Years ago, I had a light and laughing voice. Then shame hit and blasted me into some state of petrified mortification. When my voice returned, it returned obsessively; reciting words repetitively late into the night, while my hand copied them over a page across hours. Even snails could write faster. My rhythm had been altered. I had lost the movement of my original expression after being shamed by a teacher. Years later, my voice emerged, abruptly with the coaxing of a master hypnotherapist and storyteller in a crowd of others. Its emergence shocked me to the core, so it took another few years before it came out again. Now it is almost impossible to stop. Words come in floods and phrasing in snippets. It just keeps coming.
This is the true rhythm of birth, a surging flood of expansion and contraction with a great deal of breathing and tremendous push. This is how stories come into being and how they evolve a word at a time into books. Creation is a labor of love and an act of faith-most necessarily in the self, the author of the work that is struggling to become. Given this struggle, imagine my delight when I found a shareware tool that takes words from passages and turns them into textual images with a few taps on icons. Creation made simple in the form of a tagxedo. I don't know whether I like the donate model or the actual product more-Donate to keep tagxedo free-the site says. So, I donated and made a tagxedo called The Bluebird of Happiness to put in a book project I am birthing.
I chose to tagxedo a poem called Soul Birth since the birth of my voice is the awakening of my soul. I wrote soul birth for doulas to chant aloud. May mothers, fathers, doctors, healers, family, and doulas all say some combination of these words to bless babies as they come into the world; heralding and inviting the arrival of the next generation of being.
Sending wild applause out to the creator/s of Tagxedo for giving us such delightful word salads.
Make your own creation here at: http://www.tagxedo.com/app.html
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Hi. Didn't have your email but wanted to get back to you about the Dan Eldon project. I am now accepting "rolling submissions" so please feel free to send on whatever you have as soon as it is complete. And thanks for wanting to participate! Seth from The Altered Page
ReplyDeleteThanks Seth.Will be working it up as the universe began "dumping" all kinds of usable materials my way as soon as I found the first piece on Wednesday. The rolling submission process is lovely-it reminds me of breathing. Looking forward to working with the intersection of our Somali experiences. Dan Eldon was and remains inspirational.
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