shaping | Life-Built Poems

lighted paper lanterns floating above a crowd in the night sky

FOLLOW THE GOD-THREAD (Shaping Dilemma)

Netta Comments 10 comments

Here’s the most pretzel-brain-making question there ever was in the history of human thought: “Life is ___________” (fill in the blank). That’s the deceptively innocuous-looking problem that, given even just a little bit of space and time, can toss you smack-dab onto the back of the Chaos-Beast that takes you on a ride straight down the most convoluted and paradoxical rabbit hole a thinking being will ever encounter. Argh! I’ll tell you right now going in: That question actually has…

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CHECK YOUR FILTERS: Roadmaps and Story

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The thing about living your life as a poem or a story or any other kind of art is that there’s got to be a theme to the thing. (It’s one of the rules, according to grade school English and art teachers when it comes to analyzing some bit of self-expression.) This online dictionary I am looking at tells me that a theme is “an idea that recurs or pervades a work of art or literature.” It’s how you make…

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OTHER VOICES: Grace Iwashita Taylor

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New Zealand’s Grace Iwashita-Taylor is a Shaper and a poet. She lives her life as a single mother, as a loving daughter trying to deal with the realities and challenges of her beloved mother’s decline into dementia and as a youth worker in a place that is one of the most expensive places to live on the planet. She is also an award-winning spoken word and published poet, playwright, and performer. The poet’s upu (words) circle around and around the…

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SHAPING IS BUILT ON ACCEPTANCE

Netta Comments 8 comments

Okay. Almost everybody agrees: we humans can shape our own worlds. All we have to do is make the choices that help us get to our own bright and happy place. Making choices, deciding where and how we want to go, is our best and brightest super-power, it says here. So, why does it keep going glongy? Every time we use this supposed super-power of ours, why is it that the options we choose rarely transport us over the threshold…

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SHAPING 101: Your Body Moves Your Mind

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I have some most excellent, scientifically correct news: We humans are a lot more than big old naked brains riding around in vehicles that are kind of like animated meatballs with feet. I have to admit that is a bit of a relief. (I like albondigas in their place, but life, it seems to me, is more than a tapas bar.) All during my growing-up years, I was dragged kicking and screaming into the prevalent paradigms that told me that my…

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SHAPING STARTS WITH YOU

Netta Comments 12 comments

I’ve been circling around this latest concept I’ve stumbled across like I imagine an awestruck fan would do to take in Michelangelo’s Pietà at the Vatican. My head keeps going, “Wow…wow…wow.” My heart is drowning in the swelling sound of some Gregorian chant or something. OOOH! The idea that each human being’s ability to make choices can absolutely affect and shape both the forms their own lives take as well as the world in which they live is a mind-boggle…

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SHAPER CHALLENGE (An Un-Seeing Exercise)

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John Milton (an English poet who wrote epic poems in the 17th century) once wrote: “The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.” Milton did call it right. All of us humans do have one super-power. Every single one of us can shape our own reality and make up our own world. It’s why we find everybody else’s stories so fascinating, I suppose. Because we each have our own…

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