“We have to dare to be ourselves, however frightening or strange that self may prove to be.”
May Sarton
Who is it who said authenticity is pretty on the outside?
In today’s video there is some videography one may call really messy or one may call exceptionally “in the moment.” I prefer to see it as in creative presence because that is exactly what the focus was: intuitive journeying into that precise moment - living into today.
I made this video after a morning of forward progress, backward progress, pushing against and falling forward. I needed fresh air and processing so back I went to my Palo Verde/Volunteer Palm friend for some inspiration.
Take a moment to watch and listen not for the exceptional editing - there is none - or the artistry of the filming - it is definitely more about presence than polish.
There is a reason you are here, watching. Now engage and listen and take note.
Now that you’ve watched the video I can tell you the “biggest” thing for me was seeing the scar on my face from my melanoma. It isn’t always that noticeable, but from the angle and from the shadow there is no mistaking the heart-shaped scar with the slightly jagged line toward the back of my ear.
That, in and of itself, is a metaphor.
My scar isn’t pretty in the conventional sense AND it is beautiful AND it is me.
What is my scar saying to me?
I will write a response to that today.
The symbolism that appears in our life doesn’t necessarily speak all at once, it is more of a slow download, a peaceful hug that takes its time to be felt completely.
I can’t pretend away my scar any more than I can pretend away any of my life. I can mindfully interact with whatever shows up - be it an unconventional tree or my dog, Beth, snuggled up to me as I write or an inspiring quote from Vironika Tugaleva that reminds me of what I now know: “You’ll never know who you are unless you shed who you pretend to be.”
Now it is your turn to go more deeply into your rich life experiences and what surprises surround you in symbols and metaphor.
This sweet bird reminds me to go beyond conventional listening.
Like I say in the video, “Little bird, what are you trying to tell me?”
# # # # #
Julie Jordan Scott is a writer, creative life coach, speaker, performance poet, Mommy-extraordinaire and mixed-media artist whose Writing Camps and Writing Playgrounds permanently transform people's creative lives. Watch for the announcement of new programs coming in Spring, 2015 and beyond.
Check out the links below to follow her on a bunch of different social media channels, especially if you find the idea of a Word-Love Party bus particularly enticing.
Use metaphors to enliven your writing, your mixed-media art and your curiosity to inspire your further creative growth-
This morning I've been singing Jackson Browne's "Late for the Sky" into my empty house. I've been remembering how much I enjoy his 'under produced' earlier albums: For Everyman, Late for the Sky and his self-named first album. Something starts to shift with The Pretender - or at least it seems to - that starts to subtract some of that authentic poet I fell in love with in high school.
For the first time in years, I've been creating my own version of underproduced videos which invite you more deeply into your creative process while you just go about living your life. To just experience your life and on the way, find yourself reborn artistically.
With that said, check out what came about day before yesterday when I was walking at a park near my house.
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What metaphor do you see?
What is it speaking to you?
I followed up with a second video which has more surprises for you and shows you * live, unedited, uncut * what I discovered when I went back and visited my PaloVerde/Volunteer palm tree again. See that video here.
Julie Jordan Scott is a writer, creative life coach, speaker, performance poet, Mommy-extraordinaire and mixed-media artist whose Writing Camps and Writing Playgrounds permanently transform people's creative lives. Watch for the announcement of new programs coming in Spring, 2015 and beyond.
Check out the links below to follow her on a bunch of different social media channels, especially if you find the idea of a Word-Love Party bus particularly enticing.
Join the Productivity & Playfulness on February 27 -
Passion Activator Friday will be here all day February 27, 2015 so you can "Have Fun While Getting It Done!"
Passion Activator Friday is a "Yes. we can!" laboratory of intense, purposeful productivity in community scattered across the globe through the power of teleconferencing bridge lines. The concept is simple:
Intention + Laser-like nuggets of time + a Community cheering you on = Wildy Rich and Abundant productivity.
Stop wasting time ~ stay ultra focused on your most important task of the day and get cheered on just for showing up and doing it.
Do you have a project shouting for some intense attention? Join us... and yes, you heard me right... it is even free of charge. How can you miss?
YES! Our next Passion Activator Friday with teleconferencing withh be Friday, February 27 ~ starting at 6:45 AM Pacific time. Join us for hourly accountability and celebration calls throughout the day (as many or as few as you choose) up until 2:45 PM Pacific time ~
(If you know you want to participate, please scroll to the bottom of the page to register for email updates and the dial in number for the bridge line to call for inspirational check ins.)
Are you:
Having difficulty getting motivated to complete projects or clear clutter or just get those last details managed?
Maybe you are a one-person business, perhaps in the creative or healing arts, who would like to hang out at a "virtual water cooler" with other folks who are like minded, like souled and like hearted -
Buried by half-dones, niggling clutter or piles of stuff you can't seem to get to without support?
We have a way to solve your "just can't seem to get it done" blues with Passion Activator Friday!
Passion Activator Friday, in a nutshell: a day of intentional productivity in a supportive community of caring, active, focused individuals who gather every hour to set their intention - then take action - then report back in to cheer one another and get support for the next activity on "the list."
The intention is to schedule a whole day or a half day to handle things that are lingering, undone, need to be communicated – anything you’ve been meaning to get to that you want to clear off your plate. It can be a bigger project or several things like creating a new program, painting a room (I did that on one call) or a bunch of things like, paying bills, clearing off emails, running some needed errands, returning some phone calls, filing papers, de-cluttering – get the picture?
FRIDAY, February 27 - Simply fill out the simple subscription form below to receive reminders and updates as well as the dial in number for our calls.
If you have any questions or would like to receive any passion activator pointers from me, email me:
Julie Jordan Scott is a writer, creative life coach, speaker, performance poet, Mommy-extraordinaire and mixed-media artist whose Writing Camps and Writing Playgrounds permanently transform people's creative lives. Watch for the announcement of new programs coming in Spring, 2015 and beyond.
Check out the links below to follow her on a bunch of different social media channels, especially if you find the idea of a Word-Love Party bus particularly enticing.
to blossom, to bloom, to reflect, retreat and create.
Unlike literary granny Virginia Woolf who said, "A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write," I have never in my adulthood had a room of my own. I don’t have a space dedicated to myself or my endeavors. I share space with my family members, my animals and all my creative projects.
There is no “getting away from it” unless I opt to take myself out of my house for a thirty minute or one hour extra mini-retreat to restore my spirits.
Sunday morning I got the itch to go so I grabbed my sketch pad, my notebook and a blanket and decided to head out to the blossoming almond orchards not far from my home. A week ago I had visited and found myself completely enamored with the sensual banquet amidst what looks, for much of the year, an ordinary grove of trees in an agricultural area filled with groves of similar trees.
For a few weeks in February and March, local Bakersfield almond orchards become a slice of heaven on earth.
In those times they also become the perfect retreat space for creative people like us. In seeking spots like this, I have to believe there are tucked away gems in every area if we keep our eyes and hearts open to the possibilities. There might have been a time when I thought it completely audacious to sit against an almond tree in some anonymous farmer’s orchard.
Now I not only sit against a variety of almond trees, I have been known to lie down next to them, to soak up their scents - to listen to their murmurings.
Yesterday I noticed nuances about the blossoms that fell like a gentle snow as my pencil moved across my page. A bouquet started to form on my sketch book and I noticed some of the petals had darker pink seams on them and some had no seams at all.
This detail fascinated me and prompted me to roll onto my belly, running my hands through the petals on the ground to determine how common the seams might be.
I took my shoes off and enjoyed feeling the moist soil under my feet through the petal-snow. When I sat back down on the blanket to write and sketch, I was enamored with the colors on the soles of my feet.
I went from feeling overwhelmed yet flat and numb to feeling alive and refreshed and new.
Through sketching and taking photos and writing, through smelling and touching and listening I returned to myself, gently.
I was ready to go back to face the routine of my day and get the tasks done ahead of me with a clear mind and an open heart.
I might not have a room of my own, but I do have a will of my own to make the most of what I do have even if that includes falling in love with an agricultural area and taking a 45 minute retreat rather than a weekend at the beach. I would love the latter, but the former soothes my soul, too.
My friend Jennifer Louden says, “Carve out the time….Time wants you to realize that she is the most precious and irreducible fact in your live. Make her into what you will” Yesterday I carved out time and I carved out space and I opened my heart to create in that time and space.
I once again understood time as holiness and the space around me as precious.
As I write this, I feel the same spaciousness I felt sitting under the almond tree. Delighted expansiveness all around me and within me.
Julie Jordan Scott is a writer, creative life coach, speaker, performance poet, Mommy-extraordinaire and mixed-media artist whose Writing Camps and Writing Playgrounds permanently transform people's creative lives. Watch for the announcement of new programs coming in Spring, 2015 and beyond.
Check out the links below to follow her on a bunch of different social media channels, especially if you find the idea of a Word-Love Party bus particularly enticing.
It started like most Saturday mornings, my mind meandering down my to-do list, juggling the needs of myself and my family members. I walked out to my car to start the "busy-anything-but-relaxing-weekend-day" only to discover my tire was flat. I had spent the night at a friend’s house and had envisioned a smooth, quiet ride in the early morning of a very busy day.
It wasn't happening.
I knew the culprit was a slow leak caused by a nail pushing its way into my tire.
My solution?
Drive to the nearest gas station and add air. It would hold at least through my busy day.
Slowly I drove to the closest gas station whose air station was naturally broken.
Four blocks to the next gas station which somehow didn’t have an air station.
Four more blocks and I backed my car into the stall next to the air station. There was a U-haul there, too, and shelves for people merchandising their Valentine’s Day cheap-and-convenient hideous baskets of junk made by the poor of developing countries.
Naturally the place where I was supposed to put quarters was jammed.
I didn’t care, though, I marched into the cashier and told her my circumstance. “I’ll start the air,” she said, pressing the top secret “free” air button under her counter a handful of us know to ask about when nails cause such slow leaks.
I bent to fill my tire with air and laughed.
“What a metaphor! My entire life feels like this slow leak. I just need one of those secret buttons someone can push to start the flow of air moving into my being when I get deflated!”
I thought about the events I would be attending that day: a picnic and a celebration of life - both filled with people who offer me flow simply by showing up and smiling and when I’m really lucky, offering a hug.
An hour later, I saw a new friend named Jazmin. “Hi!” she said and hugged me. She is the same age as my daughter, Katherine, who lives three-thousand miles away and I miss very much. I held Jazmin in a hug and when I felt her start to pull away I said, “May I hug you just a minute longer?”
She laughed and when we released one another, we were closer than when the hug started. My smile was wider and my heart felt warm.
Jazmin added air without even knowing. I gratefully accepted.
Julie Jordan Scott is a writer, creative life coach, speaker, performance poet, Mommy-extraordinaire and mixed-media artist whose Writing Camps and Writing Playgrounds permanently transform people's creative lives. Watch for the announcement of new programs coming in Spring, 2015 and beyond.
Check out the links below to follow her on a bunch of different social media channels, especially if you find the idea of a Word-Love Party bus particularly enticing.
One of the secret weapon beliefs in my creative arsenal is, “When one gets stuck, the best remedy may be to take a break with a completely different approach.” I needed to use it again this week.
I was struggling with a class assignment that was all wrapped up in language.
I just didn’t seem to get the energetic barrier down with solely words, so I pulled out one of my “bits of paper” boxes and reached in without attachment. My hands fell upon a repurposed junk mail book I last worked on in December.
I opened the book-in-progress and impulsively made the outline for a face.
I added completely unpolished eyes and eyebrows and a mouth and suddenly the face had a name and a soft voice, urging me in my homework project. I knew I was onto something.
Sometimes I forget my love of paper and color and mixing up the goodies to make something different, especially when I have a lot of writing and theater circling about me. The last few days, though, the call to layer “stuff” became much stronger than my call to stay stuck.
Staying stuck is never comfortable, but when your heart and your thought process stay open to different possibilities, extraordinary results will come.
Don’t fuss over being stuck, just set your struggle aside and be ready to work on something else. That working on something else may be a simple as singing along with a video or curling your hair in a different way and it may be starting a painting rather than writing another headline.
Keep a “five minute box” (or envelope or journal or sewing kit.) These hold projects you ccan work on for five minutes at a time and make a real difference as well as glean insights.
Approach any creative block as a preschooler might: with playful curiosity. We only learn as we get older that there are “right ways” and “wrong ways’. Once you begin to de-program yourself to play rather than get plugged up, you may not even need articles like these anymore!
Julie Jordan Scott is a writer, creative life coach, speaker, performance poet, Mommy-extraordinaire and mixed-media artist whose Writing Camps and Writing Playgrounds permanently transform people's creative lives. Watch for the announcement of new programs coming in Spring, 2015 and beyond.
Check out the links below to follow her on a bunch of different social media channels, especially if you find the idea of a Word-Love Party bus particularly enticing.
An entirely different way to look at time management --
My eldest daughter, Beyunca, texted me last night asking if I could babysit first thing in the morning.
I have to confess my first thought was, “Oh, no, seriously? My precious time rituals will be shattered! This is why I opted out of babysitting full time. I love my grandbaby but my life work is on the line here!”
My second thought was to discern how long “this task would take.”
I know, not very loving or giving or compassionate.
I agreed, setting the intention I would invest the rest of my day well. What would “losing” a couple hours hurt, right?
When I woke up this morning, I decided when I babysat I would take Jaxon to Hart Park. “I have some stale bread to get rid of to feed the ducks with,” I explained to my daughter as I got the baby dressed and out the door as quickly as possible after I arrived.
We got to the park and drove right past the assorted ducks, my usual stopping point.
My heart lead us to a path my friend Michelle introduced me to the previous week, close to where the peacocks live.
I parked the car and put Jaxon on his feet. I didn’t bring his backpack to create a harder workout for myself, I wanted instead to create a Granny-Grandson nature hike with both pairs of our feet on the ground.
On this day, he could walk and he could explore. He could pick up sticks and pinecones and decomposing leaves from last year. He could open his eyes widely at the sight of a peacock and run after it with the lustful detachment toddlers master which I would like to remember more of the time.
He came to a block - a curb taller than he is used to lifting himself over - and I stood back to watch what he would do. He became nature in those moments and I became the nerdy-science-class-child, witnessing. With that hurdle crossed with a Granny assist, I carried him down a hill onto the trail and off we went, along the river, slowly gathering in the scents of the new life, the old life, the water.
He didn't see the curb as a block or barrier, he saw it as a place for playful experimentation.
He got cranky a time or two. I would lift him and carry him and then put him down and try again. He explored cottonwood, the inside of my purse and attempted to leap into the river - a toddler tradition for all my children.
He looks like he is saying, "Oh, Granny, ummm, there is this big better than a bathtub thing in front of me, do you think you might go back down the path for a little while?"
Emma called from school with a very valid senior-in-high-school-crisis which could have ended my reverie if my mind was in a different space. Somehow watching Jaxon just be Jaxon as we walked along the path and explored together both calmed and inspired me.
We hustled back to the car so I would be accessible for Emma’s needs and Jaxon’s mom texted simultaneously saying she was on her way home. I would be able to help Emma, take Jaxon home and still have a full day ahead to invest in forwarding my life work.
Ironic, isn’t it?
I got home and wore a big smile on my face. “What a great day so far!” I thought. I knew nature was dialing me into the powder room so I better take care of that quickly. I grabbed a book to read while there.
Mary Oliver’s collection White Pine was within arm’s reach. I sat and read and actually had the most inconceivable, yes more than slightly arrogant and flat out outrageous thought, “Mary must have had an off year with this book. None of these poems are stirring me at all.”
And then I turned the page.
And Mary’s words knocked me off my porcelain throne.
There I was, feeling smug and proud for “managing my time” with intention and insight and oh so fabulously spiritual yet tangible and applicable not at all esoteric terms and here Mary wrote, in her poem “At the Lake”
”This is, I think,
what holiness is:
the natural world,
where every moment is full
of the passion to keep moving.
Inside every mind there’s a hermit’s cave
full of light,
full of snow,
full of concentration.
I’ve knelt there,
and so have you,
hanging on
to what you love
to what is lovely.
===
I read it once, silently, to myself.
I read it twice, aloud, to no one and the entire world.
Mary’s words knocked me off my porcelain throne and invited me to live a couple questions, to walk around in them for a while.
What if I looked at my concept of time management as expansive holiness? What if I held time like the touch of the river water along the banks, letting it flow and gurgle and smell so good I just want to throw off all my clothes and leap into it?
What if I integrated the thought of time as holiness and passion and movement and me as holy-time’s playmate, co-conspirator, fairy godgranny?
This is where I want to kneel with time.
“Full of light, full of concentration,” and “every moment full of passion to keep moving” even in the stillness of tears in my eyes, kneeling with my grandbaby and wondering "how the hell did I get so blessed?"
Time as holiness.
I am diving into it, headlong, and see the feather comforter supporting me and surrounding me and yes, perhaps you are there laughing beside me.
Time as holiness.
With my life work, with the people I love, with the people I serve that I absolutely can't help but love. With my creative projects. With the next-whatever-it-is-that-pops-up-next.
Time as holiness.
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I love the siren song of synchronicity. This particular experience followed a theme from one of the Tracking Wonder communities I run with, the theme being "shaping time." The randomness of finding this exact poem from the piles of books I could have picked for my sojourn in the restroom is truly remarkable. Ahh, just had to share. So grateful you are reading here.
Julie Jordan Scott is a writer, creative life coach, speaker, performance poet, Mommy-extraordinaire and mixed-media artist whose Writing Camps and Writing Playgrounds permanently transform people's creative lives. Watch for the announcement of new programs coming in Spring, 2015 and beyond.
Check out the links below to follow her on a bunch of different social media channels, especially if you find the idea of a Word-Love Party bus particularly enticing.
I felt impatience from the soles of my feet to the middle of my belly. “How long does it take to take three bouquets of flowers and make two bouquets of flowers?”
I marched myself to the workroom doorway so I could perhaps get a clue of the holdup. I imagined the clerk on the telephone or chatting with another clerk or maybe working on something besides my flowers.
I sighed a heavy, woe is me sigh and the frown I wore caused a deep wrinkle between my eyes as I glared through the door into the arranging room.
There the clerk was, carefully and consciously arranging the flowers I had given her. She wasn’t hurrying, she wasn’t engaging in anything in that moment except to take the flowers I had given her and making the most beautiful floral design possible. She was holding the lilies, carnations and the single iris with such devotion my complaints dripped off my feet and became tears in my eyes.
“She could be arranging flowers for a wedding. For her wedding, my daughter’s wedding.” My eyes burned with tears of shame, love and surrender. In the next inhale, I finally felt an aligned emotion, one that fit.
I was at the floral shop at Forest Lawn Cemetery, where my firstborn daughter was buried twenty-five years ago after she died at birth.
The woman arranging the flowers wanted these bouquets to be just right. She didn’t know they were for my daughter’s twenty-fifth birthday and simultaneously the anniversary of her death.
She didn’t realize the emotional jolt I felt simply witnessing her artistic and loving care. She was simply being herself, giving the gift of thoughtfulness as she did her job.
She wasn’t taking too long, I was no longer in such a hurry, and I could snuggle into this brief moment of unexpected sacred joy. My daughter, Emma, came to stand beside me.
“She is taking such care with the flowers,” I said, my chin quivering; my voice cracking.
Seventeen-year-old Emma nodded, understanding and compassionate even though she never knew her older almost mythical-to-her-siblings-sister, Marlena.
I remember the words of one of my favorite writers, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, when she wrote “Flowers always have it — poise, completion, fulfillment, perfection . . .”
We took the bouquets and placed them beside the graves of my daughter, Marlena, and the baby buried beside her, Emilio, another tradition.
This time, though, the experience was new: different, reborn.
It wasn’t that the February weather in Los Angeles was perfect or that Emma was the just-right age to be with me or that my friend, Sofi, was selflessly sharing herself with us.
It was the gift of presence from the florist clerk that reminded me how sacred this moment was, even so many years later. In those moments I was reminded of the value of my daughter’s life in the past, present and future.
Julie Jordan Scott is a writer, creative life coach, speaker, performance poet, Mommy-extraordinaire and mixed-media artist whose Writing Camps and Writing Playgrounds permanently transform people's creative lives. Watch for the announcement of new programs coming Winter and Spring 2015 and beyond.
Check out the links below to follow her on a bunch of different social media channels, especially if you find the idea of a Word-Love Party bus particularly enticing.
I have professed repeatedly "I am not a video watcher!"
I have a propensity to not follow trends. I am a sometimes video listener, but I don't sit in front of my computer and watch much of anything. I do occasionally "do" workout and dance videos with my computer, but just sitting and watching... I've never been one to do that.
The other day I spontaneously recorded a video though, a quick one-minute-thirty-seven-second-video which I posted to a couple groups and on my facebook page, laughing all the way because it is so very... me.
And then I realized "There is some decent advice here" so I figured I would share it with my readers and blog visitors, too.
In fact, doing exactly this is a part of accepting my own "medicine" I offer in the brief clip.
Ready? (hit play!)
Thank you - and I apologize for not knowing all the ins-and-outs of sharing my video... I'm on a learning curve as I bet you are, too.
Enjoy!
Julie Jordan Scott is a writer, creative life coach, speaker, performance poet, Mommy-extraordinaire and mixed-media artist whose Writing Camps and Writing Playgrounds permanently transform people's creative lives. Watch for the announcement of new programs coming Spring 2015 and beyond.
Check out the links below to follow her on a bunch of different social media channels, especially if you find the idea of a Word-Love Party bus particularly enticing.
“Stories are light. Light is precious in a world so dark. Begin at the beginning. Tell a story. Make some light.”
Kate DiCamill
This morning I wanted to get the image you see here posted for a group I am facilitating. I felt compelled to give some direction “first thing” in the morning in case anyone woke up and wanted to write - with my direction, naturally - so I needed to be complete with my self-imposed task.
I allowed myself to feel the pressure of "If I don't get this done, people will be disappointed in me" that I sometimes give room to roam. It was getting bad enough that I felt my breath get increasingly shallow and my shoulders tense as hit various photo editing buttons on the screen of my laptop.
I lifted my face and looked over my screen and there it was: the sunrise sky - that unique tangerine color I have come to know well. I might have even gasped.
I looked up from my morning rush to see the sun's preview sky smiling at me. No hurry scurry, just pure presence.
This tangerine color doesn’t last very long. It is like a brief wink, a soft whisper heralding the sun is near. Light is with us.
Somewhere deep within me something rang out. Perhaps it was a divine energy, lifting my chin.
I could have missed it entirely.
I had to make the choice nonetheless to let go of my worry and self-absorption in order to really see the sky. Worry and self-absorption are indicators I have let fear have a chunk of my energetic real estate. I have offered up a portion of peace that lives in my spirit to be consumed with negativity. I had almost forgotten what Victor Hugo wrote, ‘Even the darkest night will end and the sun will rise.”
I am carrying this memory, this story of light, into the rest of my day.
What if we choose to collectively let go of self-absorption and worry - or however you tend to package fear and darkness - and allowed light to shine through be it in a tangerine sky or a flashlight or a single candle flame?
It would be such a pleasure if you joined me, too. See the light, dear one.
See the light and become the light for those you encounter today.
Watch as the world suddenly becomes a more beautiful place to be.
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Julie Jordan Scott is a writer, creative life coach, speaker, performance poet, Mommy-extraordinaire and mixed-media artist whose Writing Camps and Writing Playgrounds permanently transform people's creative lives. Watch for the announcement of new programs coming Winter and Spring 2015 and beyond.
Check out the links below to follow her on a bunch of different social media channels, especially if you find the idea of a Word-Love Party bus particularly enticing.
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