I am grateful for…. this was a tough day to choose one because there are so many things I feel
grateful for… I walked through the door to get my cup of coffee to write
(grateful) and smelled the applesauce cooking in my crock pot (grateful) from
the apples we picked with my children, my mom and friends (grateful.) I stopped
to check some of my works-in-progress (grateful) as the Mod Podge dries on them
(grateful.) I admired my photo editing handiwork on Anais Nin (grateful) and I
thought about this session of #wordmongering (grateful.)
How do I choose one and say, “This is it!”
I am grateful today for my love affair with old books. I
love to take old books and use them as my medium. I talk the pages out, I dye
them or paint them (or both). I read as I go. I iron the pages when they dry. I
sometimes print photo images on top of the pages. I sculpt and mold the pages.
I read them aloud, again.
I share them with people around me who can’t help but listen
to my insistent oratory.
I use them when I teach writing sessions to prompt my fellow
writers.
I am grateful I have been collecting old books, dictionaries
and thesauri so I never run out.
I am grateful for the texture of the paper in old textbooks:
some of those books are my favorite.
I am grateful for the brave women authors, especially, who
wrote before women had the right to vote or the right to own property or the
right, some thought, to be taken seriously.
I am grateful for the stories within the pages.
I am grateful for my love affair with old books and all the
shapes, twists and turns my love takes me.
The
place that is the heart of transcendentalism, Concord, Massachusetts – and this,
the legendary place Thoreau went, in his words, to “I
went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the
essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and
not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”
Lost, found, on a path, on the path, on
my path, none of it mattered. I was here, now, in Walden Woods. I heard the
train whistle. Felt like home.
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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Today's prompt from #BlogFlash2012 - A Different World
I don’t know what woke me before six this morning, but once it smacked me on my forehead I had no choice but to get up and face the day.
I started coffee and took a book out to the front porch and the quiet, rare crisp August air, I was grateful for these moments of solitude for reflection.
It is otherworldly, this experience of my front porch in the morning. I am able to welcome the sunrise: today she was like a diva, stomped from the front door into her dressing room without stopping.
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 couldn’t help but fall in love with Gold Rush writer Dame Shirley, who was called Louise (Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe) by the people who knew her.
Her place in literary history came from the letters she wrote to her sister, Molly, who lived in Western Massachusetts. Louise entertained her family as she made a life with her young husband first and last in San Francisco with two years in the early 1851 and 1952 along the gold mines of the Feather River northeast of San Francisco where young couple moved because Mr. Clapp was in ill health.
Louise’s writing became a powerful link to the lives of the women of the California Gold Rush.
I especially enjoyed her letter to Molly telling about when she actually tried on the occupation of Gold Miner. “Nothing of importance has happened since I last wrote you except that I have become a mineress; that is if the having washed a pan of dirt with my own hands, and procured therefrom three dollars and twenty five cents in gold dust, (which I shall inclose in this letter) entitle me to this name.”
Her letter continues to share she would rather not continue as a miner. She realized the male miners were hungry for female companionship while doing this grueling work. The solution, they thought, was to hand a new mineress a pan to sift through that was heaped with gold as an encouragement for her to continue because “it was such easy work.” They knew better AND they wanted more women around!
When she and her husband returned to San Francisco, she wasn’t happy about it. She wrote in her final letter: “My heart is heavy at the thought of departing forever from this place. I like this wild and barbarous life: I leave it with regret.” Her husband was tired of California completely. They divorced, he moved to Hawaii and eventually back to the eastern US and she added an “e” to the end of Clapp forever becoming Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe and happily stayed in San Francisco.
Her colorful letters were first memorialized via a magazine called The Pioneer in 1854 and 1855. Famed California writer Bret Harte later published fiction that bore a stunning resemblance to the stories Louise told in her letters to Molly.
Harte was her primary detractor, criticizing her letters when published in The Pioneer. Interesting, isn’t it, that when questioned about the similarities between her early letters and Hart’s later work when she was a teacher in San Francisco in later life, she stood beside her frenemy saying, “Oh, no he didn’t plagiarize my stories. He was unconsciously recreating what he had read from my letters and meant no harm.”
She taught for twenty years before returning to Elizabeth, New Jersey, where she was born. Another irony from Dame Shirley’s life was she rekindled her friendship with Bret Harte’s estranged wife in New Jersey. She actually lived in the boarding house of one of Mrs. Harte’s nieces when she died in 1906.
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 have so many books I have written sitting in Word Docs and notebooks and blogs and articles I use to keep me warm, like a quilt, somehow afraid to stitch together and watch fly away into other people’s hearts and minds.
The irony is people ASK me where they can “get” my books.
“Oh, I’m in poetry and essay anthologies. I have a couple ebooks…” my voice trails off.
They want a book, a real bound book with pages to turn and margins to add their thoughts in purple ink.
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 -
I realize how much my memory is diminishing its ability to recall data – primarily stuff I have committed to do with dates attached that I have completely forgotten until #1 – I have disappointed someone by forgetting or #2 – I am reminded right when I am about to miss something which puts me completely off kilter or #3 – I hear later that so-and-so was hurt when I didn’t or did something I had forgotten about entirely.
It happened again this week.
I felt so terrible and I immediately jumped to fix it as best as I could, but I know the damage may have been unfixable. I still don’t know exactly.
I was in Barnes and Noble this weekend and I saw a book there about Memory. It is a sort of how to improve your memory using the same skills as geniuses across the ages have done it. I want to buy it, preferably on Amazon for the discount, but I can’t remember the title or the author.
See what I mean?
I can remember ridiculous details about the coat room from my second grade experience, but I can’t remember I said I would have coffee with a former co-worker at 9:30 at Dagny’s on Tuesday.
I decided I am going to start using a calendar ap on my phone that will remind me of things. I can see no other way to fix this, at least until I go back to Barnes and Noble and text myself the name of the author and the title of that… oh, yes. Of that book about genius and memory.
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 I was talking to a young woman from Austria and she doesn’t know it, but she shamed me into learning more about international news. I asked her if she knew who Cesar Chavez was and she didn’t (which would surprise me if she did) and she said, “Oh, I am confusing him with Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez.
I had never heard of President Hugo Chavez until that moment.
I was more than a little embarrassed but I didn’t let on.
I think my head is too filled with the current headlines of non-news-stories about has beens or non-celebrities like Anna Nicole Smith and Paris Hilton and Lindsey Lohan. How did we as a country get into this conundrum where Brittney Spears being hospitalized for a mental disorder is more significant than international news?
I am renewing my subscription to the Christian Science Monitor and will seek out “real news” now. I confess, I do enjoy shows like The Bachelorette but it doesn’t need to be the lead story on the news whether Emily chose Jef or Arie.
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 -
I am a poet. It has been in my blood since birth, or possibly in my mother's womb or possibly deep within my Father's blood or Grandmother's and spilled into the DNA that made me long before it made me.
I used to publish almost daily on my poetry blog. You may find my poetry at JulieJordanScott.com It has been a long time, though, and I am thinking perhaps this particular adventure in Summer Blog Challenge is a call to reawaken.
The poem I share today has been sitting dormant in a notebook of mine where most of my poems have been living lately. I never stopped writing, I just stopped publishing. Perhaps my feeling of vulnerability was stronger than the compulsion to share myself and my words freely.
That being said, thank you for reading... and I would love, love, love any thoughts, comments and conversations - simply so I will know you were here, you read, and you care enough about me continuing to say something.
Flagpole
She watches as the others raise her mistakes on the flagpole at dawn Her spine withers by midmorning coffee clache Where is she Where are you where are we safe? Where is she Where are you Where are we running to and from?
A wise mother asks, "What have you ever traveled toward more than your own safety?" The tarnished bronze ropes rip holes in her skin and scramble her memory Did the others ever lower her mistakes on the flagpole at dusk?
PS - The Wise Mother referred to in this poem is poet Lucille Clifton, whose words are included in quotations in the poem.
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 -
Like many children when the “What do you want to be when you grow up,” brought a multitude of answers from Astronaut (long before Sally Ride!) to Actress to Mother to the one I wanted to be the longest was teacher of the blind and deaf.
I read a biography of Annie Sullivan, teacher to Helen Keller, and it sparked something deep within me. I wanted to be like her. I wanted to reach out and into the lives of people who were separated from the world because of the lack of visual and sound light.
While I gave up that specific vocational goal, I think as a life coach, I do reach out and into the lives of people who are separated from light: and oftentimes that leaks into not being able to see or hear life at its finest due to blocks in belief or hope or love or joy. I help people to re-discover those sensual experiences we relish in childhood.
I am also an actress and a mother, so I didn’t do so bad, did I?
I love this prompt and question. Makes me smile.
So – when you were a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?
Julie Jordan Scott has been a Life & Creativity Coach, Writer, Facilitatorand 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 -
June 21from the Summer Blog Challenge -- Most recent words of wisdom you heard that stuck with you.
Have you ever had one of those books recommended to you that you resisted reading?
I have authors like that: people say “Have you read thus and so?” and I say “No…..” and over and over again “Thus and So” shows up in your consciousness.
This is what happened to me with Terry Tempest Williams. The other night her book When Women Were Birds insisted I buy it. I gave in. I took the insistent book off the shelf and bought it. I started reading and was hooked. It was like a reunion with one of my oldest and dearest friends!
In fact, there is wisdom on nearly every page!
I have gleaned a couple quotes here. No, the only “aloud hearing” of this wisdom was me reading the words aloud to me and myself alone, but nonetheless, these are the most recent words of wisdom, especially sticky, that I have come across:
“Beware of the charismatic wolf in sheep’s clothing.”
“I take a breath and sidestep my fear and begin speaking from the place where beauty and bravery meet – within the chambers of a quivering heart.”
“It is not the lips of a prince that will save us, it is our own lips, speaking.”
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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