Waging a War: Spoken Word #2

I wrote another spoken word poem a few days ago. I'm finding I quite like the format :) Next time I'm hoping to get better sound quality and improve my video skills a little bit, but for now, here's the message, raw, pure and unadulterated. This poem is about fighting the world's ugliness with light, truth and beauty. It's about the call I feel to write and bring hope into a world that often seems dark. Thank you for watching! The words are below.


There's a seed planted in my chest.
Pulsating and shimmering, alive with the desire to grow,
To blossom into something more than just a girl who writes.

There's a dark cloud outside my window, black as hopelessness and thick as fear,
Whirling with the intent to choke the good and pure things of the world.

There is poetry flowing in my veins, lending me power to cloak the world in beauty,
My eyes are the color of pastel wonder, and my heart beats out a cadence that my mind gives words to.
And with every word I can choose to bring forth darkness or I can choose to bring forth light.
There will always be ugliness. We cannot cause the black cloud to disappear, but we can fight against it with beauty and light, as long as there is breath in our lungs. 

I am waging a war on ugliness and vulgarity. I have a pen instead of a sword and words instead of bullets, and I will prevail. For I have the power to speak the language of our souls. 

I have the power of poetry. 

golden

  golden
  sleepy sunlight through your window, butter colored blossoms and amber wheat waves dancing in the sun,
  golden honey pouring sweetly from a jar
  gold is the color of dreamy content and peaceful bliss
  golden is what you are when happiness has soaked into your bones and you are made of flesh no longer, but are crafted from pure sunlight.

Apple Juice & Overalls--A Ramble

   World is covered by our trails,
   Scars we cover up with paint,
   Watch them preaching sour lies..
   I would rather see this world through the eyes of a child

  Darker times will come and go,
  Times you need to see her smile,
  And mother's hearts are warm and mild..
  I would rather feel this world through the skin of a child

  When a human strokes your skin,
  That is when you let them in,
  Let them in before they go,
  I would rather feel alive with a childlike soul...

                               ---Aurora

This past weekend I was at work early in the morning and found myself pretty bored, as usually happens when I'm working early. So I decided to have some apple juice for breakfast. I had only one dilemma though, the apple juice was warm from being in the pastry case. Gross, right? So I put it in the fridge for a few seconds, but quickly got tired of waiting and took a sip of my slightly warm apple juice.

It was one of those magical moments in life where you momentarily forget where you are and what is happening around you and it suddenly feels like you have been transported to another place altogether. Suddenly, I was no longer a responsible almost 18 year old at my paid by the hour job. I was seven and I was sitting in the back of our family's white mini van as we drove through the brown Arizona landscape, sipping from my juice box. The sunshine filtered through the big windows, I was bathed in its golden light and the anticipation of our trip. And I was thoroughly enjoying my slightly warm apple juice.

That moment, brief though it was, opened my eyes to something. The feeling of being a child is one of the best in all the world. The complex becomes simple, the anxiety becomes giddy anticipation. We are free. Free of inhibitions, insecurities, and innuendoes aggressively covering up how we really feel. Children come from such an honest place. If they are sad, they cry. If they are happy, they dance and sing and laugh and show us what their joy looks like.

Today as I wandered down to the park with my siblings wearing my recently purchased overalls, pink jacket and braids in my hair, I felt that sunshiny joy of a child to simply be alive on a beautiful spring day. And so I wanted to share what I learned: Sometimes, when you're almost 18 (or 38 or 85), you just need to go to the park and be a little kid for a while.

Childhood is the core of human nature. It is the foundation and the beginning to each life and it is where we learn the lessons and values we carry with us into the future. I think that there are plenty of lessons to be learned from children that adults could apply for a happier and wholer existence.

You can call me naive and ridiculous, but I know that sometimes getting in touch with that core inside of us is just what we need to remind us that the world is a happy place. It hasn't necessarily been easy for me to find it, and I know it is that way for many people. It's true that most of my childhood memories don't exactly line up with what I have described here. It happens. We get tainted by society and adults and expectations at young ages. But I'm confident that each one of us can go back to a time, maybe before we can even remember, when we were living out of our heart. Simple, unadulterated joy.

So go outside and dance in the sunshine, listen to a song that reminds you of being small, giggle uncontrollably with a little one, or just sing out of the joy and delight of your soul. Do what it is that makes you remember what it feels like to be alive. We are closer to God when we remember that we are just children in His sight, children that he loves eternally.

"I would rather feel alive with a childlike soul...."

Bubbles

Bubbles-- A Spoken Word Poem

This poem is about the negative effects of social media, something I've seen a lot of people hurt by, and something I've been thinking about a lot lately. For a long time now I've wanted to share my thoughts on this subject, but felt it was too big and widespread of a subject to be able to grapple into a poem the way I wanted to. Yesterday I made this video for a journalism assignment and then uploaded it to Facebook. I have since had some people asking me to share it, so I'm posting it here, with the words below :) Thank you for watching!

We are all so human.
So terrified to show the weakness and the vulnerability of our condition
But we want to.
We want the world to see who we are
To accept the thread that stitched us up in the places where we ripped when we tripped over our insecurities because we took the risk of caring
And it left a scar.

They handed us rectangular boxes with screens and told us it was the key to connection,
To staying in touch, being in the know, sharing our lives and watching others grow,
So why is it that every time I logged on to Instagram instead of a connection I felt pressured to perfection, a comparison to an image that wasn't even real.

Why is it that all I hear is the criticism because she posted that selfie just hoping someone would accept the person she is behind the puckered lips and inch thick make-up?

Why have our interactions become limited to a superficial addiction to staring at a screen? Why instead of connecting, loving, accepting, do we walk around with bubbles around our heads just big enough for our screens and our judgement?

Because we all crave acceptance. But getting a certain amount of likes will never fill the void in each of our hearts.
We're not robots, we're not meant to hide from each other in our bubbles.
We all need love, we all need real connection.
So let's stop judging and hating and start loving and giving.
Life is so much more than what you see on social media.

Songs Waiting to Be Sung

And that’s when I thought,

Maybe I’ll write a poem about me.

Maybe I’ll put a rhythm to the way I get excited about things I believe in,

Write words to describe my laugh when I’m shaking too hard to take a breath.

Maybe I’ll turn my smile to a rhyme and the beat of my lonely, strong heart to a meter,

Because at the end of the day I am a story

We are all stories waiting to be told and songs waiting to be sung

And the biggest hope in my chest is that people will hear my song and it’s melody will make them want to sing their own.

More Old Writings

     
Hey again. I just found this little thing in my post drafts. Another old writing of mine, which I never posted, probably because I thought it was cliche and annoying. But I'm trying to love all my phases of creation, so I decided to post it today. Hopefully you enjoy :)
               
  I want to visit lands unexplored and green, full of the magical scent of possibility. I want to wander through forests full of little hollows and hills, where you might spot something otherworldly at any second. I want new sights, sounds, smells, and tastes. I want to experience the world through the eyes of a wondering, innocent child, who has everything to learn and nothing to lose. I want to love til my heart has nothing left to give, and then find my strength in a heart of equal strength. I want to go to cities where people buy strange fruits and make spicy traditions around cozy tables. I want to transfer my soul into neat black letters on a white sheet of paper, so people can read them and fill their hearts with fire, and their stomachs with butterflies and their mind with blossoms of poetry. I want a love of life that is contagious and breathtaking. I learned that the word 'fernweh' means "a craving for travel, a homesickness for places you've never been." I guess that's me, and it's an awful ailment.
         

Inspiration--- A Ramble

Last year in March I felt like I was in a writing rut. I was searching for some inspiration, a way to get out and try new things with writing. So naturally, I did what any teenage girl in the twenty first century would, and went to Pinterest for answers. Pinterest came through for me when I saw an ad for something called the Writer's Roadmap. It was authored by a woman named Laura Davis and upon subscribing to it, you would receive weekly thought provoking writing prompts in your inbox. So I decided to give it a go and I subscribed. I did this weekly writing prompt for almost six months, and it ended up being such a cool and insightful experience! But when school started back up I became overwhelmed with my schedule and dropped the habit completely. So today I decided to read back on some of my old writings and I was amazed by what I read. Have you ever read something you wrote in the past and it felt just like you were being transported back to that time? It was just like that, but at the same time I was amazed by the deep insights that were able to come to me just by carving out the time to look deeply inside myself and write what I felt. So I decided I would share with you a few snippets of what I wrote for today's blog post :)

March 29, 2016--
"When we numb ourselves, we betray our inner truth. We betray that which is inside of us, that which bloomed from a seed of truth. Our emotions. Those messengers that are there to tell us something about ourselves. When we numb ourselves to emotions, we can also numb ourselves to conscience. And when that happens, we suddenly find ourselves in a world without morals.
As for forgetting, this too is a sin because when we forget the lessons we have learned from the past, we are bound to repeat our mistakes. And we will have gone through hell in vain because we did not learn from our experience there."

May 24, 2016--
"Recently, I wrote a personal manifesto, detailing my beliefs about all aspects of life....Something that I noticed with awe as I wrote this, was that my belief in a loving God who created the world and who is all powerful, touched every other aspect of belief. My belief in a universe that lives and breathes by the power of love is foundational to my life and makes me who I am.


And finally, on August 2, 2016 I wrote something that was a humongous inspiration to me today :)
"  I am living proof to myself that I can overcome fears. Making mistakes is such a part of life. If we didn’t make them, we would never learn, and I feel that my whole life has been a testament to that. I’ve made so many mistakes, and each one of them taught me something and made me stronger as a person. I wear my imperfections like jewels, and make my insecurities dance in the sunlight. No more will I hide. I will burst forth into the light, and I will show the world courage and dignity as I chase my dreams.
I am finally ready to stop being afraid. To embrace mistakes as they come and let them shape me to be better. I’m endlessly grateful for the things I have learned. I’m ready to move forward. This next chapter of life coming up will be a thrilling one. I’m teetering on the precipice of adulthood, treading the waters of independence. I’m getting ready to begin the unleashing of my potential on the world. It’s a very exciting prospect, and one that I am finally not shrinking from. I know I have the ability to change the world. I’ve always known it, but now I’m not letting my fears get in the way of the achievement of my goals. I feel that in this last month I’ve become a different person. The power of my thoughts, the action coiled within me, is ready to spring forth and make a change. No more will I fear mistakes, because mistakes are the keys that unlock each new version, new layer of an improved me."

This was kind of a scattered, random post, but I hope you took something away from it. There are two morals to this story: 1. Take the time to write! It is so valuable later on, and teaches you so much. 2. Sometimes when searching for inspiration, you need only look as far as yourself.
Thanks so much for reading!
Love,