National Poetry Month was a busy one– filled with writing workshops, performances, collaborations, and new poems. In my workshop, “Road Maps to the Heart” I encouraged participants to explore the terrain of their own hearts, and they created their own (stunning!) heart maps. I also spent quite a bit of time working on ghazals for The Ghazal Project, an ambitious project I set out for myself at the beginning of April. Listen to all my ghazals here.
May is my birthday month, and I like to take time to reflect on my year and the challenges and triumphs the year has brought me. It’s also a time to focus on planning, re-focusing and re-evaluating where I am and how I’d like to move forward. My dear friend, Nadiya Virani of Nadiya V Design, has helped me re-focus with a refreshing rebranding (lots of re’s in that sentence!) of my promotional materials, including new, watercolour seafoamfantastic prompt postcards. If you’d like one, drop me a note!
The word “manifesting” also comes to mind in May, because I believe that having a plan and a vision are critical to manifesting the kind of work I want to create and the life I want to lead. The other word that keeps coming back to me is ’embodiment’. How do I create, live and work in a way that embodies my practice? I find that I can embody a poem on stage, or collaborate with purpose and meaning, but when I am on my own, I slip out of this sense of ‘being in my body’. Sometimes my racing mind gets in the way of my intuition.
The question I’ve been asking myself is:
How do I surrender to my creative practice in a way that engages my entire being, in whatever I do?
This is the challenge I have given myself. Stay tuned for my discoveries as I embrace the possibility of deepening and expanding my creative practice and finding ways of embodying it.
Have a wonderful month filled with creativity,
shenizjanmohamed.com 