“The care of rivers is not a question of the rivers, but a
question of the human heart.”
Tanaka Shozo
I haven’t spent much time this year visiting my river. MY
river. Notice how I call it that?
I went for a couple picnics this Spring, but there was no
lazy time of river wooing where I would sit beside the river and write and take
photos and scribble inlets of thought in my notebook praying they would make
sense later. I drove through with a couchsurfer or two.
We got out and they were amazed by the flecks of gold in the
water. Yes, we are the land of the gold rush. That isn’t just a folk tale, it
is how California came to be who she is today.
2012 has been a squeezer year: that time when I expect to
have bushels of time when what I get is a tablespoon of leftovers after I’ve
done everything else I’m supposed to do.
I imagine my favorite spots along the river miss me. They
wonder where I am and even more
importantly, when will I return.
I think of my calendar. The weekend after this one is
completely booked up now, a week out. The weekend after that I plan to go out
of town.
I think I need to take a mental health day during the week
to be with my friend, the water, the falls, the surprising coves and the
changing face of my beloved.
It will be intriguing to see now that I have set this
intention, how long will it be until I realize it?
I am thinking as you read you are daring me to make it soon
and make my time there well invested.
Be watching here, for more. Right now photos and in the
future photos: they will be here soon!
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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you enjoy this essay? Receive emails directly to your
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When I saw today’s prompt from the Blog Dare I knew immediately what I wanted to write but then I thought confessing to this as the source of my last big belly laugh might be taken wrong, but then I thought… many of us have silly little brother memories and after our The Great Southwest Road Trip, my daughters and Samuel and I will laugh about this for years.
We will probably share it with his future girlfriends, too.
The prompt was simply, I laughed so hard:
It started innocently enough. A slightly unusual smell would overtake the backseat of the car and slowly waft toward me in the front. Whichever sister was sitting next to Samuel would say, “Ewww, what’s that smell?”
If it was a color, the smell would be a faded mustardy yellow: sort of like Gulden’s mustard. It was overweight and putrid.
After it consistently happened several times the first couple days and was usually accompanied by squelched giggles from the little brother of the family, we figured it out.
Samuel was gifting us with Silent But Deadly Farts.
None of my children had heard this expression before. Samuel had quickly become a master of SBD’s.
Sometimes he even delivered them to hotel rooms. On one occasion when I was either out at the car or perhaps getting a cup of coffee, all three children were doing that famous sibling bonding on the bed. All three children were sitting up and happy under the quilt in the middle of rural Utah. They looked so nearly All American Family before times got weird when Samuel decided it was the perfect time to introduce his sisters to the famous “Dutch Oven”.
He created an enormous SBD and then lifted the quilt. The girls reportedly had to get off the bed because they couldn’t breathe with that horrifyingly bad stench eminating from it. Samuel laughed and laughed and then they laughed and laughed and then I came back in the room and we all laughed and laughed.
Come to think of it, he hasn’t done this since we got home.
A part of me hopes this is just an eleven-year-old-boy-smelly-fad-that-passed but another part of me misses the raucous laughter that came as a result.
My kids may not remember how gorgeous the view was while standing on Weeping Rock at Zion National Park. They may not remember the awe opening moments standing in Pueblo Ruins from the 13th Century at Mesa Verde. The legend of the Spider Woman in Canyon de Chelly may become a fuzzy “What was that again?”
The laughter from Samuel’s Silent but Deadly Farts will never be forgotten.
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. She leads Writing Camp with JJS & this Summer will be traveling throughout the US to bring this unique, fun filled creative experience to the people wherever she finds the passion & the interest.
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I don’t like to be the bearer of bad news, but while you are on your blissful vacation getaway with your family, there will be tension. There will be crankyness. There will be botched communication.
If you are roadtripping, you will miscalculate miles. You may not stay at the hotel you planned to stay in and if you couchsurf like we do, you may have to write to your planned hosts and say, “Sorry, we can’t come stay with you after all.
Believe it or not, hosts look forward to having couchsurfing guests, even rag tag lots like us. I am chronically afraid of disappointing people.
It wasn’t daily but it was near daily when we were going from nature spot to nature spot that Emma verbally lashed out at me for making her attend this worst ever family vacation and why do we go on these stupid vacations because we always end up hating each other.
I listened, I agreed with most of what she said, but I had to deny the hating each other part.
Yes, it wasn’t her idea of nirvana like it was my idea of nirvana, but we will remember certain things until the end of time. Things like Samuel’s silent but deadly farts that were so bad, we had to roll down our windows to keep from coughing “to death” Katherine would shriek, “Samuel, you are killing us!”
This, naturally, would make Samuel laugh, howl and fart more.
He is eleven. I think we will have many years in the future of Samuel farting when the roadside gets uninteresting to him. He can fart and entertain himself by making his sisters scream and then laugh hysterically. He is the star!
I like to think (delude myself?) I have raised my children to be healthy by nature of allowing them to speak up about how they are feeling. I come from a long line of WASPy people who don’t believe in emotions and certainly don’t believe in airing their emotions to anyone unless they are happy, content or an accomplishment laundry list.
I allow Emma to complain. I allow Samuel to fart. I allow Samuel’s rituals to stay intact as much as I can.
I allow them to see ME have a rough time.
Traveling alone with three children – even when one of them is twenty-years-old – isn’t easy.
Tomorrow I will share with you my biggest secret trick that helped make this entire trip happier for each of us. It is a secret trick you can easily replicate. I can see you smiling from here –
Now, just watch out for those silent by deadly gas emissions.
And know that if your daughter is upset, let her say it and then watch the venom dissipate. If you insist she hold it in, your vacation will quickly go further downhill.
Happy Travels!
Writing Challenge:
Tell about a time when you were cranky and lived to tell the tale. What solutions did you find? Please share your stories with us!
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. She leads Writing Camp with JJS & this Summer will be traveling throughout the US to bring this unique, fun filled creative experience to the people wherever she finds the passion & the interest.
Did you enjoyed this essay? Receive emails directly to your inbox for Free from Julie Jordan Scott via the Daily Passion Activator. One inspirational essay and poem (almost) every week day. Subscribe here now -
Last week we started our road trip in Houck, Arizona: a town on the edge of the Navajo Nation where my eldest daughter Katherine helped work on houses all Summer Long. She came back to me quite capable with many tools I have no clue how to use.
She also still has blue house paint in her hair.
The other skill she has that I wish I had was a belief in herself as capable with power tools.
For whatever reason, I have bought into the “Real Women Don’t Use Power Tools, We Delegate that to Big Strong Handsome Mans Who Do Our Bidding.”
No more.
I want to use those power tools, too. I did use a sander this winter before painting in my living room, but I want to learn more. I want to build stuff, I want to repair stuff, I want to feel capable instead of unable. I want to feel confident of my ability to learn instead of thinking “oh, I could never do that.”
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. She leads Writing Camp with JJS & this Summer will be traveling throughout the US to bring this unique, fun filled creative experience to the people wherever she finds the passion & the interest.
Did you enjoyed this essay? Receive emails directly to your inbox for Free from Julie Jordan Scott via the Daily Passion Activator. One inspirational essay and poem (almost) every week day. Subscribe here now -
Because I constantly talked about Word Love in my original A to Z Challenge posts, I figured I would start the A to Z Roadtrip with a Word-love post. I am so glad I discovered the roadtrip! I have missed all of you!
I have refilled my coffee. I have grabbed an extra oreo. I have taken my butt and seated myself squarely in my chair to be sure I write, write, write without stopping as I share with you straight off the top of my head why my mission, to spread word love throughout the world is so important.
I am also going to offer to you the option of catching word-love fever.
I sat in a café in the unlikely location of Pierpoint Springs last week with a new friend from Austria. She was a couchsurfer and my family and home were the couchsurfees.
I have a compulsion to make each visit from each couchsurfer as memorable as possible. This is why we found ourselves at such a locale: we were on our way to Sequoia National Monument taking a different road than usual. I wanted to visit Miss Julie’s Bar which is back behind this gem of a diner in Pierpoint Springs, right on the edge of Camp Nelson, right on the edge of Sequoia National Monument’s Trail of 100 Giants.
The trail was our (supposed) destination after all.
We nibbled and chatted and I knew Chrissi, like myself, wasn’t one for idle chatter, so I pulled out my phone and started taking notes. Mostly I was transposing the words of a guy seated in the booth behind me. He was a sheriff’s officer, who was calling in a report on not his phone, but the diner’s phone. Once I heard “357 Magnum” I knew I needed to write this down.
No one would believe this was actually happening. It all seems too cliché and too “America has the craziest and most lovable wacky cast of characters imagineable.”
Chrissi asked me when I looked up, “Have you always known you were going to be a writer?” she asked.
I smiled and said, “I wrote before I knew how to write. I would dictate to my mother what I wanted to write, she would write my words on paper and I would then copy my words she had written.”
Before I was literate, I was in love with words.
I understood their power to create. I didn’t yet understand their power to destroy.
That would come later.
These days, though, I not only write, I teach writing to some and inspire the writing of others. Sometimes the “teaching” and “inspiring” are synonymous. I do this because I know lives are changed when we express what is inside us, begging for us to communicate it.
Even if the only reader is ourselves as we write in a journal which we may later burn, the words are given space outside our overfilled head. This is a huge blessing and this is where the word-romance begins.
Two words come together. They meet. They grow into more words, perhaps with a question mark attached.
I promised myself not to stretch these words out beyond my timer’s song. It just went off.
I love words.
I hope you love words OR if your romance is idle or dull or hasn’t begun yet, take a moment to write a sentence. “Writing and words serve me when they……” and just write a sentence. Be aware of how words show their love to you and you show your love to them.
And then spread the word-love, starting now.
I always have been a matchmaker, after all, a romantic seeking a world of surprising relationships.
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. She leads Writing Camp with JJS & this Summer will be traveling throughout the US to bring this unique, fun filled creative experience to the people wherever she finds the passion & the interest.
Did you enjoyed this essay? Receive emails directly to your inbox for Free from Julie Jordan Scott via the Daily Passion Activator. One inspirational essay and poem (almost) every week day. Subscribe here now -
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