Four Months – Sunday

| Sheree

Four months from now, June 17, you’ll be flying into Keflavík International Airport. You’ll be filled with excited and apprehension, as even if this is your first time or fourth journey to Iceland, you can’t help the way travel and adventure makes you feel. You are filled with wonder and awe and questions. But you know in your core that this creative retreat is what your soul has been screaming out for, for so many years.

Once you come through passport control, you will get the opportunity to peruse duty free. If you like an alcoholic beverage, chocolate or even fancy a traditional Icelandic woolly, this is the place to pick them up, before you leave the airport. This will be the cheapest place to buy the these goods. So make the most of it now.

Collect your luggage. And sail through customs out into the arrivals terminal where I am waiting. Waiting with a sign calling your name. Waiting with a smile of recognition. Welcoming you to the country that has nestled deep into my heart. Welcoming you to a week of possibilities and opportunities and creativity. Relax now, you are in safe hands. Promise x.

Botanic Gardens, Belfast

| Sheree

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Day 3 – Pain as Logic and Metaphor #eatmystardust

Botanic Gardens, Belfast

The pain that lives in my body
intensifies confined under
the dome of the Palm House.

Livid burgundy blooms burst
upon ochre and gold stripes
knocking along flat sharp leaves.

How deep it roots depends
upon the heat striking the panes
of glass reaching for the sky.

Process – Part 2

| Sheree

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Sometimes when I sit down to write, I can use the journal of my everyday, my visual journal.  Other times, I need a blank sheet of lined paper with no other distractions. No image, no colour just a clean slate.

Here I might start with the impression I was left with after my walk. Burgundy. Burgundy what? Wall, poster, leaf? I would try to describe the colour for someone who hasn’t seen it. Is it a flat colour? Dull or sharp? No this burgundy was vivid because it was so shocking to the eye around so much green. There I’m starting to bring in comparisons. I’m starting to bring in feelings.

I could worry this line for ages but the aim is to keep going. Just like walking. Keep one foot moving in front of the other and so the writing of lines is the same. Keep moving the pen over the page, keep the words flowing. This is just the first draft. Things are bound to be wrong, messy, cliched. But only when you’ve words on the page are you able to start the pruning and beautifying process. You have to have something on the page to work with before you can create the masterpiece. The poem.

There are many drafts of the poem, of the same line even. Adding in words. Taking others out. Switching of verbs for more specific ones,  verbs that are really working it within this line or that.

At all times the purpose is to leave the reader with an impression. To get them to connect to the words not with their head but with their heart. To move them in some way. Create a shift.

Process – Part 1

| Sheree

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I had the urge to write a poem. My hand was itching but not quite ready to lift up my pen. So I went for a walk. Walking helps the process. Helps me think but in a very freeing way. Thoughts of my life or work flit through my mind. But they don’t stay because something in the rhythm of putting one foot in front of another allows the thoughts to enter and leave without making an impression. This is good as my aim is to get to the point where I leave myself and my troubles behind. That I get to the point of being free, unburdened and open. Open to receive.

Once I become open to the environment around me, my senses kick in. I see things,   but more importantly I start to feel things. Feel the air on my cheeks. Feel the concrete shudder through my legs. And then smell. Diesel, cut grass, midget gems.

And so it goes on the more I walk. There further I walk away from me and the closer I walk to inspiration.  And an impression is made upon me from the outside world that I carry back with me inside to my pen and paper. And usually the impression is a colour. Burgundy today.

Getting Angry

| Sheree

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Last night I got angry and I mean really angry. I think I might have scared @hazmatt72.

This was a different anger to any I’ve experienced before. No I tell a lie. I think I might have had a glimmer of this deep visceral anger back in 2014 when I was organising #blacklivesmatter events and I was finding my political voice and going public with my thoughts about race.

And then I was silenced and all that anger turned inward. Turned against myself and how stupid I’d been and the mistakes I made. Anger turned up so high that I almost didn’t hear the whisper of self-compassion, forgiveness and love.

Fast forward to last night, the anger has shifted from focusing on myself to sending fierce fire balls out there.

I recently became a member of @secretmessagesociety ( or am I supposed to keep it a secret?!?) and my first Zine talked about developing a back bone. To start putting myself at the centre of my life and everything/ everyone else out there, outside of me is ‘the other’.

At the mention of ‘the other’ I had a gut reaction. A recoiling. As a black woman in colonial, imperial, patriarchal, hey (wo)man, in any kind of discourse, I ‘m labelled/ perceived/ treated as ‘the other’. And even though I have argued against this, this didn’t stop me internalising it. Taking on the label myself and seeing myself as ‘the other’ in comparison to the white norm.

Coming across ‘the other’ @secretmessagesociety, something shifted and was dislodged to the point that I’ve de-centred my whole belief, operating system. I no longer claim ‘the other’ as me, my label, my positioning out there and within me.
No. I’m right bang centre in my life, in my identity and everything outside of me is ‘the other.’ I’m no longer kept in the margins, the minority, the freak, the fat ugly black bitch, the deformed, the other.
I’m so gloriously centred with me/ within me.

And I’m angry. But a shimmering healthy get things sorted, changed sort of angry. Which always flows from love. #iaintsorry #hellno #fuckem #angryblackwoman #othering #decentre #takingbackwhatsmine #practice #process #patience #self-love #self-care #secretmessagesociety #gettingmesomebackbone