Creative Arts and Healing
I AM TRYING AGAIN TO SPEAK WITH YOU 
dear friends, readers, all who happen upon this post

I KNOW i wrote a blog entry in August. I had just returned from more than two weeks of R and R up North, in Morgantown, West Virginia and Ithaca, New York, including a week long stay at a cottage on Cayuga Lake, and I was revved for thinking about Fall when the sap would rise and I'd be on a creative wave of energy.

I wrote in that entry about returning to teach in the prisons, a women's prison, not far from my home, offering writing to the inmates. I used to teach in the jail and the prisons nearby but haven't since 1998. I hope one day to compile an anthology of writings from the inmates and from my own pen (we always write on the word prompts together). I will call it PRISON WISDOM. Its amazing how each person has a unique voice, a unique back story, a unique heartfelt way of expressing their reality. And, as someone more famous than me once remarked "We are ALL doing time."

I wrote a blog about returning to the wonders of my garden, where the zinnias were aflame and happy to see me, how my cats rejoiced and my parakeet sang like crazy, and so on and so on, and I posted it, and I thought it was there, but when i recently went to check -- woosh, it wasn't there at all.

Did I dream the whole thing up? Anything is possible!

So here I am, trying again... and sharing that this morning for the first time in a long hot summer, i felt a coolness come in the window, and my heart sang -- ah, a whiff of Autumn. For Fall truly has always been my favorite season, i feel invigorated and ready to take on projects, discover new challenges, and take advantage of opportunities that suddenly appear
and beckon to me.

Thank all of you for being alive at this time, too, and being part of the tapestry of my
life, my journey. Since this is not an interactive site, remember you can e-mail me if you have thoughts or reactions or just want to share your own hopes, dreams, victories,
worries, and rejoicings.

Now, let's see if this will post!

xo Ka



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SPRINGTIME! 

My Spring to-do list
plant garden, water garden
watch my life ripen

***

And, it's time for a catch up. What have I been up to since the last entry? Writing a whole sheaf of Out the Window poems, inspired by a pen pal whose barred window reveals only a brick wall, who asked me "What do you see today out your window?" Perhaps this collection of "what do you really see when you look, how is nature revealing herself, and what human spin does my consciousness make of the scene before me?" will be published to inspire others to watch the shifting reality of their own landscape. I've also taught another Lifestories class, held a writing retreat at Alligator Point, and offered a Haiku Hour at our local Knott House Museum.

I honored the one year anniversary of my father, Bob Sabaroff's, death, on March 11.

April 30 is the last full day of paid employment for my husband Tom as he transits into retirement and creating his own firm to continue his conflict resolution advocacy.

On May 1, our daughter, Alana Rose Taylor, will graduate with a degree in architecture from Univ of Florida, and go on to graduate school for her Masters.

I'm out in the garden planting and watering, picking flowers for my sills and kitchen table altar, getting ready to update my will -- yes, mortality is on my mind -- swimming at Myer's Park Pool several times a week, continuing to take stock of my life in my current journal, and writing "assignments" with friends, and pondering - as always - what workshops or offerings are next, which manuscripts to compile into books....

I go on witnessing the political stream of rancor and hope, trying to "be the change I want to see in the world" rather than frenzied demonization of "the other side" (so easy to fall into this trap), weeping for tragic loss of life in earthquakes and other climactic disasters, celebrating the passage of health care reform - even in its imperfect complexity -- weekly visiting my public library to nourish my continuing love affair with books, language, as well as tuning in to the wisdom and talent of fellow writers...

And I'm pledging to write my blog entries more consistently, in case my readers are wondering where I've gone to, and when I'll return!

Astonishingly
every day I find myself
beginning again

So grateful for my life, my fellow pilgrims, my earth, and this amazing internet that permits us all to share instantaneously and continuously with one another. On we go!











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YES, I'M BACK, AND VERY MUCH ALIVE 
Dear readers, friends, family, whoever accidentally or on purpose is now reading my words:

Summer in Tallahassee, I'm back from California where I had to clean out my dad's house of all his earthly possessions -- the end of a chapter, a chapter of having living parents (my mom died in 02, my dad in march of this year)... and what a relief it is to be looking out my study window at the last of my garden -- a bumper crop of basil, a few scraggly left over tomatoes, zinnias, and some flowering japanese eggplant that will continue to produce for another month or two -- and soon, it will be time to dig it all up, and consider a fall garden... such are the rhythms of nature and my life.

Now is the time to begin considering offering Haiku Hour and LifeStories workshops around town -- Fall is always a time of renewed energy and productivity -- whereas summer is a time to slack off and drink cold lemonade and read library books and go swimming -- in a privileged life, which mine is -- I remember once, a very long time ago, when i was in my early thirties, and still leading a somewhat tumultuous life -- that an astrologer doing my chart told me "You will have a serene old age." Maybe that is now, maybe these are my golden years, that would be sweet.

Not that there aren't earthly, mortal challenges that show up on any given day, unexpectedly, and that is as it should be -- otherwise the line that shows brain and heart activity would be flat and boring -- one wants waves and crests and spillings and risings up and spillings again -- at least I do -- and more poems, which come from a place both of satisfaction and disturbance -- poems of praise, and also poems of sorrow and disruption -- for both are linked to one another, in some mysterious way, I find.

My dad's death -- counterpoint to my daughter starting her last year of college in the architecture program -- counterpoint to the health care crisis in america -- counterpoint to the appointment of the first hispanic supreme court justice -- counterpoint to
so many polarities and ironies and discoveries and paradoxes that make my time on earth so fascinating and worthy of contemplation.

What is this blog but a way of hearing myself and sharing with you the thoughts and feelings that pass through the matrix of my unique consciousness? In the hopes that somehow it matters -- what i think and feel - and the hope that my ramblings will inspire you to write your own messages onto the fabric of the universe.... and into my e-mail box (see bio-contact page to e-mail me)...

What I see sees me
a mirror echo image
caught in a poem

xo
ka






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ALMOST MAY DAY!!! 
Dear friends, fellow writers, and curious ones who just happened upon this blog -- the birds are singing in my little corner of Tallahassee, the golden hibiscus have opened their cups to the sun, and finally, after what feels like years -- my web site designer, Elgin, and I are about to activate this web site so that the whole world has access to Creative Arts and Healing Studio. How dramatic and post-modern and marvelous is that??? I am a humble practitioner of life -- like the rest of us -- but in this site I am trying to create or re-create a legacy of 30 years of work in the field of writing and the healing arts. (I can only hope for thirty more, because a writer's work is never done, nor a healer's, and just being alive on the planet is a gift, I find. )

My next big project is filling out the Healing Touch and Movement section of this site.
I want to dance, and invite you to dance; I want to reach out and touch you with my hands, and invite you to touch loved ones, friends, colleagues, and even strangers - in need - yes - with your hands. I want to explore with you the relaxing "Rock Around the Joints" move, that is so soothing and balancing, as well as the art of Foot Reflexology, and invite you to play "mirror" with friends, students, clients, to learn new ways to move, and to become "one," in essence, with the person you are mirroring.

I want to share personal essays I have written on the inherent power and beauty of the body that each of us inhabits, a body that is too often seen as "separate" from the mind -- a body that has been forced to sit still, wear uncomfortable shoes, never encouraged to break into a jig on a sidewalk, a body that we often ignore, or punish, through neglect or harsh habits.

I do not intend to offer sermons, (preaching the way and truth and light!) but simply, I want to share what I love with you -- the art of putting words together to create beauty and meaning -- the art of movement, the multiplicity of ways our bodies can express themselves -- and the art of touch -- using our hands to relieve stress or pain in ourselves and others, to soothe and uplift and nourish...Ah yes...

And, in my personal life, my 21 year old daughter Alana is about to fly to Hong Kong, China, and Japan for eight weeks with a group of architecture students -- to learn about design in the Far East --- yes, she will get to Japan before I do --- and hopefully, write some Haiku while on her journey --which I will gladly share with you, my readers.

And on Mother's Day weekend - with my daughter already in Hong Kong, Tom and I will head for St. George Island --- where I hope to write a long piece on my dear father, Bob Sabaroff, who died at the age of 89, after a very brief decline, on March 11 (09). Dad was an architect, engineer, professor, world traveler, and patron of the arts, and was married to my mom Rose (who died in '02) for 62 years. What an adventuresome, full, accomplished existence, and I carry him (and Mom) within me always.

That's the news of the last day of April. Tomorrow, May Day, my site goes live!
And the work and pleasure before me stretches onward....




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here it is a BRAND NEW YEAR 
Here it is a brand new year, almost Valentine’s Day, and I am enjoying my love affair with my two almost hot-off-the press Haiku volumes: MY HAIKU LIFE, and HAIKU MOMENTS, two poetry anthologies that represent four decades of my enchantment with this ancient Japanese “essence” poem. In the next month or two, these books will be posted on my publications page, ready to go out into the world. What a learning curve it has been for me – self publishing, but well worth it! I look forward to hosting another local “publication” party to celebrate the students whose poems appear in the new books’ pages. We will read our haiku aloud, honoring the wisdom, the bittersweet beauty of our human condition, each poem expressing the unique voice of its author.

At 65, I find I have become the fruit of my own tree -- filled with bounty I am now
reaping. May this tree – which, in my Tallahassee neighborhood, could be considered
a historic landmark – live a very long time, continuing to bear fruit, exotic and plain,
rich and simple in flavor. May I reach out to friends and strangers – with my utterances, with my dark ink, with insight, confusion, rejoicing, retreating, returning. Let me be
like the waves of the sea, at my beloved St. George Island – rolling in, ebbing back, rolling in, leaving treasure on the shore.

The pen is waiting
with the world spread out below
for us to notice

Feb 10, 2009



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