The nights in the Hollywood Hills had a spell on me. So much had happened in that home that was nestled into the woods. So many memories of a lady, of triumph, of failure. My Yorkies Larry and Beau were a constant.

My art was not taken for granted. My mother’s visits from the East Coast where charmed. She pushed me further still into realms of my work. She had confidence in me.

It was quiet in the hills and there was music playing from the CDs and from within my soul.

I soared, knowing that I had finally landed.

My Holly Wooed Days

Five years ago I was living in Laurel Canyon on Wonderland Avenue, high above Sunset Boulevard. To get to my house you had to drive up a long, narrow, and winding road. My home was nearly at the top of the mountain and it seemed more like Maine up there among the trees, birds, and the general quiet, than the din of equity called Los Angeles. There were gaggles of hippies, older flower children now, who had squirreled themselves up in the hills. Every now and then I’d see one or more of them at the local convenience store that was located half-way down the mountain.

When you live in the hills, you tend to plan your drives down to the flats with more care—doing several errands at a time made sense. If I needed some milk or a bread, the convenience store was the pit stop.

I had set up my living room as my studio. I also had an easel on the back patio, which was enclosed to prevent my two Yorkshire Terriers, Larry and Beau, from outside predators and their own curiosity.

I was in Hollywood.

In the course of my activities, I met with directors, actors, writers, producers, investors, studio people, and, in time, I had learned the gestalt of the movie business.

The drive down from my house eventually fed into the midst of all the gaudy, bawdy, and elegant action on Sunset Boulevard.

Sure, there were the high profile restaurants, the expensive cars and hookers. But the people walking on the Boulevard were the stars of the show.

During a meeting with a European auteur director, I took out my pad and began another ink and color pencil drawing.

I had gotten into the habit of working on my art during meetings, which allowed me to create my karmic work while engaging in the conversation as needed.

Yes. I could do both at the same time. It is the right and left side of the brain working in harmony.

A few days later, I showed the director the finished piece and asked him if it seemed familiar.

“Is that my wife back there in the middle?” he said.

That, of course, was entirely up to him.

“I call it Percy or Pablo,” I said. “But don’t get caught up in the title. It’s merely to distinguish one work from another.”

The gypsy jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt and the violinist Stephane Grappelly came vividly alive for me one evening.

I had been given a screenplay to read about the life of Django. I knew nothing about the musician. I read the fine screenplay that night and finished in the early A.M.

I leapt up out of bed and went to my drawing table to find a piece I had done the day before. I realized that Django and his musical associate Stephane, and I had already met. They appeared in the piece in front of me.

As a teenager, Django had been severely burned when his trailer caught fire. He lost the use of his left hand, especially the fourth and fifth fingers.

Django was on the right wearing a gypsy-type chapeau and his guitar had melted. A gloved hand with four fingers was there, too. Django’s injured fingers? Stephane, on the left, embraced his fellow musician with feeling.

There is a precise mechanism that controls all that was, is, and will be.

Abundance is having all that you need—not out of mindless and crude greed but out of the understanding that wealth consciousness comes from a generous heart.

Abundance is the physical manifestation of knowing that the source of all material reality comes from a non-material, or transcendental essence, called the Great Creator—God.

The universal abundance machine has no limitations and is available to all of us.

Although I can’t prove it, I’m certain that—all things being equal—everyone gets the opportunity to choose between mediocrity and the unknown.

Robert Frost’s poem, the Road not Taken is just as significant in this moment as the day it was published in 1915.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.