quotes

if Only I Was Creative

| Sheree

“A creative life is an amplified life. It’s a bigger life, a happier life, an expanded life, and a hell of a lot more interesting life”

Elizabeth Gilbert

I do believe that we’re all creative at our core. It comes down to just some of us listening to our core, providing space and time for our creativity to makes itself known and seen.

So when I think how I’m expressing my creativity these days, straightway I think I’m not creative at the moment. Coming off the back of the BALTIC commission, I’m tired and exhausted. And I really don’t have an external deadline or event to be working towards. So the outward facing, showing some of creativity is not present. That is if I’m falling into the comparison trap or looking at what at the end product and not being satisfied with the result or allowing fear to creep in and ask, what am I doing?

At this point, I have to check myself, as this script I’m running is not necessarily true. I’m {BEING} creative everyday when I turn up to the page to write in my visual journal. I’m pushing around feelings, thoughts, ideas and inspiration within these pages that at some point morph into something else. I’m facing my fears on the page. I’m living a creative life through the conversations I have with strangers while walking a dog, to the food I put into a soup, to the choices I make around how I adorn my body each day.

All of these practices, ways of being, are nourishment for my soul, are creative endeavours to keep me honest with myself. make be vulnerable at the same time as empowering.

Fear to Fury

| Sheree

James Baldwin when interviewed after the SNCC Freedom Day demonstration in Selma, Alabama, October 1963 described what he saw there.

When was asked if he was afraid in the moment when the police were moving in on the African Americans waiting patiently to vote with guns and clubs and cattle prodders, Baldwin replied,

“ The thing is you get – you’re so scared – I was scared in the morning. Before it all began. And I was scared the first time I walked around there. But, later on, I wasn’t scared at all … Your fear is swallowed up by, you know … fury. What you really want to do is kill all those people.”*

* Quoted in Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America And It’s Urgent Lessons For Our Own, by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.

“The helmets were, you know, like a garden. So many colours.” James Baldwin *

Quotes are useful too

| Sheree
Visual journal 12/05

Sometimes I can’t find the words. Sometimes a smear of paint might be enough or an image to spark the imagination or to stand in for that void.

Other times a good quote is enough.

“Don’t let what they want eclipse what you need. They are very dreamy. But they’re not the sun. You are. You are the sun.” Christina Yang

Quality reminders through tough times, quotes can be just that.

Walking In Search of Purple

| Sheree

I’ve started again. I think it happened a couple of weeks ago now. But I’ve started walking out and searching for the colour purple again. I first started this last year during lockdown, when I would take a daily walk, but walk with intention. My intention was to search out purple, usually purple flowers, pause give thanks and snap a photo.

As Alice Walker write in The Color Purple “I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it. People think pleasing God is all God cares about. But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back.”

Walking is a meditation. Like breathing. When I walk my footsteps fall into a rhythm with my breathing. I always feel better after a walk. During the troubling times of the Coronavirus pandemic and Black Lives Matter uprisings around the world, I’ve been searching for purple, more often than not. Does that mean I’m been looking for God? Looking for the reason maybe for all this suffering? But maybe there’s isn’t any reasoning for everything that’s happening. Maybe it’s just a case that this is how things are in the natural scheme of things. How it’s always has been and will be? That’s there’s meanness in the world and suffering and pain as well as beauty.

As more and more in society reopens after lockdown, and more and more people are making demands on my time and attention, I’ve slipped back into walking and searching for purple. And I think this is not to just fill my creative pot with joy, but also to makes sure I keep moving through this world at my own pace. Slowly. And when I lean into taking things slowly, doing things at my own pace, I know I’m in control of everything that is happening in my life.

It’s me taking back me power. And I think that’s what purple symbolises for me. As a colour, for centuries it has been associated with power. Not just regal power, but also because it was so expensive to make, purple was only worn by the select few, the echelons of society.

To be empowered from the inside out is real power for me. Power isn’t how much money or status you have in society. For me, it’s how much you value your own worth, protect your boundaries, lean into what makes you feel happy, what brings you joy and continue to relight your creative fire.

This is power to me. This is purple.

What we need

| Sheree

What we need is tear leaders, not cheer leaders. We need tear leaders to teach us how to mourn. – Allison Adelle Hedge Coke

October Readings

| Sheree

October turned out to be a great month of reading after I set myself the Sealy challenge; of reading one book of poetry a day for a month.
Here’a the books I got through:

  1. Other Poetry, no.23 – anthology of poetry
  2. Writing for my life – Nancy Levin
  3. The World Don’t End – Charles Simic
  4. Our Dead Behind Us – Audre Lorde
  5. Butcher’s Dog 12 – anthology of poetry
  6. Butcher’s Dog 13 – anthology of poetry
  7. What to look for in Autumn – Ladybird Book
  8. Facts about the moon – Dori Anne Laux
  9. Undersong – Audre Lorde
  10. Postcolonial Love Poem – Natalie Diaz
  11. What the Water Gave Me – Pascal Petit
  12. It Ends With Her – Brianna Labuskes
  13. I am an Island – Tasmin Galidas
  14. The Crossroads of Should and Must – Elle Lune
  15. Danger on Peaks – Gary Synder
  16. The Goddess Oracle – Amy Sophia and Mara Rashinsky
  17. Blue Front – Martha Collins
  18. The Autumn House – Alison May
  19. The Winter House – Alison May