present

Fugitive Practice

| Sheree

For those of us who live at the shoreline… Audre Lorde

It will be 10 years this August that I started my visual journaling practice.

Then it was called Dreaming on Paper, as I completed the course of the same name by Lisa Sonora.

I needed a safe space to explore the tumult of my feelings and thoughts. I was going through a traumatic experience of escape really. Escape from the life I’d spent the past 12 years building up, that was took away in the flick of a Facebook post.

I ran away from the public, the writing community, my home as I travelled into the Scottish Highlands and Islands. To heal.

Visual journaling helped me heal. Helps me continue to heal.

Overtime, I’ve come to understand my visual journal practice as a fugitive practice. Within these paints, images and words, dreams of freedom are planned out and eventually come to fruition. Projects, happenings, events – all on my own terms.

I mean, the whole point about escape is that it’s an activity. It’s not an achievement. You don’t ever get escaped. – Fred Moten

Within these visual journal spreads, I work out how to escape, how to get outside white supremacy culture while still having to be living on the inside. Coming to terms with the thought of that the outside can only occur from the inside. Being here.

Visual journaling is me trying to create an opening, a break in the fabric in which to slip on through into the otherside/ outside, into the woods running between the trees with the dogs barking at my feet. Creating beauty, creating a beautiful space in which to linger in while the terror rages around me.

Visual journaling is a safe space, is a nurturing space, is a free space.

Tender, Undoing Self Within Night’s Skin – Day 13

| Sheree

I say to myself : stop. Stop undoing yourself within night’s skin.

Tell myself a promise to sort out my living habits so I don’t die prematurely like my mum.

Imagine the tenderness: like soft beige rolls of fat, like soft pink tongues languishing in wet mouths, like soft woollen blankets tickling toes.

I may no longer be the second daughter, the misfit who could conjure a soul’s reflection through colourful art.

Please night as you stretch out your skin one more time, please be tender with my damaged, twisted stars.

Couplets – Open Heart – Day 12

| Sheree

Feel the breeze through the trees. Even the leaves strive

to stay alive. The energy is flowing through you, my love.

Pause and feel its spinning. The way of this world , freedom

is for the taking with every breath, linger

in the outside, the black outside while still enclosed within,

for now.

Revisions – Day 11

| Sheree
Come Again

Day 9 – Goofing off Revisions/ redrafting

Ten years. Ten long years of changes, I’ve been dreaming on paper.

I had to give myself permission.

To create again. Safely.

I was fearful. Fearful of the word. Images are safer. Images speak to the soul.

Paint. Takes me back to being a child and all I wanted was love and joy.

Tapping into this feeling of being with self, I show up to the page. Each day.

Each day, I have the opportunity to start again.

Each day I have the opportunity to meet the sunrise anew.

Goofing Off – Day 9

| Sheree

I made a journal this week.

Recycled a print out of the Darkling manuscript.

I needed to get centred, grounded, focused.

So I stitched the printed sheets together into a book.

Then I applied paint to each page, blotted off any excess.

I had a journal of colourful pages.

I had a safe vessel to capture all my thoughts feelings and to-dos.

I had been feeling overwhelmed.

Like treading water and getting nowhere.

Creating this journal was fun.

It felt like goofing off my day-to-day responsibilities.

This journal helped me get my ducks in a row.

And tick(le) them off into the sunset!

[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.

[the hour before] – Day 7

| Sheree

I know I was in the full of it all. Life overflowing.

With all its distractions and demands and me thinking I’m the central force.

I know I was missing from the family home, chasing the next big gig, the next recognition slip.

Maybe my family had eaten for the day and I’d missed it again.

Maybe I had to circle the streets trying to find a parking space for at least half an hour.

I know I carried loads of bags with stuff packed just in case, always worried about being unprepared and found wanting.

I know I lacked the self-belief and love of self. I know I needed more of everything.

So when night fell, and I found myself still working, reorganising books for god’s sake, I know I wasn’t prepared for the public shaming.

But my gut probably knew this day of failure would come to expose me for the imposter always felt and knew.

A Study in Short Lived Adventures – Day 5

| Sheree

We’re always looking for answers.

I think that’s why I tell stories or lies.

The purple sky really sets off the creamy whites of those stars.

Silence plays itself. Silence.

I just wish you’d open your eyes when you hover over me.

I just wish you would see me.

Let Us Indulge -Day 4

| Sheree

Let us linger here in this room with the curtains closed with our other lives forgotten for a little while longer.

Let us not use words when our hands, lips and tongues can communicate our needs, our wants.

Let our breath be silken on our skin, let our bodies entwine still able to promise bloom and ripple.

Let us slow it all the way down, slowly, slow, so we can feel each stroke, each gliding smooth folding into each other.

Let us hear each others moans of joy, of wonder as our bodies wander together away from this room, this bed into our happy place where we can ride out the rest of our time here on earth.

Let us dream this lushness as we reach for each other, conjuring connection beyond the here and now, in the here and now.

Let us linger in the lingering light and just enjoy this afterglow, this pleasured pain like passing ships never to traverse these same desire lines ever again.