If you were to ask me to stop cleaning the bathroom and come and sit by you, I would.
I would gladly throw down this cloth, take off these rubber gloves and come cuddle up on the couch with you.
The sink can wait to be rinsed. The toilet can wait to smell piney. The bath can wait to gleam clean.
I’d forego to all, even the tiled floor, to come be by your side and let you whisper into my ear, caress my neck, stroke my forearm.
Tell me how lovely I am, and how you can’t get enough of me. That the stars have no contest when I smile. That your life was barren until I came along.
He’ll, I’d even leave the smudges in the mirror, to have you put your arm around my waist and pull me into a sweet slow kiss.
I’ve been thinking of moving to the Highlands, buying a small cottage by a loch and swim every morning.
There’s a river too, that haunts the glen, between my cottage and the mountains. I feel it, breathing within the shadow of mountains.
I know this is not just a pipe dream. I know someone who’s done it, made the move across the border, living a blessed life.
I’ve been thinking of an open fire where I’d bake bread with the sun rise and when ready sit sit out on the porch with thick slices, warm and buttered. Dripping butter and the air smelling like home.
My home.
I’m thinking there’s one village store miles away. I walk every other day for exercise. On the way, I bird spot. Blackbird, moorhen, blue tit, eagle.
Small talk with the store owner might be difficult after long moments of silence in my cottage by the loch. In the silence I can hear myself better.
Being a water woman and a mountain woman, I will welcome the solitude and the haunting rolling out before me as nothing would hold me back.
Laughter and fun, with trust and communication, honesty and commitment but not in a heavy sense but much love and affection and respect and joy, I spent a long time in a relationship that wasn’t joyful and really what’s the point, life’s too short to waste time and energy on people who don’t treat you right or who aren’t happy in themselves, I want to be with someone who makes time for me and us, just like I make time for them and us, hey I get it, people are busy, leading busy lives but I’m of the belief that if you want to be with someone you make time and effort to be/do just that.
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.
Living Wild Studios 