Fear Distraction

Distraction is ultimatley avoidance for me. Avoiding the fear buried in achieving something or finding out I am not capable of achieving what I dream. Pursuing the dream might mean to lose it or find out it is not there to be grabbed a hold of - that I might do it so very badly...so who cares if you do it badly...I guess I do...I always have. So I do nothing instead.

Humour is a way of being glib about fear. Where is the fear I am avoiding through distractions? Begin with the distraction: Creative distraction is maybe discovery and not fear at all..maybe yearning to create is to do somethign meaningful; to get to the meaning of things.

There is meaning in writing, picturing meaning and seeing meaning. I have not yet found that one thing brings meaning into my creative space. I find my photos and my writing a little cliche... afraid to cut to the surface. In fact writing about myelf is really not writing practice at all...but pure distraction from wiritng. I need to write with meaning. I need to picture that.

But this is a warm up. What is my artistic vision - one that will transcend written word, the photograph the medium? I think it will have something to do with fear or rather the lack of it. The quality of woman standing alone and strong in what she beleives. That is not me, it is what I hope for me to be. But when I see it in a statue, a photo, a poem or story - it draws me in.

I need to stop journalling and begin wrtiting and getting real about it. Getting into a real mode of writing and capturing that which is true to what I really want to express, not what I hope to distract myself with. Shame is at the heart of my fear. Put my hear to the ground and listen to the pulse of that for a moment. Fear and judgemnet cloud my head and writing. Quick to write off what doesn't make sense, I need to open my mind and heart to what is before me and listent to what is being said, not what I perceive to be before me. I need a new language of seeing and new what to filter the distraction and a new way to hear what is inside me. Why do I need to travel? Another distraction? Maybe, but it opens me up - wide open - especially where life is smaller that where we are now.

Shame

Maybe it is because there is a part of me that is still back there somewhere. The child that was embarrassed to have other people know that she lived in the projects on Martha Street. Thirty-six Martha st. I liked to think even then that I was better than what was around me, but the truth is - I was as poor as any of them and in many ways as unhappy. I could hear my friends being beaten by their parents for small things, yelled at on their front lawns, looked filthy and bedraggled on their way to school; children with mean dirty faces. They were worn down before they had a chance to do it to themselves. The sadness was there as a constant, but only lessened by bursts of playing a game of chase in and between the rows of houses into the evening. So when I see these young weathered faces, I feel helpless in the worst way. I want to whisper in their ear that they are good and smart and worthy of love. I want to tell them to hang in there…it will get better. To hold them tight. But, I know that for many they will only carry their shame and hurt into their lives, and some of the lucky ones, like me, will pretend that this never happened. Deny that it was ever part of you. Look forward and make the past disappear somewhere. Look the other way so it doesn’t hurt anymore.