past

Dear Future Self – Day 21

| Sheree

Dear Future Self

I hope you are well. Or as well as you can be, as I know you have a tendency to fall out of love with yourself. Waste time on not looking after yourself and beat yourself up for it too.

I just hope you’re learning because, at the moment, I think you’re doing remarkably well. You’re still here aren’t you? You’re still smiling? So you must be doing something good.

And even if you’re not, just remember that you are good. Good enough just the way you are. For reals.

And I know you have your current worries and concerns. No doubt worrying about where your next pay check is coming from and do you have to compromise your integrity to get it.

But listen, I know you and I know you always find a way. Because you are a fighter. You’re resourceful and determined and you love life far too much to just give up on it. To just give up on yourself.

I just love how you’re living your life on your own terms not being worried about what others think about you or what they might say.

I just love how you’re striving for what makes you happy to hell with everyone else. This is inspiring. This is you.

This year has seen you really lean into a morning routine to set you up for the rest of the day. And it’s been rewarding to see how this has helped you to move forward.

I say continue on this path of making sure your needs and wants are met each and every day first as this puts you in the best position to then help and support others.

Simple small things like enjoying that first cup of coffee. Listening to Love Devotion on repeat in Insight Timer. Small things that might seem insignificant but actually remind you that you are loved, loving and loveable by yourself, first and foremost.

And then look for that love from others as it is there. The love. It’s always there. Love.

Keep following those sparks that reveal joy. Which make you light up from the inside out. Solitude and quiet, just as much as company and music. Getting out in nature and moving that wonderful body of yours.

Someone said to you recently that life is long, instead of thinking of life being short, too short, so seize the moment now. And that still holds true but to think of life being long is to not only savour it now and to be grateful for it, it also means that we never really leave or die. We just transform and transcend into someone or something else in time. Over time. Through time.

This opens up whole new portals and possibilities and is exciting. Therefore, no need to panic or rush or run around like a chicken with no head. You’re okay resting, taking that afternoon nap, without fear of missing out.

Everything goes into the mix to make up this weird and wonderful life. You’ve just got to remain open, baby. You’ve just got to keep that beautiful heart of your open and welcome whatever comes your way. The good, the bad and the ugly.

Everything of this beautiful terrible life is welcome here because it is yours. Your terrifyingly beautiful life.

So go live it now hun. Go {BE}.

Love you

Sheree

[the hour after] – Day 8

| Sheree

Letting my brain catch up with the happening, I allow my heart to stop for an instant. Feeling unmoored to make sense, far too soon.

If only I had saw it coming. If only someone had thought to talk to me before this. Maybe things would be different, maybe the wound wouldn’t cut so deep.

Needing to rewind the clocks, to go back to that ignorant bliss, that season of love and acceptance, is a fool’s wish.

Under the avalanche of words, I move silent into the dark night, to piece myself back together following a different schema, charting an undiscovered course.

On the road again

| Sheree
Thorntonloch Beach, Dunbar

For years, I used to travel into Scotland, maybe with work in Dunbar or Edinburgh, and stop off on route at this beach, Thorntonloch Beach.

It’s nothing spectacular, apart from stretching out at the feet of Torness Power Station, but it would be a good place to stop and stretch my legs and calm my spirit.

I remember stopping there on my first trip to Iceland and being all giddy as I watched the waves roll in. That was May 2016.

I say all this because for the last few years and the last few trips across the border, I haven’t stopped and walked this beach.

I do not know why. Maybe I didn’t want to step back into a former Sheree. Maybe I didn’t want the hassle of sand in my toes. Or maybe I just didn’t register why I really used to stop at this beach.

I used to stop at this beach, to just be. To breathe. To be present.

Torness Power Station, Dunbar

And this time as I skip across the border, I pull over, park up and just be with the beach and sea.

Octavia E. Butler

| Sheree

I’m fixing to read all 12 novels and the one short story collection of Octavia E. Butler this year. The time has come to make intimate with this pioneer of science fiction, speculative fiction and wisdom.

Watch this space!

Part 2 – Exploring Rituals To Be More Present in My Life, Never Mind Writing

| Sheree

A poem can start with the sound of water falling onto my body. Allow it’s curious wet teeth to sink into my flesh, to pull out chucks of questions to fuel a conversations with myself, later. 

The ability to be present was a luxury my mother never had as she worked 3 jobs with her hand down toilets and fixed smile for the men with keys and brutal laughs. 

I claim the ability to be present. To allow my yearning for a past to awaken a future I will imagine, as I salver my arms and legs and belly, housing a familiar homesickness I’m not sure where from, with coconut oil. 

Turning cold hard oil, soft and warm against my skin, I reconstruct fragments of history, lost in colluded archives, and turn them into bleeding scars and pickled memories of somethings rather than nothings.

When I’m ready to forgive and understand, I’ll conjure Dad back from the dead, sit him down, and ask why he never ever mentioned love, in all his administering of disciplined care. 

Dressed, hair twisted and walking across green fields, and under cherry blossom, I swallow doubts to turn a phase over and over against the roof of my mouth, rewriting with each footstep. Slide stepping cliches, kicking around experimental metaphors. 

Or the poem could hit me full force when I walk into the coffee shop. Glasses steamed, journal in hand,  eyes on drinks board, but already knowing my order by heart, the table I’ll take – number 13, my lucky number.

Acting like the fugitive from my life, here, I steal time to soften my gaze and repurpose the image of  the sea into an open window that will startle you, dear reader, into a new perspective, into a new way of holding your mind and your heart towards yourself.

Someone told me once …

| Sheree

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The other week I went back to where I grew up. My time in a small village by the River Tyne were my formative years. I grew into a woman there and then left to go to London for university. I couldn’t leave quick enough. I found the place small and claustrophobic. It was a place where everyone knew your business. And to top it all we were the only black family around for years and miles. So we stood out.
Someone once told me that I should learn from the past but not hold onto the past. At the time, I didn’t quite get what she was getting at. I nodded my head and said thank you and moved along. Going back to my roots the other week this piece of advice came back to me.
Growing up in that all white village, I learned how to fit in, I learned how to make people laugh, I learned how to make other people comfortable being around me.
That is in the past. What I know now is that it’s okay to be myself; my whole self because if somebody doesn’t like me or gets uncomfortable that’s their problem not mine. I’m not in this earth to make everyone like me. I’m not on this earth to just blend in and smile.
I know I am here to shine. To offer up my gifts to the world and those who are on the same plane can appreciate them and learn from them if they do choose.
In the past, I worked hard for you to love me. In the present, I work at me loving me. And that’s enough now.

What are some of your essential tools?

| Sheree

Recently I’ve been asked a few questions about my practice and process with my artwork. One question which struck a cord was, what are some of your essential tools for creating?

 

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My practice changes but what I can say is that I’ve fallen in love with mark-making while completing #100daysofabstracts, so anything that can manipulate paint on the page is something I want to get my hands on.

My trusty old disused credit card is always by my side as I use it to create the background for my visual journaling, but lately this has been accompanied by a Catalyst pebble sculptor No.6 white, a plaster’s trowel and a spaghetti scoop.

I love creating mixed media layers of papers, pencil, pastels, gesso and acrylic paint and then scraping layers away so the past is revealed.

Take the term, palimpsest which I’ve come to understand through my writing practice as a piece of paper where the text has been scraped or washed off so that it can be reused but each use is still visible, like a ghost.

I see the abstracts I’ve been creating in the same light when I create layers and scrap areas back so previous layers or versions haunt the finished piece. I’ve always been interested in how to read history and heritage in light of the present so we can learn for the future, through these abstracts I’ve been exploring these concepts visually.