Take Back Your Life!

About 3 years ago, I wrote a blog post about the masks I’d worn, taken off and still have fragments of to remove. I got nervous right before hitting the send key because I thought, it’s too rad for folks. Well, that post got more comments than just about any post. It spoke to readers.

Yesterday, while patrolling the supermarket aisle in search of organic items (or was it meaning?), the title for this month’s newsletter popped into my head. Everyone Is Beautiful When They Take Off Their Masks.

If you take off your metaphorical mask, you will expose the underneath you, the one you’ve been taught to hide or hold in check or be ashamed to reveal.

The beautiful human you. The vulnerable you.  (more…)

I sometimes pick up Origin, the conscious culture magazine. It’s got alternative viewpoints on a wide variety of topics. New ways of thinking about old things. Interviews with folks whose ideas lives closer to the fringes.

The article “Subterranean Cathedral” stopped me in my skimming tracks. James Ramsey and Daniel Barasch heard about the vast, abandoned underground spaces that lie dormant under New York City and approached the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to turn it into an underground park illuminated with their invention of redirected sunlight. Fascinated with how they will do that. The forgotten world reminded me of the 1987ish show Beauty and the Beast. In that show, The Beast and a bunch of other folks lived under New York City. (more…)

About two weeks ago, a few friends and I held a creative visioning session at our local library. It’s part of the creativity group I started to move my town to a new, artsy, creative, community-oriented kind of place. We sketched, shared and schemed ways to take small steps to get us there. The participants came up with some phenomenal ideas for restaurants, recycling, biking, museums, art-centers, community public spaces, etc.

How often do any of us get asked to do that? We’ve had some not-that-helpful consultant led events where you say stuff and it ends up in a giant circular file never to be seen again. Sometimes, I swear it’s just an information gathering session for developers. This was put on by the community for the community.

I’d love for some of you to share your ways to create a world driven by love and kindness rather than hate, indifference and meanness. (more…)

I just finished Creative Mind: Tapping the Power Within. Am on a creativity reading bender to say the least. Am reading everything even tangentially related to that topic.

I’m reading Improv Wisdom and the subtitle is “Don’t prepare, just show up.”

It reminded me to live my life unscripted as much as possible.

For example, last night I went to a stacked Town Meeting knowing I was going to speak against the crowd. It was for more money for an athletic complex that has gone way over budget because they stuck with the plan when they hit significant financial issues early on. Many voters felt like they were stuck between a rock and a hard place. We’ve spent millions and they wanted another million and say they will come back again for even more. (more…)

My first foray into fiction!

Nail Polish Stories is a fabulous tiny and colorful literary journal. Each entry is just 25 words long. How adorable is that?

Nicole, the editor, will publish a print anthology in 2013.

Check out Luscious Lips and Forest Green. Send in your own …

Thanks, G.

I’ve been busy taking drawing classes, reading drawing books, drawing almost daily.

In my present drawing class, everyone else is attempting to copy the still life. I started to do that in week #1 and then found myself taking one part of the still life and making it unstill, making it overflowing with possibilities, filling it with things that don’t necessarily exist the way we view the world. (They may exist if I can think them up, but that’s another blog post.)

Every week since then, I’ve gotten an idea and gone with it. Sometimes I put a slogan across the top and draw what represents the slogan to me. Other times I start drawing and the slogan appears. I love note cards and note pads and decided I wanted my drawings on them. (more…)

I’m in essay writing mode, which means I’m reading a lot of essay/memoirish type books these days.

One with spectacular writing is The Anthropology of Turquoise by Ellen Meloy (2002, Pulitzer Prize Finalist). I majored in Anthropology and love the word. The clothing store chain spells it Anthropologie, which I like too. Funny how words become in vogue after sitting in obscurity for years. I’ve heard that anthropology is one of the most popular majors at my alma mater. I must be a trendsetter of sorts. When I attended the program had about 40 students majoring in it — if that.

I loved the classes and teachers and subject. We went to Safari type places, studied the Yanomamo on the Orinoco River, genetic drift, vervets, cultures and people. Offbeat, fascinating stuff that I’ve come to appreciate the last 10 years or so. I’m so tired of everyone saying all the jobs will be in math and engineering. How can that even be true? Imagine if everyone majored in one of them, nothing else. Would that create more jobs? I don’t think so. (more…)

Magic has surfaced as a theme for the writers taking my latest Story Circle On-line writing adventure: Grab Life By The Writing Gusto.

I believe Magic exists, we just learn to filter it out on our slog to the “Real World,” which of course is anything but real. Truth continues to be stranger than fiction, so I’m not sure why we continue to train the young for the real world when that’s not in our best self-interest.

Someone said to me that the title for my class wasn’t possible, that you couldn’t grab life by the writing gusto.

Why not? That’s how ingrained folks are to sort everything into real and not real. (more…)

I’ve been jumping around The Art of Recklessness: Poetry As Assertive Force And Contradiction. It’s due in two days and despite renewing it once I waited until almost the last minute to crack the cover. (Deadlines can be great motivators.)

The author Dean Young says, “We are all trying in the writing of poetry to bring about something that doesn’t exist, that will surprise us, delight us, perhaps, but we must always be prepared for its initial unrecognizability. The imagination is that which will not be subservient to so-called reality, so-called duty, not to expectation, requirement, prerequisite, obligation.” (more…)