
Sharon Belknap embodies Love and Divinity. She is Essence Expressing. She is a Soul on Fire.
