Path: Some times the best path chooses you.
-- Patrick Rhone
"What path chose you this year?" asks Meredith from Cultivate2012
Phew. I am getting tired of talking about this all the time and it is only day 2 of December.
One path chose me this year: cancer. Melanoma to be specific. It is a path that pisses me off, quite frankly. I am working through it. Sometimes I abhor this scar on my face, other times I think it is awesome and still other times I forget it ever happened.
I like that last option the best.
I haven’t reached that giddy excitement to just be alive like many cancer survivors do.
Another path chose me: branching out creatively.
Yesterday at a soul collage workshop the facilitator said, “Well, you know how it is, Julie… as a painter you understand.” I didn’t say anything because I am surely not a painter, I insist. I am a poet, yes. I am a writer, yes. I am a performer, yes. I am certainly not a painter. I play with photography, sure I’ve sold some pieces and I have leaped into mixed media and jewelry making but no, thank you, I am not a painter and then someone I respect deeply not only referred to me as a painter, he called me specifically an “abstract painter.”
This seems ridiculous. Why do people keep insisting I am on a path which I know I am not on?
Silly people.
Perhaps this is partially because of my melanoma: I have
pulled back from theater because I am concerned my appearance will be upsetting
to audience members and “pull them out of the moment” that is, if any directors
would be foolish enough to cast me.
Cancer chose me. Deepened creativity chose me. I can’t be angry for either. I believe I was at choice with the deepening creativity now I guess I need to be at choice in not saying, “No I am not a ____, if I was that I would be horrible at it!”
I also want to shift to being at choice with my cancer, more in that I do not see cancer as a “thing that happened to me” or “something that chose me because I am somehow wrong, bad, or I deserve it.”
Each prompt this year is helping me get more clear.
By the end of December, I should be exceptionally brilliant. (See me laugh and hold my tongue firmly in cheek.)
Thank you, Cultivate 2012!
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Julie Jordan Scott has been a Life & Creativity Coach, Writer, Facilitator and Teleclass Leader since 1999. She is also an award winning Actor, Director, Artist and Mother Extraordinaire. She was twice the StoryTelling Slam champion in Bakersfield.
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