Julie Unplugged

Virtual Book Tour of "At Night, The Dead" by Lisa Ciccarello Visits Julie Unplugged

The dead are everywhere. Their pungent aroma clogs your mind. Especially at night. Mostly, yes, at night.

We can't escape them. The fresh dead: Edward Kennedy, Michael Jackson, perhaps your grandmother, your nephew. The long dead, Marilyn Monroe, Billy Holliday, the man whose crypt above Marilyn Monroe is being sold, on ebay, for his cash-poor-widow to pay her mortgage.

Nor can a reader escape the pull of Lisa Ciccarello's chap book, "At Night, the Dead." The first poem ushers the reader into a dark chamber where she finds herself oddly delighted to be held, trancelike, inside the sanctuary-womb of the dead.

All of the poems include the words, "At Night, the Dead" (Sometimes with more words as well). It begins to feel like a chant or a benedictory incantation for that particular group of words. Following the title you will find a sparse staccato of words which beg to be intoned aloud.

I found myself reading Ciccarello's words aloud at Starbucks or when I was stopped at red lights or spoken into the emptiness of my living room. I murmured gone... nothing... gone.... nothing... like a slowing metronome, remembering and watching death simultaneously.

I heard myself read and say "I am that girl" and I became that girl, no longer a forty-seven year old mother of three in

Bakersfield

,

California

, I was the girl in the poem. I was at night, with the dead. I found myself feeling along windowsills in the dark, hunting for salt by touching it, begging for the vapors of boiling water to touch my thirsty skin.

My favorite of Ciccarello's techniques was her smattering of sweet surprises, like angel-of-death babies that appear unexpectedly within the poems themselves. They peek out from the corner of death's inner chamber, flirting with the reader.

Out of the darkness comes a string of words "whose love is just a series of letters".

When you read the words, "Stop listening" mark the book and close it.

Take the book outside.

Take a breath.

And read the next three poems aloud.

I can not put into words how the following three pages impacted me except to say I don't want to spoil your experience of them or of any of the rest of your time, "At Night, the Dead."

Get Your Copy from Blood Pudding Press on Etsy:

The Virtual Book Tour is brought to you in cooperation with

 If you would care to read some of Julie Jordan Scott's poetry, please visit her poetry blog by clicking this link.

Virtual Book Tour for ReadWritePoem.org and Lisa Ciccarello's At Night the Dead starts here, tomorrow

Tomorrow, my Julie Unplugged blog plays host to the ReadWritePoem.Org Virtual Book tour and I will be sharing my thoughts and reviewing At Night, the Dead  a” darkly delectable poetry collection “ penned by Lisa Ciccarello.

 

 

 

Today – in honor of that and an upcoming poetry performance, walk with me down my own creative path and be sure to check in tomorrow for the First Stop of the Virtual Book Tour.

I oftentimes agree to appear in shows or perform my poetry without giving much additional thought to any possible consequences to those agreements. Case in point – my phone call last night with Ginn Williams, who is producing an upcoming show at Fishlips titled “Two Hours Inside.”

 

She called me to schedule rehearsal time with her and to give me my “the rest of the story” assignment.

 

In those moments I fell simultaneously freshly in love with Ginn and wanted to kick her butt and her event off my calendar. My knees started to buckle under so I did the only reasonable thing I could think to do. I sent a text message to a bunch of my friends, inviting them to see me be excruciatingly uncomfortable and hopefully halfway evocative at the show.

 

(No, I didn’t say provocative, I said evocative. I will leave provocative to some of the other Spoken Word artists.)

 

When I say yes to projects and people push me closer to the end of my rope, I am delighted and I hate it more than I can put into words. I never know exactly where these projects will lead me. What I do know is they will more than likely lead me into new, fresh soil – brand new places of expression I never dared to go before because on my own this sort of travel scares me so badly I can’t see.

 

Somehow in the company of other artists, it is still scary beyond words but not only is it do-able, it is so compelling I have to keep moving, I must show up, I can’t miss out on watching others doing the same thing: being scared blind yet willing for whatever reason you want to label it – to show up and put themselves on the line.

 

We put ourselves on the line in front of an audience.

 

I am nuts.

 

I went through a mental checklist of my work I could bring out, the work that causes the hair on my arms to stick out, mostly. The voice of Miss Nicey Nice was shrieking in my ear so I took by her sweet little pony tails and shoved her into a box under my bed where the other cootie people live.

 

I decided on a theme – “The Me You Don’t Know” – thanks to Ginn’s prodding.

 

People think they know me when really, they have no idea.

 

Now I just need to fill it with twenty minutes of raw, fresh, scarier than life material.

 

What did I write yesterday? What did I suggest YOU do, yesterday?

“Now is the time to risk.”

 

I can do this. I will do this.

 

 

 

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Now is the Time

Yesterday I re-opened my pricey-to-me moleskine water color journal and was smacked in the face by the words of Stephanie Dowrick in her book, Creative Journal Writing, “Notice the questions you have been avoiding. Risk them.”

I vaguely remembered taking out a thin-tipped black sharpie pen to inscribe the words there in a sacred moment, thinking “This quote will frame my writing in this oh-so-special journal”. Shortly thereafter, I closed the journal where it remained for two weeks, lonely and waiting for attention.

I take writing seriously so I do it, usually, whether or not I want to write, I do it.

Like so many others, I sometimes procrastinate. I write early in the day – my morning pages, my gratitudes, my one sentence journaling, and then I often times find myself piddling around with writing, wandering about the house or hopping around social networking sites or occasionally googling quotes which I find oh-so-fascinating, especially when procrastination is the order of the day.

I imagine if my journal was a sentient being she would have rested on her back, chewing on a long piece of some form of grass, a hat covering her face except for in those moments she wanted to gaze quietly at the sky, realizing her owner would eventually recollect herself enough to return.

She wouldn’t be overly concerned, knowing her reluctant-to-risk owner had oodles of fifty cent composition books to be filled.

When I saw the quote “Notice the questions you have been avoiding. Risk them”

waiting for me, my hands drew back, as if they were toddler hands touching a hot stove. I hung my head, remembering now that I had forgotten or perhaps been avoiding my moleskine.

I wrote a bit on the first available page:

“What is it you really want with me and frome < - - -  me. I mean, from me….”

In retrospect, I notice I didn’t even put a question mark at the end. I was too busy giggling at myself for making the error on the page – where I merged “from” and “me” together because I was thinking/narrating as I wrote.

Underneath I asked the next question that begged to be asked.

“What would happen if I stopped pre-narrating my writing?”

The response came quickly.

“You might hear from God, my love.”

“Am I willing to risk hearing from Divinity?” I stopped moving my pen to blink the salt away from my eyes. Yes. I am willing to risk hearing from Divinity.

I decided to take one of my fifty cent composition books and use it as a playground for the questions I was going to risk, a la Stephanie.

For me, the first part of using any composition book is to decorate its cover. The original cover just won’t do for me, I need to personalize it. I had found some old photos which I planned to use so I gathered those materials and sat at the table to see what would be borne for this special “risky questions” edition of my journal.

I covered the journal with gesso and squiggled words into it when it was still wet. “Fall in love with all of it, all of life, silly just right Julie, risk falling in love right now, dear one. Fall into the risk.”

I sat back, unsure of the words that fell so easily into the gesso without any semblance of control from my hand.

This is why I don’t risk questions, Stephanie. They lead to questions and declarations that reach deeply into my gut.

It was just last night I worked on a water-color painting from your same request, “Notice the questions you have been avoiding. Risk them.”

I had painted my way into a strangely shaped something-or-other which for whatever reason lead me to poke away at a familiar yet not often used word from my memory file. The word? Blastocyst.

Don’t let your eyes glaze over when I give you a couple definitions before I give you mine. Here is what Merriam-Webster says about blastocyst, “: the modified blastula of a placental mammal having an outer layer composed of the trophoblast”.

That told me nothing, even though I knew what the word meant.

Here is a better definition, gleaned from a medical website, “A very early embryo consisting of approximately 150 cells. The blastocyst is a spherical cell mass produced by cleavage of the zygote (fertilized egg). It contains a fluid-filled cavity, a cluster of cells called the inner cell mass (from which embryonic stem cells are derived) and an outer layer of cells called the trophoblast (that forms the placenta)..”

Here is what I know of the term “blastocyst” which comes from the days when I was trying, very insistently and persistently, to get pregnant.

I learned during that time that the time a “very early embryo” becomes a blastocyst is also a time when many “babies-to-be” don’t make it to the end of the process. When I look at my children now I see them as extreme miracles since I know how many times they could have not made it from being conceived to being born.  What many of you don’t know is I had challenges to fertility when I was younger. I know, you see me as happy-mom-of-three but at one point I was a Mom-to-a-stillborn-baby-it-took-three-years-to-conceive.

Let’s wander back to the Blastocyst. This is the time when these cells determine their jobs, when they figure out which cells will become a hand and which cells will become a knee cap and which will become a brain or lungs or blood.

My watercolor painting reminded me, I free-wrote, of a blastocyst or maybe, possibly the top of the fallopian tube after it lets the egg go, releases it into the womb – or at least the drawings I had seen in my wanderings around the land of fertility.

A question tapped me on the shoulder.

“What is a blastocyst?”

I responded metaphorically in free writing: “It is a reminder, a survivor. It is a sweet fertilized egg that made it. “

I continued, “I wonder if my months and years of infertility were months of atypical blastocysts, children-to-be that gave up rather than subject themselves to the pain of living in a world that doesn’t welcome people who are different than the norm?”

 

My pen became a fist, shaking in the air. “This is why I don’t want to risk questions, Stephanie. They lead to more questions which reach even more deeply into my gut – without warning, without a pre-interlude bit of risk-inducing music. My gut wants to be left alone today, not beleaguered and bewildered by more questions.”

I took a deep breath and kept writing.

“What if the questions you were risking felt more like a gentle breeze, blowing your hair as you reclined gracefully on a picnic blanket?”

That very question made me laugh. I like that thought – if risky questions were like that I could answer them all day and the next one and the next one.

“What if risk felt like that rather than frightening?” I paused, only momentarily before the command came from the end of my pen.

“This is the time to welcome risk.”

My writing goes through certain phases, too, I realize as I re-read my words, wondering what is next for this collection of words I have splashed upon the page.

I have had countless early works that never made it through the writing blastocyst phase. Just like the babies who didn’t make it, the writing that didn’t make it is how it was supposed to be. I suppose if I risk asking the questions and allow Divinity the room to be heard, I may learn more.

On my journal, the closing words on this topic for today were, “Now is the time to risk, Silly-Just-Right Julie.”

Now is the time to risk.

 

== ++ ==

© 2009
Julie Jordan Scott

 

Stephanie Dowrick's book, Creative Journal Writing, may be found on Amazon by clicking here.

 

Essays like this are published in Daily Passion Activator, Julie's long running ezine which is delivered directly into your email box - Why not Subscribe today? It's free.

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The Joy of Mammoth Mistakes

In an exercise during this week’s Intensive Writing Camp, one of the activities revolved around what our writing wants us to know.

 

I have a practice that goes like this: if I am going to ask my students to experience a writing workout, I need to do it first.  I created a hand out for them and put my own example right on the page. I had to publicly announce that my writing wanted me to “make mistakes,” among other things.

 

I could deal with my writing wanting me to make mistakes, but then my writing got more specific.

 

My writing wanted me not only to make mistakes, my writing wanted me to make mammoth mistakes.

 

Oh, please – writing – I am not good at making mistakes. They embarrass me. I know, in a free write the other day I wrote about glitter in my writing, vis a vis bathing suits I wear as a child. I know I free wrote and responded to the question

 

“What does glitter symbolize for me?”

 

“Glitter symbolizes what I wanted to express as a child and wasn’t allowed to express. It was as simple as picking out a bathing suit. I wanted a glittery, frou frou bathing suit with every ounce of my being. My Mom wanted simple. She didn’t get (or for whatever reason couldn’t/wouldn’t) me a fancy bathing suit. The adult me says “the plain, red bathing suit was probably cheaper and ultimately more practical” but underneath that simmers, “I don’t like the way red looks on me, never did, never will. I don’t want to look like everyone else, I want to look like me. I want to shine and shimmer, I want to reflect light. I want to giggle and be slightly ever so slightly embarrassing-in-a-good-way”

 

I don’t enjoy being embarrassed about my writing. I don’t believe in “slightly embarrassed in a good way” when it comes to my words. Maybe I am meant to become more comfortable with it. Maybe that is the point. I do know that right in this moment I don’t like public lashing about the mistakes I have made – mammoth or not so mammoth. I take the negative comments when they come because I know they are bound to come. I know my favorite authors get such comments constantly.

 

I doubt they relish it, either.

So, writing – what is up with wanting me to make mammoth mistakes?

 

What are mammoth mistakes, anyway? I took the question to the page.

 

“Mammoth mistakes are loud, smelly, wrinkled and grey mistakes.

 

“Spewage and spittle from a long chute, leaving a swinging path leading to unknowns and leave large footprints that are deep, so deep other people may trip over them.

 

“Mammoth mistakes leave me wondering, such as is it a mistake when a mammoth knocks over a tree she is trying to eat? I wonder. I know, I know, my writing wants me to write into the wonder.

 

I sat back in my chair, smiling. This was fun, this was joyful, this was interesting.

 

I had never given much thought to a Mammoth footprint before yet I literally felt myself stumbling across one. In my mind’s eye I could fill the footprint with brightly colored block letters.

 

Who knew Mammoth Mistakes could be so playful, so energetic, so joyful?

 

Who decides Mammoth Mistakes are bad?

 

I bet some of you are even questioning my mistake in capitalizing Mammoth Mistakes.

 

The thought of the rumbling caused my choices in capital letters makes me laugh, fills me with joy from the soles of my feet to the top of my head.

 

Suddenly, mistakes are entirely new for me and this message moves from mishmash to understanding.

 

I get it now. The joy of mammoth mistakes, in either lower case or capital letters, both are just right.

 

Just like you and your mistakes, writing or otherwise.

 

Just right.

 

 

© 2009

Julie Jordan Scott

Essays like this are published in Daily Passion Activator, Julie's long running ezine which is delivered directly into your email box - Why not Subscribe today? It's free.

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Loving and Playing with Disappointment

I put myself in a lavender colored square room, bouncing a ball.

 

It is white, with the block letters “DISAPPOINTMENT” scribed on them.

 

I am sitting in the corner, cross legged, bouncing in the way a person sitting crouched in a corner can bounce. It isn’t fulfilling, not very bouncy.

I rise to my feet and bounce “DISAPPOINTMENT” so that I can feel it slap the palm of my hands as it comes up. Stinging my palms, I notice my blood vessels splattering my skin with red as if the “DISAPPOINTMENT” becomes “Ouch!”

 

I watch red, splotchy “ouch” cover my skin, like chicken pox or measles or an extreme case of acne. “OUCH!” what I feel in my spirit takes form in his lavender colored box, the place where I have come in order to play with disappointment rather than sit here, at my computer, thinking of the thousand and one ways I “shouldn’t feel disappointed!”

 

I see little Miss Nicey Nice over one shoulder telling me to write my gratitude list. Did it. Still feel sucky, Miss NN. I scowl and throw the ball, hard, at her head.

 

She ducks and for the first time of the day I laugh.

 

Wow. I can laugh at being mean? Me, the person people think is quintessential good girl?

 

Yes. I can laugh at being mean at an object of my own mind.

 

The “DISAPPOINTMENT” ball dribbles itself into a corner and I run over, laughing to pick it up and hurl it against the wall. It is now a large racquetball, I can hear the wizzing sound of a racquetball from a boy at

Dana

Hills

, WIZZ, pop on the skin of my calf.

 

Pain, which I pretended away with a laugh.

 

The fifteen-year-old me wore SHOULD! like a body-tattoo. I never showed disappointment or embarrassment because I was told I needed to be tougher so I became tougher or at least looked like I became tougher.

 

I brought the image of that jerky boy who wiz bonged my calf with the speedy ball and had him tied to the so girly lavender wall. Because it is my room, it has my rules.

I stood in front of him and threw the ball in his direction. He thought I was aiming directly at him and for once he was scared by me rather than the other way around. I never hit him though. That would have been too easy. I remembered playing right field in PE that same year. The softball final, I would have rather died than play every inning in the almost-not-there position of right field, but I stayed there because we were short a couple players.

 

He and his buddies purposefully hit long fly balls out to my domain.

They didn’t know I had a good eye and could catch anything they hit to me, which I did.

 

Over and over and over I caught their fly balls.

 

My team miraculously beat their time in part, I like to think, because of the right fielder psyching them out. Brava, me.

 

Those were yesterday’s disappointments. It is all well and good to remember those, but I need the bouncing ball to be today’s disappointment.

I need the ball with the block letters “DISAPPOINTMENT” to be the here and now. I need to hear, to see, to feel fully the “DISAPPOINTMENT” that is playing in my veins in this precise moment of time.

 

I am disappointed “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” got postponed.

 

I am disappointed I didn’t talk to Cory as I left last night – I didn’t bother thanking her for casting me and now I won’t see her until closing weekend. I am disappointed because that makes me feel like a bitch and I am better than a bitch. I am a genuinely good person rather than a genuinely bad person. I don’t believe there is such a thing, anyway.

 

I make mistakes. I am not the quintessential good girl and I am a decent person.

 

I am disappointed I forgot that.

 

I am disappointed in myself for not reaching out and expressing myself.

 

I am disappointed to still be in

Bakersfield

after all these years when a “normal” person would have left years ago. I am disappointed I will have to help Katherine change her schedule because the high school can’t ever get a single schedule right and every year we go through this because what they say is so in the preceding Spring is never what is actually so in the Fall. I am disappointed because I will have to waste my time AGAIN fixing their errors.

 

I am disappointed today, in this moment.

 

I am disappointed.

 

I am not shoulding myself away from being disappointed, I am not wallowing in it. I am just allowing it to be, giving it space so that it can know I am paying attention to it and it can get off my shoulder, crawl out of my neck, and stop shutting off my power supply.

 

I am realizing I have had “DISAPPOINTMENT” as a thread throughout my theatre experiences this season, starting with “In the Boom, Boom Room” with similar themes plaguing each  experience… lack of communication – misunderstandings between cast members, crew and theatre  – cast members falling apart – shows being cancelled. This has plagued three shows I have been in this season. Last season I experienced “DISAPPOINTMENT” when I had a role  that was the most significant role I ever attempted and the Director had a “come to Jesus” conversation with me and I managed to pull it off.

 

Is there judgment seeping from my skin, perhaps, that other Directorial teams aren’t able to have the same level of compassion, the same level of coaching-direction with these actors as my Director did with me?

 

What if I stopped being disappointed in the situation, put the ball away, stopped putting my energy into bouncing and fussing with the disappointment and instead, played with it like I usually play with things – maybe dress it up. Make it girly. Curl its hair, put blush and powder and sweet smelling oils and stuff behind its ears.

 

 I could make take disappointment out of the aggressive zone and instead, put it in the lavender square beauty parlor or spa. Massage disappointment, let myself be massaged so the disappointment washes out of me.

 

What if I painted it, in a girly way?

What if I wrote it into a poem?

 

There would be tears – there is nothing wrong with that.

 

I don’t have to always look on the bright side.

 

The show was postponed

Sadness tugs at my heart strings

Just two fewer shows….

 

I put it into focus like that and I immediately hear “Stop yer whining.”

 

It isn’t the fewer shows that bothers me, it is the missing Joe that bothers me. It is that it was over without me knowing it. I didn’t get to say “I believe in you”.

 

Now I will believe in Cory.

 

And I will believe in myself to scrape the grouchdom off my feet before stepping into the theater tonight.

 

There is a quote from a theater thinker – he talks about wiping the stuff from the outside off your feet before entering into the theater. Leave it outside.

 

In light of not having that quote, I found some others.

 

"Forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair."
Kahlil Gibran

 

"Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads."
Henry David Thoreau

 

I will consciously shift – and know that playing with disappointment is significant and remembering that disappointment just is – it doesn’t cut off my power supply, I cut off my power supply.

 

I can choose to turn it back on through remembering….

 

“that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair.”
Kahlil Gibran

 

and that

 

“Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.”
Henry David Thoreau

 

For some reason James Dean called out to me:

 

“An actor must interpret life, and in order to do so must be willing to accept all the experiences life has to offer. In fact, he must seek out more of life than life puts at his feet.”

Perhaps this is why I feel so much.

 

Perhaps this is why Disappointment oozes from my veins while it barely seems to impact other people. And even when I feel disappointment, I need to continue to play with my life’s work, which is, as Mary Oliver says…”My work is loving the world”...

 

And stay there with "My work is loving the world"....

 

BECAUSE my work is loving the world and sometimes, because I love the world, I feel disappointment more deeply.

One Sentence Journaling

I have been writing an almost daily one sentence journal for close to a year now. It has helped me polish my writing skills in several ways, but the most beneficial is using my editing hat.

What is the most important moment of the day? What is its message? Where is my focus? What words will I choose to help it sound the most effective and melodious?

Here are this week's offerings so far:

August 6, 2009

 

A near perfect day: knitting in community, collaborating creatively with a group of artists including Emma, and closing out the day howling with coyotes, sharing a cigarette and conversing about a variety of aspects of life with Coryn while moonbathing.

 

Note, I don't normally smoke. I smoke about four cigarettes a year and when I do, it is a very mindful smoke. Coryn is quitting and this was her only cigarette of the day which made it a rather remarkable experience.

 

August 5, 2009

 

I hit my emotional marks tonight, finally, but once I started crying it was tough when we kept stopping and starting and stopping and starting and stopping and starting.

 

August 3, 2009

 

Samuel and I art journaled and Emma went on her way to another overnight adventure.

 

August 2, 2009

 

Rehearsal and connection, throughout the day, and I wonder what that smile meant… if anything?

 

August 1, 2009

 

Emma is home and sleepy, perhaps because I was out doing my work for the fairy queen.

Writing in Community

One of the most valuable methods of keeping myself inspired as a writer is to meet with other writers so that we can write separately, together. I have been meeting regularly with a group of women for well over a year now. I have known most of them for several years. Yesterday Jodi facilitated the writing. I enjoyed what came out so much, here is what came from the tip of my pencil as I sat at my kitchen table, phone to my ear.

 

Mrs. Bourke Speaks to Me 

 

When I make my bones my home my posture changes. I sit on the edge of my chair, feet poised, pointed toe, ballet becomes the form of choice for my movement.

 

Mrs. Bourke said it, long ago, in her living room on Midland Avenue, “You are so light on your feet, Julie.” My chin, lifted, alight – folk music from

India

, Mom-made Sari, my ten-year-old bones my home then. I was blessed out, little me, away from a home of challenges and crystal doorknob induced night terrors.

 

Mrs. Bourke proclaimed my lightness. I believed her. My bare feet, arched, lifted up, grounded and heavenward.

 

My bones are my home when I allow myself to feel angry, when I back off, retreat, pull the “closed” sign down because of her: that woman, that her, the showing-off-ness of her, attention whore bitch, my bones grumble, weary, wrap around my heart and breath like armor. I note her whisps of hair, brushed away from her eyes. She is surrounded by her middle-aged mean girl posse.

 

I let myself be with that when my bones are home.

 

I don’t let fake airyness take over, instead I stay grounded so that Mrs. Bourke’s refrain may continue to speak to me.

 

The

Adirondack

Chair

 

My stripped of duty self, following the edge of my heart right into the waiting Adirondack chair, calling me to sit, to watch, to witness.

 

(I got distracted right now, by this duty-in-the-moment, of motherhood, of Emma, frustration wrapped anger, let it go, my shoulders, released again. Sam hoots, matching a computer generated buzz.)

 

I breathe back into the “stripped of duty” cause, see the empty-me-suit, deflated and lying prostrate on the sand next to the

Adirondack

chair. I think the chair is from a paperback book cover image. The deflated me is simply me, without spirit, soul, breath, bone and skin.

 

My pen stops. My attitude labels what is duty and what is not.

 

Privilege, proclaim that. “Mary gifted with privilege and stripped of duty.” The Adirondack chair me inflates with being and stands up to take care of what she is privileged to take care of, now – which is writing, this, here, now. 

Samuel and Mommy make an Art Journal Page

Samuel and I collaborated on an Art Journal page and then he wanted to make this video. He loves making Mommy and Samuel videos, obviously. I always blow his big endings though... maybe next time Mommy will get it right.

 

Speaking of Talk and Talking....

I am blessed because I have several friends I meet on a regular basis simply for talking. Love these moments of conversation. Whenever I fill in any sort of "things I like" lists (like on social networking) I always say I like deep conversation) but somehow this prompt got me going on the word "talk" itself.

I wrote it out, first, in my journal and last night, I did an art journal page. I adore the way it turned out.

"talk as if no one else can hear you

talk as if the only one listening is yourself, or me

talk - unfettered, unstructured, unrelenting

drink the words you talk

talk, how is it different than speaking?

talk, staccato, tongue drumming teeth

talk - talk - talk like tock TIC tock TIC tock TIC

talk - give voice to my eyes, stinging

talking doesn't "give voice" it blurts voice

talk "I can't tell you this"~ I can't speak ~

I can't not talk ~ I can't start talking ~ I
can't emphasize enough, I won't talk louder than
a hoarse, unkempt whisper shout.

"We need to talk" is different from "speak to
me" <-- --> "talk to me" <---> is it
talk spackle, cover the conversation holes,
fill them with dense wallboard substitute?
talk is tall, wide armed."

:-)

And my writing was interrupted.

It didn't feel complete, so the art journaling and my thoughts took it further.

Something magic has been happening, lately, as my writing productivity has taken off and my art and collaborations are right there, close at hand and heart.

I don't know what it is AND I am grateful for it.

= = =

 

Essays like this are published in Daily Passion Activator, Julie's long running ezine which is delivered directly into your email box - Why not Subscribe today? It's free.

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