What's in this room?

 Such an uplifting, energizing prompt offered up in the midst of a raw write by one of our lovely soul flowers... the line just appeared as she wrote and she ran with it! And it was soooo full of love. Simple, yet full of feeling, memories, prompts. 

Start here, now, right where you are. Even that clutter you stink eye is worthy of love and has much love to offer. You'll see. Perchance that Junk Mail? 

That old thrift store chair with the off yellow velour seat? The copy cat Bentley rocker? The cast aside Ikea chair, another bound for the chair graveyard in the backyard with all the other rejects that failed your body or cuz your body failed them? If that chair could talk, it would give me an earful about now

The exercise bands, the dozens of post it notes, the writing on the wall, the echoes of wild women, the calling Om and the flying blue fish dangling from the sky   and all the invisible things.... and... 💛

Living in the Poem

 Last week in Wednesday Writers we were workshopping some stellar pages that got us talking about well, what if this moment right now was an unfolding poem? In fact, what if life is always an unfolding poem that you can choose to live inside of anywhere, anytime? Like start seeing dolphins kind of thing. 

And not just the big and small poetry moments that much poetry is made of like sunsets and sunrises and hellos and goodbyes and war and lost love and weddings and apple trees and seeds and seasons and babies being born and all the "big" scenic life things (not complaining) that beg to be drawn out and snapshot for the page, for eternity, saying look at me, see me, see this, witness this miracle (as they should!), but what if we stop right now and also see the unfolding poem in the mundane (fraught, bored, impatient, uncouth, etc) or even the un moment? Not just see, but immerse in, be a part of, be the poem itself unfolding? 

This shopping trip to Trader Joes a few days before Thanksgiving, for example. All the chaos and commotion and passive aggression and blaring car horns in the impossibly small parking lot and people being their best and worst and conscientious selves and getting in your way and/or saying "go ahead" to avoid a head-on cart collision. And waiting in line forever and all this commotion swirling around one dude, the center of gravity, standing quietly zen like, bored to death still behind a pop-up display of pecan pie samples in those cute little white cups. And he's not getting much action (why not? saving up pie calories for Thanksgiving? What would others think? Well, I'm about to have dinner so...), but a few zealous takers who grab the cup and run (Oooh... yay! Pie! Pecan pie! My favorite! Sooo grateful for this! I better not...) with a chortle of gratitude (aren't we having fun? Oooh, I'm so bad, but let's not tell anyone: I won't if you won't ha ha ha ha ha) in attempts to (maybe?) justify their (shameful!) giving in to temptation and/or indulging a compulsion to people please in the perfunctory societal scripts in which we're all complicit... (ahem, what happened to that unfolding poem, Missy?) met with a blank stare by the dude at the display who could care less, I just want my however much it is per hour so I can go home, a TJ's teamship anomaly, if you ask me for isn't this The Love Boat, after all? Ahoy Matey! It's the Good Ship, Trader Joes! and why so glum dude? And it almost breaks your heart when some older guy, say 75 approaches the young glum bored display dude and says practically out of a movie, the old ones that still make me all kinds of nostalgic and incredulous (wait: life was like THAT?), he says "don't mind if I do!" and sweeps in with an elegance that is verging on extinct, which isn't what makes you sad so much as the dead air around him/them, that it goes unheard, that no one but me saw that and heard that, no one there to see this unfolding poem, accept his hand and waltz across the TJ's dance floor (isn't this... couldn't this also be a prom or a ball or..?), no one there to see and say back and match his old school joy for the simple things and my heartache turns to apathy and 

this was certainly not what I intended to write, but I guess I got so inside the unfolding poem that I found something swelling, which is to say I guess it worked (for me!). That was fun!

And anyway: all of this is just to say what if everything right now, even this now, was a poem and you were a line in the poem and the poet or the person living inside the poem channeling it for all the rest to see? 

Try it?   :)

How could I forget about you? (Writers of the Lost Ark)

 Holy Wow. How wonderful to receive the sunshine of this blog after so many years away. So many years away I actually forgot it was here.  

And yet, here it is, waiting, unchanged. 

What else have I forgotten that is still here, loyal and waiting? All the little gifts, written and otherwise, I've left for my future and now self as a reminder that my heart still recognizes the light. That these are the welcoming arms. 

I didn't go looking for this blog; I highlighted a dead link while editing an old template buried in the cavernous tunnels of infinitely spliced randemonium...certainly I wasn't searching for the lost ark.  And yet isn't that how it is when we write? How openings and portals and answers and old friends and love appear out of nowhere and once opened, how they shine up, even the darkness?

But if you try sometimes...

I cannot tell you how many times I have written about my first concert—The Rolling Stones—since the long ago day in 1980 when I was ten. And I cannot  tell you what joy it brings me every time I write about it, despite it not being a very pleasant evening. I could write about that night a million different ways with a million different details and it would still make me smile. 

I don't know why it happens every time, but it does. I mean really... what's fun about the 1980s anyway? What's fun about feathered hair, the LA Coliseum, the nosebleed seats, the drunk, raunchy Dead Head who squeezed my ass on the way to get Nachos, the roach my boyfriend's mom passed us in the limo, the puke in the gas station outhouse on the way there? What's fun about waiting for your preppy boyfriend to kiss you all night, the loneliness of coming home to an empty house and having to kick in the door, shirtless Mick Jagger in lemon yellow tights worming around the stage, and the foreboding echo of You Can't Always Get What You Want careening through your innocent, almost adolescent mind?

But somehow when we write and share—for better or worse—it feels good. It's fun! It's a deep cleansing, honoring, and remembering. It takes you back. Or forward. You get to hear yourself again... or for the first time, only with a gentle voice of experience looking back on innocence, on that one evening or moment in time and being able to say to your little(r) self, "hey, I'm back. I'm here. I've been here all along."

And if you do this long enough—this writing and sharing—you just might find...all these years later... you get what you need.

Oh yeah.

What made you smile today even if you had to force it?

My son being goofy in piano lessons
My Tuesday women's group writing about childhood and then some
A text from a grown man with cartoon doggies and hearts
A text from P in Austin
Ma's totally mixed up/faux pax voicemail wishing me a Happy Passover and to have fun at the cousins tonight (er... we weren't invited...)
Playing Lucy in the Sky... on the piano
Stretching my poor aching calves
Sitting in the sun
All the written words
Snow troffs coming down in clumps off the brick building across the street 4 floors high
Not wanting  to stop... knowing it will be always waiting for me

When in Rome... or your backyard... or...

Happy Spring Writers and those who love them... I recently received a request from a dear student for some travel prompts. Little did I know her request would turn into a prompt! Hence what we all know to be true: everything is a prompt! Happy travels!

There are so many prompts that I can only imagine will show up every moment of your travels; if you stay open to prompts, you will see them everywhere. Notice what energizes you/charges you--for better or worse and all in between--and there you have a loaded prompt. Is it pinwheels? Elevators? Hotel rooms? Hotel lounges or pools? Is is the lone person? The happy couple on their honeymoon? Is it a know-it-all-therapist? Is it jealousy or joy? Cocktail hour? Feeling left out? Feeling acceptance? The jacuzzi? The memories of being here before? The sensory array of blooming things? THe not blooming things? Can a face bloom or not bloom?  Notice what's happening inside and write from there and you cannot go wrong.

Sit. Check in. Look around. Check in. Write. Oh, and what about "checking in"? That there is a great prompt. Especially in therapy-land. Many stories there.

Ditto walking. 

Ditto sitting in a conference hall.

Ditto the carpeting in the hotel conference hall. Oh, the memories and infinite possibilities that live in hotel carpeting.

Which has so many shades and patterns and colors, and really, can take you to drapes, which have many stories you've forgotten you've forgotten, and of course, windows and views outside of windows and.... do you prefer your shades up or down? Is your favorite color blue or red or both? And what are your memories of that color and associations with it? And what if you just write for an hour about lemon yellow? Or lemons? Or table cloth white? Or table cloths? You've got to just trust that when you give it space and time, something magic will show up and have lots to say. Will move through you and thank you dearly.  For that matter, you could write about gratitude. Or grumpiness. Yours. Hers. Theirs. The righteousness you feel when it's some unenlightened else's. 

What you hear at the pool. Or smell. What does chlorine do to you?

And of course the food. What you love. Fear. Won't eat. Can't eat. How you judge what others eat. How you hold back. How you count calories or splurge or compile recipes or tell yourself "well, I'm on vacation..." and what about all that? Or maybe you have a daquiri which you haven't had since you were 21? Or whipped cream? Or try eel sushi? Or skip a meal and write about your hunger. Hunger moves words in a myriad of acrobatic and architectural ways.

And of course... it goes without saying... what you're learning and how it moves you because most of all I think it's good and energizing to attune to what moves you, what works that incredibly receptive life giving muscle to tears, laughter, to happiness, to release, to insight, to friendship, to new beginnings, and possibly new endings... 

and before I say 'write about beginnings or endings' or meetings of all kinds or reunions, I'd better quit now before this gets completely out of hand, but for now, I'll just say "thank YOU for the prompt."

Have a ball! (oh gosh... and who doesn't have ball stories? My first ball was a soccer ball...)

Bon Voyage!

Rox 

I just got a new push broom and I am thrilled!

What are you thrilled and excited about today?

Wish I had more time to write about this. Or more time to sweep. Darn. Never enough time to push the broom across the floor. Or sweep the hand across the page. But I've wanted one of those brooms forever. Lucky me.

What do you love geeking out to?

Presently geekin' out big time to Phillip Glass. Seriously? You betcha, Minnesota. Blasting it and feeling very dramatic and deep. Feeling all proud to be a Jew. It's killing me with pleasure.

Listening to my melodramatic thoughts make up all kinds of stories about my past, where everyone is wearing serious clothing and making eye contact the way they used to do on TV when I was a kid. Taking myself way too seriously and loving every minute.

Eventually I'll just lie down in the middle of the floor. Turn it up even louder, let it replenish my sense of belonging, dissolve—with each layer of those beautiful repeating keys—the personal mythology that I don't belong. Deepen my internal grooves, weight my connection to the earth, invite my spine to unfurl, my fascia to unwind again and again.  

And then I'll turn it off, eventually, so I can go back to doing the dishes.

RISE UP! WRITE UP! What do you geek out to these days?

Was it a beautiful day?

In your neighborhood?

Write about any neighborhood you remember or want to: now, then, in between.

Write and see what happens. They may switch around. Your childhood neighborhood might show up in your dreams and spill into yet another neighborhood. 

Enjoy running into old neighbors and expect many surprises. Personally, when we did this yesterday in my monthly Memoir/Creative NonFiction Group, I was delighted to run into my old love, Joe D, whose last name is so dang literary I long to share it, but alas... even my first love with the pompadour and Buddy Holly glasses deserves his privacy. Especially since the writing and running into him yielded some yummy memories and that felt really good to write about; not because I long for him, not because I wish I still lived in my childhood neighborhood in Los Angeles with the lemon trees and Olympic Blvd, with its 12 lanes of traffic. Not even because some of my happiest memories live there and daily beckon me back to the ocean. 

It felt good simply because in the mysterious ways that writing together works its magic, I was full as I could be to unexpectedly remember and write about that pale, aspiring actor, with  his green cardigan and white pick up truck, his face in the jasmine bushes in my front yard, breathing deeply, not a care in the world for that summer moment, despite the gridlock he'd just battled all the way from Carson.

Rise Up: Your Neighborhood

What do you love?

Happy Valentine's Day writers! 

"What do you love"? is a great life giving prompt any day, any time. Give yourself a love wash, a love bath inside and out as you write out the little details of the big things and the big details of the small things and see how size doesn't matter when it comes to love. It's the spirit of the love muscle pumping all that juicy gratitude through your body and out your pen that you'll come back to again and again, weeping through it with joy and nostalgia and who knows what else.

Or maybe today it's just one thing you love and you linger there and grow that love. Like: your aloe plant that keeps on making babies and healing your wounds and lifting your heart. The little aloe that could that you got downstairs at Hunt n Gather (or was it Ikea?) because way back when you needed houseplants. And what was once a teeny spec of green life, is now an aloe tree leaning into the daily light. It doesn't ask itself of it's worth or whether or not it should grow; it just does its thing, leaning into life, neck and neck with the geranium plant.

Lingering with the details of what you love on the page is an awesome way to grow that love outwardly and inwardly. oxoxo

Rise Up: What do you love?

What did you play as a child?

Today in Friday Writers. Boy that was fun! 

We played school, Four Square, marbles, teacher, home-maker, Star Wars, nothing at all, in the sandbox, in the attic, with our kids, alone, in Minnesota, Los Angeles, in the fifties sixties, seventies, and eighties, etc, etc etc... until, like Jacki Paper to Puff, we stopped coming out to play. Stopped believing. We lamented that, wondered about it, knew we couldn't stop it from happening to our kids... wondered why suddenly things get and look so flat and real. Buzz kill: party's over.

But it was fun to play. Felt reeeeallll good! Like playing again. Writing does that!

Try: What did you play as a child?

Writing Kindness: Glimpsing Good at The Dollar Store

Today as I was leaving the Dollar Store, a signature bag containing two long loaves of generic white bread blocked my exit. I flashed on the man in line before me, who was one of those dudes who talks loud and talks to everyone, not a care in the world. The woman behind me inline had a duo of tantruming toddlers, whom she was trying to soothe with platitudes, and he looked at her and said,"What's he so upset about?"

Big lipped, the kid looked at the man and said through tears "bbaaabaa Valentimes," to which the man nodded and smiled, unarmed with an answer. The boy calmed.

My heart swelled with my love of the dollar store: where else can you get batteries, white bread, brown rice, a mop, reading glasses, a pregnancy test, a statue of the virgin Mary, a figurine of Bart Simpson, and a helium balloon? Where else can you see people unlike the ones at Target?

Well, lots of places, but not for a dollar a Bart.

The point of the this story is not to tell you that I am awesome for grabbing up that bag of loaf and running it out to the kid calming, talker guy down the street who was using his walker as a shopping cart, where multiple bags full and empty flagged his ride. "Oh, yeah, " he said, smiling with a quarter row of teeth, "my bread. I was looking for that. Thanks."

For an infinite moment, that smile on that sidewalk near the corner of Nicollet and 46th in the freezing cold under that noon-thirty juicy sunshine was a succulent painting. I drank.

"Can't get too far without that!" I said and we went on our ways.

The point of the story is that it's nice to go to The Dollar Store and write about it. And feel happy as I write it. And I suppose kindness, or being neighborly or human or however you want to call it, goes a long way. On and off the page.

So you can write about a kindness exchange or The Dollar Store or anything from your day or moment where you might, however momentarily, see the glimpse of good. Er... the glimpse of life, but you know what I meant. 

Fourth Friday Write OUT! "Confessions"

Friday February 24, 2017
1:30-3p @ The Beach
A Writing Cleanse to remember... and forget! 

"Confessions"

Come clean as you write out your deepest burdens, baggage, quirks, tricks, surprises, unspokens, hard truths, or whatever else heeds the call to let that one fall from the tree! Free that fruit before it goes to seed!

"And what I really want to tell you..."

Monthly Writing Cleanse/Write Out this Friday January 20, 2017!

Second Monthly! 
Writing Cleanse/Write OUT: "Despair"
@The Beach 1:30-3 p

Gratitude WRITING Workshop Thanksgiving Friday 10a-Noon

Friday November 25, 2016.  $25/what you can

Write where you belong.

                       

Real Writing for the Minnesota (and the not so) Minnesota Nice.

You can go anywhere to learn to write. And that’s good for many things. But first you need to learn (or relearn) to love to write. And then you need a sanctuary. Rise Up Writing is just writing. No line breaks, no commas, no workshopping, nothing perfect but the abundant moment found and shared on the page. And the freedom to just say it like it is.

What is Rise Up Writing?

Practicing the moment. We write, we share, we write, we share, we get real intimate. We heal. We laugh. Oh yes, we cry. We get real. We figure it out. We say what we gotta say. We hear and be heard. But we don’t plan it. It just happens.

details

Your 90 minute group Rise Up session includes lesson, practice, Rise Up book of prompts, and all you need to keep rising up together on and off the page!

My place The Beach  $175

Yours                           $200

Write where you are.

Add a little Rise Up to your Book Club, Women’s Group, Meetup, retreat, Healing group, training, writing group, bridal shower, school, or any special gathering with a sweet infusion of sanctuary.

Why Rise Up? Rise Up! Write Up!

Writing Together Feels Good! Connect to your group

Connect to self

Laugh and play

Remember your fun self

Take risks

Meet yourself on the page

Practice compassion

Witness

Work through Stuff

Take a break from your thoughts

Embrace your Wild Woman/free spirit

Raise your heart

Find your authentic voice

Stretch

Remember

Be here now

Embrace your wild woman/free spirit

Show up

Embody your animal self

Be more intimate with life and in your relationships 

Discover the writer you never knew you were!

Celebrate

 Rise Up Writing with Rox!

Details/info classes, retreats, healing, openings, write ups, private sessions, writing therapy, trainings

www.riseupwriting.blogspot.com

rox@writingwithrox.com

 

Ongoing Rise Up!

Women Writing Together

Fridays 10 am-12:30p

E/O Tuesdays 9:30 Am-Noon

Rise up Biweekly Wednesdays 10a-noon

Tues eve Healing group

Monthly  7-9:15 pm

 

Biannual Wild Woman Retreats

Rise up at the Loft Literary Center!

Shimmering Images Retreat Saturday July 30, 2016

Intuitive Writing, Fall 2016

Healing Memoir Winter 2017

Rise Up Writing with Rox!

Details/info classes, retreats, healing, openings, write ups, private sessions, writing therapy

www.riseupwriting.blogspot.com

Why Rise Up with Rox?

"I am a dog lover, so I understand a little about packs.  This is a good one.  We have a tender and respected alpha, Roxanne, who keep us all safe and groomed, well-fed and sheltered.  She has taught us not to bite one another too hard, but to roll on the ground joyously in play.  She encourages us to sniff out our own adventures.  She will help us lick our wounds, and she will nudge us out of the den before we get too comfortable.  Waaaa-OOOOH."

 

“Roxanne leads writing groups where we write spontaneously and as honestly as possible with the topic at hand.  I was amazed at how healing this process was and how deeply I connected with other members of the group.  It was truly a delight and the process reignited my desire to continue to go deeper into writing as a tool to heal past and current wounds. "

"I love Roxanne's writing classes. I have taken several  over the last year and a half and plan to take more. She presents us with such  intriguing invitations to write about little pieces of our lives as well as the opportunity to share them. Though I often feel hesitant,  it feels empowering to share my stories and an honor to hear my classmate's stories. And we also laugh a lot."

“I highly recommend your class to anyone who wants to stay fresh, awaken new ideas, and be inspired by the amazingly talented and imaginative people who share the experience. Your class should be taken like  a vitamin supplement to enhance any other writing or creative  endeavor one is involved in.”

 

Teaching you to love to write since 2001.

Roxanne Sadovsky, Writing with Rox, MA, MFA is a Twin Cities freelance writer, teacher and healer. She earned her masters degree in counseling psychology from Antioch University Seattle (1998) and a master of fine arts degree in creative nonfiction from The University of Minnesota (2004). Roxanne teaches Intuitive Writing and The Healing Memoir at the Loft Literary Center; her private healing practice (Writing with Rox) offers integrative workshops, healing groups, Wild Woman writing retreats/groups, classes in creative expression (memoir/intuitive writing/therapy; drama therapy, adult play therapy), and more in a safe, supportive, and playful community.

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