MESSAGES TO self STORY
One evening I found my friend Denise sitting at her kitchen table. No surprise there, when she wasn’t luxuriating in her bed, or beavering away in her painting studio, that’s where those in the know knew to find her. The moment she registered me coming through the door she burst into laughter, her face crinkling-up into the epitome of glee, “You’ve got to come see this! You’ve got to come see what I’ve been doing!” Knowing Denise, her penchant for quirky oddments of delight, and her relentless drive for self-discovery through creative exploration, I knew this was going to be good.)
Spread-out on the table before her was a jumble of small squares of paper, each bearing one hand-written word:
dream/ trouble/ and/ house/ today/ me/ great/ told/ bed/ healed/
to/ moments/ enjoy/ be/ end/ secrets/ beyond/ of…
I took my seat opposite her at the yellow formica table and the next moment both of us were consumed by laughter, fingers sliding words here and there as we concocted variation after variation using all the words each time. which turned out to be the most fun thing I’d ever done with language, and way beyond that, way beyond anything I could’ve imagined that evening, introduced me to the style of what I later came to call “word-collage poetry”. I went home that night with a duplicate set of “word tiles“ Denise tucked into an envelope for me, and by the next morning I’d emailed her twelve new versions, abiding by the exhilarating “rule” of having to use every word, each time. I was hooked, besotted, dotty~ my life would never be the same again! I quickly moved on to cutting words from magazines starting with a pile I had gleaned from the magazine exchange bin at my local library. Right away I learned which magazines had more of the kind of content I wanted, finding ‘O’ to be high on the list (okay, maybe not to read, but it sure made great contributions to my word library!) I would find myself every morning at my kitchen table, and before I could even move toward beginning my usual morning routine, my eyes would spot a word, my fingers would start flying, and from there it was all I could do to surf it to its completion sometime later, which is when I would “come to“, kind of waking out of the thrilling, dozy right-brain trance I’d been under the spell of for however long. It wasn’t long before I realized that not only didn’t my conscious mind have anything to do with this process but that these word collages, that seemingly wrote themselves, were sourced from another dimension~ from my subconscious, my super-conscious, my soul, my spirit, my guides~ and that’s when I understood~ these were messages from my “greater Self” to my “small self“. That’s when I got the designation: “Messages To self”, perfect! Later came a natural evolution from using single words to using complete phrases~ it’s astonishing what can be done with language when it’s taken out of the intended context! So much of what I’ve come to value is from the world of advertising~ products, services, lifestyles~ that I would never desire for myself yet from the perspective of this other dimension, fit my cause precisely, seamlessly, flawlessly. Case in point:
Fall in love/meet deep restoring/the festival of love/back to your true nature/share the bountiful feast/the ultimate price will be/the magic of/about your dream job/from inspiration to reality/spark your sense of wander/masterpiece in the making/take an amazing journey/you’re golden/reassuring information/shines under pressure/space for all voices/and proud to call it home/your world your way/the mothership storytelling happens/the light fantastic/share your emotions/spread the love/the one you’ve been waiting for/taking flight/where you can find your place in the sun/the tap dance of/enter to win a journey of a lifetime/how far will you go/power the movement/on your way to live your own…
I ask you! If you just took these phrases right here, right now, you could make something incredible~ from ad copy, everyone of them, genius!
Below are three of the original twelve iterations that jumped into being that life-changing night I first found my fire with this medium:
Your DreamHouse today told me of fun, trouble, and despair. In moments beyond Life make Great Secrets to be healed in bed.
(And, now enjoy the day's end.)
And now: Beyond Fun! The Great, in-house Dream Secrets! The Life Nobody told me of healed today! Trouble and despair to end!
(Make your days be the moments in bed. Enjoy.)
End your bed today and dream now of healed secrets beyond trouble and despair.