Secret Selves

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Dialogue of Opposites M Senese

This drawing was made after a warm-up with a creative writing exercise.

The exercise is to establish a dialogue with a “secret” part of yourself.  Give the part an identity and characteristics.  Get to know that part. Let the writing flow without stopping or correcting as you go along.

This kind of exercise may surprise you with a deepening of your self-identity.

My example:

Dialogue with My Soul

Who are you, my Soul?  First I must understand who or what you are! How can I know you when my personality is caught up in daily living and survival?  You don’t seem to care much for that, not in your vocabulary.  You are so “present” that for you there is no “time” or “death”.

Yet I am stuck in a body that I actually love, with eyes that adore beauty, feel the flow of the curve of hills, taste the play of purple and yellow on fields of autumn grain.  The “me”, that I am most familiar with, worries about paying bills, keeping my weight steady, surviving the family dramas and mastering my own emotional weather as volatile as a Norwegian sky.

You by contrast seem to be all light and love, filled with dynamism, joyous to the point of ecstasy, content with things just as they are.  I have touched you, felt you rise up in me, explode into a million particles, disappear in your orb of energy, stable yet vibrating like a galaxy of stars.

You recede and my old perspective returns, filling the narrow confines of my ordinary consciousness.  I call you, invite you back but secretly wonder if you ever were really with me. It must be a parallel reality that touches me when I manage to get the coordinates right and meet you in the zone like a lover’s rendezvous.

Will you speak to me in a secret language that only we know?  Will you teach me to hear your voice amid the jarring clamor of daily life? There is a field where we can meet.  It is the place where I can most be myself, feeling delight and joy in what I do.

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