It may be the tiniest spark, the smallest inkling – barely audible until you put your ear close.
Soft whispers.
You may see an almost invisible change in light.
Fingers lift your chin via the scent of rosemary or mint or in the early morning as you take your morning walk. Maybe you sit on your porch and write bacon sizzling on someone’s stove in the neighborhood. Cinnamon, warming up, perhaps is the scent that calls you.
Allow these voices to rise through you now.
What is the seed inviting you to say? To write? To create?
Is it a poem, a song, a letter to your fourth grade teacher?
Is the seed saying a warning, a funny story, a memory to cover you gently like a down comforter at precisely the right moment?
Take that seed-music and create. Paint. Cut and glue and make mistakes. And grow in acceptance that those exact mistakes are the exact right result.
Allow the seed song to fill you with courage so you may create fearlessly.
Imbue the seeds beginnings with a sprinkling of gratitude.
Mix up a batch of thank you’s for the persistence of the muse, the repetition of the note so you finally tuned in to hear it or the ticklish jolt of awareness.
Be with gratitude as it morphs into wild, passionate love – simply because you listened, you saw, you took the tiniest action and now create… simply create.
Prompt: What is the seed song inviting me to (write, sing, dance, paint) with gratitude? Today, I (hear, see, feel, smell, touch....)
Julie Jordan Scott inspires people to experience artistic rebirth via her programs, playshops, books, performances and simply being herself out in the world. She 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 soon!
To contact Julie to schedule a Writing or Creative Life Coaching Session, call or text her at 661.444.2735.
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 rested in the pre-dawn darkness hovering between despair and simultaneously wondering how I would be able to make this any version of better.
I thought of writing practice but didn’t even begin to feel inspired much less motivated to move my pencil on the page.
My phone told me Collier (Odd Poet Girl) was on-line so I hopped on Periscope. As always, my kindred shared her brand of enlightening motivation. I knew soon the #Peri10k Shareathon would begin.
I participated in the shareathon experience, taking notes and allowing my mind space to collaborate and create, nodding and commenting and sketching.
The Peri10K Shareathon speakers helped me remember why the work I do is so important.
My work is Your rebirth as well as our collective Renaissance, my work is to come alongside and unclog those stuffed up places that don't allow our words come onto the page and in turn, add to the love and light for all.
It is more important than ever to be in the space of renaissance and rebirth. With that, my lights came back on and the lousy to evaporate.
It has been a few hours now and I can guarantee you from the souls of my feet to the top of my head, turning those lights of awakening back on feels so much better than feeling lousy.
Two videos for you to be with, to center, to connect. First a short video illustrating my process briefly and second, a more vivid recap via periscope.
Now, a longer video via the community in Periscope.
Julie Jordan Scott inspires people to experience artistic rebirth via her programs, playshops, books, performances and simply being herself out in the world. She 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 soon!
To contact Julie to schedule a Writing or Creative Life Coaching Session, call or text her at 661.444.2735.
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.
Theatre is a compelling creative interest of mine - one I abandoned for thirty years. There will be no more abandonment.
I wrote for 5 minutes on one of my creative interests - theater - and here is what popped up:
“Actors need a kind of inner force. Don't be only one-sided, sweet, nice, good. Get rid of being average.”
Stella Adler
I just want to type those words over and over again, shout them from rooftops. Get rid of being average. Get RID of being average. Just stop it. Blow it away. Get rid of it now.
Today someone I highly respect called me a warrior.
That isn’t average. I want to continue NOT being average and if that compels me to enlist as a warrior for a spell and fully integrate and accept this mantel of warrior so be it. So be it.
Most of the titles I carry I wouldn’t have elected for myself.
Who says “I want to be a special needs mom. Oh, so fun!” or “I want my first child to be born dead." Who says THAT?”
Get rid of being average.
Who wants to get death threats at work?
Who raises her hand and says, "Yes, oh sign me up for that run with melanoma. I want that one, please."
Get rid of being average.
I am a warrior.
I am not willing to be average. I am not willing to stay numbed out. I am not willing to stand idly on the sidelines and watch, fear nipping my feet, choking my voice.
No. No. NO!
I have been given a gift of words and a gift of performance. These are mantels I claim. These are costumes I wear proudly and vow to use, to stand up and wave about with in a peaceful, standing strong battle where people surrender the moment I walk in the room.
That has happened to me before: a school psychologist I frightened with my intellectual might. Get rid of being average.
By the way, I didn't get on stage for thirty years due to hurt and sadness and misunderstanding and poor communication. I hadn't been called a warrior yet. I hadn't heard yet that my real job was to get rid of being average.
Sometimes getting rid of being average means the assignments you are given divinely are not the ones you wish for, like my first child being still born – after waiting and trying to be pregnant for three years and then carry that child to almost full term only to have her arrive, dead?
I didn’t want that as my legacy.
I am a warrior.
I am setting aside any notion of being average, of being like those others.
Special needs sister: I am that and it was not easy.
Special needs mother: I am that and it is the toughest most difficult job ever.
I was not born to be average. I was not meant to be like the Jane on the street who hasn’t gotten it yet AND here’s the thing. My charge as not being average is to lift others up so they aren’t average either.
My task, my privilege my delight is to come alongside and use my creative gifts and interests to spark others to behold their OWN life and claim themselves as ANYTHING except average.
My writing timer forgot to sound. I was meant to say these things.
You and I - we are the ones who know the power of getting rid of being average, the numbness of "fitting in".
I wrote longer than five minutes and today, this is perfect.
I am a warrior. I am devoted to shake off any average remaining.
Watch me. Dare me. Hold me to it, and I will hold you, too.
Julie Jordan Scott inspires people to experience artistic rebirth via her programs, playshops, books, performances and simply being herself out in the world. She 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 soon!
To contact Julie to schedule a Writing or Creative Life Coaching Session, call or text her at 661.444.2735.
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 can not, in honesty, pledge to protect my children - especially in the face of these election results.
A few hours ago many of us were huddled around our devices, trying to find comfort or at least connection after the election results came clear.
Several of my friends posted an article from a well-known source who advised us to tell our children, “We will protect them.”
I’ve been parenting long enough and through enough difficulties to know I cannot honestly say I can protect my children. I haven’t been able to protect them so far.
Two of the three of my children have had unspeakable acts occur to them while at school. One of my children was urinated on by a peer, for example. Another child was repeatedly humiliated and called crazy by a counselor. On another occasion I had to literally bend my knee and clasp my hands in a prayer pose to beg a teacher to stop behaving aggressively toward my child.
I cannot protect my child.
I can love my child and stand with my child when she or he experiences the unthinkable. I can listen. I can create a safe space for self-expression.
Samuel stood at my bedroom door at 11:45 last night. I rested in bed, pretending to be asleep as I had been for the last two-and-a-half-hours. I heard sirens and a helicopter overhead. These sounds of unrest mimicked what my heart and gut felt like.
“Samuel? What’s up?” I asked him.
“Do you know who won the Presidential election?” was his question in return. While I didn’t know the answer, I had felt it in my core since I placed my vote at 6:10 pm and tears flooded my eyes, feeling that emptiness begin taking root in my belly.
“No.” I answered.
“I guess you’ll find out when you wake up,” he said as he turned and walked back to his bedroom.
An hour later it was my turn to stand by his door, speaking.
“Samuel, why are you still awake?”
“I’m watching, about the election.”
I hesitated, choosing my words with caution. “How do you feel about what happened?”
“I don’t know.” He is always honest, my son.
“I don’t know how to feel either,” I told him. “I do know that you should get some sleep. I do know we will be all right in the long run. Please turn your light off and go to bed. I’m going to sit on the porch for a little while.”
I walked to my porch and sat in my trusty red rocking chair, usually a favored morning spot.
I looked up at the sky, not able to have even the softest conversation toward heaven. I silently looked at the stars, recognizing their sameness from last night and the night before. When I was pregnant with Samuel I used to lie on my front lawn, looking up at these same stars feeling a similar hopeless emptiness. Circumstances weren't optimal for us then, either, in those last seasons before September, 2001.
When I went back inside, Samuel’s light was still on but he had stopped watching the news. “You should try to sleep, Samuel. That’s what I am going to do.”
“All right,” he said.
“See you in the morning.”
I waited another hour before sending text messages to his older sisters who live on the East Coast. I waited another hour before deciding my continued attempts at sleep would most likely be unproductive until I spent some time with words, with my keyboard, attempting to make some semblance of meaning around what just happened.
Words have been my constant since I was four years old when I started writing cursive “e’s” across the page, not able to translate my own attraction to language. I trusted the movement of the pencil or crayon across the page. Later, still pre-literate, I would dictate to my mother whose words I would then copy onto construction paper with crayon.
I asked my mother to send these letters to the appropriate party be it Santa or my Granny or I can’t remember who else. I knew then as I know now expressing myself honestly with words invokes healing or at least the earliest inkling of understanding.
While I appreciate the entirety of the message from this earnest writer from this famous publication, I still sit numb and unable to nod in agreement no matter how much I wish I could.
I understand the call to use words to create love and reassurance or else I wouldn't still be here, typing.
The Occoquan Workhouse in Northern Virginia - where Suffragists were imprisoned unlawfully in the early 20th Century, now an Arts Center.
I cannot protect my children.
I cannot make promises to them on behalf of democracy as much as I would like to – it wouldn’t be honest.
I do know I will love them and stand with them. I will write to create connections, to forge hope and love in spite of what barriers we may face along the way. I will bravely speak even when afraid, like right now.
I think that’s what Samuel was looking for when he came to my door and what he was waiting for before he finally turned off his light and climbed into bed. He wanted to hear my voice, speaking to him directly, saying anything.
He needed to hear my voice saying “I am with you. I love you.”
I hear a rooster crowing in the distance. It is 3:20 am and I realize now I never ate dinner as hunger makes herself known. I hear a train whistle, always reminding me of my grandfather sounds and sounds again. “You are not alone,” it says.
In a few hours the sun will rise. I will make coffee and pour myself a bowl of cereal and maybe eat some yogurt. I will probably drive Samuel to school. I wish I could protect him from the rhetoric and boasting and ugliness he will likely hear throughout the day.
I cannot. I will be here when he gets home. I will speak, I will listen, I will love.
Things will take on a different semblance of normal.
Julie Jordan Scott is the mother to three children. She inspires people to experience artistic rebirth via her programs, playshops, books, performances and simply being herself out in the world. She 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 soon!
To contact Julie to schedule a Writing or Creative Life Coaching Session, call or text her at 661.444.2735.
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.
Spark your creative spirit with the #Gr8FullCre8ives Gratitude Challege for #November. Simply repost the prompt image on your Instagram account, then share images and videos that express your gratitude based on the theme for that day. Use the challenge hashtag #Gr8fullCre8ives(might help to remember two 8's, two L's, and one S on the end.) Don't forget to follow both @creativitytribe and@juliejordanscott. Follow the challenge hashtag to support other participants.
Joining late or missed a day...no worries. You set your own challenge pace. Also look for a gratitude series on Periscope with @juliejordanscott and@creativitytribe.
You may choose, like I do, to take 5 minutes and write #5for5BrainDump style.
I elected to write a 5 minute brain dump based on the quote from Auguste Rodin. Here is what followed (This has not been edited, just off my fingers on the keyboard. No apologies for what was written and I don't need to hear about corrections, either.)
“The main thing is to be moved, to love, to hope, to tremble, to live.”
Auguste Rodin
There usually isn’t herald, sounding a melodic tune in those moments something significant begin in our lives. At the end there may be a fizzle or a shout or a gleeful laugh.
I had a gleeful laugh last Sunday when a clerk at a Rite Aid carded me when I bought some strange pomegranate concoction that was 5% alcohol. I think what he really wanted was an invitation to join me for a taste, but that’s beside the point.
I have a feeling Rodin had lived the words after “to be” here. Move, love, hope, tremble, live.
Say them aloud with me.
“Move, love, hope, tremble, live.”
I can feel their interrelationship and I suppose Rodin wove their interconnections into some of his sculpture.
In the middle of my writing I pause to actually stretch, to move – and find myself laughing at how this must look. Me, a nearly 55 year old woman doing an odd dance in my chair, thinking about broadcasting it in attempt to get more viewers. Only I doubt said viewers would be there for any right reasons, eh? At least that’s what targeted marketers might say.
Well, I moved (and I loved how it felt) I got hope – from allowing myself to laugh.
I will soon be stretching my life by helping my dear friend get a task checked off his list and perhaps I’ll do some more broadcasting so I may check more off my list? Perhaps perhaps perhaps?
Still, no trembling.
The last time I trembled was when I found out a dear friend was lying. Again. And I didn’t know what to do about it. It is the same trembling that came after Marlena was stillborn and I leaned back in the hospital bed and the shaking took over every muscle of my body as if I was a human ice cube.
“The main thing is to be moved, to love, to hope, to tremble, to live.” I intend to tremble with joy before the day is out. I hereby intend to tremble with joy as some point in the next 11 hours. Join me.
= = =
To discover more about the #Gr8FullCre8ives Instagram Challenge, visit here now. We've expanded it a bit, mostly so more folks who understand the importance of creating gratitude and the power of gratitude itself will be able to connect with others who agree.
Julie Jordan Scott inspires people to experience artistic rebirth via her programs, playshops, books, performances and simply being herself out in the world. She 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 soon!
To contact Julie to schedule a Writing or Creative Life Coaching Session, call or text her at 661.444.2735.
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.
Day 6 Today’s #Gr8FullCr8ive spark: self-expression.
Ask yourself: In what ways will I (or do I wish to) express myself with gratitude today?
Then do just one of those wishes, one action, one forward motion at a time.
Document what shows up. Share it and hash-tag it #Gr8FullCre8ives
Spark your creative spirit with the #Gr8FullCre8ives Gratitude Challege for #November. Simply repost the prompt image on your Instagram account, then share images and videos that express your gratitude based on the theme for that day. Use the challenge hashtag #Gr8fullCre8ives(might help to remember two 8's, two L's, and one S on the end.) Don't forget to follow both @creativitytribe and@juliejordanscott. Follow the challenge hashtag to support other participants.
Joining late or missed a day...no worries. You set your own challenge pace. Also look for a gratitude series on Periscope with @juliejordanscott and@creativitytribe.
You may choose, like I do, to take 5 minutes and write #5for5BrainDump style.
Here is what happened when I did exactly that....
This morning after I posted my first Instagram image about #Gr8FullCre8ives I was almost immediately remorseful. Apparently self-expression includes a hyphen and I had done it wrong, again, as usual, a perpetual screw up gosh darn it I should just delete it give me a break what kind of a loser am I…. and then I took a deep breath and let all that possibly clog inducing gunk out of my system.
I hadn’t included a hyphen.
This was in no way an enormous problem to humankind, this subtraction of something I hadn’t realized was supposed to be there.
YET this clutter-gunk of self-judgment almost stopped me from continuing to create.
It ALMOST urged me to stop speaking, to stop taking action, to stop connecting with my soul-self and even now makes me feel a little bit more concerned than necessary about whether or not to choose a hyphen.
Instead I let it go and I gathered my notebook and set off to have my Sunday morning breakfast at a local eatery and on the way there I had an urge to visit a park I’ve never had an inkling of existence (easily found thanks to google and GPS). Upon arrival the swing set shouted, “All aboard and swing, love!” so I did and I giggled and I felt each and every pump of my feet and all the wind and the slight resultant nausea. All of it felt heavenly. Gratitude met me from the soles of my feet (touching to the pulsing deep within the earth) all the way to the tops of the glorious linden trees lining the play area.
I hugged another tree and took photos of the textures of its skin. I felt the sand in my shoes from overzealous taps to the sand when I wanted to go higher and higher and higher and I allowed myself to be temporarily afraid that the swing wouldn’t hold this much larger than I was when I was a swinging child version of myself.
I smiled at everyone I encountered as I expressed my self.
When I arrived at the eatery, I did walking meditations of “love” and in my mind and heart I sprinkled love-dust all about the place, especially to the most unsuspecting.
I read a chapter from two books, I ate slowly, I wrote in my notebook. I dumped my brain. I laughed to myself and quietly visited another park on the way home.
I found an odd assemblage of shopping carts. Took photos. Talked to a homeless gentleman and another random man about the device he was riding. “How do you make that move?” I asked him. (Note: I am still not entirely sure.)
I came home, gratitude filling the words I spontaneously sang and cheerfully started doing chores.
What if I had allowed the festering gunk of my lack of a hyphen to get in my way?
What might have happened then?
The thing is, I have let things like a missing hyphen get in my way before in the past. The better news? I am actively practicing no longer allowing that to happen, one swing, one photo, one love meditation at a time.
And yes, the gratitude continues to flow. I bet you feel it, too.
Julie Jordan Scott inspires people to experience artistic rebirth via her programs, playshops, books, performances and simply being herself out in the world. She 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 soon!
To contact Julie to schedule a Writing or Creative Life Coaching Session, call or text her at 661.444.2735.
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 the Hashtag #Gr8FullCre8ives to share your images on Instagram (and elsewhere). The birthplace of the challenge is on Instagram. All the sparks are there for the month now.
Gr8FullCre8ives – Day 2
The Spark (from Rachel) – Surroundings –
I have wanted to love my surroundings for so long and only recently in fits and starts we’ve come into joyful collaboration. The walls painted, the floors calling to be refinished one room at a time.
Virginia Woolf started it: figures, right, she with a room of her own encouraging me to make a small, sacred space that called specifically to me and those who “get me” those who understand that even at 54 years old, a pink ruffly room may be the perfect sanctuary for one who never was allowed such a precious, safe-feeling room.
Yes, Virginia, there is a Julie waiting to continue her process – who shouts “NO!” to the long clogs she once steeped in because in her DNA she believed, somehow, that was the way.
(Yesterday’s a-ha, exhaled while waiting in line at that oh-so-soulful drive through having ordered a fast meal for her son and her biggest sin, a drink laden with chemicals she also longs to kick off her “must have list” for now….)
The image. The shadows, the slant.
A nod to Emily, to time passing, to her willingness to show up as is. Her call to you, there reading –a smiling connection as the fourth wall comes down.
That waiting for the timer to sound, for the applause or the buzz or the bewildering siren of something.
Of something that surrounds us.
Of something that says “You belong. There are people who look like you here. There are eyes that light up, eyebrows that raise, arms that open to your shyness… awkward is acceptable and in fact, one of our identifiers. We love awkward, impulsive, glasses, fluffy, stumbling, not-knowing-quite-what-to-say island of misfit toy people, looking for acceptance and praise.”
My timer. An alarm.
Time to go for now.
Please re-read if you think you missed what you were meant to read. Perhaps aloud this time. You’re a-ha is right here on the cusp, I can feel it.
= = =
What are you grateful for you in your surroundings? Consider your home, your neighborhood, your downtown. Think abour the people who surround you, colors, memory, books. Perhaps for you surroundings are the places you visit: libraries, the park, the house across the street.
Use these starts as continued sparks on the #Gr8FullCre8ives trail.
Share your discoveries on a broadcast, in an image, in a tweet, in a blog post, a snap chat or anywhere you like to “hang out”. Please tag #Gr8FullCre8ives so we and other members of the community - may find your posts and feel your gratitude with you.
Julie Jordan Scott inspires people to experience artistic rebirth via her programs, playshops, books, performances and simply being herself out in the world. She 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 soon!
To contact Julie to schedule a Writing or Creative Life Coaching Session, call or text her at 661.444.2735.
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.
Julie Jordan Scott inspires people to experience artistic rebirth via her programs, playshops, books, performances and simply being herself out in the world. She 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 soon!
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