Tag: creativity

Do I remember how to do this?

~ jennadawn ~ Leave a comment

Months away from the creative page.
The desire to make things
or express myself with words
evaporated and melted away
like the unseasonably warm weather of these winter months
kept the snow away
and prevented it from returning to stay.

I cannot find the words to convey the depths of pain and grief and depression and anxiety and ambivalence and change and interspersed joy that have filtered through and between the days of recent months.

I could not imagine what such words would look like, sounds like, spell like, write like or hear like, so it seemed worthless to spend any amount of time before a blank page, hoping for the imagining to come to me.

The thought of spending time before a blank page cascaded waves of fear, discomfort and vulnerability through every tissue of my body, maintaining distance between us.

I have felt vulnerability before, even embraced walking alongside it. But this felt different. It was vulnerability in a new form, a more terrifying form, and I chose to stay away for what I believed to be my own self-protection.

Last weekend, in the midst of an anxiety attack, I tried to color in a coloring book with pencil crayons, reasoning that the act of coloring would distract and calm my mind. Instead, my anxiety amplified. Fears of choosing the right picture (not too complex but not too simple), fears of choosing the right colors, fears of coloring too faintly, too intensely or beyond the lines, fears of choosing colors to live next to each other that do not complement. Questioning why I am limited to the colors chosen to be within this collection of pencils. Questioning why I need to adhere to rules and lines and systems laid out by an entity separate from myself. After ten minutes, I abandoned the effort.

I want to stand before a giant white canvas and throw globs of paint upon it, then wave a brush to spread them all around under the guide of exploration and curiosity. I want to get my hands messy. I don’t want to abide by arbitrary rules that tell me what’s right and what’s wrong with my exploration of self. I want to translate myself into colors and textures and images that words cannot always adequately capture within themselves. I am evolving. I am expanding.

I must believe
I am strong enough
to rise up against any tribulation
threatening to pull me down
and keep me there.

I have to trust
that I have the means within me
to face each new situation
in the moment.
It’s somewhere deep inside of me
waiting to rise when the time is right;
the knowing of what to do.
All I need to do is trust.

Trust that evolution
is a celebration
and a journey with no finish line.

I must trust that I remember how to do this,
and will remember how to do this
when I need to.

re-acquaint the pen with my hand

~ jennadawn ~ 1 Comment

I have forgotten how to hold my pen –
index, middle and thumb?
index and thumb?
concave or convex?
thumb tucked in or overlapped?

I write a line, or a word,
then my fingers fumble and fidget,
switch to a different position
then switch again a few words later.

What was once a natural extension of my hand
now lives in the unfamiliar.
Half the process now, requires learning
how to enable the pen to rest
within my fingers and thumb
to scratch legible letters,
never mind focusing my mind enough
to connect thoughts into coherency
to write at all.

I have been away from the page
for so long
the practice, the rituals I once knew
and depended on,
are foreign.

Long ago
(or what seems like long ago)
I began this practice
fumbling and learning and
constantly switching my fingers around the pen
just like I am now.

This is a chance to begin again
to re-acquaint the pen with my hand
and begin walking along a new trail
of the forest.

virtual retreat

~ jennadawn ~ Leave a comment

The past four days
have been a gift.
Coming here,
to the office desk space
beneath the east-facing window
in the back bedroom of the house.
Here,
in a space both virtual and physical
I have reunited with her,
my creativity,
the part of me prone to playing
hide and seek
for now, has settled with me.
Notebook pages
have been filled with ink,
Word documents
have word counts spanning thousands
and all due
to my first-ever writing retreat.
Virtual connection
with writers ranging ages,
provinces and experience,
helped me feel safe
to feel, to release,
and to create,
with much more yet to come.

Deep and heartfelt appreciation to the Saskatchewan Writers’ Guild for creating this opportunity.

shifting

~ jennadawn ~ Leave a comment

Periods of writing
have become few and far between.

Me,
settling into the slowness
of the lingering winter season
with her cool air and cloudy skies.

I grant permission
to embrace slowness.

This is a time to absorb
creativity around me,
to focus less on creating.

Shifting projects, priorities,
selecting new sources of inspiration.

Seasons shift,
evolve,
surprise and endure.

believing in my body

~ jennadawn ~ Leave a comment

When my body talks to me, I listen to her. I listen to her, and I believe her.  

When my body told me I was safe with him, I believed her.

When my body told me I was not safe, and I needed to get out of the situation, I believed her, and I ran.

When I received declarations of love that did not resonate with my body’s perception of truth, I believed her distrust.

When my body ached and longed and dreamed of the situation being just a little bit different, like how I had imagined it in my mind, she allowed me to play along for awhile, because she could see how much I wanted to believe, and how tightly I was holding on. But when she murmured over and over again that the situation would never change without me sacrificing my personal integrity, I believed her, and slowly, eventually, let it go.

When my body shows the beginnings of a sore throat and the quiet introduction of a cough, I believe her and I take care of her.  

When my body initiates the slow and soft hum of building pain extending across my pelvic floor, I believe her message that my bleed is coming. She has never let me down before.

When, on the screen, my body showed an organism too small, with a heart beating too slow, I believed her message that she was doing everything she could, but it would not be enough.

When, after the second procedure, I felt like my complete, whole, ‘normal’ self, I believed my body was feeling that way for a reason; she doesn’t play mind games with me.  

When my body expresses hunger, I believe her. When she requests movement, I believe her and get my heart and lungs working. When she experiences discomfort, I tune in and solve my way through the problem until I reach the heart of it.

When my body pushes me out beyond my comfort zone with insistence that I will grow if I do, I believe her, and do my best to push aside my anxiety.

When my body calls for artistic expression, I believe and honor her requests through writing, photography, vocal release, and decorating my skin with ink.

When my body knows there’s something worth fighting for, she stirs up the energy I need to speak my truth and advocate for others. I believe she knows, better than my mind does, what is important to me.  

When my body whispers to me her need for rest, for stillness and quiet, I believe her, and give her what she needs.

When, over the last few months, I felt subtle shifts taking place in my body, I believed she was trying to tell me something, even if I couldn’t understand it.

When I learned I would need to undergo more testing before re-entering treatment, I heard my body say quietly, under her breath, that there’s no guarantee this test will have normal results. She told me to wait until I didn’t have other concurrent commitments, but at the same time, that I should have it done soon for there’s no point in unnecessary waiting. She reminded me of the futility in detailed planning for months in the future, because the first test needs to be clear before the other dominoes can fall into place, and I haven’t had that test yet. I believed her, but I still held on to hope that perhaps, she was worrying unnecessarily, like my mind tends to do. That for the first time, she might be wrong.

My body wasn’t worrying unnecessarily. She was right and proved, once again, how I can and must always believe her. 

reclaiming the act of sharing art

~ jennadawn ~ Leave a comment

For weeks and weeks
maybe even months
I have been writing
but it has been
a different kind of writing,
different than a pen and a notebook,
different than poetry.

I have been writing a kind of writing
that requires a computer
the ability to use both of my hands
to write faster
to keep up with the dialogue and the story
pouring down from my head,
the kind of writing
where you can see word counts
at the bottom of the screen,
and pages and paragraphs
and can easily go back and make changes
if, realizing after a while,
thoughts have run off-kilter.

These weeks and months
have kept me writing
nearly every day
in joy, in creativity,
in imagination
and the wonder of seeing
my mind’s movies begin a life
on paper.

The trouble, though,
if chosen to be seen in such a way,
is the lure of my computer
and open Word document
call out to me with urgency greater
than my pen and notebook.

The pen and notebook
have remained in their spot
on the living room coffee table
beside the plant
and below the window
ready on the side stage
for a call that has faded away,
pages left empty.

I find myself in a confusing place
because the desire to write
and share the words I do
remains
in fact,
the desire grows stronger every day.
The dissonance lies
in the difficulty of sharing words
from a novel in-progress
and yet
having no other words written
seemingly better suited
to be shared with the world.

I feel a pull to absolve the dissonance
between the words I write
and the words I share.
Break my self-imposed rules
of what type of art belongs where.
Dissolve the criteria
of where art must be born
and rather, shift focus
to capturing the magical moments
themselves, as they are,
no matter the medium
or method.

Sharing art for the
simple, generous, vulnerable, beautiful,
act of doing so –
this is what I have lost
and what I want to reclaim.

I can do it, too

~ jennadawn ~ Leave a comment

If she can work part time
in a store
to pay the bills
and devote her afternoons
to writing her novel,
owning her dream to be a novelist
and tell world
she is a writer
then
I can work my part time job
to pay the bills
and devote my non-work time
to writing my novel
owning my dream of being a novelist
and tell the world
I am a writer.

I can do it, too.

A new journal, a new pen

~ jennadawn ~ 1 Comment

My counselor,
her name is Marcela,
assigned homework for me
during my last therapy session.
She said I had to go out
buy a notebook of visual appeal
alongside a high-grade pen.

The idea was to stimulate my creativity
with a notebook I liked to look at
and a pen I liked to write with
to make the experience enjoyable and enticing
to draw me in
to create for the sake of creating
to help me re-connect with this part of me
that, at times, seems to be fading.

So
one day after work I went to the bookstore.
I looked for a journal to catch my eye.
Funny how, at the same time,
my mind automatically eliminated some
because they looked too expensive.
Or,
I would find one that looked pretty
but my mind would convince me it wasn’t right
because of the size
because of the binding
because of the line spacing
because of the ‘fanciness’
because of the price.
If any journal held these qualities too well,
I told myself,
I would feel inherent pressure
to create content of high esteem, high value,
worthy enough to live between its covers
thereby creating more pressure
and likely, shying away from
scribbling out thoughts
for the mere purpose of releasing them.

What should have been instinctual
and taken seconds
took me minutes and minutes
standing in front of the journals
wrestling with my mind.

At last, I landed on this one.
Different than any I’ve had before
a thought-provoking cover
and on sale.

I chose a package of pens
I knew I would like
even though I could clearly see
the dozens of unused, good-enough pens
waiting at home.

A new journal
a new pen
starting a new journey
while I was away from home
in the mountains
looking for a reset
seemed fitting.
Connecting the stars within me
into constellations
bringing me back to myself
one page at a time
ink and words flowing.