Creative Life Midwife

Inspiring Artistic Rebirth

Choosing to Be Love’s Infinite Harvest

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It is Sunday. I came home from the hospital on a Sunday. Typically a day of rest.

Now five years later, I am writing ahead of time because I will be away from my computer and every single day this month I have posted.

I have a request of you which you may or may not choose to honor.

On this Sunday or next Sunday, will you please take a moment to reflect upon where you have been for the last five years.

What do you remember of your last five years? Take your time with this gleaning from your memory. Look at photos you or others have in their phones, pull out your calendar, see where you were and who you were with – be granular, be general. Allow the memories to find their way back to you.

What can you imagine for the next five years?

How will you invest your precious time and energy?

I don’t mean the big mountain top stuff, I mean the everyday moments in time where the truest, most infinite love lives. 

In October 2021, I wrote this question to consider in my own life: “How can I be love’s infinite harvest?”

This was around the time I was new to the manse and manse life.

I had no idea what I was in for – the good, the horrifying, the dull and the dull ache moments.

When I think of the question now I think, “How may I be love’s infinite harvest?” or “How WILL I be love’s infinite harvest?”

For the rest of the month, I will be asking it again, myself, on repeat.

Perhaps you will join me in asking this question for yourself.

🌟 Creative Life Coach & Muse Cultivator

 🎨 | Award-Winning Writer/Actor/Storyteller

🌱 | Empowering Your Second Act

🎉| New Courses/Programs Coming soon!

🎁   Your presence here makes me feel grateful. 

✍🏻I am a writer first, writing & creativity coach, multi passionate creative next. Writing has always been my anchor art and to her I always return. Thankfully, with great love.

🎯 My aim is to create content here that inspires and instructs – if there is ever a topic you would like for me to explore, please reach out and tell me. My ultimate goal is to create posts, videos and more that speak to your desires as well as mine because where these two intersect, our collaborative, joyful energy ignites into a fire of love, light and passionate creativity.

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“Stories are my medicine”

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Yosemite vising in 2020 to continue my healing adventure from Valley FEver.

Four years ago Emma and I were visiting Yosemite. It was during the pandemic and the park only had 20% of its usual number of visitors. It was an amazing time.

One of the very notable aspects of it was a then-to-now sharing of how amazing it was to see a bear! We saw THREE bears in all and we thought his was some sort of amazing time. 

Less than two years ago I saw my first bear in Northwest New Jersey running across an offramp near Katherine’s home.

This Spring, I made an acquaintance with the neighborhood bear I now call Baboo. Baboo is a regular fixture who I am aware may be around quite regularly and impacts when I take out my trash, where I park my car and my relationship with my neighbors across the street.

A lot can happen in four years, in one year, in five years.

Some people would suggest we brush away memories and not talk about them.

One of my experiences in the hospital was sharing stories with nurses. My favorite nurse of my time in the hospital thanked me for asking about her life because other people tell her to stop telling her stories.

“Stories are my medicine” I told her.

“I’m grateful you share different kinds of medicine here with me.”

What story do you not tell that you think would help you heal if you told it, freely?

🌟 Creative Life Coach & Muse Cultivator

 🎨 | Award-Winning Writer/Actor/Storyteller

🌱 | Empowering Your Second Act

🎉| New Courses/Programs Coming soon!

🎁   Your presence here makes me feel grateful. 

✍🏻I am a writer first, writing & creativity coach, multi passionate creative next. Writing has always been my anchor art and to her I always return. Thankfully, with great love.

🎯 My aim is to create content here that inspires and instructs – if there is ever a topic you would like for me to explore, please reach out and tell me. My ultimate goal is to create posts, videos and more that speak to your desires as well as mine because where these two intersect, our collaborative, joyful energy ignites into a fire of love, light and passionate creativity.

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I Knew It Was Arriving Soon: Now, the Day is Here… and we start and continue beginning

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I have been waiting for my facebook memories to cue me, to invite me into the memory – to recognize – to be alert that five years ago my hospital stay began. 

It was the day of my first gratitude list from the hospital where I filled people in on what was going on with me:

The pneumonia wasn’t getting better, so I’m now tucked away in a downtown Bakersfield hospital. I’ve slept for 12 of the last 15 hours after an 18 hour wait on a gurney in the hallway of the ER.

I’m grateful:

1. For patient phlebotomists who are willing to take their time chasing down my shy veins.

2. For Michelle and Julia who have visited and brought Emma with them. This is stressful for her, too. Last night she was very helpful.

3. For technology that brings my favorite relaxation music into the hospital with me.

4. For Miracle Mark Tarango who lit up the ER with his presence yesterday.

If you are in Bakersfield and would like to visit, please text or pm me to find out where I am. I may not be super interactive, and it would be great to see you. Prayers from everywhere are welcome.

The 2024 me is finding the conscious collection and curation of these memories to be fascinating. The self-compassion is infinite now, the me-who-was-in-the-experience was trying hard… and was more than slightly miserable.. was definitely doing her best and taking things one moment at a time.

Today I am going to be putting finishing touches on The Muse Method Project and in my breaks from that, I am going to do some meditative time travel back into my 2019 self in this experience.

I am brave enough. I am ready to step into the full depths of this healing, just as I am ready to complete The Muse Method.

Thank you so much for reading. Your presence means a lot to me.

Julie Jordan Scott hugs an unusual tree
Julie Jordan Scott hugs all kinds of trees

🌟 Creative Life Coach & Muse Cultivator

 🎨 | Award-Winning Writer/Actor/Storyteller

🌱 | Empowering Your Second Act

🎉| New Courses/Programs Coming soon!

🎁   Your presence here makes me feel grateful. 

✍🏻I am a writer first, writing & creativity coach, multi passionate creative next. Writing has always been my anchor art and to her I always return. Thankfully, with great love.

🎯 My aim is to create content here that inspires and instructs – if there is ever a topic you would like for me to explore, please reach out and tell me. My ultimate goal is to create posts, videos and more that speak to your desires as well as mine because where these two intersect, our collaborative, joyful energy ignites into a fire of love, light and passionate creativity.

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Learning from Prompted Free Flow Story Telling on Video Seven Years Later

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Examining a flourising cottonfield and a forgotten cottonfield as we heal in 31 Days of Beginning Again Day 8

It sat on the edge of memory: an abandoned cotton field which I found incredibly beautiful. An Uber passenger who gave me a $100 dollar tip which allowed me to go to the Kern Shakespeare Festival. A therapist I wanted to click with badly and didn’t. Finally, returning to talk to a camera and anyone who later watched some stories I was unlikely to tell.

First: Wasted and Unharvested

I’m standing in a sea of cotton, here in Kern County, agriculture country. The cotton around me won’t be used for anything, which feels like such a waste. It reminds me of how often we don’t use our own gifts and talents, letting them sit idle, full of potential but untouched, unrealized. There’s something deeply personal in that for me.

I’ve never talked much about my daughter, who was stillborn. And standing here, I can’t help but think of the dreams I had for her—the dreams that never grew into anything. They stayed unfulfilled, just like this cotton, never reaching their potential.

It’s strange, isn’t it, how life mirrors the things around us?

A Gumball and Unspoken Pain

There’s something else I don’t talk about much, but it’s been on my mind lately. When I was a little girl, I almost died choking on a gumball. I still remember the panic, the way my mother tried to save me, right outside a grocery store. I haven’t thought about that in years—until recently.

Two weeks ago, in a therapy session, my therapist asked, “What’s the most pain you’ve felt in the last ten years?” And just like that, I felt my throat close up. I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t speak. It was as if the question lodged itself in my throat, like that gumball all those years ago.

It took me two weeks to remember that story, but now it’s all coming back. Sometimes, the past sits there, waiting, until you’re ready to untangle it. And here I am, still processing, still discovering, still learning to breathe again.

The sun is setting now—time’s up.

I had no idea two years later I would almost die and five years after that, I finally felt strong enough to step into the memories completely, to process, to explore and to ultimately get to a new level of healing.

I’m curious: what speaks to you the most from this blog post and video?

Julie Jordan Scott, writer, creativity coach, award winning actor walking in the woods
Julie Jordan Scott, walking in the woods

🌟 Creative Life Coach & Muse Cultivator

 🎨 | Award-Winning Writer/Actor/Storyteller

🌱 | Empowering Your Second Act

🎉| New Courses/Programs Coming soon!

🎁   Your presence here makes me feel grateful. 

✍🏻I am a writer first, writing & creativity coach, multi passionate creative next. Writing has always been my anchor art and to her I always return. Thankfully, with great love.

🎯 My aim is to create content here that inspires and instructs – if there is ever a topic you would like for me to explore, please reach out and tell me. My ultimate goal is to create posts, videos and more that speak to your desires as well as mine because where these two intersect, our collaborative, joyful energy ignites into a fire of love, light and passionate creativity.

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The Space Between Yes & No is Unknowing + Love – Everything + Nothing

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“In the space between yes and no, there’s a lifetime. It’s the difference between the path you walk and the one you leave behind; it’s the gap between who you thought you could be and who you really are; it’s the legroom for the lies you’ll tell yourself in the future.”

Jodi Picoult

Five years before I waited at home thinking I would be feeling better at any moment,  I wrote this poem:

Lasting revolutions are bathed in silence –

in one moment when everything stops.

Choices wash away, swept into the

tide of “I must I must I can’t I don’t know

how and I can’t and…” suddenly we find

ourselves on our feet off our asses

Standing, wobbly. Saying no. Saying yes.

Saying nothing. Praying. Soundless.

We vaguely hear the breath entering

and leaving our nose, feel our chest

moving up and down, threatening to

heave unspilled tears out with extra human force. 

We swear there is 

so much heat in our blood our

skin will blister.

It doesn’t.

Did I know what was coming five years in the future? Did I know in ten years I would finally be finishing the book?

Did I know the biggest decision of my life was on the horizon? 

Ironically now I have no idea what made me so fired up that I thought the heat in my blood would cause my skin to blister from the inside out.

I sit here now, wondering where any concept of wisdom or brilliance or stunning growth may show up and share some unexpected or hoped for revelation.

It’s coming. 

It’s coming.

This is the waiting time Jodi Piccoult describes.

Where are you in that spectrum?

In the meantime, step back with me to two years ago when I wrote this writing prompt in one sort of collaboration with Brene Brown.

Brene Brown quote to inspire and own our story and loving ourselves through the process

Remember your lens is love. 

When you get upset or discouraged or hopeless, remember: your lens is love.

Write for five minutes. Remind yourself, “My lens is love.”

Repeat the process until you know in every ounce of your understanding.

“My lens is love.”

Julie Jordan Scott, writer, creativity coach, award winning actor walking in the woods
Julie Jordan Scott, walking in the woods

🌟 Creative Life Coach & Muse Cultivator

 🎨 | Award-Winning Writer/Actor/Storyteller

🌱 | Empowering Your Second Act

🎉| New Courses/Programs Coming soon!

🎁   Your presence here makes me feel grateful. 

✍🏻I am a writer first, writing & creativity coach, multi passionate creative next. Writing has always been my anchor art and to her I always return. Thankfully, with great love.

🎯 My aim is to create content here that inspires and instructs – if there is ever a topic you would like for me to explore, please reach out and tell me. My ultimate goal is to create posts, videos and more that speak to your desires as well as mine because where these two intersect, our collaborative, joyful energy ignites into a fire of love, light and passionate creativity.

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Trying and Alone. Alone and Trying

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Even poorly planted

rice plants

slowly, slowly…. green 

Issa

English Version, David G Lanoue

Perhaps it is because I wasn’t present nor did I capture much of my life during the time between when I was told I had walking pneumonia and the time I was hospitalized that there are so many mysteries of what I was thinking, feeling, doing.

Maybe this space of unknowing may be what brought forward my desire to create daily. 

When I morph myself back into 2019, I remember thinking in the years prior it would be a time of incredible growth. Samuel would be out of the house.

I was going to finally be free to do what I most wanted: finish my book projects, become a nomad, explore all those interior rooms of my psyche and be the fabulous iteration of me that somehow didn’t feel comfortably expanding when I was always on red alert waiting for the next crisis to bubble up that would need me to rush in and run graceful, patient and peaceful intervention.

Naturally. 

Because yelling and fussing and drawing attention to myself is not something I ever did… except for on stage, where almost anything was allowed.

October 4, 2019 fell on a Friday. 

Most likely it was quiet. Most likely I sat in the recliner in the corner of the living room, resting, perhaps watching videos and chatting on my laptop computer which often sat atop my lap desk. I doubt I went anywhere substantial. I may have driven Emma around here and there.

I was quietly doing my best to heal.

It is only in this reflection that I realize how much I have improved in my daily-loving-of-myself.

I definitely treat myself now with much more tender loving care than in the past, when I forgot to be intentional, when I was struggling to get by, was researching loneliness because that was something I struggled with each and every day.

Today I am rarely lonely, probably because of mastering daily self-love as a practice.

Interesting because this week I have been balancing hospitality with my usual routines AND I think I accidentally bumped into a healthy equilibrium. 

What a gift from my past self to my present self.

What a gift to be able to share this with you.

I’m so grateful you are here, reading and look VERY forward to deepening our connection.

Woman at her desk, drinking coffee, preparing to blog.
Hi! It’s Me!

Julie JordanScott

 Creative Life Coach & Muse Cultivator | Award-Winning Writer/Actor/Storyteller / Empowering Your Second Act /|New Courses/Programs soon! Your presence here makes me feel grateful. 

I am a writer first, writing & creativity coach, multi passionate creative next. Writing has always been my anchor art and to her I always return. Thankfully, with great love.

 My aim is to create content here that inspires and instructs – if there is ever a topic you would like for me to explore, please reach out and tell me. My ultimate goal is to create posts, videos and more that speak to your desires as well as mine because where these two intersect, our collaborative, joyful energy ignites into a fire of love, light and passionate creativity.

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Renewal & Restoration: Begin Again

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It is another October – a time we wave goodbye to the beginning of the academic year and prepare to prepare to prepare for the rush of the end of the year.

My heart – my brain – and work as an artist of life nudged me to do the Ultimate Blog Challenge in a new way. A renewed way, a restorative beginning again way. A means of cultivating and curating my stories from the past five years. 

I will be sharing stories/insights/lessons learned from these last five years that have been so incredibly life changing to who I am as a human.

In October 2019 I had a near death experience and while I survived it, there is still unprocessed gunk, some lingering joy and lots of growth edges I have held very close instead of letting them out into the world.

I am honoring the call to let go, to stop holding on so tightly, and allow these stories and episodes and learnings their due.

The Ultimate Blog Challenge allows me the opportunity to focus on my blog and its readers while I reconnect with blogging friends and meet new ones, too.

I’m so grateful you are here, reading and look VERY forward to deepening our connection.

Woman at her desk, drinking coffee, preparing to blog.
Screenshot

🌟 Creative Life Coach & Muse Cultivator

 🎨 | Award-Winning Writer/Actor/Storyteller

🌱 | Empowering Your Second Act

🎉| New Courses/Programs soon!

🎁   Your presence here makes me feel grateful. 

✍🏻I am a writer first, writing & creativity coach, multi passionate creative next. Writing has always been my anchor art and to her I always return. Thankfully, with great love.

🎯 My aim is to create content here that inspires and instructs – if there is ever a topic you would like for me to explore, please reach out and tell me. My ultimate goal is to create posts, videos and more that speak to your desires as well as mine because where these two intersect, our collaborative, joyful energy ignites into a fire of love, light and passionate creativity.

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Who Is Julie Jordan Scott & What are her July Goals?

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First: I don’t normally talk about myself in third person, but here I am and here we are – and I am incredibly grateful you cared enough to visit this blog post and hopefully let me know what resonated the most with you in my introduction and in my goals.

We’re going to do a 5 + 5 approach: 5 Unconventional Facts About Me and 5 July Goals

Facts, just the facts about me, ma’am by means of introduction:

  1. I am the fourth of six children. My two younger brothers have died so since December of 2021, I have been the youngest child which has been quite strange (at least for me.)
  2. I enjoy doing consistency projects like writing Writing Haiku for 377 Days or Hugging Trees for 377 days. It has been a while since I have taken on a new big consistency project so this month I have a top secret experiment in a shorter term to see if I still get as much joy from these activities.
  3. My middle name is Ann, which I always thought was exceptionally plain and ordinary. I did think for a long time that one of my heroines, Julie Andrews, was actually Julie Ann Drews, so this made my middle name much less unfortunate.
  4. Rivers, lakes and the ocean are among my natural friends. In July, I will experience all three.
  5. When I was a child I wrote letters as a hobby. Perhaps as a way to encourage my writing, my parents never complained about the cost of stamps, even though I wrote upwards of 10 letters a week or more.

GOALS for July:

  1. By Mid-Month, send my book to the book designer (finally, not finally, right on time.)
  2. Create a sustainable evening/ pre-bed routine.
  3. Successfully on-board my new virtual assistant.
  4. Participate in Summer Reading Challenge
  5. Maintain a learning goal around writing fiction (I usually write creative non-fiction and poetry but participated in NaNoWriMo again this year and enjoyed it very much)

Who are you and what are your goals for July? What do you resonate with from my two lists?

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Gut Kicks & Delayed Returning Day 31/31 of (Self) Belonging:

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I have been wading around the shallow waters of (self) belonging for the last few days due to – not surprisingly – due to what felt like a piercing of my shield (maybe better seen as a cushion, safe space, another word) of my sacred internal safe space.

I don’t feel the need to write the specifics here, but I was thrown by what happened and had the privilege of expressing my emotions with depth and had support to restore myself.

Another metaphor, from the poem “Wild Geese” by Mary Oliver, “the soft animal of my body” needed to go back into my cave and gently, quietly lick my wounds in a familiar, anonymous setting.

A bit of a setback and a bigger space of deeper healing because I allowed myself to feel what needed to be felt, to speak what needed to be spoken and perhaps most important, I allowed myself to receive the gift of belonging from my sister – even when the message I was pushing back on and stumbling along the way was translated through past experiences and the tapes that have played in my mind for years that rang out  “you are wrong, you ruined everything, you are unworthy, you are a problem, you don’t belong” which historically brought me to my dank, dungeon exile, empty of the nurturing tools of love and reassurance.

I can still hear my sister’s light laughter when I recognized she reached out to protect me, to be with me in what had become my danger zone.

I’m not accustomed to being protected. I am grateful she did as it helped me stay in the cave longer and use tools that before would vaporize after an attack rather than become completely numb and unable to access my self-nurturing tools at all.

I realize as I continue to process – my acceptance of protection and taking my time before jumping back into the public sharing is also an example of (self) belonging.

During these last 61 days of 2023, I am getting closer to understanding how to express and live from a space of (self) belonging. What a heart felt victory!

How do you connect with the concepts I’m sharing here in this rough, raw draft?

Julie JordanScott is a Creative Life Coach, an award-winning storyteller, actor and poet whose photos and mixed media art graces the walls of collectors across the United States. Her writing has appeared on the New York Times Best Sellers List, the Amazon best sellers list and on American Greetings Holiday cards (and other greeting cards). She currently lives in a manse in Sussex, NJ, where she has recently finished her most recent book project, hugging trees daily and enjoys having random inspirational conversations with strangers.

Follow on Instagram to Watch exclusive reels, videos, stories and posts about writing and the creative process.

Let our Words Flow Writing Community: the only one missing is you! Join us in the Private Writing Group

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Belonging in the Classroom of Life: Day 25/31 of (Self) Belonging

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With 67 more days in 2023, I feel a strong call to be more intentional with the time I have both introspectively and in action as I integrate what I have learned and discovered this year in this wildly wonderful classroom of life.

Yesterday I did some early research about belonging in the classroom as a part of my 100 Days of Belonging project. Since I currently work in a school and spend 21 hours a week in classrooms and have a deep caring for the students I serve, this feels exceptionally important.

Unlike many of my peers at the school, I don’t have the pre-Covid/post-Covid experience to longingly look back towards.

Instead, my focus and my independently operated “course of study” and assignment from Harvey Milk – even though he has been gone from the planet for years – is to work from the inside to discover as much as I can about belonging from my experiences with these students.

It’s kind of like yesterday, when I had a huge a-ha about my body and belonging in my body and realizing the significance of shoes in my overall life experience.

More than one of the students I work with show up at school declaring they want to be at home. “I want to go home,” they say. “They want to go home?” says my curiosity.

Instead of what some of my peers do – marginalize the student’s spoken desire – I do some research to see what it means most often when students make such proclamations. 

When students say they want to go “home” it is evidence of being overwhelmed, perhaps a bit of languishing – maybe not being engaged…here we are stepping even more clearly into belonging territory.

As I continue to focus on my self-belonging, I am challenging myself to see where my exploration of self-belonging will help me reach out to students differently. 

On Monday at the end of day, I linked arms with a student who was going through a rough time emotionally mostly because she felt alone and unheard in the classroom. I created a space for us to be together and for her to be heard, to know she was safe saying whatever she needed to say with an adult who would listen, consciously, to what she felt was missing that lead to her upset.

I went home feeling grateful for that connection and looking forward to returning to the workplace as more than just a place to do my seven hours and get back to my “real work” as a creative entrepreneur.

This week has been rich with a-ha’s. I look forward to seeing what’s next.

What has been your biggest a-ha this week?

Julie JordanScott is a Creative Life Coach, an award-winning storyteller, actor and poet whose photos and mixed media art graces the walls of collectors across the United States. Her writing has appeared on the New York Times Best Sellers List, the Amazon best sellers list and on American Greetings Holiday cards (and other greeting cards). She currently lives in a manse in Sussex, NJ, where she has recently finished her most recent book project, hugging trees daily and enjoys having random inspirational conversations with strangers.

Follow on Instagram to Watch exclusive reels, videos, stories and posts about writing and the creative process.

Let our Words Flow Writing Community: the only one missing is you! Join us in the Private Writing Group

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