Posted by JohnD
Fri, 05 Dec 2008 22:59:00 GMT
Nefertiti at The Inspired Self has kindly honored Storied Mind with the Lemonade Award. I want to thank her, especially since this was quite a surprise. We have discovered one another’s blogs just recently, and I look forward to reading regularly her beautiful insights about life with clear inner guidance.
The rules of this award are as follows:
- Put the logo on your blog or post.
- Nominate at least 10 blogs which show great Attitude and/or Gratitude!
- Be sure to link to your nominees within your post.
- Let them know that they have received this award by commenting on their blog.
- Share the love and link to this post and to the person from whom you received your award.
I’m glad to be able to recognize many blogs that have become a part of my life in this special community. Here is a remarkable group of souls, as I hear and sense them through their honest and moving words. And in keeping with the spirit of this award they show great attitude, sometimes just because that’s who they are and love to share it with the world, sometimes because they’re gutsy enough to try to keep their heads above troubled waters and share too the vast effort that takes.
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Posted in Connecting, Creativity | Tags attitude, award, blogs, community, gratitude, lemonade, soul, spirit | 10 comments | no trackbacks
Posted by JohnD
Mon, 24 Nov 2008 16:13:00 GMT
Some Rights Reserved by a whisper of unremitting demand at Flickr
Merely Me wrote a wonderful post on the importance of bringing play back into everyday life. It is the forgotten tonic among adults in general and depressed adults in particular. She paints a vivid scene of a group therapy session where she coaxed recovering addicts into playing rather than talking about themselves. Some brought in precious toys they’d probably had for years, and everyone got immersed in their games. It sounded like they felt the release of a long-buried instinct – for play is surely one of the basic human instincts.
Her post brought to mind one of the most extraordinary people I’ve known. He was a born teacher infusing his own life and the lives of those around him with imagination and play as a natural part of his instinct for life.
Steven and his lifelong friend Maria arrived in town one day, found a small space they could rent to start a school and dubbed it Little Earth. Its first citizens were both kindergarten age kids and the dozens of figures emerging from the imaginations of this gifted pair. The little kids referred to them as the grownup kids because they took the imaginative adventures and instinctive games of children as seriously as any event in adult life. They accepted kids on their own terms, could speak their language, play with them, win their confidence and teach them through play-adapted methods.
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Posted in Connecting, Creativity | Tags AIDS, angels, ceremony, children, circus, death, education, imagination, instinct, life, magic, medication, Merely Me, play, school | 10 comments | no trackbacks
Posted by JohnD
Sat, 01 Nov 2008 22:34:00 GMT
Storied Mind has had the special honor of receiving the Arte Y Pico award from both Melinda at Melindaville and Clinically Clueless. It’s wonderful to receive this recognition from such amazing and truly fearless bloggers. As many others have said, the community of mental health bloggers has given me so much more, and more generously, than I could have imagined when I started this project last year. Melinda and Clueless hold nothing back in sharing the often searing experiences that have shaped their lives and that they have bravely faced and overcome. I thank them both from my heart.
The ‘Arte Y Pico Award’ is given to five blogs at a time based on their creativity, design, interest of content, and contribution to the blogging community, regardless of language. To learn more about this award, click here. Part of the honor of receiving it is passing along the award to other blogs that honestly seek out the truth of their authors’ experience.
Like many in this position, I’ve taken a while to look again at the moving and powerful blogs that have meant so much to me. It’s more than hard to pick just five from among so many to recognize with this award.
Here are the remarkable bloggers I have selected – in no special order. Each of them has made an enormous contribution to our understanding.
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Posted in Connecting, Creativity | Tags A Never Quiet Mind, Arte y Pico, award, Beyond Meds, Clinically Clueless, creativity, Inside Candy, Melindaville, mental health, Mental Motes, wellbeingandhealth | 9 comments
Posted by JohnD
Sat, 11 Oct 2008 18:34:00 GMT
Some Rights Reserved by Lady Orlando at Flickr
Catatonic Kid (CK) and Isabella have had an inspired exchange of posts in the last couple of months on the use of language and creativity to engage depression, take away its power and release creativity. There are so many ideas and evocative phrases in these posts that I’ve had trouble picking out responses from the dozens that run through me. So I’m going to start with notes on writing, creativity and language and how they relate to depression – and see where these jottings take me.
To be clear, though, I can only talk about how these basic elements help me in recovery. CK and Isabella have their own truths about words and creative imagination. Each of us responds differently, and what works for me may not work for another. So this is my take, a rough rendering of my truth – maybe it’s like yours, maybe not. There are as many paths to recovery as there are people trying to figure this out.
My imagination is expressed primarily through writing, and it helps distance me from the symptoms of depression by portraying them as different characters intruding on my life. These are my visitors from the theater of depression. I can laugh at them, kick them off stage or manage their movements and cues like the director of a play.
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Posted in Connecting, Fighting Depression, Creativity | Tags catatonickid, changetherapy, characters, creativity, depression, healing, imagination, language, play, power, recovery, theater, underworld, words, writing | 10 comments
Posted by JohnD
Sat, 13 Sep 2008 20:16:00 GMT
Some Rights Reserved by even at Flickr
About a hundred years ago, Robert Frost wrote a famous poem about two roads diverging in a wood: “And sorry I could not travel both/ And be one traveler.” He makes his choice to take “the one less traveled by.” “Oh I kept the first for another day!/ Yet knowing how way leads on to way,/ I doubted I should ever come back.”
When I faced a choice of two roads to my own future, I believed I could follow both and be one traveler. Why were there two roads? I imagined there were two sides of myself – one creative, artistic – the other public, drawn to political and social change – and I needed both to feel whole. What followed from this attempt were years of struggling and failing to balance both, searching for the fulfillment I needed but finding it always just out of reach on either path. I tried sprinting down one for a time, then leaving that to cut through a brambled mile of thickets to get back to the other, sprint down that road for a while, cut back through the less and less penetrable undergrowth, hit the other again – and so on. What does that mean? Among other things, it means that I spend a lot of time between the roads in those thickets – lost.
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Posted in What Depression Can Do, Fighting Depression, Creativity | Tags career, choices, depression, double, fulfillment, life, oneness, path, robertfrost, tension | 12 comments
