Image Prompt: A half open window - tell a story of your "half opened window."
Welcome to Let Your Words Flow: a Daily Quote, Prompt and Image for your Creative Inspiration.
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Now - on with today's inspiration -
Quote:
"There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you."
What stories about your business/life work want to be told?
What stories are you carrying within yourself? What roadblocks keep you from telling them?
Bonus: begin writing one of those stories now, one sentence at a time.
Lists:
Make a list of 5 to 10 stories do you enjoy listening to/reading/watching the most.
Make a list of 5 to 10 stories you tell regularly now. (for example, remember the time when....?)
Make a list of 2 - 5 stories (or more) you want to start telling.
Traditional Writing Prompts:
I automatically smile when I remember my childhood story of....
I started on my journey because....
On the day my life changed, I.....
Thank you for your reading & participation in Let Your Words Flow! Please come back as we offer new prompts to spice up your blogging, writing and creative thinking every day!
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.
Dive Into Morning Pages: What Looks Like Trash May Be Treasures You Didn't See Before....
I wonder if gorging on words and images too early in the day may actually slow my creative process to a slow, almost dried up trickle?
This morning, for example, I was so fired up from writing poems in my morning pages and really watching and looking and snapping photos of yet another picker going through my Wednesday morning trash among other things.
What is up with this?
I finally sat at my desk and nothing worthwhile is spilling from my fingers.
Including this.
I think I may go work on my garage organization or tape off some painting projects or get in my car and drive to the river.
Certainly here at the keyboard nothing is happening.
I quickly peruse my morning pages. I find this haiku:
Slice through needless words
Emma sleeps on, late start day
My arm slowly heals
Bicycle Riding, Shopping Cart Pulling Picker - in front of my house. Yes.
I discover a couple unspent American Sentence poems (a form like haiku created by American Beat Poet Jack Kerouac)
First light goings, comings: two wheels, shopping cart, SUV, garbage truck.
===
Thought of you as the sun hid behind the cloud. Please don’t leave me alone!
I find a typically random phrase, seeking a poem to appear within: “Staccato syllables represent my thoughts.”
I saw three pickers in total working my neighborhood this morning, hopeful they would find something recyclable. I don’t know why they don’t limit this hunt to the day when we all put out our recycling trash cans? It is much cleaner garbage and pre-sorted for them.
I saw a pregnant prostitute, doing a strange sort of belly dance for south bound travelers on Union Avenue. She was wearing zebra striped stretch pants and a tank top pulled over her tummy, protruding belly button and all. This tipped me over into “huh?” land and except for making my daughters lunch and adding these words to the page and writing a found poem, I haven’t created anything.
Yet when I look at that list, I realize I have been creative all along.
The goodies still pour forth, only sometimes they pour differently and perhaps not exactly like I expected.
My Morning Pages and a Found/Black Out Poem - from Today
They are not a trickle at all – they are more like a sorting of ingredients into small containers like they do on cooking shows. A ramekin of this and a bowl of that and a spoon of this and I always wonder, “Do they do this preparation at home?”
It’s almost like this brand of creativity is the guys picking through my garbage. Sometimes they hit pay dirt: a lot of cans and bottles, and the other times they just stick their hands in a lot of stinky stuff. You just never know until you dive in.
= = =
Julie Jordan Scott is a writer, 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.
Embracing "This day – this moment – this "right here under our noses" is our day yet. " will change your life
Samuel will be twelve-years-old this coming Monday.
How did this happen?
How is it that in a few short weeks I will no longer have
any children in elementary school and I am expecting my first grandbaby?
People ask – which daughter is pregnant? They almost always
think Emma, which makes her sort of laugh, but no. It is the first daughter I
raised, Beyunca, who is pregnant. She is thirty-one, prime baby time, and very
pleased to be bringing life to the world. She is due in December. We are using
this time to continue recreating our relationship.
Like much of my life, it is not a conventional one.
The one constant, though – for you and for me – is we will
each gain so much when we learn to hold this day as the treasure it is. This
day – this moment – this right here under our noses is our best day yet.
Embracing this thought will help us to understand the purest
forms of gratitude and awaken such an abundant attitude, the sadness of a
little boy becoming a young man will turn into a swelling pride in the young
man he is becoming.
He wants adobe aftereffects for his birthday – the movie
making program – because he keeps honing his skills as a video maker. He does
so many things I could never figure out.
Today Emma is celebrating her first full day at school with
no braces by wearing makeup she put on herself and an adorable outfit. She is
truly coming into her own. The conversations we have been having lately would
be mind-boggling if I didn’t know what a miracle that young woman is, just in
being herself.
I even grieved a bit to learn Katherine is not going to be
home this Summer after all. She is off to either Berkeley (my fingers are
crossed and re-crossed!) or Washington, DC. I have been focusing not on my own
selfish desire to hold her a little bit longer, but on holding her growing
independence as she reaches into the adulthood she has been earning ever since
she arrived on the Smith College campus nearly three years ago.
The mulberries are crashing off the tree today, firm and
tight. Instead of splattering on my neighbor’s cars, they bounce off.
My yard looks like mulberry stew.
I am holding this moment by looking up recipes that include
mulberries. Would you believe I’ve been in this house with this tree for
twenty-two years and never gleaned the fruit to create anything edible?
I wasn’t ready then, I suppose, for the full abundance this
tree has offered me season after season after season.
There is a whole other story there.
I’ll leave that for another day, another moment, another
time of writing life.
Enjoy your best day - what will you create with it?
Almond Blossoms Look Like Snow but They Feel More Like Heaven.
Their faces started popping up on facebook sometime last
week.
I began to see photos of my friends in the orchards
surrounding Bakersfield. These trees are in a lovely place in the bloom process
which comes every Spring. It happens quickly. If you are a day late, the
blossoms are all on the ground and then they very quickly return to the earth:
fragrant dust whose appearance lives in the memory of those who take the time
to notice.
This blossoming season makes me happy to live in Kern
County.
I wanted to take new photos of flowering trees but more importantly, I
wanted a new experience of sitting with solely and soulfully with myself among
the almond trees.
It was just before sunset last Monday when the wind
whispered in my ear, “Hey, Julie, everything is under control at home. Steal
away, drive west….so I did. I left my home in Upper La Cresta in Bakersfield
seeking what I heard were some incredible blossoms in orchards along Snow Road.
I forget sometimes how far out that road goes but when I got to a place that slightly resembled a dead
end I knew I was onto something sacred.
It was a less smooth, almost dirt road I drove onto when I noticed
a few other cars parked alongside the
trees.
Word was spreading. Other photographers were here. Some had
special reflecting and light equipment. One was doing a shoot with a mother,
father and toddler. I didn’t get too close to them, but how I wished I had done
that with my children when they were little.
I thought of bringing my daughter out there, but here it is
Friday and we haven’t had time. I know the magical moment has passed right as
the wildflowers start covering our grassy hills for a different sort of
enchantment.
The bloom and fall of almond blossoms has a short window of time to enter into its
secret safe haven. The scent coming to me from my sun open roof was compelling
me to stop driving and and just be.
“Stop and step inside!” The blossoms whispered.
My purple ballet flat wearing feet stepped onto a carpet of
softness, a sea of almond flower blossom petals lining the muddy ground with
what looked, at first glance, like snow.
It was better than snow. It was warm and smells of rebirth and new
beginnings.
It smells like waking up and being well after a long time
not being well.
It smells like the wedding bouquet before it is taken on its
journey down the aisle.
It smells like the first day of kindergarten, the last day
of high school and the first day you moved into your dorm room freshman year.
I looked down the rows and rows of white and saw a tree,
resting on her side.
This was a sight I had never seen: one fallen tree among
many trees still standing.
I walked toward her soundlessly in the sacred hush of this
sanctuary. I put my books and my portable lap desk at her feet and
kneeled. Her branches reached to me, defiantly
blooming like all the other trees.
“See my beauty,” she said, her voice soft.
I breathed her floral scent deep into my belly. “I see your
beauty, I smell your beauty. Your beauty is reaching into me.”
It felt like she, the tree, was asking me to carry her
beauty with me.
I have to tell you, I love nature and I love experiences
like this, but I normally do not feel as if I am having a conversation with a
dying tree.
This is a moment that will live on in me and in my words.
I rested myself underneath her, scooting as much of me as
possible underneath her tilted branches.
The ground was wet and muddy underneath the blossom blanket, but I
didn’t care about getting slightly cold and damp, this tree was allowing me to
be her witness.
Nothing would stop me from living such a privilege she
offered me.
I closed my eyes and prayed.
I felt the sun dappling my face in different areas as it
moved toward the horizon. I waited and prayed wordlessly. It was at a point
beyond language, beyond translation, beyond understanding.
As darkness began to fall I sat up and wrote what I could.
Only a few sentences could speak through my pencil. I prayer-wrote thanksgiving
to the absent orchard owner. I
prayer-wrote profound gratitude for the tree herself for inviting me into such
an intimate time in her life.
I stepped out of the orchard a different woman than the one
who stepped into the orchard less than
an hour earlier.
Transformation doesn’t have to be a lengthy process, it only
has to be one met willingly with an open heart and a listening ear.
My final gratitude is for myself, for offering myself to
both the will and the listening.
What calls to you today? How will you respond?
= = =
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.
Did
you enjoy 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 -
This quote from Katherine Anne Porter could have been my anthem this week.
I vacillated between confused and discouraged and faithful
and encouraging and laying the compliments so thick they had to be cut with a
machete.
I wasn’t so sure if my love and I would survive it.
At one point I sent a text that included one of the quotes I
firmly believe in: “Sometimes love is not enough.”
Relationships, even the most loving among us, may not
survive not because of the love factor, but because something else happens or
doesn’t happen that causes the end to come before, perhaps, either party really
wants it to come.
I have re-learned how to love this week.
I have re-learned how to be patient, kind and willing to
wait out the storm.
Yesterday I did a free writing session and used several
words from George Eliot’s Silas Marner as my beginning point.
This is what the end
of a curtain rod feels like in the moment before and after it gets pushed into
place. Then, the moment it is held there, above a window, without choice. It is bound to its
duty of keeping the curtains aloft without complaint, without needing to be
seen.
The wind quietly
whispered across my nose and cheeks. I sipped it in, slowly. I closed my eyes
to feel it, completely.
I can see his
backside, swathed in baggy jeans, so baggy only a hint of his frame is
visible.
This is love, holding
itself back, being willing to be invisible, not knowing how to break free from
its hold. My breast bone feels the end of the rubber stopper (or bumper or boot)
pushing against the distance.
Must I feel this?
How may I feel
comfortable with this discomfort?
I stopped asking
questions though the curiosity continues to dance, quite formally and stiff, alone the curtain rod.
Simply writing what I felt into what I believe was wanting
to be a piece of some future
fiction helped me to feel much better, much less
isolated.
With that, I was able to get loose from the strangle hold of
the curtain rod. I was able to come back to the ground and be with whatever is,
was and will be.
I am continuing to learn about love, as Katherine Anne
Porter suggests.
It is a spiritual practice, a sacred adventure, and a
dynamic way to live.
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 have attempted to sit in my seat and write for an hour now.
I have written roughly five hundred words which for me is the usual for thirty minutes.
I have been wandering away consistently, though, taking on what I call “short attention span keyboard” and I’m not exactly certain why.
The why doesn’t even matter of course, what matters is what will I do about it with multiple writing projects hanging in the balance, how can I sustain them and my overall happiness with the craft if I don’t stay put and write?
I look up from my desk and see Anais Nin looking down at me.
I see photos of Alice Eastwood, a woman naturalist who was so passionate about her work she astonishes me. Plus I need a hat like she is wearing in the circa 1900 photo. Susan Glaspell is up there as is the work of Charlotte Perkins Gilman and a postcard of a woman levitating above her lawn which my friend sent me because she said it reminded her of me when I write on my porch.
What should I do, wise women, when I am having trouble sitting still to write?
Anais says, “Do something that honors the hunger of your senses,” as she takes a puff on the end of her very long cigarette holder.
Alice says succinctly, “Climb a tree.”
Susan says even more succinctly , “Improvise.”
Charlotte Perkins Gilman says, “Don’t be too rough on yourself. Do what you feel the urge, right now, to do the most.”
I plant my face in my palm.
Charlotte continues, “Obviously in this precise moment, writing isn’t it. You are excused for the next hour. Make some good.”
And with that, I shut down my computer, grabbed my dogs’ leashes and headed out to one of my favorite outdoor haunts very close to my house.
It was a tremendous choice.
The next time you feel completely stuck behind a brick wall of words and think what you SHOULD do is chain yourself to your key board, consult some of the writers you admire the most.
I did use my senses to see, to smell, to feel textures. I took photos, I talked to people I met along the path. I enjoyed my dogs.
I didn’t climb a tree, but I honored and greeted several.
I definitely improvised.
I took a break.
I came back and I wrote.
Try it.
PS – If you are unfamiliar with the writers I mention here, use your favorite search engine and seek information about them. Each is a fantastic woman writer who could teach each of us a lot.
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.
This morning I made a light proclamation to my daughter,
Emma when I said, “Your Great Great Grandpa was Canadian.”
She didn’t find that very funny.
Emma is taking AP World History this year and one of her
first assignments is to research where her family roots began. We’re thinking
nineteenth century here. Most of her classmates have roots in Europe or Central
or South American during that time, but my little Emma’s roots stretch across
the United States in that time.
My family of choice goes beyond blood. My family of choice
flows words and images as blood. My literary Grandma’s and Aunties, My Artist
Cousins and Sisters, these women so many people haven’t heard of yet.
In honor of the spirit of “FLASH” today, I am going to leave
you with images of these women and request you visit the links I will leave
from my “Women in Literary History from A to Z” series from last Spring.
Lucy Larcom, Mill Girl & Writer
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Social Reformer & Writer
Ina Coolbrith, First Poet Laureate of California
Kate Chopin: Novelist, Short Story Writer (with her Children)
Julie Jordan Scott has been a Life & Creativity
Coach, Writer, Facilitator and Teleclass Leader since
1999. She is
Julie Jordan Scott writing at Ina Coolbrith Park in San Francisco
also an award winning Actor, Director,
Artist and Mother Extraordinaire. She was twice the
StoryTelling Slam champion in Bakersfield.
Did
you enjoy 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 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 -
Are you ready to write from a prompt unlike any you have ever written from in the past? It is different because it is a sight of nature unseen by so many until now.
Your prompt is twofold: a still photo and a video.
Set your timer for either five, ten or 15 minutes.
Look at the photo.
Watch the Video.
Write from your senses using one or all of these prompts:
I see
I hear
I smell
I taste
I touch
I feel (as in emotion)
Just move your fingers on the keyboard, stream of consciousness style, across the keyboard. Don't think, just type. Repeat the prompt again. I see... I smell... and choose to mix them up if you would like.
There are no rules to writing from this image and this video, just write.
Honor this memory and this experience we now share.
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 wasn't sure if I should include this blog post as one of the Ultimate Blog Challenge "blogboost" entries. It isn't a how-to, it isn't a business-y post. It is everyday life poetic: where does that fit amongst social media - how-to's - build your blog I see there so much? Then I decided "This is me. This is what I love to write. Someone out there must need to read this so-be-it, amen!" So here you have it.
“I early learned to love birds
the light of birds the kingdom of birds
in the high treetops
stricken with light.”
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, “The Light of Birds”
This morning I sat on my porch, my bottom held in place in a chair not unlike a baby’s sling as it holds her close to her Mommy’s heartbeat. The pure pleasure in the closeness the baby feels is not unlike the pure pleasure I felt as I read Lawrence Ferlinghetti poetry. My silent joy gained the trust and presence of a family of house finches who feed from the small wood house I filled with hopeful seeds yesterday, the ones I bought at the discount store and mixed diligently with a brown paper bag of cracked corn.
Samuel comes to me after I have moved inside to bring you into the Ferlinghetti meets my bird loving experience.
“Breakfast” he whispers into my right ear.
“8:00” I whisper back. “It is 7:42.”
“I am hungry,” he says plainly.
“7:50” I counter. He nods and moves to the kitchen, giving me room to speak with you.
I hear him fill a cup with ice and then water.
It reminds me how you and I and Samuel and the sleeping Emma are each and all our own light.
Like Ferlinghetti writes in his poems about the light of different places, the light of birds, overheard conversations of Indiana, we could each write a poem of light of Samuel or the light of the birdfeeder or the light within the discount store. That last one seems like a stretch but I am sure with the right frame of mind, even that is possible.
I know I used to habitually limit myself to the obvious.
Life has gotten so much sweeter since I changed that habit and recognized light, instead, in the gash on the prostitute’s calf as she works a side street in West Oakland and the light in the eyes of the young mother, so tired and lonely as she pushes her two babies in the shopping card in another nameless – characterless – grocery store in another nameless –characterless town in Central California.
Writers – you and I – are the stewards of light. We are offered the privilege of seeing it and translating it to others. Our words are an invitation to sight not unlike the eyeglasses perched on the edge of my seventh grade social studies teacher’s nose.
I have forgotten her name but I remember her eyeglasses and her demand, “Whoever is out there, clicking your pen, stop right now.”
It was me. She hadn’t or couldn’t see me clicking as I concentrated on the blank map of Africa which I was supposed to be filling in with names of countries I had yet to know.
She hadn’t learned to translate the light of these newly free countries: Ghana and Togo and Mozambique with their newly minted independence. Instead she gave us newly minted papers still smelling from the mimeography ink, still damp, still hungry to feel the light of our pencils.
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 -
This is my Ultimate Blog Challenge Writing for the Day. Be watching for my challenge posts which will include Writing Prompts, Writing Tips and General Life Tips and Essays. This is Blog 5/31 for July!
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