Julie Unplugged

Please Listen: Twenty-four Years Ago Arid Mailboxes Dotted the Landscape (or Maybe They Didn't)

Please listen: I am not writing any of this in order for you to commiserate with any woe I have felt in the past present or perhaps even twenty-four years from now. I am simply calling myself into experience and inviting you along into that experience.

I can still smell the malty flavor of the budweister brewery as I remember early morning when twenty-four years ago I woke up and knew something wasn't right.
I didn't know that day ould change my perspective on life and leave me never the same again.

I had a friend and co-worker named Michelle back then. When I told her I would never be the same she shooshed me, saying, "Don't say that!"

Interesting how truth plays into the old way of thinking and behaving.

"Don't speak. Don't unruffle anyone else's perspective. Be quiet."

Twenty-four years later I still write of her on her birthday.

I've given up on not speaking and am open to both unruffling and being unruffled.
I remember sitting in a circle with other moms in similar situations. We were mothers stripped of motherhood. There was a Mom named Sandy who became a Mom after years of hoping only to have a stillbirth, like I did. She had her little girl when she was in her early forties. She would be in her mid sixties now.

I used to see her every now and then. I remember once we bumped into each other in a department store in a nearby mall. The store has since gone out of business and the mall sits, unappreciated with all its anchor stores finding the same fate. The mall is more empty than full.

I haven't seen Sandy since I got pregnant with Katherine who is now twenty-two years old. I wonder sometimes how she is doing, what became of her, how her life turned out.

I think Sandy then saw me as one of the Moms whose motherhood wasn't stripped away anymore.

This isn't entirely true, though.

I have never known the romantic aspect of a completely smooth pregnancy or a pregnancy without the whispers in the back of the head. I have never known a pregnancy as a fullness, I've known it more as a time to avoid the eventual emptiness of last year's waiting.

Ripples of silence from those moments live on in disappointments and the under currents of misunderstandings. I imagine this will more than likely inhabit my life indefinitely. I have become comforable with thaose ripples..

I don't celebrate them, but I don't stand at the metaphorical door to block their entrance.

Please listen: I am not writing any of this in order for you to commiserate with any woe I have felt in the past present or perhaps even twenty-four years from now. I am simply calling myself into experience and inviting you along into that experience.

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 Julie Jordan Scott is a writer, creative life coach, speaker, performance poet, Mommy and mixed-media artist. Her word-love themed art will be for sale at a First Friday soon, when it is warmer than it was in December!, in Downtown Bakersfield. 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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   © 2014 - Julie Jordan Scott - all rights reserved.

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Mixed Media: Broken + Layered + Past + Present + Future

I’m not sure when I discovered how fun it was to layer photos, especially photos taken years apart with content that looks completely unrelated.

Last week I posted my image that combines an image from a cemetery very close to the birthplace of W.E.B. DuBois overlaid with a screen window from the hospital building at Weedpatch, the setting for John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath.

This week, I did a photo transfer of a layered photo: a self portrait of me, crying, from my soul-grief series from 2007. The layered photo is me, writing, in 2012 at the Mountain View cemetery in Oakland, California, on the steps of a mausoleum there. Somehow these two photos painted a picture for me the two separate photos didn’t say on their own.

Broken: Mixed Media on Wood Board by Julie Jordan Scott

 

I had a painted piece of salvaged scrap wood that begged to be used in art, so I painted a layer of black, white and gray acrylic paint. I transferred the photo collage directly onto the wood. I appreciate the slight tear in one section. The imperfections spoke out, reminding me of the perfection of imperfection and brokenness.

I bought some dishes at a thrift store with the sole intention of breaking them and using them as another dimension of this piece, another monument to brokenness, literally. I used the mirror I broke as a reflection of the brokenness in everyone. Each person in the world shares a sense of brokenness which we rarely recognize in one another.

I know I often think I am the only one who is broken, everyone else has it perfectly together, right?                                           

This post is a check in for Creative Every Day with Leah Piken Kolidas

There is more, too, which the piece is speaking to me. Perhaps I’ll write more about it here.

I’m so grateful you are reading. I look forward to reading your comments & hope to return the visit to you very soon.

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© 2013

 

Art Heals & Helps: See How it May Help You with the Grief Process & More

I use my entire body when I create art.

 

I call this photo "Prayer Hands" because the Process felt as if I was praying the entire time.

I call this photo "Prayer Hands" because the Process felt as if I was praying the entire time.

My favorite method is not to use a brush or a pencil, if at all possible.

Sunday I created a piece I call “Dividing Line” at a Grief-Art workshop at the Art and Spirituality Center at Mercy Hospital in Bakersfield. The piece doesn’t feel finished yet though it will be on display in an upcoming art show. Perhaps, like grief and like the General Assembly at the United Nations, it is never finished, it is just experienced differently.

I closed my eyes in the making of it.

I started in a much more organized manner. I didn’t know what I was doing with pastels as I have never used them much in the past. I started with a white pastel on the black paper. I moved it back and forth, soon discovering I liked to use the chalk on its side more than using it like a pencil or pen.

It was a large piece of paper and I was using my non dominant hand. Up and down and all across the page in circles and colors and sweeps. I crashed into the end of the table cloth and my chalk seered down the edge, tracing the stitching of the table cloth.

It jolted me.

I adored it.

This is how I have been taught to grieve: behind a line, behind a veil, in a space where no one else might be made uncomfortable by the rawness of my emotions.

How many times have we heard it at a funeral? When the family members are stoic and showing no emotions, we say “Oh, they are doing so well!” Maybe we should say “Are they on too much medicine to feel the service? Will they remember it at all? Do they have a safe place to express their loss?”

Yes, we all grieve differently.

I am a loud, active, deep feeling, very reflective griever.

I respect each of our methods of grief.

What was difficult for me when I was younger is I never had any grief models. I was never allowed to go to funerals. I didn’t get to talk about loss or death. I remember when the call came in that my grandfather died, I was with my mother. I looked at her with an odd, six-year-old excitement, “Should I go tell Daddy?”

I still don’t know how he was told.

I still don’t know how he responded. He was in the midst of a worsening relationship with alcoholism though.

I do know when I facilitated my brothers Celebration of Life nearly forty years later, all the grievers stood in a circle, holding hands, as we remembered John. Katherine, my daughter, said my father’s hand shook with grief as she held it. I am so grateful he was able to express his grief and I am so grateful my daughter was able to fully witness it without fear or anxiety or judgment.

If I had been faced with raw grief like that at her age then – fifteen – I would have been frightened. I had no exposure.

Now I feel like a grief expert of sorts. It isn’t a title I enjoy claiming, but I do value it as an integral part of who I am as a member of the human community.

This post is a part of Going Green: where the best posts are "recycled"

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Change: If You Had the Power to Change ONE thing that happened in 2012....

Yet another fantastic REVERB prompt, this time coming from EMBRACE LIFE.

Visit her link (it is with her name, Embrace Life above) and pick a prompt or two or twenty and play along. It is a grand way to look back and look forward consciously.

This was a prompt I wrote from yesterday but never got to post. It was one of those days!

If you could change one thing that happened this year, what would it be? Why?

What is one thing I could change that happened this year, it wouldn’t be my cancer. I think that was an important happening which I am supposed to use in some way. Well, I think we are to use everything that happens, but the one I would choose to change took all my breath from me and it happened simultaneously with my diagnosis and treatment for cancer.

Impeccable timing, eh?

I would change my beloved cheating on me. The good news is I am getting clarity on what I will accept and what I won’t. The bad news it is taking much longer than I believe it needs to. The bad news is when I asked him if he was “still seeing her” he said, “Oh, she’s been busy with other people” rather than, “I know it would hurt you if I continued, so I consciously made an effort to break it off.”

There is a text I wrote to a dear friend, one of my only friends who knows the situation. Here is what I said: “I told him bad choices don’t make bad people, as long as we learn from it, dust off and rebuild. Have to be willing. God knows I’ve made some horrible choices in my life. He sounded like he might cry, I think he gets it now. It is possible to inflict horrible pain on someone yet that person who you’ve hurt may choose to offer grace back.”

I wish I could say that was the last time I had to deal with this issue and this behavior. It wasn’t.

The third time I said to him, “You know what they say. Once, shame on you. Twice, shame on me. Three times, you’re out.”

I kept reminding myself of my stand for grace. He was horrified at the thought of me retreating completely.

I prayed about it and I continue to pray about it.

December and January will be important months. My hope is to wake up on my birthday on January 29 with a clear solution.

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© 2012 by Julie Jordan Scott

Collage from the Soul: Art Every Day Month Check In November 15

I had a very tough day yesterday starting at about 2:30 pm and yes, it is still continuing.

Before I go on about the visual art I created, I did write this lovely meditation on my blog about "Places Left Behind." You may visit it here (though please return to see the rest! or wait until you have read this to go back to the reading.)

I am so grateful I had a SoulCollage (TM) event to attend so I could retreat into quiet and contemplation. Without that island of time and creativity previously orchestrated, I don't know how I would have made it through.

My soul collage cards have several similar themes in this batch.

I only made three, which is a low number for me. I usually make six, but I was very slow - as is usual for me when I have had a shock or a burst of emotional pain.

This first card pays homage to Ophelia in Hamlet. She is the character I relate to in this card. See her, there? That little blue eyed girl in the water, looking up through the doorway while no one else notices?

 

 

I usually make my cards completely intuitively. Last night I was primarily intuitively, but I also had certain plans for composition. This one, with the large flowers, did not turn out as I wanted it to at all.

I wanted the orange head to be splayed open more, like in the Emily Dickinson quote,"If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry."

This isn't poetry, though, this is pain and me trying to avert it. That menacing man is representative of all the negative thoughts racing through my mind and the flowers are the Pollyanna thoughts I always tend to replace the negative thoughts with rather than integrating the ouchy thoughts into something better.

Here I acknowledge I am working on releasing those menacing thoughts, not willing myself to pretend them away and lacquer them with Georgia O'Keeffe sized flowers.

 

Again, usage of windows and doors with my character represented behind the window or door, again, not being noticed, seen or heard.

It appears, I am actually giggling now - I was creating Shadow cards and didn't realize it. At Mercy we have a workshop coming up about shadow and these are sooooooo evident of my deepest, darkest, least integrated shadow.

A Divine poke, perhaps, to continue getting more and more real before that workshop.

GOOD NEWS: I have created tomorrow's art and it isn't even 9 am.

I know I will feel better tomorrow.

Have you allowed room for your shadow to show up in your art? How might that help you to grow as a human being as well as an artist?

 

 

 

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Do you have a lot of stuff to get done but can never seem to find the motivation? We have a solution - Get stuff done while having lots of fun at Passion Activator Friday - November 16, 2012 Check it out!

© 2012 by Julie Jordan Scott

 

Thankvember, Day 13Today I am grateful to be comin' round the depression mountain again....

I am grateful for my comin’ round the depression mountain once again.

Or maybe I should say, I am grateful for depression and the lush stages it brings.

Are you crossing your eyes and thinking I’m nuts? More than likely. If I heard myself saying this a couple years ago I would have thought I was insane, too, pushed right over the edge actually.

Listen to me, though. When you think of all the important, highly productive, world changing people who had depression – something shifts in me. Does it in you? Look at this roster of fellow depressed people who came around their depression mountains:  Beethoven, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Buzz Aldrin, Sylvia Plath, Winston Churchill, Charles Dickens, Abraham Lincoln, Princess Diana and the list goes on and on.

I have said if I hadn’t experienced depression, I wouldn’t be as intimate with the beauty life offers me as well.

I remember when I was in denial of depression and walked around in a near coma state all the time. When I finally took it on and appreciated it, did therapy and medication mixed with self care, the fog lifted.

Some days and some times are better than others, but today when I walked into my house after dropping the kids and it smelled of a combination of baked apples, fresh chocolate chip cookies and bacon, I knew things were once again getting better.

Yes, I know there is the possibility of another surgery in January.

We’ll take it on. Everything IS going to be just fine. I reflect upon where I was last year compared to this year - and I just sit back in awe. Last year I was not having it easy, but looking back - I was very bad off emotionally. Sometimes in the muck and mire and continuing with the daily routines we don't notice.

But today, I noticed. I'm comin' around that depression mountain again. Next time I find myself moving up it, I'll recognize it sooner and play with it and allow it to play with me because I know it is there to help me and you, perhaps, in reading this all the way through.

And I am forever grateful for that.

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© 2012 by Julie Jordan Scott

Trick or Treaters & the Holiday Rush: How They Impact Grievers and Those Who Love Them

Today's Blogfest Prompt comes from Kathy Combs from the Giggling Truckers wife. I went off on a bit of a tangent... but it is an important tangent. I wrote and read and thought.... yes, I need to follow this thread.

I don’t know if this would be considered a favorite Halloween memory, but it is a memory and it did take place on Halloween.

I tend to remember the years these were by layering other memories on top of them. It was the year we bought our Astrovan. Katherine was in the last year of preschool. Mansour was about to come stay with us so Bianca was in the seventh or eighth grade.

I was home alone that Halloween night, for once I was the one to hand out the candy.

Isn’t that strange?

I am always the one hoofing around the neighborhood, taking the kids to parties, that sort of thing, but this time I was home. I was making phone calls about buying the car, I was giving out candy, I was sitting at my dining room table writing.

It was the days before the internet, before the homes were all filled with laptops and IPads.

It was me, my pen and my notebook.

I wrote how the trick-or-treaters were the ones who ushered in the holiday rush for the rest of the year. Once they arrived it was just a matter of holding on to our hats until the New Year.

I was working on an article for the newsletter I was editing for a support group for people who have lost babies due to miscarriage, stillbirth or early infant death. The holidays tend to be tough for us, no matter how many other babies come, no matter where we adventure in the back of our minds there are those children of ours who did not grow into little Marios or Luigis or Pocahontas or Cinderellas.

It has been a long time for me now, but as this season begins its frenetic maelstrom through the lives of all of us, I would like to pause for a moment to remember those whose holiday season doesn’t loom festive, instead the holidays loom heavy.

For those who need to put on a “Happy Mask” due to other people’s expectations.

For those who feel guilty for breaking long held traditions, knowing or not knowing that break will sever the ties to those traditions forever.

This will be a different holiday season for many. For those who have been grieving for more time, recognize the sacredness of this year among other years. For all of us, wrap yourselves in quilts of compassion. Take more time by the fireplace and less time at the shopping malls and grocery stores.

For those of you who know people who are grieving, I know it is natural but don’t try to “cheer your friend up” by doing what you think they would like done. Instead, invite them into your experience by saying, “Would you rather go out for coffee today or would you like me to shop with you and lend a hand?”

“Would you like me to come over and bake cookies for Sarah’s class party or would you prefer I sew Marti’s Thanksgiving apron at home and bring it over later?”

Don’t rush in with solutions, ask questions and be patient for responses.

Be willing to say, “I would be happy to come over and we can watch chick flicks, anything other than the rampage of holiday television shows. I’ll bring popcorn and beer!”

Be willing to do nothing yet continue to follow up, letting your friend know you are there.

Each year is different with grief. I won’t say it gets better because it isn’t something that can be measured. It is more like… you integrate your grief experience differently.

I won’t end with any trite prescriptions like, “Be grateful for what you have,” or “All good things come to those who….” or “It will get better,” because those sorts of words usually only make the speaker feel better. She wants to tie her “taking care of the griever” in a big red bow.

We know better than that, don’t we.

Love, Love, Love.

 

 

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© 2012 by Julie Jordan Scott

This is my twenty fourth post (of 31!) for the October Ultimate Blog Challenge. Watch here for challenge posts which will include Writing Prompts, Writing Tips and General Life Tips and Essays.

  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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