A baiku book in the works

Rode sixty miles

Uphill was nothing but slow

It seemed all uphill

Remember these little poems? I've posted them here every now and then. Does the May blogathon rink a bell? That's when a whole gang of us writers have shared our haiku poems. Me? I write a different kind. It's called baiku, found as #baiku on Twitter, where I'm known as @bikelady. It's poetry for the bicycle enthusiast. That's me!

I've composed enough baiku now to fill a few books. So I wrote one. I pulled about 50 of these fun poems together, added some backstory about my BIKE story and information about the poetry, included writing prompts and space so readers can write their own poems, and there you have it...a book. It's done!

I'm now beginning the challenging and lengthy process to get it published. Please spread the word. And when it's out, I hope you'll buy a copy. I assure you, it will be fun, inspiring, quirky--a good read worth sharing.

Expect the best!
Jackie

The Prescription for Pain is Compassion

I know your first inclination after hearing about yet another shooter on the loose this week, that is, if he hadn't been dead already: Kill the bastard!

Mine? Compassion.

The reason? Pain.

When I woke up yesterday morning, like you, to the news about the shooting at Navy Yard, I posted on my Facebook page that there's "too much pain in the world." Aaron Alexis is yet another example of that. Yes, of course, he's just caused so much more. No dispute there. But what can we do about it?

No pills, please. There's just one answer that I can see: Pray for compassion. Don't make this a religious thing. Make it a human thing. We had a life who'd been hurting for a long, long time. A news report today says Alexis had exhibited signs of mental illness in his early 20s. He had even complained of hearing voices and may have shown signs of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) after 9/11; he may have taken part in rescue efforts. Several arrests followed. More than a decade later, the young man was still crying out for help, but who heard him enough to help him?

This is why stories like this drive me crazy. Here, we have a young man who was voicing his own concerns about his mental health. He was acting out, most likely cries for help. He was exhibiting behavior that, in totality, clearly shows a man in trouble and in need. Yet, he didn't find the help he needed. Why the hell not?

Can we please use this latest example of horror as the impetus to reach out. Could our government please step up with more mental health care coverage? Could our mental health experts please continue to educate us how we can recognize a person in pain and what can we do to help? Can we please teach our children that it's okay to speak up when hurting -- even if it has to do with how you feel? Can we please, now, make it okay for anyone to ask for help? And can be please find a way to provide it?

So many questions with no clear answers. And now we have so many more lives destroyed because, once again, we've failed. We've failed to recognize the growing mental health concerns our nation faces. We've failed to see the importance of funding mental health. We've failed to appreciate the need for more awareness programs regarding mental illness. And we just do not understand mental anguish at all.

If I were the one making the rules, I'd require everyone from age 15 and on to sit once a year inside a courthouse to observe. You would be surprised that the majority of cases a judge hears every day involve young men -- and women -- usually repeat offenders, in need of mental health care or drug intervention. Some of them, like Alexis, hear voices. Some of them, like Alexis, will gain access to a weapon. And who knows what will happen next?! But it might just happen in your hometown. Dare I say what you might suffer then? Were we able to require annual visits to the court house to see what really goes on inside our justice system, it might be a steady reminder of what you don't want. Maybe you'd get a clear idea of what we need to put in place. Jail time and prison time don't seem to be the answer to this kind of pain.

We have to find a way to build a more compassionate world -- one in which we reach out to the people in our community, one in which we don't look the other way. We're in need of understanding. We're in need of being heard. People are not listening to each other.

So maybe people in pain don't do the greatest job of expressing themselves. Maybe they're not clear enough. So don't look to their words to hear the pleas. Look in their expressionless eyes, at the way they carry themselves with drooping shoulders or a slower pace than normal. Look at the way they live, in a state of overwhelm. If their cries, especially the unexpressed, aren't heard, it's going to naturally turn to anger. Months? Years? If they go on unheard, that's an awful lot of boxed-up feelings. You must know, eventually, that box will open. Then out comes another Navy Yard. Only it just might be your yard.


So let's not just pop a pill in the box or turn the other cheek. Pills are a band-aid and ignorance isn't bliss in this case. If anything should be killed, it's the pain. There's too damn much pain in the world, and we can kill it with compassion. Let's start there.

What life lessons have you learned?

Here's one of mine:

Obstacles aren't meant to stop you; they're meant to strengthen you.

Discuss.

Twitter, improv and an artist date

It started with a simple tweet, which I retweeted:

Then a conversation between the two of us followed:

He mentioned "bike." And I was hooked. I took the free class on Saturday afternoon. It lasted three hours and was such a blast. I returned to Twitter that evening and chatted with The Torch Theatre some more, promising to return for a class in the fall. My summer schedule is too up in the air to sign up now. But I will be back. Here's a bit of what happened in the free class. Wish I had photos...

We did the warm-up exercises where you learn how important eye contact is to improvisational acting, and also how to work together as a team. This is where you practice saying, "Yes, and..." In improv, you learn how to accept another person's idea and roll with it, in order to keep a scene alive. If you disagree or don't want to do what the suggestion calls for, the scene ends. There's no where else to go. And what is the fun of that? In general, this is a great life lesson.

For fun, try these improv games at home with your family and friends:

Zip, Zap, Zop (and other variations)
Stand in a circle. One player begins by pointing with his hands to the player on his right, makes eye contact, and says, "Zip." Now that player turns to his player on the right, points, makes eye contact, and says, "Zap." The next player then points to the player in the circle on his right, makes eye contact, and says, "Zap." You keep doing this till you're comfortable, and then you can start pointing to anyone in the circle. It no longer has to be the person on your right. It can be the person on your left or the person across from you, anyone at all. You just keep shouting out, "Zip, Zap, Zop," trying to keep up with the words and the rhythm, all the while making that eye contact so people are clear who's being called upon. It becomes a loud mess of yelling, laughing, getting confused, but eventually you get it. The game helps you practice making eye contact, maintaining a sense of focus, and accepting your role in the game.

Yes, let's!
For this exercise, be prepared to get silly. The game starts by someone yelling out some call to action. It has to start with "Let's." So it could be something like, "Let's eat pizza!" And the group yells back in union, "Yes, let's." And everyone immediately starts miming the act of eating pizza until another person calls out a different action. It could be anything. In our game, people called out things like, "Let's swim with the sharks!" and "Let's eat cotton candy!" and "Let's walk the dog!" After each request, we all yelled back, "Yes, let's!" and then proceeded to do that action. Since the stage at this theater is very small, the ten of us -- all strangers to each other -- were crowed in tightly together. It was sheer madness and a ton of fun. Lots of laughing out loud. Lot's movement. Lot's of up and down. You never knew what the next person was going to call out. But whatever it was, we said, "Yes, let's!" and did it.

What are you doing?
Here's a game that will teach you how to think fast and be in the moment. You all stand in a line against the wall. One player at the head of the line goes to the center of the stage and begins miming an action. The next person in line walks over and asks, "What are you doing?" Instead of saying what it looks like he's doing, that person makes something up that is entirely different. So maybe he's miming folding laundry. But instead of saying he's folding laundry, he'd say he's changing a light bulb. Then he leaves and that new person starts to mime changing a light bulb. The next person in line comes up to him and asks, "What are you doing?" The person miming changing the light bulb says he's doing something else. Maybe he'll say, "I'm painting a masterpiece." It doesn't matter what you say, you're just learning how to think fast on your feet and convincing the next person to commit. So that next person proceeds to "mime painting a masterpiece," when the next person in line comes up to him and asks, "What are you doing?" The game goes on and on till everyone has a chance to play at least once.

Emotion Scenes
We also engaged in some scene work with partners. In one scene game, we were assigned space on the stage for four emotions: anger, happiness, sadness, fear. Depending on whichever emotion we were going to express in the scene, we would stand in that area. The instructor called out a scene prompt (telling us who we were or where we were), and we had to take that prompt and apply the emotions to the scene. The point here was to learn how to express various emotions. You didn't have to go big, necessarily, but you did want to focus on what it might sound like, look like, and feel like to express anger, happiness, sadness and/or fear with another person on the stage. The objective was to see if you could make a connection with the scene partner. If you could make a connection with your scene partner, you could make a connection with your audience as well.  

Body Parts
In one of the final scene games, we paired up with another person on stage to practice walking in peculiar ways. But first we were told to walk around the stage as we would normally. Then, the instructor told us to focus on a particular body part. So you might try walking around your home using your forehead first, or your elbows first, or your knees first. Once we did that, we were asked questions about what that felt like and which body part we might like to explore as a character. While the walking looked hilarious on stage, the resulting answers were interesting and insightful. One young man, who was told to walk around on stage using his forehead, thought it made him feel like a nerd or a scientist. When I walked around stage using my elbows, I felt at first like cowboy, and that morphed into feeling a bit bird-like. Since the elbows are more flexible and can move in more ways than other body parts, it seems like it could be interesting to explore just where such movement would take creativity.

Which brings me to my point of why I wanted to take the class in the first place...I was looking for an artist date with myself. I felt the need to explore creative pursuits in a more physical manner, something that would go beyond writing. Improvisational acting is certainly one way to achieve that.

What are some ways you've been exploring your creative spirit lately?