well every time in image and imagination class has been an intense rush, and a visit from two classmates last Saturday generated a lot of good energy among us.  But tomorrow night is the next class, and each of us is supposed to talk, with a tape recorder going, about what we’ve learned from peer group meetings, what we’ve learned about the images we have been making…and I’m feeling totally tongue-tied.  So far my images have shown me awesome journeys, interactions, and been full of animals and people I gratefully cherish. But  in class there I am in the imaginal dimension, seeing people’s emotions and concerns underwater so to speak, while they are still talking and even judging from the rather patronizing heights of ordinary ego reality. I know it is hard to let go of ordinary life-support illusions, but I wish some more people would at least try.  It’s really fine in this dimension of reality that is so much more flexible and loving and full of hope.  I’m in this blissful state, but lonesome.  I’m afraid that tomorrow will just bring more lonesomeness; that instead of trying to see in this way, the others will continue to just talk about it from all their readings, and be detached.  So I feel worried and sad right now.

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Home >> Creative Outlet >> Writers’ Open Mic >> Poems by Joan Sheski

Poems by Joan Sheski

Clouds of Confusion

Smoke in my mind
Create the illusion
That chains really bind
Ghostlike intrusions
keep worry on overtime.
But sweet eyes an infusion
An understood sign
Bringing hope of solution
And sweet voice low and kind
Sings an air of resolution
Clouds’ dissolution
peace lights my mind
Thank you for eyes
That understand mine
Thank you for songs
Pathways that wind
Sowing hope-seeds
in the space in my mind

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Home >> Emerging Mud Puds >> Joan Sheski

Joan Sheski

Once, upon time, I was caught in a web of mistrust, anger, blame, and other creepy attitudes. Annihilation by unchosen sacrifice was always imminent around me. Sometimes I even got deluded into believing it was all my fault. For awhile I used anger and mistrust to survive (my father’s teachings). My trust was betrayed very early and often by my mother. In this existence there were only two safe places: the imaginary worlds in books, and the woods where I played alone.

I began to experience a universe in which love creates everything around us - even the walls of our houses. I think it must be the condition of being inside the hearts of others, and them being inside my heart.

My whole universe is different now. At a turning point of readiness after years of trying to understand, fight back, or gain justice for myself, I realized that I could ask for help from the only trusted place I had: my imagination. Sure enough, it came. It came from grownups to the little girl inside me who couldn’t carry the burden of trying to heal so many ills by herself.

What a relief it was to give this burden to stronger and wiser beings! Letting go of all of this web of trouble opened up vast new spaces to me, not only in the imaginal world, but at the same time in the physical world. Loving, compassionate people welcomed me into a new reality. The light that I am, that was hidden in imagination, became visible to them. They nurtured me, and I could nurture them. I began to experience a universe in which love creates everything around us - even the walls of our houses. I think it must be the condition of being inside the hearts of others, and them being inside my heart.

Everything is very fluid and flexible in this universe. Instead of linear time, there are states of being, maybe cyclical, and instead of cause and effect, there are swirling and merging and dancing energy fields moving us among each other. I am new to this world; I am like a little child feeling my way. In the other universe I was alone, cut off from everything. I never felt like I belonged to anyone or anything or any place. In this one I know I am home.

I am still lonely a lot in this one though, and I don’t always see how the inner dimension relates with the outer one. This universe of love does though; it moves us around on the planet, it forms our homes around us, and dissolves them, it brings us what we need and what it wants us to help it with. The moments when I feel at one with another in this universe are joyful way way beyond description with mere words, and these moments seem to generate creative love energy of infinite magnitude.

Yes, sometimes there are shadows, or I come up against something solid, even threatening. But the new guides here have good advice: don’t react. don’t take sides. let go of logic, let go of fear, and allow the light of compassion to penetrate. Then act as you must, but without anger or vengeance. Your act will then contribute to harmonic energy fields, and make more love possible.

That is what they have told me. So here you have my story, which is old, and new, and metamorphesizing all the time. Love, Joan

Posted in Autobiographical Sketches ~ 538 Comments

I’m pleased and proud and thankful to be a Mud Pud along with you all.  Before waking this morning I started thinking about what to write - so here goes - I’m presently immersed in two courses at two different universities, and as usual, in my mind am weaving their meanings together with my realities, or trying to.  One course is called Ethics, and the other is called Image and Imagination. Ethics has a wide variety of stances ranging from complete selfishness to total altruism, and tends to get lost in ’shoulds’ and in opposites, but it has made me think how when any one of us is stuck way down in the mud, we also can get stuck in desperation.  Desperation - it’s a universe where poverty, fear, anger, reaction, usery, competition and a bunch of other rough elements seem to be our social tools.  Some of us were born into it, and some got tossed into it for awhile, but I’m willing to bet all Mud Puds experienced it.  Plus, it might be that it is what some call the “real” world - after all, it is all over the news all the time.  The ethics of it are pretty brutal - dog eat dog, use others to get what you need, oppression….so it’s really blind, or nonempathic, for philosophers or ministers or whoever to come up with a lot of “shoulds” for someone duking out survival.

Nevertheless, desperation is really a way of thinking or a way of perceiving the world, and the way we think actually shapes the world.  Scary, huh?  This is where my other course, Image and Imagination, comes in.

In this course we are making images freely, trying to respect and nurture imagination so that it can get past our fears and egos and little identities to show us … a whole other universe, another dimension of reality that is going on simultaneously with the one we assume is “reality”.  I am blissed when I am in this class because this imaginal dimension is the one I’ve been hiding out in, pretty much by myself, all along.

I promise to describe it in my next posting!  Just one thing - here in Mud Puds is a good place to say I know how fragile each of us is and how important it is for that fragility to have safe loving space - those three things arrive in the imaginal world around us by magic - here, by the magic of Cabe’s imagination.  Merci, Muchas Gracias, Ahi hi, Thank you.

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