listening as the story changes
IN THIS POST: an update from somewhere new + create your passion project and I'll edit it + why we go where we go.
“Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen for what it intends to do with you. Before you tell your life what truths and values you have decided to live up to, let your life tell you what truths you embody, what values you represent.” ― Parker J. Palmer, Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation
Dear friends, far and near: this quote is really speaking to me this month. Because it has a quality of surrender I find comforting. Meaning it's not all up to me. Sometimes, change just takes you somewhere new.
Two new things to share: a new place where this newsletter lives - ghost.io and a new place, Arizona, where I am presently.
Oh, said a friend, you have gone from one very hot place to another. Yup. How does it feel to be in the US of A after two plus years in Spain, with sojourns in Ireland?
Well, you know when you make a big change without thinking about it too much - you just go? That's how I went. Family health issues brought me back. I needed to be near but also, maybe there was some part of me that felt it was time.
Then/now - about a week ago - while pushing a box full of stuff across the floor of the apartment, I pulled a muscle. First, a twinge. And then, a radiating nerve pain on the right side, lower back - eesh - the kind of pain where you grimace and wince and go to physical therapy, and sit with heat pads and ice packs. I have a bulging disc and it is mending slowly.
Hmm, I said when it happened, verry interesting.
How quickly the story can change.
What remains when I am stripped down to my most sedentary self? I find I am writing and editing and meditating. oh that rhymes 😄
I (re)wrote this: Why this place, why now - a long ago meditation from Mongolia on why we go where we go.
I would love to read and edit more so consider this an invitation to send in your unfinished words, memoirs, scripts, performances, your passion project.
If you know me even a little, you know I love working with passion projects - stories that don't fit in, that you can't quite make sense of - except you gotta tell them.
The kind of editing I love to do is often called Developmental Editing or Story Mentoring or One who gives gentle, compassionate inspiring playful feedback on what you are creating, while you are creating it, so you can keep creating with ease and magic. Read more here.
And if you have an idea and haven't yet given it words or movements, but would like to - let's start there and go forward. Not knowing is just a place to start from.
Editing and sharing feedback is something I've been doing for years, informally for friends and at times, formally, an editing gig here and there. But in the past few years, it's been growing and I really love it.
I've written across all genres and studied story craft for decades- the art of fiction, the short story, crafting a memoir, screenplays - with such fine attention. I used to feel overwhelmed by it all. But now, I feel free to chose this or that as an option that best suits the story. I sense that all my work/play on colonization has liberated me from the voices of authority that would boom in my ear and say: "a story should be this or that..."
I’m inspired by Peruvian writer, Jose Maria Arguedas who created new names in Quechua for the poetic forms he used. In this way, I invite you to see your storywork as part of a lineage, and also something new: a story true to its own telling, one that requires you to listen.
And that brings me back to Parker Palmer's wisdom about telling life what you want and listening to it. It's a dance, isn't it?
Onwards, adelante con arte, into the mystery.
More about my editing here, and write me at info at shebana coelho dot com if you want to chat more about your project. I'd love to!
And finally, as inspiration for imagination: the first part of CREATIVITY IS THE SEA, a guided meditation series to keep creativity flowing endless, fathoms deep. aisa. así.
yours in imagination - Shebana
