Showing posts with label therapeutic writing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label therapeutic writing. Show all posts

Thursday, February 5, 2009

Blue Blue

Nothing is as visible as what we try to hide.
Japanese proverb

...been reading these books on therapeutic writing...with all these suggested prompts for venturing into the jungle inside...shadow selves, inner critics, masks and mood colors...all that shit...and finding it’s taking me a long time to get through it...keep doing all the exercises in my head...including the ones they keep emphasizing should only be attempted with a qualified facilitator...preferably with a degree or two in counseling, present...can make for a rather harrowing reading experience....

Blue blue electric blue, that’s the color of my room, where I will live,
blue blue
David Bowie

...pick a color that expresses your “current life or state of being”...all I can think of when I read that is blue...it’s not even like I pick it...or that it picks me...it’s just there...in the forefront and behind my entire field of inner vision...any other colors just dancing around ephemerally...and we all know what blue means, right?...every day, every day I have the blues...blues fallin’ down like hail...when she turned blue, all the angels screamed...but, just outside, there’s the sky above the snow...I mean, it’s trite, but it’s real...all we have here is sky, all the sky is is blue...and but for the sky there are no fences facing...and, then of course the ocean, water...chaos between earth and sky...giver and destroyer...blue all the life giving waters taken for granted, they quietly understand...when the levee breaks, there’ll be no place to stay....

...synaesthesia is that exquisite little misfiring of the synapses by which sounds are interpreted as smells, or smells as shapes, or shapes as flavors...kinda like saying you want a red flavored snow-cone, but a bit more sophisticated....a friend and I used to sit around listening to music and making tapes for each other...he had these multicolored magic markers, and I’d write down song titles with those...always trying to choose the right color for a particular song...sometimes we’d discuss it: would you say those two are red songs or blue songs?...I’m thinking kind of a blending of the two, not quite purple, really, more like red and blue tendrils interweaving, swirling together, kinda....the strange thing was, he seemed to know what I was talking about...at least at the time....

...so, here I live, in between the mean old lonesome blues and the clear blue sky...embroiled in the raging ocean or floating on the calm sea...then, don’t we all...the ideal, I think, is to float peacefully on a raging ocean...but I’m not anywhere near there, yet...hey blue, here is a song for you...because it all, somehow, feels like music....

[particular shades of blue provided by Pablo Picasso, B. B. King, Robert Johnson, Lou Reed, Jane Siberry, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, Memphis Minnie (by way of Led Zeppelin), the Grateful Dead, and Joni Mitchell]

Monday, January 19, 2009

The King and I

Have we not come to such an impasse in the modern world that we must love our enemies - or else? The chain reaction of evil - hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars - must be broken, or else we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation.
Martin Luther King, Jr.

Martin Luther King’s birthday, when I was growing up, was marked by African American kids staying home from school...which, no doubt, would have really, really horrified Dr. King. Now, of course, we have the official holiday (even if most years it's not actually on his birthday...then, somehow only Christmas and the 4th of July manage to escape the overwhelming force of Americans' everlasting desire for a long weekend), though I don’t know how thrilled he’d be about everybody staying home and playing Grand Theft Auto in his honor, either...which is part of what makes the Martin Luther King Day of Service a beautiful thing....last year, I walked around Germantown picking up trash in vacant lots. This year...I must confess...I didn’t...though I’ve spent much of the day reading books on therapeutic writing, which I hope will be useful in helping some of society’s dispossessed to tell their stories....I think maybe Martin would be okay with that....

Lately there’s a lot of talk about how happy he’d be right now...and I can’t doubt he’d be pleased with certain recent events...though it's hard to picture him sitting around with a complacent smile on his face—more likely, I imagine, he’d be thinking hard and planning, eyes focused squarely on all that remains to be done....