empowerment

SoulCollage® – Community Suit – One Giant Leap

Claire art, SoulCollage® , , , , 0 Comment
SoulCollage® – Community Suit – One Giant Leap

July 20, 1969. I remember watching the lunar landing with rapt attention. It was almost bedtime, but I stayed up, my eyes glued to the black and white images on the screen of the family room TV, still wearing my damp swimsuit from a backyard swim earlier in the evening.

I was 11 years old and a bit of a nerd. I was good at math, an A-student for the most part, still a good little Catholic girl, kind of shy and dorky. Along with the usual cartoons, Leave it To Beaver, I Dream of Jeannie and Bewitched, I also secretly loved watching Nova, a science program, on PBS. And Star Trek and Lost in Space.

I knew the difference between fiction and science, but seeing those men walking on the moon made all that science fiction stuff a lot less fictional and a lot more real. It seemed like anything was possible. I wanted to be able to go there myself one day. Exploring space like Captain Kirk seemed like something we’d all be experiencing in no time.

In spite of the horrors of the Vietnam War, that whole era of the ’60s and early ’70s seemed so full of promise and expanding horizons. Women were getting jobs and burning bras. The Civil Rights movement had come a long, long way. And now we were planting a flag on the moon!

I made this SoulCollage® card to honor my experience of the lunar landing and the impact it had on me as an 11-year-old as well as the feelings it evokes in me now. I am putting it into my Community Suit, because it represents an actual event within my own experience that had a strong impact on me.

Feeling my way back into that formative era, I have a sense that anything’s possible and the sky’s the limit.

These are the questions this card encourages me to explore:

What is my own new frontier or far horizon? Which things do I choose to do, not because they are easy but because they are hard? What is my own small step that becomes the giant leap? Where do I choose to plant my flag? Will that flag be a symbol of peace or of conquering victory? How do I see my world differently from this new vantage point?

The Boggy Marsh

Claire Fallen, the Adventures of a Deep Water Leaf , , 0 Comment
The Boggy Marsh

I recently posted this map of Lake Sojourn, the territory in which the story of Fallen unfolds, on my Facebook page and asked people to pick a location they felt drawn to so I could tell them something about the meaning of that place. It turned out to be an engaging post. Interestingly, but not surprisingly, every location but one was chosen.

Nobody, apparently, wants to be in the Boggy Marsh.

Who would? The full name of this place is actually the Boggy Marsh of Fear. It’s a noxious, smelly, sticky place where one can be too easily trampled by beasts or torn up by talons. Nobody in their right mind would CHOOSE to be there.

Except we do. All the time. It seems like most of us, myself included, spend a lot of our time there, stuck in the muck of our inner fears or the fear de jour being fed to us from the constant stream of political and media messaging that permeates our awareness.

Like the leaf characters in Fallen, we wail and moan, we tremble in fear, we voice our outrage while we wait helplessly for the next calamity to strike. We grow numb to it and, as our feet sink deeper and deeper into the mud, we become paralyzed. We lose consciousness and when we lose consciousness, we are no longer in our right minds. We lose our power to choose.

Ah, but there’s opportunity here. Opportunity to name the beasts of fear that plague us, to observe their patterns and habits, to call them out, to stand up to them, to resist. We can help each other out with this. Lift each other up.

The hero of the Boggy Marsh is the one who says, “Enough!” and learns to harness the wind of self-determined action. One by one, we can leave the Boggy Marsh of Fear and set a new course. The map is full of unexplored territory, full of possibility.