Rosalind Guy's Blog

The Price of a Doll

Imagine, you’re a little girl. Maybe two. Maybe three. Ah, no, you’re four. No need to imagine. You’re sitting in the back seat with your mommy and daddy. This is your happy place. You love going places with your parents. Words like institutional racism, racist rhetoric, the white imagination, and abusive cops who assassinate black children with impunity…these words carry no real meaning for you. Words that do make you happy: outside, candy, toys, and maybe sister. But this afternoon, this day when you are out with your family, feeling so carefree, feeling so alive, feeling so much like a child, you hear, “Get the fuck out of the car!”

Then your daddy is snatched out of the car and slammed into the side of a police car. He’s a rag doll receiving punishing blows to the back of his head. Then slammed into a police vehicle. “I’ll put a cap in your head,” the man who’s slamming your daddy into the car says. “Do what the fuck I say,” he continues to yell. Why is he so upset with your daddy, you wonder. Your daddy’s not doing anything. The man tells him to get out of the car, he does. He tells him to cooperate, he does. Each of daddy’s movements is orchestrated by the scary man; your daddy is just like the puppet the white lady used when she entertained you kids at the library a few weeks ago. The scary man kicks your daddy’s legs violently apart and daddy almost falls, but the scary man yanks him back up and slams his face into the side of the car again. You don’t want to turn away from what’s happening to daddy, but your mommy has started to cry so you turn your attention back to her.

Mommy is crying uncontrollably. You’ve never heard her cry like this. You want to comfort her. You reach out and touch her tears. Strange. You pull your hand away, stare at the liquid. Put your hand back again. She won’t stop crying. “It doesn’t open,” she continues to cry as the scary man with a gun yells at her to “Open the fucking door” and “Put your hands over your head.” Then, “You’re gonna fucking get shot!” You don’t know what a gun is. No, scratch that. You don’t know the power of that weapon. In less than a minute, you could become an orphan. Parentless. Grief-stricken. A statistic.

Then you’re both outside the car. You and mommy. And the scary man is trying to grab you from your mommy’s arms. He grabs your arm hard. It starts to hurt. Another strange voice calls out. “Hey, hey, hey. Snatching on a woman, don’t do that. We have to live here.” You can’t see who is behind this new voice. But now the scary man who is screaming at your mommy stops trying to snatch you out of her arms. Still, you can’t relax. Because now he’s yelling at your mommy. And your arms is throbbing with pain. “Put her on the ground.” And now you’re crying. Your tears no longer frozen. Tears flow. Your mommy and daddy are gone. You feel fear that you’ve never known. You don’t know where you are. Where your parents are. Only that you’re not together. The scary men with guns took them away.

You can’t stop crying. You don’t want to. What you want is to stop hearing mommy’s voice in your head. To not hear her crying. You don’t want to remember how you felt her heart racing. The unfamiliar rhythmic beat of an unjust system. A system that views black people as others. Others is not good. You wish you could stop seeing that man slam your daddy into the side of that car. There’s no way to shut off the sounds or shut out the images. They play over and over. Even when mommy and daddy show back up. What if, you wonder. Can someone come and take them again? Will the scary man return?

What mommy doesn’t tell you when she returns is that the scary men were Phoenix police officers who were upset because, well, you know that pretty doll you saw when you were in the store, the one you picked up and accidentally carried with you, well, someone reported your theft. Such a big word for small hands like yours. It’s a lesson mommy hoped you wouldn’t have to learn until much later in life, but black children, no matter how young, can never enjoy the privilege of being viewed as children. To some, our children always appear to be much older than they are. So, the person who called the police that day probably saw a teenager, not a four-year-old.

It was a cheap doll. Scratch that. The price doesn’t matter. It was a doll. Just a doll. They took mommy and daddy away from you because of a doll. And mommy and daddy don’t know how to explain that to you. They could speak the words, but in their hearts, they know, you won’t understand because they find it hard to understand themselves. So, they kiss you goodnight. Mommy sings the song she always sings. You close your eyes. But falling asleep takes time. It’s six months before you finally sleep throughout the night.

Six months is a long way off.

It’s only two days later that you hear your mother crying. Again. She’s in the front room. Daddy is too. You’re supposed to be sleeping. What’s the matter, you hear him ask her. A young man was killed in Memphis by U.S. Marshalls. She doesn’t realize you’re still awake. It’s just so sad. The story flows from her lips. You hear: black boy, handcuffed, stolen car, Facebook, video, 15-20 times, and never had a chance. What she doesn’t say out loud is how close this came to being you. Her. Daddy. Your sister.

You lie in bed all night, your eyes open. If you close your eyes, you might wake later to find everyone gone. So you keep your eyes open. And when sleep tries to overtake you, you use your fingers to stretch your eyes open wide. You just lie there. Staring at the ceiling. Not really caring what you’re seeing. Even once the house gets quiet, it’s still loud. The scene that continues to play in your mind. A memory you cannot shake.

Maybe one day when you’re older, you will leave the city. Go to another part of the country. Or maybe you’ll just stay. In the end, what difference does it make?

What we all learn, eventually, is that there’s no escape. As long as we’re black and breathing, someone will always be out to kill us.

Peace & Love,

Rosalind

The Lover: Pedophilia is Not Romantic

“I had become his child. It was with his own child he made love every evening.” These lines from the autobiographical novel The Lover by Marguerite Duras reveal why I find the novel problematic. As the title suggests, it’s the story of a sexual relationship between a teenage girl and an older Chinese man, who is described as filthy, but rich. Published in the early 1980s, it seems the novel is supposed to be considered serious literary fiction, but, for me, it reads as romanticized pedophilia. He is a 27-year-old Chinese-Vietnamese wealthy man who is involved in a relationship with a young teenage girl, Marguerite herself. Though at times, it’s difficult to tell in a novel that vacillates between first and third person point-of-view.

The older Chinese man first sees the young French girl, Marguerite, on the ferry. She’s wearing a man’s fedora and gold shoes. When he approaches her, he tells her “he must be dreaming,” apparently, he’s so taken with her beauty. He first offers her a cigarette and then they engage in small talk, which leads to a multi-year affair.

“She’s so pretty she can do anything she likes.” These are the writer’s words projecting her own feelings onto the Chinese man. She may be right, but the relationship seems less about looks and more about two broken individuals trying to use a passionless relationship as a brief escape from their lives – both of them seeking some sort of validation from their parents. Her mother’s despair encapsulates not only her own, but the lives of her children as well. And, Marguerite is aware that her mother holds no affection for her daughter. The Chinese man is actually wealthy because his father is and seeks validation from his father. We see this when Marguerite writes that his father has declared that he will not be able to marry the “little white whore” and when he sits on the side of the bed weeping before they make love.

She carries out this relationship with an older man, in the open, and no one tries to intervene. There are times when it seems she is being judged for having sex with a man, because she’s only doing it for the money, even though it’s clear she desires more than money from him. It’s clear she gets something from him that she cannot get from her mother, who seems only to love her older son, the one she requests be buried with her. Written in disjointed brief scenes, it’s difficult, at times to follow the timeline of events, but it’s clear that Marguerite writes with a naïve sentimentality of the teenaged girl engaged in an inappropriate relationship with an older man, pedophilia disguised as love. Similar to another real-life relationship between a much older man and a teenage girl: R. Kelly and Aaliyah.

Approximately ten years after this novel was published, the 27-year- old musician R. Kelly married the teenage songstress, Aaliyah. Unlike the romance in the novel, written reports suggest that Kelly and Aaliyah were married for a brief time, a marriage that was later annulled. But like the romance in the book, the adults in their lives engaged in the spreading of rumors and discussed amongst themselves the inappropriate relationship, but no one made a move to stop him. Kelly, like the Chinese man in the novel, was wealthy and so was protected by his wealth.

But these types of relationships are not rare. They also are not stories of true romance. These are instead prototypical dysfunctional relationships where men wield an undue amount of influence over a younger girl. These young girls start to feel valued because of the attention they are receiving in these improper relationships.

Many teenage girls I attended school with dated men who were much older than them. The reason given was always that boys our age were not mature enough for us, so we preferred dating much older men. No one ever questioned why much older men preferred dating young girls.

When I was sixteen years old, I met my children’s father. We worked together at a grocery store. I was a cashier. He worked in the dairy department. I was still in high school. He was seven years older than me. Like Marguerite, I lied to my mother about our relationship. And, also like Marguerite, I took advantage of my mother’s despair, she too was deeply depressed though she was never professionally diagnosed, at the time that I entered the relationship with a much older man. In fact, she was so overwhelmed with despair that she was never able to climb out of the gloom long enough to suspect that I was a liar. And my soon-to-be husband a pedophile.

In the novel, the relationship between Marguerite and her Chinese lover doesn’t last because she moves away. In fact, in the days before she is set to leave, he starts to be unable to perform sexually with her. “His body wanted nothing more to do with the body that was about to go away, to betray.” For me, the relationship ends after ten years of marriage. Ten hellish years of marriage, where I, like a child, feared being scolded or else beat by a man who treated me like I was his child. His misbehaving child. Marguerite seemingly found happiness later in a marriage with another man. Not much is written about the man she married as the novel focuses on the relationship with the Chinese man as well as her relationship with her mother and brothers. As for me, I’m still writing my happy ending.

Peace & Love,

Rosalind

 

 

I won an award or Yay me

So, my first year in the MFA program at the University of Memphis is coming to an end. And the school gives out awards at the end of the spring semester. I entered the poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction category. And placed in both the fiction and creative nonfiction categories.

Here’s an excerpt from the essay, “Protecting My Black Son,” that garnered my first award:

“The other day I was coming home from work when I saw my son standing outside on the porch. A large tree sits in our yard, branches outstretched like arms. My son, at first, didn’t see me pulling up because his face was turned up toward the sky. Or the tree. Seeing him standing on the porch, I experienced immediate and conflicting feelings. It was unseasonably warm out and I could see why he wanted to stand outside on the porch, to just stand outside and enjoy the warm night air. I also thought about the way I’ve always known that some people take joy out of stealing the life from a black boy body. “What are you doing outside,” I asked him. “Standing,” he replied. And I stood there trying to come up with the words to demand that he go back inside. That he not stand out on the porch, making it easy for someone to come along and steal the life out of his body.”

The awards luncheon is this week at the University of Memphis. I can’t wait. In the meantime, I am supposed to be revising poems.

Peace & Love,

Rosalind

Creating Through My Grief

It’s such a strange sensation to exist inside your body yet feel like you simultaneously are existing outside your body. Grief has affected me profoundly, but it’s not always easy to conjure up the words to express how I’m feeling. It’s like I’m walking around wearing somebody else’s skin, somebody else’s life and it’s too big for me. I’m awkwardly trying to appear that nothing is different. After my mother’s death, I sensed the change occurring in me and considered dropping out of the MFA program. There were long stretches of days when I couldn’t summon the energy or will to care about any of it. I was so passionate about writing when I entered the program, but that passion waned considerably. And I feel incredibly alienated inside of my grief.

My mother was my best friend. And like all friendships, ours was a complex relationship. I wrote two poems about our relationship: one was written before her death, the other after. They can be found here: here. While I was deeply honored to see my words in print like this, I wish I could find some of my old passion. I wish I could feel comfortable in my own skin again. People have said that you never fully get over losing your mother, but you learn to carve out the rest of your life around that loss.

Every day I try to carve out that space for myself using my art. It’s cliche to say, I know, that a part of us dies when a loved one leaves this earth, but I’m finding it to be true. Sometimes I feel so separate from everything and everyone else. I suppose that is enough procrastination for now. I’m going back to finish working on poems for my end-of-semester portfolio.

Don’t forget to check out my poems using the link above, if you haven’t already.

Peace and love (as always),

Rosalind

 

 

 

A Writing Prompt

Last week, in poetry workshop, I confessed that I’m ready to go in a new direction with my poems. Much of my observation has been internal; I write about what I feel passionate about. But I want to stretch myself as a poet.

So, I Googled “poetry writing prompts” and the one I chose is this:

Start the first line of your poem with a word or phrase from a recent passing conversation between you and someone you don’t know.

So, this week, my goal is to start a conversation with a random stranger and from that conversation choose a line to begin my poem. And I challenge you to do the same. Feel free to share your poems, here. I’ll be sharing mine later in the week.

Peace & Love,

Rosalind

First Semester – MFA Program

Last semester, I took my own advice. I decided to put my greatest efforts toward the thing that I couldn’t stop doing even if I wanted to: my writing. In addition to entering a new role as English/Language Arts instructional coach at my school, I entered the MFA program at the University of Memphis. And for the first few weeks, the University of Memphis was my happy place.

Taking the new role as instructional coach freed me up to do a lot of the writing required to be a successful MFA student. In those first weeks, I received valuable feedback in poetry workshop and the fiction writing workshop. I also served as online editor on the school’s literary journal, The Pinch. I discovered new poets like Tiana Clark and Terrence Hayes. I learned about the American Sonnet, the elegy, and I learned what a volta is. I started making intentional decisions about the container to use for a poem to convey the greatest feeling. I became aware of entry points for poems and things that choices that could be made that would take a reader out of a poem.  I got to interview one of our homegrown writers, Dolen Perkins-Valdez. She provided so much inspiration and insight that I was blown away by the entire experience. I took poems and short stories and approached them with a new sense of purpose and direction.

Then my aunt died. And I felt stonewalled. A month after my aunt died, my mom died. And as much of a cliche as it is, I felt like a part of me died with her. Suddenly I was waking up every morning to the realization that my mother was no longer in this world and that absence colored everything for me. I didn’t know how to be in the world anymore without my mother. Honestly, not much mattered anymore. I stopped caring about being a writer. I functioned out of habit. Moving through life without giving much thought to anything but missing my mom. I almost fell off the porch and broke my ankle. I would be driving and end up someplace I never intended to go. I would read pages and see nothing and I had no desire to write. Anything. Because what difference would it make if I wrote a beautiful short story that revealed something profound about life if my mom couldn’t read it?

As I was adjusting to life without my mother, I watched my friends peel away like the layers of a blooming onion. They moved away, went back to their lives and what mattered to them. The phone calls stopped coming as often. And no one stopped by to see how I was doing. The sharpness of my grief quite possibly was the knife that separated us. I cry, even now, when I long to call my mother. I cry when I look at pictures of her. I cry when I long to hug her and realize she’s forever gone. The one who was there for me when I entered the world is no longer here for me. The most adult thing I had to do was handling her business after her death – with the funeral home and all other entities. Without support. My blooming onion was there with occasional phone calls and text messages or just the ghost of their friendship hovering somewhere nearby, but I felt like I had traveled onto foreign soil and was trying to adjust to my new surroundings alone.

In my journal, I wrote “I feel like I’m walking around with this massive wound — one that only I know about. I’m hurting, trying to find my footing, but everyone wants me to be okay because they are. They hand me a band-aid, a comforting phrase. I’m not okay.”

This absence, this loss, colored even my time at what I’d come to think of as my happy place. Because I’d been at school, in my fiction class, when my brother called me to tell me that my mother wasn’t breathing, that she wouldn’t wake up, I stumbled across campus wailing and trying not to fall, in trying to move back to something resembling normal, returning to school was not easy. That first day I sat in class and detested everyone around me, everyone who was laughing and smiling and engaging in empty conversations about nothing. I sat in the car crying and then instead of going into the classroom early, I’d sit in the lobby and read. Though I wasn’t really reading, because nothing would stick.

But why write about this now? Because I needed to. I have discovered that when I don’t express how I feel, I get stopped up inside with grief. And I start to have headaches. It surprised me that I didn’t have headaches during those first few weeks, when I’d go days without eating and spent days sobbing uncontrollably. I only got headaches when I stopped expressing myself; I needed to communicate how I was feeling and it didn’t matter what form that expression took. And because I’m about to enter my second semester where I’ll be taking fiction workshop, poetry workshop, and creative nonfiction workshop. And with my mother alive, it would have been a complete joy for me, it would have been a happy place, a place of growth and stepping outside of my comfort zone in order to transform myself as a writer and my place within the larger writing community. But with my mother gone, it’s just me trying to shift underneath the cloak of grief, trying to test the waters, trying to find “normal” again knowing that nothing will ever be normal again, and trying to not die and give up completely. At least not until the day that I stop breathing.

Peace & Love,

Rosalind

 

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To Curse or Not to Curse

I recently suggested to one of my co-workers that she might enjoy reading one of my favorite books. After discovering that like food and men, we have very similar tastes in books, I was excited to offer her a list of books I thought she might like. Among them was Sugar by Bernice McFadden.

Today, while we were sitting in one of my favorite coffee shops discussing everything from work (we’re teachers and we’re dedicated *shrugs*) to food (we really love food) and the psychological makeup of people and how they accept coaching (she was trying to help me get my mind right for my new position). As we were chatting, she happened to mention that she was reading and enjoying Sugar, which she called juicy. “She used the work pussy like six times already,” she laughed.

I paused. After the many times I have read that book, I could not recall ever reading a curse word. Not that I didn’t think the words were there. I just found it odd that this sounded like news to me. I was like, “Really? Pussy?” (Ok, transparency here, I didn’t actually say the word aloud, but I thought it okay?) Intrigued, I searched the shelves of the bookcases in my living room until I located my very worn copy of Sugar. I began reading it immediately. Actually, re-reading it. And sure enough, right there on page 33 I came across the first use of the p**** word. On that page it says, “They came for the conversation, corn liquor, catfish, and Lacey pussy.” Right there in black and white for all readers to see: the p**** word. But why hadn’t it stood out to me before?

Is it because I tend to swear like a sailor daily? And, so swear words have no shock value for me. Not unless they are coming out of the mouths of teenagers walking the halls where I teach. And even then, I’m not so much shocked that they are using the word as I am bothered by the fact that they feel it’s okay to say it in my presence. I want to feel like an adult around them and so that means no cursing, right? Or is it because the presence of the curse words didn’t take anything away from the story? If anything, they added to it. To use the word womanhood when referring to prostitutes would seem like a dishonest cheat. The word pussy fits in the passage.

But seeing the word did two things for me. One, it made me want to re-read Sugar again, so I’m currently reading the novel. I only paused in my reading to write this blog post and to finish tweaking a sentence in one of my pieces that I’ve been struggling with for a couple of days. And, two, it caused me to revisit my own discomfort of using profanity or swear words in my own work. Whenever I write a swear word, it feels awfully much like sneaking behind my mother’s back cursing and I have to look around to make sure she’s not there to be disrespected by my use of “bad words.” I have used “bad words” in some of my poems and a couple of my stories. In fact, at one of the book shows I attended where I was selling my books, a woman thumbed through Blues of a Love Junkie, saw the curse words and put it back. Then she chided me on my decision to use profanity in my poems. Including swear words in my writing has never been a deliberate decision. Instead it has occurred naturally during the writing process. And I sometimes have to resist the urge to self-edit and wash away some of the meaning of my text in order to present writing that is pure as fresh snow.

In my writing group a couple of months ago, I was reading a creative nonfiction piece I’m working on and it includes a couple of swear words and when I came across them as I was sharing it aloud with the other members, my voice grew visibly lower. It was as if I was embarrassed to say the words aloud. I knew the words I’d written were the best words to use; I’d tried revising the sentences several ways, but they always read better with the words in, so I let them stay in. My writing was stronger with the words, but I still couldn’t explain the level of discomfort I felt when reading my work aloud.

Was this the effect of my stern mother and her rule about using profanity or something entirely different? More than likely my upbringing has some impact on my use of profanity in my writing, but that can’t be the only thing that makes me feel uncomfortable using profanity. Could it be that I’m worried about how people perceive my work when I use profanity? That I think it will mark me as a lazy uninspired writer? Possibly.

There are many reasons for and against using profanity in fiction. The most obvious reason to advocate for profanity, though, is that it feels authentic. People curse. When they’re angry. When they’re unbothered. When someone is agitating them. They just curse. They do. And to remove those curse words to soothe the sensibilities of a few readers feels like using Clorox on a load of colored clothes: it’s just wrong. So, most times, I make the decision to leave the words in my writing. If I can’t be honest and authentic in my writing, what’s the purpose?

Norman Mailer is famously known for substituting, at the behest of his publisher, the word fug for the word fuck in his novel The Naked and the Dead. When Tallulah Bankhead met him one day after reading the novel, she said to him, “….you’re the man who can’t spell that word.” So, while the choice to remove the “bad word” appeased some, there were others who noticed. Still, Mailer has cemented a place in literature as a larger than life novelist, essayist, and playwright. Which means, if your writing is good, if it resonates with readers, and if you can make readers care, then you have succeeded. And, for me, that’s good enough.

So, it seems that when it comes to using profanity in fiction or literature, a writer should do whatever she feels comfortable with. Be honest. Be creative. And be true to your characters. Tell your stories in a way that is uniquely your own. What more can any reader ask of you?

Peace & Love,

Rosalind

Our Song

Our song fills the air.

It breathes, brings to life

memories that once seemed

forgotten, heaven still remains

even though you are gone

I stretch into the place we

once lived, the place where we

once loved. I am free

to remember the feel of your

lips on mine, the feel of your

hands within mine, the gleam

in your eyes when you looked at me

I never knew love like ours.

Before long, I am singing our

song and it’s like you never left

that you’ve been here all along

in my heart, in my arms

where you belong

But then the song is over and I’m

faced with the silence that’s

been left behind, the void

in my life where we once shared love.

I keep re-playing our song.

I have no choice but to

open my eyes finally and see

love isn’t a guarantee ‘cuz you’re

no longer here with me

and our love, your smile are memories

that I just can’t let go

because one day the song will

play again and I’ll remember

that love never really ends

Sometimes it’s just waiting

in the wings for our song to

begin and for us to remember

what it means to be in love.

Peace & Love,

Rosalind

100 Reasons Why I Love You

This poem has been in the works for many years. It’s still a work in progress, but I’m excited about what I have so far. I’m probably more excited because I have had the time, since I’m on winter break, to devote to reading and writing. And, just one of the things I’ve been working on is this poem:

Last night when I

should have been sleeping I

was thinking of all the reasons

why I love you.

Did you know it’s more than

one hundred reasons why–

one hundred and one, to be exact.

A smile that reaches your eyes, that’s a

number of reasons why—your eyes

how they say to me what

your lips sometimes can’t speak

Two lips that part when

I see you and you see me

What a beautiful smile. I could live

forever on just the nourishment of

just one of your smiles.

And yet we both know it’s impossible

to love what you cannot protect.

Is it possible to fall in love

with a voice—to hear the

briefest of words spoken and just know

words have always been the beginning

of everything, this is true even of our love

I fell in love with your words, the way

you said the words ‘I love you’

not always using that well-worn

phrase—we discovered other ways

to say what has been clearly written

on both our faces. How can anyone miss

that light that sparkles in your eyes? How

can anyone not know that I could never be

happy just lying in your arms, I want

to always be in your life.

The second time around love is just

as sweet, who would have thought

it could be? That rememory could

conjure up delicious images of your lips

pressed against mine and how it’s so sweet

to feel the softness of your lips time after time?

or that it’d be so easy to remember lying by

your side sharing slices of life, the history

of you and me? I held onto every word

every memory you shared with me.

And yet we both know it’s impossible

to love what you cannot protect.

Peace & Love,

Rosalind

P.S. I know I’m going to regret it tomorrow, but I’m going to do some more writing. It’s nearly three a.m. but I’m not tired yet. And, by the way, the Kindle version of my last collection of poetry, Blues of a Love Junkie, is free for the next few days. Download a copy and let me know what you think. You can access it  here.

Happy reading! Happy writing! And Happy New Year!

Make It a Great Year

your lips touch mine and

i shiver – is it memory or

reality? warmth floods my

body as i continue to discover

new ways to reignite the fire

of ghost kisses and feelings

of love as gentle as hello

–freewriting for a poem in progress

This has been a great year, one in which I have experienced growth as an artist and as an educator. Growth, like any change, is not without its growing pains, but more than anything, it provides and provided an opportunity for me to stretch my wings and see how far I could fly. As I reflect over this past year, I am proud of myself. I am proud of the chances I took to invest in me and my dreams. I am proud of the ways in which I showed love to myself. I am proud of the ways in which I loved and honored the love of those around me. And, finally, I am proud that I haven’t given up on myself because it’s so easy to do. To look around and see other’s people’s growth or happiness and judge my own growth and happiness based on what I see. No, that doesn’t work for me. And that’s why I can say 2017 was so sweet.

In the coming year, I will continue to work on my short story collection, The Women and my next poetry collection, which is not yet titled. I will continue to work hard every day, as an educator, to teach my students how to think. To make a safe space for them to fail, but to provide for them every opportunity to succeed. I have goals and to see those goals come to fruition, I have written them down along with the steps I plan to take to help them manifest in my life.

I created this blog post because I want everyone to feel the type of peace and joy that I feel. Going into 2018, I’m not trying to come up with a list of things I must do because I never got around to doing it in 2017. Live each day as if though it’s your last. Think about what will be important to you on your death bed and do that. Put energy into that thing that you know will be important to you at the end, so should be important to you now.

My grandmother used to say, “I’m going to do such and such if I live to see tomorrow.” She acknowledged the simple truth that as sure as you are living, you shall surely die. And when you live like you don’t have forever to do the things you want to do, well, you get things done. You start to live a life of passion. Because you learn that it’s a waste of time to waste time doing things that don’t make you happy. Many moons ago, when I was working full-time as a newspaper reporter, I interviewed this woman who said she always told her daughter, “Make today a great day.” And to this day, I try to live this mantra. But, it’s for more than just the days, it’s for the years as well. Make today a great day. Make next year a great year.

Keep creating! Creating art. Creating yourself. Creating the life you want. And keep creating your happiness!

Peace & Love,

Rosalind