unsmush

People at work are driving me a little batty. Everyone is coming up to me and saying I heard you’re leaving for Trader Joe’s! NO, FOOLS! I AM A WORD ARTIST NOT A DESK JOCKEY!


I’m leaving to get on with my creative life, to create the life I want to live. I’m leaving for the freedom to persue dreams, I leaving because this air-conditioned, beige cubicle is murdering my muse! I went back into my original Nashville-move journal last night and it was full of gems, poetry, beautiful thoughts, story ideas, creativity.

Now my journals read like laundry lists. “I am so sad and bored and stuffed up” blah blah blah. It is possible for a place to stifle a person but only if that person allows it to. And I have allowed this place to smush me. I officially unsmush myself.


Sure, I’m working at a grocery store part-time. A grocery store I love, that treats people right and provided free benefits and good options for good workers. I am learning to work at work again, to find my motivation, to be among the living while being paid essentially what I am paid here.

but I am also putting my art into the world, I am starting an etsy, I am performing a rock opera, I am freelance writing, I am poet mentoring, I am LIVING and I don’t need a big Daddy corporation to take care of me. The world is changing, work is changing and America has become a service-oriented culture. what service can I provide my community, my friends, my neighbors? Well I am surely not providing it here at a Christian publishing house. I am a creative free-spirited silly outspoken authentic artist and until I own that and live that I will be miserable and I will only bring those around me down. I am living for myself and for the betterment of the people around me.

Love to everyone and every living thing.

Throwing myself

Leap and the net will appear.
Does this work? We’ll see, I suppose. I am trying to put my 2 weeks notice in at work. But my current supervisor (only of the past few months when my boss left for Atlanta) is never in his office. Monday, he was out all day “waiting for the contractor” who never showed up. Yesterday he was out for a dental appointment. Today, it’s a different contractor issue and 10 am and he’s still not in. BLARGH!

But I have gotten a part-time job with Trader Joe’s (free benefits, yo!) and I’ll have the freedom to do workshops with Youth Speaks Nashville. My first workshop was with middle-schoolers on Monday. Inspiring kids to love and be creative with language on a regular basis is heaven to me. I felt absolutely magical afterwards. The writing exercise I gave them was so fun to read.

I am thinking of doing some personal archeology, taking it on as a project, with interviews and everything. After the writing group last year about ‘firsts’ I’ve really been interested in writing a memoir. I don’t know if anyone would want to read it but I’m of the ilk that if you need to write something you should rather than writing for an audience. I had a wicked crazy childhood, no sense in letting that story be forgotten.

Success Terror Alert!

I meant to post more in August. I HAVE NOT BEEN WRITING MUCH. And this is a travesty. I felt empty inside, devoid of purpose. What is wrong with me? I KNOW I need to write to feel lively and part of the Universe but still I don’t find the time.

Can I be melodramatic for a moment, please? Yes? Ok - Work is KILLING me right now. KILLING ME. STAB TO THE EYE. Everyone is gone. Everyone that is cool awesome lovely has either been let go or let themselves go to a new job. Yay. Good for you. I hate it here. Ok, not everyone but ALMOST everyone.

Kat and I are working on a rock opera together and its going well. I am having trouble getting into it, feeling like a part of it because I’ve been avoiding doing the work. Listening to the music in the order I put it in, feeling the storyline, moving within the art. Why have I been avoiding it? FEAR OF SUCCESS. Totally immobilizing and terrifying fear of success. Scarier than Public Speaking and Death. In fact, I love public speaking and within the past 24 hours have actually wished for death but you know what goes bump in the night? You know what terrifies me beyond all recognition? *shivers*


The thought of succeeding and moving forward.
Must. Defeat. Success. Wait…what? No. Must Defeat Fear. (paralyzed)

Do you remember freeze tag from when you were a kid? I wish I were playing freeze tag with God (The Universe, Great Spirit, whatever you wanna call it) and God would just unfreeze me and I could run like the wind to my most productive and successful existance.

writing workshop

This weekend I took part in a critiquing workshop at the main branch of the Public Library.

The creator of the workshop sloppily foretold in emails what s/he was planning. Declan, an obscure male traditionally-Irish name, turns out to a be a young woman. She is probably in her early twenties and proactively decided to begin her own writing workshop to built her resume. I appreciate the gutsiness.

About 12 of us show up, as soon as I walk in I see my son's grandmother. The woman who served us with papers filing for full custody at the behest of her son, who took part in the brief time when we were denied access to our child until the courts rectified that. This all took place after a painful and unfortunate accident that left our son injured, a time when he needed his parents (all of them) the most. I was shocked, but being who I am it was easy to hide shock and I only said, "hello".

She didn't recognize me at first then, registering shock in her wide blue eyes, she stuttered "I'm so happy to see you here."

It was all I could do not to say "I'm so NOT HAPPY TO SEE YOU here." I felt invaded, scared, irritated, angry. Then, I took a deep breath, let her sentence hang in the air and said something non-descript like "what a surprise."

In typical steam-roller fashion, I had agreed to share one of my poems at the first meeting. I waffled, thought of reneging then just decided whatever the world has in store for me, it will out. So I guess I'll go back next week. I am thankful that such a program exists in this city for broke writers such as myself, even if it comes with unwanted lessons in forgiveness.

Composting classes

Last night K and I got a babysitter for the first time ever and went to a lecture by Eric Schlosser at Belmont University. It was a refresher course for two organic local-food-buying, non-junk food eating women (us) but it gave me a renewed vigor regarding composting.

Schlosser was talking about the guy who started the organic food movement in Britain, Sir Albert Howard, and how we are all interconnected to the soil. That in turn got me thinking about composting. I have a little compost plot in my back yard. It isn’t beautiful and in the summer it draws bugs but I love watching the eggshells, coffee ground, paper towels, broccoli stalks and other vegetable scraps turn back into this black soggy gorgeous earth. I love that I am teaching my son this by doing it with him. I love watching the birds twitter around it looking for goodies. I love that my trash never stinks.

In fact, our household makes very little trash. There is usually a week every month we have NO TRASH to pick up. I wish this was so for the rest of the neighborhood. I drive down the street on trash day and some of the bins are full to bursting and they have NOTHING in their recycle bin on recycle day, some don't even pull it out.

So all of this has me thinking about having a composting class at my house this summer for people in my neighborhood- especially kids- because they love to learn this stuff. Then as time goes by and more people in our neighborhood are composting start to have a gardening class. I always have a liberty garden with lettuce, spinach, herbs, cucumbers, pepper and a few tomatoes (tomatoes don’t love me and don’t grow very well for me). Very little work is required to grow a small garden as long as you’re composting because you are providing all the nutrients the plant need to grow by composting your scraps.

So that is my idea for the day, start a composting workshop at my house this spring and get people to have less trash and more beautiful rich healthy soil. I want to help people to begin to see that everything is everything else, we are earth and sky, that without bugs and birds and possums and bats and trees and lovely dirt we can’t thrive. We are merely surviving when we buy into this technological insanity and disconnect ourselves from the beauty and wonder of creation.