[Image Credit: Karen Light] Sometimes I get these headaches from literally trying to figure everything out all the way through. Have you ever experienced that?
It is a clear indication that I must let go of the reins a bit, which is especially difficult for me to do when I am really excited about a big vision, either for my art or for my creative company. I just want to dig in there and work out all the steps and see the path laid out before me in one clear linear line… But then my head starts spinning or my eyes start crossing or suddenly I notice I have been scrunching my face for a while and I have gone too far. I was having one of these moments and I decided to do one of the cards from my new Creative Wisdom Doodle Deck! The card is called 'Move Mountains' and I chose it because I felt like I wanted to do it all, but was limited by time and energy. As I doodled, the image that emerged was me following little breadcrumbs on the ground. The message that arose as I contemplated the image was that all I need to do is follow one breadcrumb at a time. Sure, I can hold the big vision! I can use it to be energized and excited! But if I was given everything I had to do to achieve it now, it would only lead to burn out and possible failure. And frankly, there would be little joy in the process. Instead, the practice is to trust that the piece of clarity I have right now is enough. That taking action on that clarity is the only next step I need to do. And, when this clarity is present, I need to trust that I can handle it, even if it is outside of my comfort zone and a little scary. Each little breadcrumb is helping me to build the confidence, the skills, and the ideas that will help me to see the next breadcrumb. And, one by one, they will take me on a surprisingly meaningful and creatively adventurous path towards my vision. Where are you trying to figure it all out? What happens when you just look for the next breadcrumb? ---- Karen Light is an Artist/Illustrator and a Creative Coach. She is passionate about healing and nurturing the creative spirit. Empowered creatives change their worlds as well as the world and have a lot of fun doing it! Have fun with her and other creative minds as they all find the next breadcrumbs on their creative path in the upcoming Creative Wisdom Doodle-Shop on April 15.
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[image credit: Photo-Karolina Zapal | Collage-Shawnie Hamer] In February 2021, Languages of Elsewhere facilitator Karolina Zapal asked her workshop participants questions of movement, such as:
Interested in taking this workshop? You can rent/purchase the archived videos for an accessible flat rate in the commons starting April 1st! "On Fray & Freezing" by Jessica Rigneyabout the artist:Jessica Rigney is a poet, artist, and filmmaker. She is the author of Follow a Field (2016), Entre Nous (2017), Within Poetic Boxes (2018), and Careful Packages (2019). Two of her poems, À la Brütt and Grass Began, exist as limited edition, letterpress broadsides by Wolverine Farm Publishing (2016 and 2017, respectively). Jessica was a quarter-finalist for the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry in 2016 and 2018. The YouTube channel, Jessica Rigney, carries her poetic short films. Her poetic music and voice experiments live at jessicarigney.bandcamp.com. On Instagram she is poetjess, where her imagery and words, as well as announcements for new work can be found. She lives and wanders in Colorado and northern New Mexico, where she films and collects feathers and stones. Links Bandcamp: https://jessicarigney.bandcamp.com YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/JessicaRigneypoetry/videos Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/poetjess/ "Bonsai Kayak" by Thomas A. Thomasabout the artist: Thomas A. Thomas studied with Gregory Orr and Donald Hall at the University of Michigan, where he won both Hopwood Minor and Major Awards in Poetry. He later studied with Matthew Shenoda at Goddard College in the MFA program. His poems have appeared in Anesthesia Review, The Periodical Lunch, Writer’s Digest, Oberon, FemAsia Magazine (link below)and most recently in Spanish translation on Revista Palabrerias (link below). Additional poems are forthcoming in the Spring ’21 edition of The Banyan Review. His full-length book Getting Here, published in 2005, received an Honorable Mention in the 14th Annual Writer's Digest International Self-Published Book Awards. It is available on Amazon and other major vendor sites in paper or electronic format). In the Pandemic year of 2020 he has read for international and inclusive audiences in Cultivating Voices Facebook group, with writers from Ireland, India, Canada and numerous other countries, and was also featured in the 100,000 Poets for Change, Toronto Canada ZOOM event with poets from 4 continents and 8 time zones. Instagram: tthomas7828 Facebook: Thomas.a.thoma Links In A Time - FemAsia Magazine Trotamundos | 5 poemas de Thomas A. Thomas – Revista Palabrerías (revpalabrerias.com) "Against the Bones" by Elizabeth Kate Switajabout the artist:Elizabeth Kate Switaj lives on Majuro atoll where she works at the College of the Marshall Islands and rescues cats. Her second collection of poetry, The Bringers of Fruit: An Oratorio, is forthcoming in 2022 from 11:11 Press.
It was mid-afternoon. Prime work time. I’d been banging away on my laptop getting stuff done, but out the corner of my eye, I had been watching big fluffy white flakes falling from the sky for a while. I felt my inner child getting antsy, squirming in her seat, desperately wanting to run outside. Between long winter days and the endless pandemic, she was already restless. Now, with the snow, she could barely contain herself.
Meanwhile, I also heard a stern disciplinarian telling her to sit still and stay focused. “There is a lot to do and not doing these things would be irresponsible. And being irresponsible could lead to some pretty dire consequences. There is a time for work and there is a time for play and this is time for work.” Then, a teenage rebel voice chimed in. She glared at the disciplinarian between puffs of her cigarette and through the darkness of her heavily black outlined eyes. Whatever. “This is lame. Forget work altogether. Just do what you want. This lady is full of crap. Your work means nothing.” I stopped pecking at my keyboard and sat still for a few moments listening to these voices. The disciplinarian and the teenage rebel voices are quite familiar to me. They may seem like bitter enemies, but they actually secretly work together and I have been practicing staying clear of their trap. You see, the disciplinarian will make me keep working and always putting off rest and play because of all the important things to do and all the bad consequences that could happen. But, eventually, I am so burnt out that I will just throw my hands up and become the rebel teenager who doesn’t care about anything for a while. I will lounge about doing nothing productive until the disciplinarian makes me feel bad enough to start working again and so the cycle goes… One is afraid of never accomplishing anything if you take a break and one is afraid that life will always be a grind if you do any work. I know they were looking to ensnare me once again on this beautiful snowy day. In the still moment, I took a good look at my inner child. Her eyes were shining and hopeful. She seemed to be the secret to escaping their trap. I told her to go bundle up for the cold and she jumped up with joy, putting on layers as fast as she could! As I went out walking in the snow, my inner child spoke to the inner child of several others as well. A couple people joined me on my excursion and we waved and exchanged gleeful hellos with others along the way. I felt alive and present and happy. I came back inside and sat down to work feeling refreshed and inspired. I was more than ready to get back to work. I looked over at my inner child. She was curled up, happily resting after an afternoon of play. And I reminded myself how important it was to keep paying attention to what she needs. Deprivation never leads to happiness. It leads to resentment, burn out, meaningless success, unhappiness. Giving yourself joyful, playful experiences is deeply satisfying and meaningful. It cultivates creativity and energy to transform those ideas into reality. What is your inner child asking for today? --- Karen Light is an Artist/Illustrator and a Creative Coach. She is passionate about healing and nurturing the creative spirit. Empowered creatives change their worlds as well as the world and have a lot of fun doing it! Bring out your inner child in her next Create It Class: Idea to Creation in Four Weeks. So, today what I want you to do is open up and let Blackness into your heart, the energy of Black, if it can enter you. --Akilah Oliver I think of Akilah Oliver’s words often. I first encountered Oliver’s work at Naropa University—where I studied her flesh memory: the she said dialogues and listened to her archive as I practiced and wrote/performed into the space of healing ancestral trauma—how to exercise the ghosts that haunt our bodies. As a community member of collective.aporia, and as a poet and artist, I want to document my experience (share this account for the archive) at a Black Lives Matter march in Portland, Oregon, as a way to discuss the notion of healing collective grief. This continues to be at the forefront of my own artistic (activist) practice as we are confronted yet again with the reminder that the policing of this country disregards Black lives with the recent shooting of Jacob Blake. I’m currently living in Portland, Oregon, and for many of us, 2020 has been a tumultuous year of transformation. Daily I’m thankful to witness the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement. This resistance gives me hope. Many of us have been moved in spite of Covid-19 to join the countless BLM marches and protests throughout the nation at such a crucial and pivotal time. The following are notes on funeral marches as a way to protest in Portland, Oregon (a former white utopia). We walked slowly, weaving through empty SE Portland streets, chanting “march with us”— towards Cleveland High School where just last year the school faced a “series of incidents” that included a noose and a blackface cake. We were among hundreds of people in the streets, trying to practice social distancing, wearing masks, searching for the grief in each other’s eyes, moving together at the same pace, pausing sometimes to make sure we were safe—altogether, holding signs overhead, shouting “Black Lives Matter.” Moving together, I could feel our collective grief. I could feel myself hold back tears and could also feel the tears in everyone’s shouts, screams, crying out: “No Justice, No Peace.” Over the hours we moved together, my stomach was tense, my feet ached, and as we began to sing, a feeling of déjà vu overwhelmed me to tears. It was as if my ancestors had also taken the streets like I was—or they at least dreamed about voicing their dissent and disappointment in humanity. Heartbroken we sang together, “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me ‘Round”—a Black spiritual that entered my body and emerged from my throat. After singing this spiritual and committing the words to memory, a quick search brought me to the words of Bernice Johnson Reagon: Black singing is running sound through your body. You cannot sing a spiritual and not change your condition. These words appeared in P. Kimberleigh Jordan’s “‘Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Round’: Spirituals as Embodied Acts of Resistance”—reminding us that “for nearly four centuries, people of the African descent in the Diaspora expressed their presence, pain, desires, and hopes through the repertoire of spirituals.” The collective presence and performance at the BLM march was/is participating in this legacy of healing the pain of the past and present. I sit with these words and think of Tracie Morris’s “Africa(n)” and I come full circle to Akilah Oliver’s invitation to “let Blackness into your heart.” Blackness is the griot giving us permission to weep for the dead. This notion of Blackness, resistance, and community brings me to consider how the BLM march functioned in a similar way as a ritual. I think about Malidoma Somé’s writing around ritual: “In a tribal community, healing of the village happens in ritual.” While Portland, OR is far from a tribal community, as a woman and creative of color I walked away from that BLM march protesting the murder of Black lives, racism in public schools, while also paying homage by chanting the names of countless lives lost—in a way, collectively performing final funeral rites for these Black lives. I continue to walk around Portland humming those songs, reminding myself that these experiences allow for our collective to grieve and move this grief through the collective body so that real healing can begin. You could say I’m self- soothing as I hum these songs to myself and the Portland city streets as I feel how the community continues to burn in grief, in fear. For this reason, the protest songs—or spirituals—these Black Lives Matter (funeral) marches that contain elements of ritual, hold and heal the community each time we take to the streets and listen to the words and songs of BIPOC community members. This account of a crier at a BLM march, aims to write into the space of grief and how we hold and move grief through our bodies—in this case, by attending a BLM march, joining my community in song. While we are bombarded by images and stories of trauma, while we move slowly through this long hot summer into an uncertain fall, may we also remember to move and speak with the intention to heal these deep ancestral wounds. This is an account of a brief moment where I caught a glimpse of hope for our local community meeting together to heal deep collective grief. These moments hold space for all the tragically beautiful, moving music and art, all the transformative collectives and organizations that have and will continue to emerge from this uprising, grief, and revolution. april joseph is a poet and clarinetist from East L.A., CA. She received her BA in Literatures of the World from UC San Diego, and her MFA in Writing and Poetics from Naropa University. She has taught high school, undergraduate and graduate students in Eugene and Portland, OR, Las Vegas, NV, and Boulder, CO. april creates mourning songs to heal ancestral trauma. Collaborative, student-centered, process-oriented learning inspires her to teach artistic expression to transform lives, to be free. Her most recent publications have been included in the literary journals: Morning/Mourning (2018) and TAYO Issue 6 (2016). You can learn more about april’s work at bodyfulspace.com.
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