For this session of #5for5BrainDump I am experimenting with including poetry as a supplement to the standard #5for5BrainDump content. Each day's session is thematic. Each livestream day includes a writing tip and each day has a poem or two. Each summer session follows a theme. This theme is "Journey" which we will take metaphorically and/or actually. The choice is for each person to choose and then follow our word-flow.
One of today's poems is NON-Commitment by Chinua Achebe. My reading of the poem and video may be found underneath my writing, which was done #5for5BrainDump style which means no editing, no forethought, just throwing down words on the keyboard or written on paper stream-of-consciousness. Today's writing was done at the keyboard and took me by complete surprise. (In other words, delightful.) Read on, beloved, read on... June 27, 2018: Five Minutes After Chinua Achebe My heart isn’t cautious at all. It leaps, willy nilly, constantly if I let it my heart would become the Greg Louganis of.. Wow, really? Am I being honest here? What has shaped my life the most? Stillbirth, dead-before-arrival and ever since I have dug my heels in and done anything, absolutely anything, to prevent stillbirth again so much so that conception is altogether impossible for me and has been for a very long time. My heart is so prudent it is asleep. My soft-intellect, the one most closely related to the heart space is angry now. How dare you, she rears her head and starts pointing that damn finger. No, she’s right, says the most child-like of the bunch. She’s woefully right. I have been petrified of stillbirth, worst has been since 2011 which she just finally committed to believing this morning when she sat on the porch and wrote her morning pages. Now the writer me takes over and says, “Friends, this is more than a bit ridiculous. I am now writing of me in the third person from several different self perceptions. The writer me is confused and wants her hands chanting, ‘be specific, how many times must I tell you to BE SPECIFIC!’” I almost stop writing. I didn’t expect reading Chinua Achebe’s poem would incite a riot in my head AND heart, my intellect AND spirit it is no wonder I am teetering on the edge of depression daily. Sleep, depression, mania, what shall it be today? I pause to be sensible and get a prescription filled. At least that is a measurable milestone I can check off my to-do list. Done and done and I have a choice. Do I publish this mis-mash of written non-sense or do I act like I’ve got everything under control? If Chinua could write so beautifully about seminal rage and Biafra and get all those honorary degrees and really, I have no connection with him except reading that one novel back in 1982 and yes, I know more about Africa than most white people, sure. I’ll hit publish and birth this wackiness and will leave my questions half answered because at least I can make the choice. And show my eccentric side. And smack depression (and her partner-in-crime, my motivation) on the forehead. For now, I’ll take happy mania and life, thank you Chinua. Thank you.
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This writing came as a result of the prompting from #5fo5BrainDump. Lots of intensity flowed as I allowed myself to simply and purely write without judgment or forethought. Here we go!
Trust lives in the heart. Distrust lives in the brain, in the swirling business that happens when we are afraid. Trust grows in the breath, when we breathe into our heart space, when she share from our heart space. Take notes from the heart. What happens when I take notes from the heart? I am sitting in my recliner, my laptop and lap desk across my legs. I am attempting to write, in that I am making frowning faces and not allowing my fingers to move across the page. My lack of action – letting the words to flow from me – is yet another way my brain – my thoughts – my worry – my fear – stays in control. The blasted safety net that actually becomes all too quickly like a noose made up of mediocrity and status quo is like handcuffs on my words. I take a breath and allow myself a moment to recollect. “Five minutes isn’t very long!” says the intellectual snob that sometimes take residence in my brain, a cross between a long ago sitcom character and my next door neighbor who is perpetually mad at me for something (or at least I believe he is.) Another deep breath. I am writing about trust, I am writing about taking notes from the heart. I am writing about taking notes from the heart. My heart hears so differently than that pesky voice. My heart has a natural, profound guiding rhythm and a natural, equal method of giving and receiving. My heart is so strong yet so fragile. My heart has a reach far beyond what we can see. It’s core and its ability to send signals to others is legendary. When my heart takes notes, it has wisdom beyond the facts. It takes the facts into consideration and it stirs it up with divine guidance, sometimes that stuff of facts that one just can’t explain but we “get” untuitively. I can trust that invisible stuff more than I can trust the way some facts are presented. When my heart takes notes and I allow her to speak with her gentle strength, everything feels better. Thank you heart, thank you divinity and thank you ME for giving silence a chance. This post was written #5for5BrainDump style - I will be sharing here at least several times a week as we prepare for #5for5BrainDump in June - the next session begins in the comfort of your home, office, park or wherever you find yourself on June 18. To register to receive our free daily videos, livestreams, recaps, prompts and numerous ways to become unstuck so you may continue along your purposeful journey, register by clicking the link above the map below. My journey lately has been a covert one, so covert I haven’t been definitive about it. Seems odd because as I am writing this, suicide is wracking our world, appearing to be a grim reaper of choice. Yet coffee is brewing, Mozart is humming around me – or the notes he wrote and someone is playing piano or did play piano and I am able to sit and enjoy it. Lately I’ve felt more optimism than I’ve felt in a long, long time. Amidst the toiling and the sadness and the maniacal people who are leaders to so many, I am daring to feel optimistic. Daring to be the little girl who believed she could be an astronaut, who lived to protect her brother, who believed (and still believes) all people are holy – filled with a divine purpose, a reason and part of that is to connect and create and just be love for one another. Not “just” be as much as fully be…. Fully be. Since I had the crash and burn, I have been attempting to feel better. Do you see that? “Attempting” and “to feel better” – I was… working on it. Continually. Could that be why I haven’t a actually felt better except in fleeting bits and pieces of time? This is a question to sit with as I continue to simply and purely continue this journey where the pieces of me that never left, that optimistic little girl and older woman… bid me to join hands and say yes… indeed. Yes, indeed. To Sign Up for the Next Session, please click this link to register. |
Julie Jordan Scottis the founder and creator of 5For5BrainDump. She has been inspiring artistic rebirth since 1999. Archives
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