Tag Archives: visioning

shaping a writing home

mural: fish and faces and movement and kitties and eyes and eyes and eyesgood morning good morning– it’s early, the tea is cooling, the sun is pearling the morning clouds, the candles flicker over everything.

How does your morning lift you so far?

I’m in the quiet writing room where I can’t see out any windows, where I don’t look out into the quiet uncommutered street, where I am only focused on the screen, on the notebook, on the words.

Above me, on the built in shelves, are the sticky notes I brought back with me from Hedgebrook (such as this one from Christian McEwen’s World Enough and Time: “Fall if you must fall / The one you will become will catch you”), a short string of Tibetan prayer flags (which can’t strictly pray, since there’s no breeze in this room — maybe sharp exhalations of frustration, though, would flutter them, would offer movement enough), the poems (Wild Geese, yes, of course, and Roberta Werdinger’s fabulous “Poem,” which opens Give me your blood your bone / your sockets your breath and closes with the lines Open my body leave in a mark / Open me river me do what you will.), and image of Artemis the moon dancer that I received from a friend many years ago back when I lived in Maine.

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shaking off as much sand as we can before we get in

puppy graffitihttp://www.flickr.com/photos/44124436774@N01/82179210The alarm goes off and I wake up with the feeling like I’m on the edge of the world, like I’m in a void, like nothing’s happened or about to happen, just my heart is pounding.

It takes  a little bit of being up before I can remember my dreams, some big performance I’m supposed to be mc-ing, with or at the CSC, it’s supposed to be like one we’ve done there before but now Robert wants it to be different, only now I can’t remember exactly how.  The first one had had a couple hundred attendees, and now we have maybe 20 or so. It was only 18 minutes past when the show was about to start — more people were probably on their way.  I was trying to get us all to move outside from this big room we were in, so that the show could start — earlier in the dream, I think it was earlier, I was taking an exam, an english test, like reading comprehension, only I started the test late because I was looking for something, like I didn’t have the right exam booklet or something else.  I was cocky about the test, I didn’t really think I needed that much time for it because it would be so easy for me, but then I ran out of time and was going to have to start making educated guesses.  it was a multiple choice exam, and I was trying to remember the rules about educated guessing, like you have to do on the SAT sometimes.

This whole year has seemed like fall, like we moved from winter-rainy season (finally, in May, we moved out of it), into this thick warmish early fall, where the chill’s always just around the corner. Does it seem that way to you?  We’re starting to cook fall things — I’m ready for apple dishes, soup.

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get brave

be brave -- with heart! flickr.com/photos/hryckowian/

text says: "be brave!"

(from some visioning for 2010: I’d like to post more consistently here at the writingourselveswhole blog, and one topic I want to communicate about is this process I’m entering around growing the workshops into something more like a nonprofit. I never saw myself as someone who would start an org, and have a lot of ‘inner critic’ stuff coming up about these new steps. I want to be transparent with these voices, with my response to ’em, and more…)

Remember that writing prompt, “If I were brave, I would…”? Here’s one of my writes in response:

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