Creative Life Midwife

Inspiring Artistic Rebirth

Trust in Creativity: Start with What’s Wrong

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Today’s blog post started as a free writing exercise and turned into an important discovery (or discoveries) I don’t think I am finished with this piece of writing. The final sentence is so potent I need to step away for a few hours.

Art and the creative process works this way sometimes.

Often the most significant “work” happens when we let go of the reins and allow what we hadn’t even begun to hope for winds its way through us.

I am not editing the free flow writing I wrote because I feel like there is someone who will read this who needs to follow the meandering.

I would appreciate you commenting about what resonates from this exercise and perhaps, how an exploration in trust may help you as well. Maybe I am the only creative person who has this issue, and somehow.. I doubt it. Also, if you aren’t comfortable commenting, you may always reach out to me directly.

Here we go: 

Trust: oh, how I have struggled with thee.

I need a good epigraph. I found the poem “Trust”. I will keep looking.

My brain is bouncing around today. 

Trust. Trust the bouncing. Don’t get freaked out by Andrea saying “Well, that’s full spectrum,” when I told her I had started my writing practice (as planned) and then got caught up in obsessing about Louisa May Alcott and all things “Little Women”.

I did sound rather pressured speech-like and was tired of the concoctions and weaving I do and I wonder if I can trust learning crochet to calm me. I don’t know.

I doubt it.

But it will be something I can learn.

I also want large knitting needles and thick yarn so I might knit some scarves and remember that. Talking about knitting to someone the other day made me think “I don’t want knitting to be lost to me and my daughters” so maybe I will add that to things I can trust myself to fail at.

One moment I am writing about trust and my lack of it and the next thing I know I am reaching for eucalyptus oil, trusting it will cure my ailing stuffy nose.

I was going to write: one thing I can trust is the sun will rise every day though sometimes the depth of the clouds keep her light from shining in as it ought to, I suppose. 

I stop for a moment and think about (or rather it skitters through my brain) I remember when I lost all semblance of trust it was through an April Fools joke when my mother and sister for whatever reason short sheeted my bed.

I remember climbing into bed and Mom and Sue watching and the panic of not being able to push my feet comfortably into the bed. I was confused and didn’t speak my fear aloud. I probably said nothing though the memory isn’t entirely clear. I remember Sue and Mom laughing and I think I fake laughed with them.

I should make this into a short story so that I might clear it.

I can’t remember all the circumstances, but I do remember not understanding and feeling, literally, like the earth shook when a totally normal thing to trust – not a person, not the environment, not a government, suddenly morphed into a mystery that would not let me in. 

I no longer belonged in my own bed.

I no longer could trust my mother, or my sister would be a safe place.

Mom was actively giggling at my discomfort, along with my sister – the only other girl-person in a house with five boy-men people. 

I thought this room – our room – was a safety zone of sorts.

I was wrong.

Meet Julie Jordan Scott, the Creative Life Midwife:

🌟 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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Self-Forgiveness: Often Forgotten, Always Worthwhile.

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Yesterday as we started our explorations with beliefs, you may have run into some bumps in the road. Today’s post is especially important in these circumstances AND it is priceless in all circumstances.

Today on our creative path we are going to examine self-forgiveness: what it is, how not forgiving ourself destructively impacts our lives and the lives of others and first steps to expressing yourself creatively as a means of healing.

One of the writing artists in history who get the concept of emotional intelligence was William Shakespeare. In “Winter’s Tale” he thoughtfully scribed these words: “Do as the heavens have done, forget your evil; With them forgive yourself.” 

Maybe this is where we get that famous quip, “Forgive and forget.”

We don’t often think about the forget YOUR self and FORGIVE yourself.

It is often like the verse in two books in the Bible – both Matthew and Mark – that quotes Jesus saying “Love your neighbor as yourself” and most of us never hear the “as yourself” component.

Last week I started doing a daily exercise of asking for forgiveness through journaling and jotting toward the end of the day. I write down the tiny “I forgive myself for forgetting to buy broccoli” to the worst “I forgive myself for talking so harshly to myself that I cried for thirty minutes and had to postpone my appointment,” which runs the risk of the need for more forgiveness in the future as well.

Latasha Morrison reminds us, “In order to move from awareness to acknowledgment, we must first be brave enough to accept the historical truths and modern realities.”

The subject of your self-forgiveness today most likely has been building for a much longer time.

I have found underneath the seeds of my simple self-forgiveness are bunches of negative self-belief standing nearby,  invisible in one ways but screaming out in other ways.

If you don’t try anything else in this month of blogging, please do this.

Jot a list of 1 – 5 things to forgive yourself for today.

Don’t think, just jot a phrase or two or all five.

If you are feeling energetic, read your list to a compassionate friend. You may also leave them here in the comments or send me an always private note.

I’ll start: I forgive myself for not writing the instructions for Coleen more clearly before I went to my appointment today.

I forgive myself for leaving my clothes on the bathroom floor.. Again.

I forgive myself for forgetting to make that telephone call again.

Next, it’s your turn. Start flexing your self-forgiveness muscles.

Julie Jordan Scott hugging a tree in High Point State Park in Sussex, NJ. Julie encourages thousands to over come their blocks and begin leading a more satisfying creative life.
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Meet Julie Jordan Scott:

🌟 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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Giddy & Grateful to Move On Down to the Step Down Unit

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Here is what I shared on this day in 2019, five years ago:

Big news! I’ve moved from ICU to the Step Down unit! (Don’t ask what time I was woken up to be moved.)

This means I’m one step closer to leaving the hospital.

I even actually have a morning view that is more stereotypical!

I was over the top giddy about being able to be out of the ICU. I thought I would be able to get up and use the restroom alone without alarms sounding but that wasn’t true. I didn’t mention how when I was rolled out of the intensive care unit, I saw a nurse I am in a book club with who greeted me like it was an everyday occurrence to be wheeled onto her floor.

After that, I was afraid to see her again. I don’t even remember if I did see her again. This is a sure indicator of trauma – though now I remember I did see her again because we talked about sepsis and how my disorientation is normal, even expected, with sepsis.

I went on to cheerfully share my daily gratitude experience while in the hospital:

Today, I am so grateful for:

💡 Arian Garcia for patiently live-streaming KSFs Henry V! So wonderful to sit in my room and watch. It was the best…. and my child, Emma, truly brought it. The theatre-Mom in me was impressed AND so was the director-me who often watches plays taking notes in my head. (Trying to get over that!)

🎊 The gift of tenacity at this very vulnerable, frightening and life shifting time.

🧘🏼‍♀️People who are talented comforters (and might not even know it).

💕The powerful medicines of story listening AND story questioning and storytelling.

😭YouTube meditation videos and music.

🔦Water

And I’m grateful for each person reading here!

by the way: this room has TWO CHAIRS!

I feel like a queen.

How do you feel today?

Revisiting this post reminds me how significant it is to honor the rocking, rolling nature of emotions during times of crisis and upset. I am so grateful for the me who I was and the me who I am and the me I am becoming. Since I started writing this blog post the sun has come out – and I may get my walk done after all.

JJS/Treehugger

 🎨 | 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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Goals Then & Surpassing in Surprising Ways

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This was the day five years ago I learned the cause of my time in ICU.

I learned why I went from about to be discharged to being rushed to a higher level of care.

It started after I took my shower in preparation for going home. Things didn’t go well when I got out of the shower and my still wet self was back in the bed, shivering wildly, with someone I vaguely recognized as the charge nurse was rushing to take my vital signs, including the device to take my blood oxygen levels.

I sort of recalled them not being able to be read because my temperature was fluctuating erratically, but nothing was really making sense at that point.

I remember the charge nurse kindly gave me a heated sheet and I heard her talking to the nurse about what had happened and then I felt myself being pushed underwater.

The memory of being pushed underwater wasn’t actually happening but from my perspective I was underwater. I was looking up at the surface of the water which was arching over me from both sides. It was reminding me of when I went on a strange water experience in the Atlantic Ocean at Fort Lauderdale, Florida. 

I was at the end of my first trimester of my pregnancy with Marlena, my daughter who was stillborn. I was doing things that seemed slightly strange and unlike me, especially things that made me scared, because I didn’t want fear to be a legacy I passed inadvertently to my daughter.

When I was flung off that strange ride, this is the same sight I saw.

Once again, I wasn’t scared, I was curious and fascinated.

In those early days I didn’t dare speak or write any of this because… the person who got the increased legacy of fear was myself.

This WAS the day 5 years ago when I requested to be off the far-too-sweet liquid diet I had been on. It was probably because I started refusing to consume anything that they finally agreed.

In my notes from that day here is some of what I was saying, which definitely showed by spunky, “everything will be ok and I will live to write about it” attitude.

I managed to get myself off a clear liquid diet (too darned sweet) to a regular liquid diet. I’ve learned my Dr doesn’t like to leap frog from clear to puréed… I mean that is too much. I suggested the BRAT diet but he just looked at me like I was the brat.

My big goal today is to sit for a few minutes in a chair.

My most exciting moment of all for today and entire month is seeing Emma perform at Kern Shakespeare Festival through the magic of live-streaming and the generosity of Arian And Brian – both have been such strong support for Emma and is so appreciated by this Mama. 

And then these words: 

So strange for a usually deep breathing person to not be able to breathe. 

Many of my lab results numbers are better. Some are not. 

My big goal today is to sit for a few minutes in a chair.

Little did I know that two years from that date I would be walking on the Appalachian Trail, something I did during childhood with my father and returned to when I moved back to New Jersey after decades away.

That is a long way from a goal of sitting for a few minutes in a chair in the intensive care unit in a hospital in Bakersfield, California.

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🌟 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 Blessings of the Ordinary Extraordinary: The Infinite Loop De Loop of Giving Back after Once Again Receiving Life

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It has been unique to study my life as it nearly ended five years ago today. 

What has happened in the interim? What has shifted? How have the themes of mortality and choosing life and healing resonated throughout my experiences?

The first obvious happening includes the Covid19 Pandemic that changed the world greatly that gained space in the spotlight shortly after I was hospitalized. In fact, during our East Coast visit from Bakersfield we visited a Gaming Arena (my son is a professional gamer) in New Rochelle, New York which was one of the earliest American cities hit by Covid19. 

In February of 2020, my daughter Emma and I visited my parents in Flagstaff and my father died right before we felt comfortable traveling again: I was ten days out of my second vaccination in April 2021 when I got the call: it was officially too late to see my father alive again.

My mortality was first and foremost for those weeks in October 2019 and since then, death, loss and other people’s mortality has been an ongoing theme.

Unfortunately, my youngest brother, Joe, died in December 2021 and my mother died in August, 2023. 

That was a lot of grief in these last five years – and because I am blessed to have many friends as well, I lost too many friends who were too young. Most recently, I lost the woman who I refer to as “My Spirtual Mother” – and I was so grateful to be able to attend her funeral and see her children who I grew up with in Glen Ridge, New Jersey.

At the end of 2019 I started with my 377 Haiku project – a chance for me to practice creativity consistently and share it, much like I shared my days in the hospital. By being seen, heard and experienced while I was in the hospital, seeing people’s comments helped me feel better.

Daily photo taking and short poetry writing and sharing them brought a love influx which helped lift me out of the sadness that felt like it was subtracting so much out of me. Haiku literally saved my life – and that is the title of my book that will soon be out, sharing the profound joy of disciplined creativity. 

It was followed by 377 tree hugs and after that, I started writing a daily love letter to my readers inspired by my mother’s frequent greeting when I first saw her at the start of a new day, “Good Morning, Love.”

One of the biggest challenges of living alone now after I moved across the country from Bakersfield, California to Sussex Borough, New Jersey was not having anyone to greet when I woke up. 

“Good Morning, Love” created a win-win of having many some-ones to say Good Morning to AND once again, it kept me from sliding back into the darkness of depression which at time hovers quite close.

I also enjoy it when friends see me in person (especially in groups) and they say “Good Morning, Love!” to each other. I’ve had people share about how they look to good morning love when they’re feeling down and some people who read it every morning, unbeknownst to me.

This morning I went to High Point State Park to take photos, make videos and bathe in the glorious forest there. I hugged a couple trees and literally asked the trees, the wind, the sky and the sun, “How did I get so blessed?”

How did I get so blessed?

One day at a time, intentionally creating a small something – a container that tells the world, “You are love made form.”

First in Haiku, then in Tree hugs (both of which I still practice, on occasion) and then in Daily Love notes. (If you wonder how to read them, they’re on my personal facebook page.)

I never really thought of a blessing as something we choose AND I do see blessings as something we need to allow and receive.

Sharing these stories is part of what I call “the infinite loop de loop of giving and receiving.” Because I was gifted with more time, I received this blessing of longer life, I fully enjoy and embrace sharing the gift in return.

My everyday joy of experiencing life in the good, bad, boring (though that is rare), extraordinary ordinary and everything in between – wherever I find myself.

There will be 18 more blog posts: I hope you will read a few of them – if you have any questions, please ask so I may respond in a blog post.

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🌟 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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More Connection & More Healing Through Sharing with Stories

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My focus mate partner exclaimed this morning when she saw the deep pink of the top I was wearing.

“It’s a pajama top,” I shrugged. Admittedly, the colors are pretty and there is paisley involved. “I got it at a thrift store,” which simply says I am frugal.

“You have the greatest collection of happy sleepwear,” she said, smile crossing her face.

Seeing her in the morning across the screen while I go about my morning tasks is about as close as I come to having a fellow early rising roommate.

I settled in with my water – I don’t do coffee until I have been awake over an hour – and as I wrote my morning writing practice I came to the prompt The question I am to live today is… and my eyes scanned my desk where I had hand written yesterday’s question.

I needed to use it again, I thought. “How can I use storytelling to connect more deeply with my audience?” was what I asked yesterday.

I sat with the question again and simplified it:

“How can I use storytelling to connect more?’

It was interesting to watch my body respond to the question. My shoulders relaxed. They seemed to sigh deeply. 

When I subtracted the target of my connection, I took the pressure off myself. 

I know intellectually that the question includes my audience, my readers, my students and clients (and future students and clients), but the purity of intention is “Storytelling to connect more” feels better.

I am going to stay with that, especially looking at the note from the five-years-ago me.

I shared with my friends and family that I had managed to be admitted to the Intensive Care Unit at the hospital and wasn’t going home as planned.

It was short and clipped and it was there.

I made it a point to reach into my strongest self to check in and share gratitudes… which was the story I was most comfortable telling and the one that magnetized me to connect. 

Expressions of authentic gratitude are always highly connective.

How can you use storytelling to connect more?

I started writing this blog post and it fell flat before I realized the vibrant story was missing.

Even if the sole person I connect to more is myself, today, telling the story has been worth it.

🌟 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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Listening for Meaning: Monday Poetry

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Mining for the stories underneath this pantoum written in August 2010, just before I took my daughter to Smith College to begin her first year there. There was a rumbling of fear in most everything then and this pantoum helped calm me and also helped me find my way for a time. I’m curious to know in the comments what you do to calm yourself when fear is tap dancing around your gut. Please let me know about your solutions and also if any of the lines in this poem particularly resonate with you.

While I have you fear, you are not me.

I am not you. Though if you were I’d slice you

cut you unstitch you and examine you

the scar you left behind, the life birthed

I am not you, though if you were I’d slice you

fear: sticky red gooey tar, sucking my hope

the scar you left behind the life birthed

from the spot after I burned myself free

Fear: sticky red gooey tar, sucking my hope

I take judgment off your glue and look, just look

From the spot after I burned myself free

The core is the same? The core is the same – the same

I take judgment off your glue and look, just look

love: i’ve lost count of the numbered site – it’s you?

The core is the same? The core is the same – the same

White, waiting – wistful fresh-after-rain-morning

love: i’ve lost count of the numbered site – it’s you?

Breath lost at first touch of toe to dewy grass

White, waiting – wistful fresh-after-rain-morning

Knees buckled by laughing tears, “Hello!!”

Breath lost at first touch of toe to dewy grass

cut you unstitch you and examine you

Knees buckled by laughing tears, “Hello!!”

While I have you fear, you are not me.

What interests me most is the talk of a scar from where fear burned me. At first I thought I was writing about the scar on my face, caused by melanoma, but this was written two years before that diagnosis. Once again, it feels like the past me is reaching to the present me to communicate something, I simply am not able to translate it – yet.

Thank you for reading and double thank you for leaving a comment with what resonates most with you about this poem.

Julie JordanScott
Julie Jordan Scott

🌟 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.
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🌟 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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Healing What Wasn’t Said “Back Then”

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In Spring of 2023 I said something aloud which is what I ought to have said about this haiku project long I did.

“I’m sort of on a pilgrimage” I said to a stranger.

While it was true of that Spring day and it was true of writing haiku for 377 days and hugging trees for 377 days (and beyond) and writing love notes for 377 days saying “I’m sort of on a pilgrimage” is easier to say to strangers or people you doubt you will see again. 

Even more odd was this person I didn’t recognize is someone whose history intersects with mine but I never would have known if we hadn’t had a conversation, inspired by me taking note of the writing on his t-shirt.

On that Spring Day in 2023 I was in a garden I visited regularly as a child. It is a public garden I used to walk by on my way to school. Honeysuckle grew on its fences, a delight to taste at the opposite end of the block where I spent 14 formative years. 

I decided to go there randomly on a recent Saturday because I was being called to deepen my healing – why or how or because – the details are unclear.  I simply knew that in order to get the work done I was supposed to visit the place where my memories began.

Where was the wild path?

Long ago invitation to fear –

Now step beyond it

“I was afraid of everything as a little kid,” I said to the man wearing the interesting t-shirt. “I was even afraid of lightning bugs.”

I rolled my eyes and looked away, more than slightly embarrassed.

 This was less than ten minutes into our conversation. He had spoken my childhood story, “Are you Sue Jordan’s sister?” referring to my older sister. She was the personified antithesis of being afraid of a lightning bug.

“I was afraid of the gully at Carteret Park,” I continued. I was on a roll. 

Somehow, I held onto my dignity enough to not mention my first near death moment choking on a gum ball outside the now long-gone Grand Union.  

The adult me, though, authentically spoke of being on a pilgrimage even though I had no idea why those words flowed out of my mouth with authority, but a soulful lightbulb went off in my head as I spoke to them.

These 377 Goals weren’t goals at all. They weren’t challenges or projects or something to check off a to-do list.

The haiku writing and tree-hugging and the daily love note greetings from my everyday life were all post near-death pilgrimages back to being fully alive. 

These experiences of pilgrimage left evidence that said, “I am still here. I am alive. I am curious. I am not done with this life and this life is not done with me.”

These haiku say “I am devoted to continuing. I am devoted to holding life and all the love I can inside these measurable, meaningful, love-drenched everyday containers of creativity.”

Patricia Hampl said “The paradox: there can be no pilgrimage without a destination, but the destination is also not the real point of the endeavor. Not the destination, but the willingness to wander in pursuit characterizes pilgrimage. Willingness: to hear the tales along the way, to make the casual choices of travel, to acquiesce even to boredom. That’s a pilgrimage — a mind full of journey.”

Inhale: look at what is in front of you (first line)

Hold: Allow yourself to bring the message of the image in front of you into your body (middle line)

Exhale: Let the image go – hold the clearest bits in language for transcription! (third line)

Hold: Check in – repeat or complete? Sometimes you may even break rules.

You, who is reading

With a body, breath and soul

Crack your heart open

Haiku as a Verb

Question: Have you ever taken a pilgrimage? Whether you have or haven’t, where would you go if you were creating a pilgrimage?

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.
Julie Jordan Scott

🌟 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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