Read • Contests • Groups • Learn • Forums • Store • Help
 

Columns by CarolDesjarlais, by newest first

  • The Making Of A Collaborative Poem: Kaibab and Carol by CarolDesjarlais
    kaibab and Carol and a moment of Muses' mirrored mirage of poetic ponderings.
  • Some of my better responses by CarolDesjarlais
    Something to consider
  • Living A Soufully Authentic Life by CarolDesjarlais




    Living a Soulfully Authentic Life

    A long time ago, I garnered great respect for the healing work of journaling. In my career, I became indelibly aware that there are no words for some things. I am a writer, and I innately knew a place to go where soul resides. In that right hemisphere of the brain is my spacious peace, serenity, grace, dignity and truth.

    I have had, what some have said, was a life where Jesus wept. I exhibited all the signs of the Primal Wound (being taken from breast to the gnawing beast of being a “captured” child in the world of abandoned children. Wounding, prior to speech, are etched deep in the caverns of the psyche.

    As a child, in a very closed community of secrets, I would create a fantasy. There was something about sitting at the side of a river, where my hero and comforter, my adoptive Grandfather would be fishing and babysitting me The hand and brain stimulus of working raw clay, delving into nature for ways to express myself, allowed for expression of other kinds; deep and meaningful, healing and healthy expressions. I am a senior citizen now, a bit of a Crone, a spiritual wannabe, and I still find that working with raw materials, reworking found objects, submerging my heart and soul into expressing my authentic Self, seems to keep me in a state of meditation and presence.

    I spent twenty-three years in a career that involved retrieving troubled youth from troubled communities, in the far North ( mostly fly-in or semi-isolated communities). I developed programs for troubled youth and adults and Creative Expression was the vehicle for counseling-based education. I worked with tough cases, some encased in the Judicial System, and there was not one, in all my years, that I could not get to begin to express their deepest, authentic selves through their art. It opened channels that simple counseling or control could not. Many of those considered “hopeless cases” have gone on to be productive members of their communities, or at very least, the potential to be.

    While I was sacrificing so very much in order to give Service to my people, I had a dream: One day I will retire at the ocean, eat lobster, publish my poetry, and do my art. Dreams do have a way of coming true if you are steadfast in finding ways to make those detours towards that dream, with grace, and humbleness. Today I do workshops, women’s circles, and find that I am disciplined in the hours that I do soul work. I spend so many hours in a day writing, so many hours doing art, and find that I am more spiritually attune to the Present and spiritual work than ever before. My age and life circumstances afford me this. I am no longer ‘healing’. Now I am deepening my understanding of how those things I saw as “wounds” were gifts and opportunities to help others find ways to express their deepest core.

    I have kept an affirmation in mind that comes from a quote by Richard Hooker: I… (write, do art, etc.) “…for no other reason, but for this; that others may know I have not lived this life as if a dream.”

    ©Carol Desjarlais