An Educational Experiment

Read Time : 5 Minutes

Making room for the evolution of the soul

Every once in awhile, I erase everything I’ve ever written (in my mind…! I have paper copies of it all). I erase the past. I erase the demand I’ve put on myself to create some piece of “great art.” I erase expectation. I erase what I thought I was doing to make room for what I had no idea I might do. I tear up the script I was writing. I make new combinations of words. I take out, take away, realign.

I do this in my writing, and over the years I have begun to recognize how I do this in my life.

I’m not a proponent of celebrity makeovers or best selling closet organizers whose names are now synonymous with perceived happiness and emotional tidiness. These bloggers and home editors are perfect for their followers, but I stir my proverbial coffee with a different fork. I’m all for editing and erasure, but never at the cost to myself or what I perceive as important.

I have a reputation in my family for throwing out clutter, for reorganizing, rearranging, giving away, and even moving furniture around to try it in different rooms of the house. I am perceived as tidy, and that’s probably true, but behind the perception of a tidy person is a pretty chaotic assemblage of thinking that goes into this way of erasure. I’m quite thoughtful about what I erase. And I do it so often now I have to explain. I can let go of random unread pieces of papers, strings of sentences, entire manuscripts, an old sweater, unused glassware, not because I have the courage to let something go that I no longer want, but to give pieces of myself away so that I can make room for the evolution of my soul.

Did you ever stop to think that our souls are constantly evolving?

That buying a new suit or a new pair of shoes and cleaning out the closet to make room for them would transpire to mean that you were evolving your soul? I mean, has there ever been reason to dissect your life this way? We have a lot on our minds. A lot. Cleaning the closet, for one, editing a novel, for another, are my examples, but if you think about it editing and clearing are two of the same actions that move energy not only from your closet, but from your being.

Editing is soul work.

Did you ever stop to think that our souls are constantly evolving?

This is my educational experiment

I attend a transformational school, the one where I am encouraged to lift myself out of my past to make room for my present being. Why wait until I reach some greater place in the sky to do soul work? Why not do it in the here and now? I mean, if the prophets are correct, and I will eventually go to this great Heaven, what guarantees are there that I can do any better work to my being in some celestial place? Isn’t Earth a celestial place? After all, she is a floating ball of light, a piece of the stars.

So I have to ask this question.

What makes us interested in cleaning? In erasure? And why is it easier for some of us than others? Is it when we’re living in the present that we can make these changes for ourselves?

Perhaps it is when we are living in the past, that part of ourselves we can’t let go of, that causes us to hold onto the pieces of ourselves we no longer need. But by rearranging, realigning, redistributing, we clean out the closet of our being which gives us more room to look at our own evolution. As much as we love our celebrity home editors, what I think we really love is the motion, the permission to shift, to erase, to clear, and to clean greater aspects of ourselves.

We don’t need permission to do soul work

We don’t even need to know that we’re doing it, but I guarantee you this: Earth coughs up old energies, makes shifts to her terrain, and causes us to do the same. Every day our planet is moving and shifting. Inch by inch, the waters recede or flood, the land masses move closer together so perhaps one day these land masses, our continents, will retro fit themselves back into their original formation as they were before they broke apart. I think about this a lot. What part of our being needs to come together again? Are we like the continents regrouping and shifting back into our original formation?

We’re nothing but these broken fractions of ourselves scattered about trying to do it all, be it all, accomplish what we perceive as it all. We’re land masses ourselves on a soul’s journey on a planet. Period.

I’m convinced we’re on this journey together and we’re hanging onto some semblance of a past to save us from our unknown future, but by cleaning out pieces that no longer belong we can invite a new being, a new sentence, a new Earth, a new formation.

It’s just a thought, but I think by erasing a few old manuscripts from my mind and starting a new work I can invite my being to look at herself and what she has to say in new words. New thinking. New beginnings.

Creating Amid Distractions

Read Time : 2 Minutes

Landscape is part of a creative response to our environment.

When we’re in a place we love, such as the woods or the beach, we create a different response in our minds to creativity. Most of us actually relax and become more creative because we’re responding to landscape. But what happens when we can’t get away to our favorite place?

We forget how to tap into our creative selves. Suddenly the dishwasher, the honking horns, and the train clattering along the tracks distracts us. We object to our landscape and shut down our creativity. I won’t say I can wave a magic wand and enhance your creativity while you’re distracted, but we choose to let ourselves become distracted and we make excuses as to why we’re not finishing that novel or new vocals, for example, because we can’t get away to a perfect landscape.

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I, for one, hate construction noise, but I’ve trained myself over the years to work alongside noise by merging sounds so the noise isn’t noise, a distraction, but a part of the creativity. Ok, I admit that sounds a little wonky, but I’ll try and explain.

By listening to the inward voice, and not my outward environment, the inward voice gets stronger and louder than say the construction noise. By focusing on the construction noise, I will lose the inward voice, the writer’s voice, but by allowing the construction noise to be there, not trying to mask it or run away from it, I create a place where I’ve learned to balance outward sounds and mind chatter with the writer’s voice. It’s become a mind game not to listen to what’s going on around me or get distracted by all the chirps and bings on my computer telling me I have a message. We can think of plenty of excuses not to work alongside distractions, but if we do we fail to create. While choosing to create amid distraction, acknowledge it, work with it, focus on the desire to be in balance, and you will create a more rewarding experience.

I often tell the story of when I was first began writing.

I would do so at the kitchen table while my two young daughters played in the same room alongside me. Best training ever to teach myself how to balance distraction and creativity! Trust me. It can be done! It takes enormous patience with yourself and a desire to muddle through. We’re creatives. Creatives create. Be patient with yourself and you, too, can muddle through. Focus on the competent you. Listen to that inward voice and the outward sounds will diminish. I promise.

Finding excuses not to do something is easy, but reevaluating landscape and making it a part of the process, an accessory to creativity, will give it less attention. And when there is less attention placed on where you’re writing, or what you’re listening to, suddenly the train, or the children playing under your feet, becomes a comfort and never a distraction because it was never defined as such. xo

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Sharing My Writer's Journey

I never wanted to become a writer.

I never really aspired to it. I wanted to become a nurse. Or a healer of some kind. Possibly a Hospice nurse. I thought about that a lot. I am a mother. I am a nurse and a healer. I take care of. I actually thought I might become a broadcast journalist. I wanted to share the news. I learned to think and type simultaneously when my father, a broadcaster, told me that this was the only way to write effectively. I would write compositions, term papers, and stories long hand and ask him to type them for me. He quickly gave me my own typewriter and told me I was doing it all wrong, that to think and type simultaneously was the only way I would become a journalist. I changed my mind. I didn’t want to become a journalist. Thinking and typing at the same time was difficult and my muscle memory and my brain reacted against it. But look at me now. I think and type. All the time. It’s my career. My father was right. I am a nurse and a writer. A mother and a healer. I write what intuitively comes to me…words of encouragement and healing. 

Although I didn’t realize it at the time, my journey to becoming a writer began when I started typing…

…playing “writer” on my new electronic typewriter. I would pretend to write words, long sentences, even paragraphs that were a jumbled mess because thinking and writing at the same time was difficult. But pretending was fun. I was an effervescent child, not quite here. Off in the clouds somewhere. I played writer and became a writer. I’m not sure many people approach their life choice this way, but I typed my way into it and now I can only think and type at the same time. I guess you could say I became what I pretended to be.

There’s mysticism in creating oneself.

We all do it. We think and become. I want to become the healer and help others understand that their journey is the journey of creating, manifesting, and becoming. 

Writing is a tool to teaching. I never thought about being a teacher, but I played at that too as a child. We set up “school” and took turns playacting. My friends and I loved playing school. I loved the teacher/student way. Looking back, I guess I’m somewhat stymied by it all struggling to understand the writer’s journey. How did I get here and why can’t I shake this complicated existence? I am a nurse, healer, student, teacher. A seeker. And I write to share. There’s no other way.