You need to at least try to understand a couple things about me, please. Or perhaps I should say I would be delighted if you would at least recognize two things about me before you read this post. I tell you what, I will recognize a few unconventional things about you if you will recognize a few unconventional things about me.
Brilliant!
Lately I have been playing with indoor gardening. Nothing fancy, mind you, but simple, unkillable house plants. My latest fixation is the nearly indestructible pothos plant a friend gave me in the dreary days of winter – I can’t remember exactly when but I am guessing January or February.
I have loved this pothos so much it overgrew its pot after I cut a piece from her “wings” and created a pothos baby. I loved this pothos so much I started hand painting terra cotta pots to give her a beautiful place to live.
I continued the process this weekend – I put the finishing touches on her new home and clipped a new pothos plant from her wings.
When I prepared her new home, though, I went even bigger than just painting the pot.
I placed river rocks I collected from my beloved Kern River on the bottom of the pot.
I collected tidbits from my backyard to place upon the rocks: I chose a grapefruit skin from my grapefruit tree and some twigs from last year’s Christmas tree. I put some potting soil atop those items and then decided, as a writer, I need to fill my plant with words.
In went some poetry with the theme of revelation and a page from Kate Chopin’s awakening.
I covered it all with soil and then freed my pothos mommy from her too tight former pot and put her in this new pot.
She has grown by leaps and bounds since her replanting. She looks at least three times larger after only a few days.
I think it may be the love and time and intentionality I took while planting her.
My almost fifteen-year-old daughter, Emma, sometimes overhears my crooning at my plant babies and mistakes my words for her. She laughs when she realizes my “Oh, you are so beautiful, I can’t believe how you are growing up!” is for the plant.
We both laugh in recognition, actually, and then I praise her beauty and her evolution.
Believe it or not, I am now moving on to flowering plants for my front porch. We can do this, can’t we, Mommy Pothos? You will inspire me every step of the way… as will you, beloved reader.
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Usually when I read stuff like I am about to say, I growl and frown, shaking my head. “Cop out!” I say. “Can’t you either say the things everyone expects you to say or just for once not be so cliché?”
I could write about the births of my children – they are my greatest single works of art.
My personally philosophy though is this: every day is a celebration of what has been, what is to be and most of all, what is NOW.
Therefore, every day is the Best Day of My Life.
No one clunk me over the head with a huge dictionary.
I will love reading stories of births and weddings and ephiphanys.
I love writing those stories.
To be truthful, though… I have to stick with THIS is the best day.
How will you spend this twenty four hour gift? What would change if you woke up each morning thinking "Wow, this is the best day of my life!" I bet it would make a difference in how you feel. I know it does for me. I know my life is richer and more optimistic now than it used to be.
Many blessings to each of my Summer Blog Challenge friends!
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"It is the soul's duty to be loyal to its own desires. It must abandon itself to its master passion."
Rebecca West
My friend Michelle loves succulent plants. She loves raising them and loves putting them into glorious displays. These are works of art, living and breathing and so reflective of the luscious woman I know Michelle to be.
Today we were at our friend Jennie’s house. I insisted she come inside to appreciate the Zen feeling it has, and she was looking at Jennie’s tea pot and confessed she spends time imagining which succulents would look the most wonderful in this teapot or that cup and saucer or that cookie jar or that milk and creamer set.
She was apologetic for her passion.
I said, “But Michelle, it is just like my crazy obsession with all things poetic. Yes, some people may find it odd but once in a while you meet a person who “gets” your passion. It’s all worth it then.”
Passion is one of those magnetic qualities that cannot be denied, much like life force growing up from rocks or cracks in the sidewalk to startle a passerby with a purple flower or a fledgling tree or one of Michelle's succulent plants bursting with vitality from her love.
Passion and Life Force are either twins or a romantically involved couple.
Perhaps a slightly different way is to see Passion and Life Force as mother and child.
I know the passion Michelle has for her succulents births incredible, alive art. The life force moves her to create, the life force moves in her blood and breath to give her succulents life. The succulents literally give life and love back and the cycle continues.
When Michelle and you and I are loyal to our passion, the result is more passion.
When we allow our life force to be a partner in our lives, abundance appears as a result in many different forms: abundant friendships, abundant color, more opportunity to share, to give, to be a midwife to more life.
Michelle had no idea I would be stirred to write about her passion, her art and her life force, she was simply being her delightful self and expressing her love for succulents one afternoon during a very short visit.
Her delight invited me to write these words.
We are, each and all, given wisdom through loyalty to soul and passion.
Her loyalty takes form here:
Michelle had no idea I was going to write this about her passion until I asked her for photos. She is one of those dear, magnetic people everyone I know falls in love with right away.
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I have said for years a simple phrase: “We are at the forefront of a revolution.”
I first remember saying it right before I got pregnant with Sam, which would be eight years and several months ago. “We are at the forefront of a revolution.”
I felt such passion within me the first time I said it.
Life intervened and it moved to the back of my mind. “We are at the forefront of a revolution.” At times it wasn’t even a whisper, it wasn’t even like a belated echo barely traceable.
I would liken it to a fossil that is deeply covered in sediment. It is still there but not scene or known or even felt much anymore. Too much “stuff” of life covered my once sacredly spoken, “We are at the forefront of a revolution.”
Recently my life has shifted.
It has shifted dramatically.
Guess what I am hearing again?
“We are at the forefront of a revolution.”
It makes me laugh to write it again.
“We are at the forefront of a revolution.”
And yes, we are there. On its doorstep. Right now, today.
“We are at the forefront of a revolution.”
I can feel the passion of it inside me and I so want for that passion to spread to you.
Here, take my hand – see if you can feel it.
Much of my shift has happened because I experienced so much loss that I lost my ability to put into words what I wanted to express. Imagine that: a writer, someone who depends on words to “be the glue” lost people she loved, lost her dreams, lost parts of her business and finally – it felt like the final straw, lost her ability to create with words.
I lost my ability to create with words.
Ouch, major ouch then and major hallelujiah, now.
Why?
I kept creating - creating differently - even amidst all that loss and this different form of creativity loosened the sediment that covered the ever-important fossil, remember it?
It was the fossil that wanted to sing its song of “We are at the forefront of a revolution.”
What is the revolution?
It is the revolution of your soul. It is the revolution of truth. It is the revolution of knowing. It is the revolution of sacred awareness made tangible. It is the revolution of you and the revolution of me – being exactly who we were meant to be achieving exactly what we were meant to achieve.
It is the revolution of trust. It is the revolution of art.
It is the revolution of your personal choosing. It is YOUR revolution.
It is YOUR Soul Revolution.
There are no “you have to do it this way” or “you aren’t doing it rights” here.
Your Soul Revolution starts with seeing yourself, knowing yourself and stepping into your wholeness, your dreams, your goals, your own methodologies.
The pathway to revolution in this form right now is through seeing yourself more clearly through the art of self portraiture. We will use this art form as a means of knowing the form your soul inhabits.
We are going inside – at the soul level – by being 1000% comfortable with who we are on the outside.I have experienced too frequently in myself that I have not been comfortable with the me on the outside so I couldn’t express the beautiful me on the inside.
I kept thinking I had to change the me on the outside in order to love the me on the inside.
Self portraits have taught me this isn’t so at all. I remembered and please remember with me, now – we are at the forefront of a revolution.
This is why this pathway is so significant.
I have said for a while “I know I am beautiful” but those were just words much of the time. There was fluff attached, there was hopeful and sincere fluff but it was fluff nonetheless.
I don’t want fluff for you. I want truth for you. I want wholeness for you. I want you to experience soul revolution.
My intention is simple.
I want to teach the Art of Photo (and other forms of) Self Portraiture so that you can awaken to your unique brand of beauty and achieve what before has been unachievable – for whatever reason, perceived or otherwise, to you.
Your Soul Revolution will benefit you in the following ways:
>> Increase confidence
>> Learn new techniques in photography (as well as other art forms.)
>> Document your life in a Visual Memoir to leave for family and other loved ones
>> Feel better
>> Overcome depression
>> Allow yourself to feel, share and express emotions that until this point have been inexpressible
>> Celebrate every aspect of your life
>> Become more truthful with yourself and others
>> Stop criticizing yourself and start honoring yourself
>> and many more we will discover as we pursue Your Soul Revolution
How will we do this?
Well, there is a lot of ground to cover during these ten weeks. Here is some of what we may share:
1. Self Portrait using images of objects to express who you are
2. Self Portraits to invoke courage
3. Self Portraits that do not include your face
4. Self Portraits to express emotions
5. Self Portraits as a study of your facial structures
6. Creating a self portrait series
7. Written self portraits
8. Self Portrait Haiku
9. Nude Self Portraiture
10. Creating a Self Portrait Group
11. Stretching the Boundaries of Comfort in Finding Your Self in Your Self Portraits
12. Adding Simple Special Effects to Your Self Portraits
13. Self Portraits as Documentation
14. Self Portraits to Seed More Creativity
15. Self Portrait Challenges and Games
16. Self Portrait Communities
17. Preparing to Share Your Self
18. Photographing Self Portraits in Public Places
19. Using Your Timer
20. Composition in “Blind” Photography
21. Expanding Beyond the Camera
22. Self Portraits as a Metaphor
23. Self Portraits as Poetry
24. Expanding Your Self Portraits into Other Art
25. Video Self Portraits
26. Intimately Knowing the Soul Your Form Inhabits
27. Being OK with How You Look Right Now
28. Reaching out to Others Using Your Self Portraits
29. Copy Cat Self Portraits
I can’t tell you exactly what we will cover week to week because I create my programs according to the needs, hopes and desires of the Soul Revolutionaries who show up. Each program is bound to have a somewhat separate make-up, so I will create a somewhat different week-to-week syllabus.
I will cover each topic you see listed above, but some may not be taught in as great a depth.
Who says Revolution takes place in a straight line with a table of contents anyway?It doesn’t – thank goodness for that.
We are at the forefront of Your Soul Revolution.
Here are some questions I will ask you:
* What are you afraid of in expanding your view of yourself? (What are you willing to do to overcome that fear)
* What do you hope to accomplish in becoming a Self Portrait Artist and Soul Revolutionary?
* What are you willing to do to know yourself more intimately through Self Portraiture?
Most importantly: * What do you want to see as a result of experiencing Your Soul Revolution?
Here are some words from expert-artist-revolutionaries. Read their words and see how you connect with them: Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson said:
“In a self portrait, a woman takes herself simultaneously as the subject and the object of representation. It is therefore not a mirror image, (though before the advent of photography a self portrait required a mirror) but an artistic process of self-inspection and self-reflection.”
Whitney Chadwick wrote:
“No single model of self-portraiture can stand for the experiences of women generally, or fully express the rich interplay that exists between the examination of the reflected image, and the exploration of the social dimensions of lived experience, but self-representation remains critical to self-understanding and it plays a particularly important role in women's creative lives.”
In 'Mirror, Mirror, Self-Portraits by Women', Frances Borzello pointed out:
The feminist revolution gave women permission to value their own lives, feelings and ideas as highly as men did theirs, and though the subjects often caused outrage, particularly when taboo subjects such as menstruation appeared in women's works, they were impossible to ignore. The new subject matter, the artistic arm of the feminist slogan that the personal is the political, has led to the most exciting developments in self-portraiture today: the extended self-portrait, an elaborate idea expressed through the self.
Are you ready to join Your Soul Revolution?
Here is a bit of the structure this Revolution will take:
The program will be live from October 14, 2008 through December 16, 2008
Included during that time frame you will experience:
10 Live Teleseminar Sessionsfor those participating via Telephone offered on Tuesdays at 4 PM Pacific Time – with more sessions added as enrollment increases.
10 Ten hour-length Audio Sessions for those not participating via Telephone and for those who want to download onto MP3s and review for a lifetime.
Video Lessons
Audio Lessons
29 Written Lessons (at least) on the Topics Listed Above
Daily Self Portrait Worksheets to Download and Guide Your Process
Online Community opens October 7, 2008
Bountiful resources and referrals to other places to nourish and grow Your Soul Revolution.
Bonus!
Register between September 24, 2008 and September 30 and receive two bonus audio lessons/teleseminar sessions as well as the opportunity for individual creative life coaching with Julie Jordan Scott.
I have an odd love-hate relationship with questions. I find myself getting frustrated by people who seem addicted to asking questions… question after question after question and then they just hop scotch across the surface of any semblance of an answer.
“Stop asking!” I want to shout, “Please, take some time in responding!”
I was a bit surprised, then, with my own response to an exercise a book I had read several years ago and started revisiting about a month ago.
I don’t remember even reading about this particular exercise. Michael Gelb’s “How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci” was an instant favorite of mine, but somehow the “List 100 Questions” flew from my consciousness before it had time to build a nest of awareness.
Today, in my 2006 experience of the same book, this section is golden.
Absolutely golden.
I am a rebel, though, and didn’t do exactly like author Michael Gelb said. I didn’t only ask “significant” questions – I asked whatever popped into my brain. So – if oddities popped in, I kept them – figuring they were pointing to something perhaps even more divinely or universally significant than a “significant” question.
My inquiries range from the silly to the sublime with examples such as these:
“What is it about the rain in Spain that makes the plain so significant?” to “Who will say my eulogy?” to “What will God say when we hug?” to “What is my next big thing?”
In cataloguing these questions and then purposefully holding them close to me without immediately rushing to find “the” answer, instead I am finding both incredible peace AND the responses to the questions came throughout October, without effort, without asking, without chasing the questions to find “the” answer.
I am reminded of the wisdom of Rainer Rilke when he wrote “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will find them gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
What I have done with my questions this time is quite compelling.
I added a form of spiritual practice with my questions. Each week I am gleaning ten questions for my focus. For that week, I am asking the questions – all then of them – throughout my day.
On some days, I will write a separate question on a page within my morning pages notebook and free-write in response to the question.
I ask the questions and then, I live.
I ask the questions and then I go about doing whatever I was doing before I asked them.
It is like seasoning my life with inquiry and then allowing my life to slowly unfold the answers without attachment, without “answering them right”, without getting stuck in the process of response.
I am, in fact, loving the questions. It is like building a relationship with them, over time, instead of having a rough-and-tumble quicky with them.
Part of the gloriousness is seeing the Divine respond in the space I have provided, the space that was there all along but that sometimes my ego likes to clog with “how-to’s” and “you can’ts” and “who do you think you are’s?”
Paul Riceour, French Philosopher, reminds us of the importance of this process when he said, “This brief period when we appear in the world is the time in which all meaningful questions arise.” Now you have the tools to cradle your questions with love.
Love to love the questions. Love to live your life with passion.
My morning pages intrigued me today. They started with word portraits of my parents before moving into inquiry of my own parenting and then an angry jaunt into resistance before settling into my new-found joy in Fibonacci.
Poetry does that for me, centers and grounds me.
Here is what I wrote:
Fib #8
I
Stop
Wonder
What is it
That raises my heart
Each time I consider your heart?
Fib #9
It
Leaves
Scratches
On the Page
My precious pencil
Partner in art, part of my soul
Fib #10
Please
Dont
Be Loud
So early
In my morning time
I need restorative quiet
Fib #11
Dogs!
Please!
Dont bark..
Its too late
Go back to sleep now.
Morning art time, interrupted
= = = = =
Buttercup caught sight of something in our front yard that set her off and she barked like wild after it, which woke up Sam and made Emma mad and stopped my flow. But I was past my three pages and I was still hoping to get some work done before my official, parenting-Saturday-workday began.
I am laughing I am even polite in my poetry.I need to fib that.
Fib #12
Please!
Please!
I said
Ummmmmm, Presto?
Make the magic sound
Instantly everyone listens?
Foolish fantasy mine so I plunder my last words
= = = = =
I took an extra line, like I did in my Cleansed Fib wait, I need to fib that, too.
Fib #13
Fib
Form
Gives Me
Liberty
To scribe extra words
I empty myself in More Space
= = = = =
Ok, I am done. Sam is resting his head on my shoulder. He just read his name and is excited.My coffee mug is nearly empty.It is almost 8 am on Saturday.
Wow. It is the end of an incredible year and I am SOOOOOO grateful! Normally I leave my gratitude lists for my "I'm So Grateful Blog" but today - it feels like I should be shouting gratitude from the rooftops so here goes nothing....and EVERYTHING!
Specifically I am grateful for....
The growth, connections, and artistry inherent in 2005
Creating improv poetry with Emma as we walked in the National Park yesterday - as we discussed art and artist's choices and Sam "improvved" owning a camera.
The gorgeous lava flows at Wupatki - the visual, natural reminder that life and love will not be denied.
Blue skies that go on (and on and on and on!) so that we could see more than 100 miles away.
My cell phone
Email
Well timed laughter
My parents
Unconventional play spaces
Warm places to rest
Thoughtful doctors
New Beginnngs
All the abundance, plenty, prosperity and blessings that surround me!
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