poetry

Artist on Hiatus : Update 

| Sheree

So things have started with my self-imposed residency of being an artist on hiatus. The aim is not to engage in anything creative. To try and not feed my artistic tendencies but to focus all my attentions on my paid work and not my creative work.I am finding this residency difficult as I realise I need colour in my life daily in order to live. In order to get out of bed and feel alive, I need colour within my life. It is my buzz. So deciding to wear a different coloured nail varnish each week to work is I think exercising my creative gene ever so slightly.

This colour fix is also evident within my work planner. So that every day is not a dull day, I pre-prepared each page within my planner with paint, with colour and inspirating images. I did this so that even if I am locked into the system, working 9 til 5, I can still dream, I can still scratch my creative itch.

All this sounds as if I’m not trying in this hiatus residency. But really I am. But at the same time, I am finding out more and more about what makes me tick, what makes me happy, what makes me, me. And I’m okay with that, with this residency. I am taking each day as it comes, and I know I am happy in what I am doing each day. So I am going to continue as I am doing.

I have even inspired others to re-engage with their creativity, with their dreams, through just showing up to meeting using my self-created planner. This colour focus is catching.

When the sun is just so …

| Sheree

On the way to work each day, I pass this concrete construction. I try to just walk on by and not look, not take any images. But at certain times of the day, when the sun is just so, it illuminates this rundown place. It becomes golden. I try and capture this transformation. And even though I’m an artists on hiatus for the next few months, I can’t help but itch this creative spot, can’t help but point the iPhone and shoot.

I’m interested in how this develops over the next few months as I continue to walk by. I’m interested enough to start looking into these buildings further. There are people living here in the flats either side of this glass enclosure. But this linking section seems rundown, vandalised and why is it there if not to allow a thoroughfare? Decoration, a special design feature?

This is a little golden nugget which will keep me going during the long, tiring days of work. A little creative well upon which I can draw inspiration and energy from. Please keep checking back and see the process.

Dreaming of Iceland

| Sheree

I’ve started a portfolio for Iceland. It seems an age since I was last there, but I am making plans to return. Bubbling under the surface of everything else that is happening in my life, is the body memory of how I felt while I was there. How I felt I opened up like blossom  to who I really was inside. That I thrived on the silence and solitude and the beauty of the landscape. Some how the serenity and honesty of the landscape, reflected something inside me. I recognised myself there, and I want to capture that feeling again as well as replicate it here, in my every day life.

How is the question?
I need to return to find out.

Dancing the Dream 

| Sheree

Dancing the Dream – the seven sacred paths of human transformation, by Jamie Sams

This is the new book I’m reading at the the moment. And I’m trying to take my time, to savour it and let the lessons sink in. But it’s not going that way. Every page that I’m reading, I’m nodding my head in recognition of the wisdom, of the truths that are being mentioned in terms of the energy that connects us all together. Our thoughts, feelings, judgements, our internal landscapes create our outside worlds. If these are full of negativity, this is the energy we are putting out into the world. And what goes around comes around. We are all connected. We are all one.

I made a promise to myself while reading this book to not write any notes. To just absorb the initiations. I intend to go back and reread the book after this first reading and actively work with the lessons. So this post is me marking this promise and making sure I follow through on it. Thank you.

Sundays 

| Sheree

wildsoulwoman says: Some Sunday’s are made for just chillin’ with the peeps. Can’t believe the summer holidays are almost over and then back to work. Trying to stay in each moment and squeeze out every last ounce of pleasure and joy. Back in the sea with Miss Ella yesterday and she said how grateful she was for her family. She’s 6 and has so much to teach me. I’m paying attention 🙂

Night Marriage, Lowlands Estate, 1791.

| Sheree

‘Let’s feel what the Massa sees in you,’
he whispers,
like a snake’s belly on hard sand.
He takes me in.
His rough stubble tears at my thighs,
as greedy palms, with raised moons,
kneed my belly. His smell is
stale sweat mingled with
the heavy wet perfume of dirt
turned over with my hoe.
His high shiny leather riding
boots are still on.

from: The White of the Moon (2007-8)

Poetry

From the WSW vault: Trust

| Sheree

October 2015:

“Fuck. It was bound to come up. Trust. I have issues with trust. Ever since I found out my dad was dying only when he was actually dead, I’ve had trouble with trust. My mum and dad thought it best not to tell us kids that our dad was dying. To protect us. So when I found out it was already too late. He was dead and I felt betrayed.

I do not give my trust lightly. You betray my trust and you’re gone out of my life. Simple as that. But it isn’t that simple. Trust is about feeling safe and putting yourself out there with someone else. It’s about being vulnerable, wanting to protect oneself at the same time as taking a risk, moving out of oneself. It’s leaning in and out at the same time.

I’ve always been able to say I can trust myself. Until now. Now I’m not too sure about myself. If my actions are carried out for the right reasons, with the right intentions?

I’m at the edge of an abyss. At the edge of my existence as I have known it. And I now I have to take the leap into the new but can I trust myself in the fall?

I know it’s about love. Love of myself. There has to be the space to allow myself to fall. To know in the fall that I can still breathe, still live and will find my footing again. It’s about accepting that I am not in control and probably never was or will be. It is about trusting in the unknown. Trusting that I will be alright, that everything will be all right. I just have to trust the process. I just have to trust in me.”

Breathe ( and make time for yourself)

| Sheree

I picked up this new magazine by chance. Not sure what I was looking for. Maybe I was looking to ‘breathe’, to gain some space in my day, in my life.

I’ve sworn off all those glossy women’s magazines, those that carry the images of perfection; white skinny beautiful women. The money I must have spent on them, trying to fit the ideal, and knowing fine well that I’d never would. But that didn’t stop me buying into the construction.

It didn’t seem to bother me that I never saw women in there that looked like me. Or did it?
As I also went through a phase of buying Pride Magazine, Oprah, Ebony to see black women in magazines.
But they still didn’t look like me, as they were still skinny, well styled and looked like they had their lives all together, nice and sweet.

I suppose when I buy magazines now, like this one, I am still trying to find myself, to better myself, but from the inside out.

I am working on my soul, my spirit, my true self when I pick up a magazine like Breathe because I am looking to take care of myself by taking the time to slow down, to try yoga ( again), to start back up with my gratitude journal etc. Magazines like this make me think, make me assess what I am doing in terms of self-care, self-love and how am I working within this world to make it a better place?

I would highly recommend this magazine if you are looking to make time for yourself, for your true self.

Love Yourself Friday 

| Sheree

love youseslf

Yes I know today isn’t Friday. But I want to share with you something that happened to me a few months ago which I am proud of.

I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Phoenix Rising Collective, for their Love Yourself First Friday.
The aim of this special feature is to shed light on various ways we as women are practicing self-care, making it a priority in our lives.

After a couple of years of being in the doldrums and not being able to look myself in the eyes in the mirror, I feel I’ve come a long way to the point of actively practicing self-love. Maybe going through situations and experiences that others might recognise and gain insight from by sharing this way.

The question that struck home the most was; Is there an obstacle or challenge that you’ve overcome that lead you to a deeper love for who you are? In answer to this question, for the first time, I revealed my dirty secret. And it felt good to finally speak out about it.

Here is my answer and read the rest of the interview here.

“What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would spin open.” -Muriel Rukeyer

There comes a time in everybody’s life when the unspeakable happens. To say it hasn’t happened or won’t happen to you is a lie. You’re kidding yourself. Believe me.

In May 2015, the unspeakable happened to me. There was a public shaming. My whole world fell apart the day I was accused of being a plagiarist on Facebook by a ‘so-called’ friend and fellow poet. He wrote that he’d found whole scale “borrowings” from other writers’ words, phrases, and structures within my latest collection of poetry. He said that he was just doing his duty for the poetry community by bringing it to everyone’s attention. What followed was what I chose to call a public lynching of me as a writer, poet and person. This was the unspeakable that happened to me. But funny enough, I am speaking about it here, as well as writing a creative non-fiction book about this whole experience. Everything I knew, all I was, how I thought myself to be was taken from me in that public posting. I issued an apology regarding my unintentional mistakes and withdrew from the public realm. At one point, death looked a very promising course of action, but I had my family and some supportive friends who helped me.

Within the Chakra system there is a heart center called Anahata Chakra. In Sanskrit, Anahata means “Unstruck.” For me this speaks to the resilient nature of the human heart. I believe, wholeheartedly, that there is a place within my heart that is absolutely unbreakable. Thank you Chris Maddox for this wisdom.

This experience did break my heart, stopped me from loving, and shut me down and out. However, there was a minute part that kept pulsing, kept the light on for me. Maybe it was my belief in self, my self-love that got me through each day.

Each day has not been wasted. I have taken this experience as a wake-up call, a wake-up to explore and claim my authenticity. Afterwards, I had nothing. I couldn’t even look myself in the face at one point. But writing my book and starting to take photographs of myself have supported me in my climb up. I can’t say climb ‘back’, because who or what I am becoming, I do not know. I have never met this woman. I do know that love and self-love, first and foremost, are at the center of this journey.