I’ve learned to let these comments fuel my passion to write even more wild and disobedient op-eds.

Honestly, it’s my favorite type of writing. I get to unleash my voice. I get to be bold. I get to be sassy. I get to use my Nancy Drew investigative skills. I get to pull disparate thoughts together into something new. To me, it’s a labor of creative love.

On February 25, 2012, I’m taking a seminar in Boston through the Op-Ed Project. This group has been going around the country trying to encourage women to share their voices in op-ed columns. I want to get my voice into the biggest, loudest, baddest op-ed venues I can. And soon, I’m going to offer an op-ed writing class on-line and in-person.

The world needs women to share their voices. It may be the missing link to a world that lessens suffering and promotes beauty.

Here’s my latest piece in The MetroWest Daily News: Keystone PipeLine: A Bad Idea.  You’ll see what I mean about unpleasant comments. Some of them were left by oil-industry folks. It’s their job to discredit anyone who disagrees with the powerful. It’s a compliment that they found my op-ed and ripped it to shreds!

For those of you interested in how I got my start in op-ed writing. I began writing letters to the editor, then free guest columns and now paid columns. I tend to write complex pieces that require quite a bit of research and the connecting of dots not previously connected.

Do any of you men or women write op-ed pieces or want to? How do you feel about unleashing your strongest voice to the public?

Thanks! G.

J, as she likes to be called, has written a new love manifesto/poem that encourages her readers to choose love. Here are the first four lines:

Choose love.

In your relationships,
in the art you create,
the words you let loose,
the causes you take up,

Observing the world near and far, it’s pretty apparent that folks of all ilks have trouble choosing love. Governments seem to have the worst “choosing love” track records and since they reflect the loving or not loving will of their people, it comes down to the citizens being afraid to show love.

I’m going to join J and try to show love in all I do. It raises my fear goosebumps just thinking about it. But since I love challenging the status quo — it’s right up my doing something different alley — I’m going to give it my best fearless shot. I left a comment yesterday on her site and whatever I said made her proclaim her new adventure to be a “love-filled rebellion.” Naturally, I jumped on that idea for this post.

Here are some ideas:

• The next time someone does something that gets the non-love part of you going, take a deep breath and think of a way you can choose love. Did this person really do something that grievous? I used to get all annoyed with folks and not let it go for way too long. Now, I may still get annoyed, but I try to get over it as quickly as possible, to even seek out that person. I can tell you that a lot of folks will try to nail you to the cross for pretty minor stuff. Not speak to you, erase you from their address book, and complain about you to friends.

• I stand up in my town a lot. If I have to do something that ruffles someone else’s feathers, I do not spend the next couple of months hiding from that person, I put myself in his or her way. I go up and say something non feather ruffling. I try to remember, we’re all in this thing called life together.

• Practice some empathy. Every one of us sees the same situation in a different light. Maybe turn your light down or ask them to turn their light up to see the blended truth in the compromised middle somewhere?

• Ask your government, wherever you live, to stop the name calling and foot stomping demands.  It reminds me of gorillas beating their chests in the jungle. Then the shoving starts. We all know where that leads.

• Have mercy on your fellow humans. Life isn’t easy for anyone. As my mother says, “We all have our crosses to bear.” Someone’s life might look good on the outside, but may be a different story on the inside.

How do you fare showing love? Is it hard? Only hard with some folks? Who can you show love to?

Thanks! G.

I’ve long thought that a lack of creative thinking ability has stalled the worldwide economy.

A multitude of problems need solving, yet we continue to prop up dead and dying industries or copy existing ones. It doesn’t make much sense unless you see the root cause as an inability to move forward, an inability to create a meaningful economy, an inability to dream up something new.

Despite returning to painting, singing, piano and taking up drawing, I still felt that I’d lost a part of my once vibrant childhood imagination. So, I began a quest to find out why and see if I could reverse it.

I read tens of books, hung out with nature, talked to other folks and I reached one conclusion — our culture of obedience conflicts with the culture needed for imagination to thrive. Sitting still, being on time, not talking back, doing your homework, going to work for 8+ hours a day, being shackled to an arbitrary best practice – none of that feeds a creative mind. It prepares the person to sit still, be on time, not talk back, stand in line, and do their work.

My niece told me at Christmas that they have to use “indoor voices” inside her elementary school. Yet by junior high my nephew told me they have no recess. They go from class to class. The chance to use an “outdoor voice” doesn’t exist after age 11 until they leave the premises.

That shocked me.

What it they’re excited about something?

We need to reverse engines and go in a new direction, one that encourages folks to see possibilities everywhere, one that lets folks use their voices to express themselves, one that isn’t afraid of enthusiasm and aliveness.

I’ve worked hard to revive my own creative thinking, so I know it is possible. It may sound cliche, but it’s never too late in life to re-engage your imagination. It’s going to require some disobedience to the official life blueprint. You may even want to rip it up and draw your own.

I know that most of you live outside Massachusetts, but for those of you that do — on Wednesday, January 11, 6:30 to 8:30 pm, I’m offering “Reclaim Your Creative Thinking Ability,” through the Friends of Ashland Public Library. It’s FREE and open to the public.

Here’s a blurb about it:

The two-hour program will engage participants in writing and thinking exercises designed to expand their creative and lateral thinking abilities. “Creative thinking takes the train of thought and moves it beyond the cliché into unchartered thinking waters. It is the only way to come up with new ideas,” says Giulietta “Julie.” “Participants will leave this life shop with expanded notions of what’s possible in the world.”

Live nearby and are interested, please call the library and reserve your seat. Phone number to call: 508-881-0134

~

What’s your experience been with keeping your creative thinking ability and imaginations alive?

Thx, G.

Surprisingly, the plot based on a 1954 science fiction novelette called The Adjustment Team by Philip K. Dick drew me right in. If you haven’t seen TAB, a likable guy (David) runs for a New York senate seat when some typical college pics surface and cause him to lose the race. Why these seemingly benign pictures caused him to lose the race didn’t make sense to me, but I discovered the reason later in the film.

The night of his senatorial demise he meets Emily Blunt (Elise) in a bathroom where they click and kiss. Great chemistry. Then they get separated only to be reunited and then separated and reunited and separated.

In this film, every person has his or her life mapped out for them by the Chairman of The Adjustment Bureau. When a person gets off the map, the guy assigned to trail said person adjusts the person’s brain to get them back on track. In David’s case, they decide not to readjust him and instead warn him that if he tells anyone about TAB they will erase his mind. They also warn him to forget about Elise.

But he can’t.David’s unending love for Elise proves to be an uber challenge for TAB teams. So much so that his compassionate pseudo-angel of sorts Harry Mitchell, helps him get to her by lending him his hat, which has the power to let the wearer use doors as wormholes to quickly traverse the city.

After keeping his knowledge of TAB secret for three years, he finally has to tell Elise (in another bathroom) to keep her from marrying someone she doesn’t really love.

I loved the movie because David refused to obey. He refused to stay on the beaten path. He refused to give up trying to be with Elise. The theme “love conquers all” kept weaving its way through the film.

And the voice over at the end blew me away (much like the voice over at the end of my beloved “Summer of ’42. Guess I’m a sucker for a good voice over.)

David’s pseudo-angel Harry Mitchell said, “Most people live life on the path we set for them. Too afraid to explore any other. But once in a while people like you come along and knock down all the obstacles we put in your way. People who realize free will is a gift, you’ll never know how to use until you fight for it. I think that’s The Chairman’s real plan. And maybe, one day, we won’t write the plan. You will.”

Beautifully said! Everything I’m talking about on this blog and in my life shops.

Get off the path others have selected for you and find your own. Activate your free will or you will lose it. You will become so frightened and frozen, that you will not be able to make decisions in your own best self interest.

I talk with folks who have convinced themselves that working to buy generic stuff makes them happy. The crowded malls with their chain stores attest to that fact. If I just get the latest gadget, I’ll feel good about myself. That was not my experience. The stuff did not feel like a reward for staying on the path. No reward existed that would make me feel happy on that path.

I had to get off or I was going to perish.

How about you? Do you feel that you use your free will or someone else’s unfree will? And is The Adjustment Bureau sci-fi or does it really exist?

Many thanks, Giulietta

I’ve been asked by the lovely and compassionate Hannah Brencher to write a love letter to “Elizabeth” during the More Love Letters “12 Days Of Love Letter Writing.” Hannah and I met on one of our blogs several years ago and discovered that we cared about the plight of others. After college, she went to NYC to do an internship concerned with poverty.

There while riding the subway, she got an idea to write anonymous love letters. On her site Hannah says, “I was struggling to get out of bed every morning and I needed an escape from my own sadness and loneliness. So I began writing letters on the train to individuals who seemed like they, too, could use a boost. And it healed me. It really healed me.”

A simple, loving gesture to make the lives of others better. A welcome relief to the fighting and conflict we see all over the world. If only all of us could do what the Bell System ad suggested back in the 80′s, “reach out and touch someone.”

So, I’m going to do that on my blog today. I’ve written Elizabeth a letter, which I will mail later today to More Love Letters “heartquarters.”

Her close friend wrote, “Elizabeth was strong for a long while but has been shutting out all those who have been supporting her, loving her and trying to point her in the direction of God. Elizabeth is a highly creative individual who is multi-faceted and full of potential. She has been through the ringer and is resisting her true life callings.”

Here is the card with the funky peacock I selected to send Elizabeth. The quote spoke to me, “Have only one rule: Be your wild, courageous brilliant self every single day. No matter what.” I hope it will speak to Elizabeth as well.

We really are courageous. We just need to be encouraged to show our courage, to understand that we won’t offend others when we do, to know that we make the world a more welcoming place when let our wild, brilliance show.

I stared at the blank note card for about 30 seconds before I figured out what I wanted to say. Then it poured out of me like a teapot of chamomile tea steaming into a friendly mug. I could have used a letter or 11 like this back in my twenties, when the world seemed dark, pointless and unforgiving like Elizabeth’s. In my late twenties, a woman in one of my classes said to me, “It gets better once you cross into  your thirties.” That little bit of encouragement gave me hope that my life would get better. And it did! Each decades seems to be better than the one that came before it. Folks diss aging, but I’ve found my life to be a lot like wine — it keeps getting better with age.

I’d forgotten what that older woman said to me until I started writing the note to Elizabeth. It feels good to reach out and touch someone else, someone who needs to hear uplifting words.

Lifting up someone else makes me feel lighter!

If you’d like to join Hannah’s love letter writing adventure, please sign up at More Love Letters. I believe that when we write love letters to others, we also write love letters to ourselves. The compassion we send to another bubbles up to our own surface where it gives us a hug.

Thx, G.

I’d never watched an HBO Series and didn’t know what to expect. Regular TV series all seem to be about folks working like dogs or folks solving murders or folks getting horrible surgeries or folks doing forgettable things. I’ve often said to others, “Why do most TV characters work and not do anything else?” Sends a weird message.

After figuring out how to use the On Demand feature on cable to watch the first four episodes (At points just randomly hitting buttons hoping to get where I needed to go.), I kicked back and met Amy.

I loved her. She has a public, angry nervous breakdown at the office in the first episode. It appears to be fueled by a break-up with a married co-worker. I figure it’s about something much deeper, some conflict with the real her and the fake her. The outburst sends her to a three-month meditation, self-love program in Hawaii. She returns seemingly calmer to live with her mother while she gets her finances in order.

Surprisingly, she returns to the company where she was a highly level health and beauty expert. Her job has been eliminated and it’s clear HR doesn’t want her back. (After all, we can’t have emotional outbursts at work. We have to feign self-control at all times. Business does not like emotion.) She tries to get them to create a position for her as a community outreach liaison – someone who makes sure the company does no harm. They don’t go for anything that progressive, but do agree to place her in the basement of the building doing data entry (reminds me of the guy in the fab movie Office Space.)

At first glance, her colleagues all appear to be freaks. They seem to be there because they’ve had a problem working “above ground.” I suspect that will also change as the series continues.

It’s clear that Amy struggles with her former angry self, her still angry self and the calm, caring person she wants/needs to be.

I relate to her character because she’s been enlightened. She now knows that there’s more to life than fancy generic job titles, making money, workaholicism and shopping. She wants to stop corporations polluting. She wants to stop companies from paying workers unlivable wages. She wants to stop the mother of two young daughters from being deported.

She cares, but no one else around her seems to except maybe one colleague, who seems to like her romantically.

I feel for her character because she thinks she’s stuck in this limbo world. She goes for and gets a job working at the homeless shelter but won’t work for $24,000 a year. Instead, she chooses to stay in the basement. It’s a pivotal, painful scene for her. And for anyone that feels stuck by circumstances.

I know people who want to leave their soul-numbing jobs but say they will only leave for the same salary.

I did quit a soul-numbing job and at first made diddly-squat, but within a year I was making more than my previous job. I’d probably be in a psych ward if I had not taken that chance on myself. Yes, it takes a leap of self-faith to cut the golden handcuffs and believe you can fly.

What’s so sad about our developed world is that we tell young children “You can’t fly.” How many parents tell their children who want to major in music that it will not pay the bills and instead to major in engineering.

Why not change the economic world so music and engineering can both produce livable wages? We create our world no matter what we’ve been taught to believe. Many of the math and science jobs out there are funded by the government. They can fund any sector they want. Why not music and art?

But I digress.

I find the show Enlightened enlightening because she wants to do good. Maybe, her company will create this position for her? During the last episode she hands her ex-lover a packet filled with info on the company’s clients and says “please read this.”

Can one enlightened person, enlighten another?

As the holiday to give thanks approaches, it reminds me how fortunate my life has been and how difficult others’ lives have been. I wonder why does it have to be that way? Why can’t we all live fortunate lives?

I’ve been distressed about the young women and children forced into sex slavery. Big subjects speak to me. I don’t care about some jacket going on sale at The Mall, I care about humans made to do horrible things against their will. It’s a growing, very profitable “industry.”

It took me a good year of reading books, watching movies, reading articles, but I finally had my newspaper column published, The Sex Slave Next Door. Please consider checking it out. Some folks won’t read it because they say it’s too hard to read.

I say, imagine living it. Imagine being sold by your parents or your boyfriend. It’s a disturbing subject, yet one that folks need to hear about so it can be stopped. If we keep turning away, how can we stop this sexual holocaust?

I’m convinced these things happen because we are not raised to care, we just give lip service to it. We are raised to compete, to make as much money as possible. That’s the sign of success – individual  materialistic gain. Why can’t success being working with others to live a great life, too?

I was raised not to care about others. It took me a long time to understand that other people do matter and that they have a right to live a life of dignity.

If you’ve got the courage to read my column that would be a great gift for the folks who suffer in this way. Light may be at the end of their dark tunnel, if each person who isn’t enslaved helps open the door to their freedom a little bit wider.

The writer George Eliot said, “What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult to each other?”

Have a wonderful day of thanks and giving.

Giulietta

~

I’d been in the cave for 3 days. My food and water were almost gone, my portable lamps running low on batteries. Yet, I didn’t want to leave until I’d completed the Van Dussen Challenge. I thought back to the argument that led me to sign up for it …

~

My husband said I’d never last. “Ha! I’ll show you,” I said and then dared him to do the challenge with me. Now, I don’t know where he is, and he doesn’t know where I am.

“Is a convertible BMW really worth it?” I wonder, thinking about the grand prize. “Yes, yes it it,” I conclude.

If I only make it out of here alive.

~

Three long days in virtual reality, not sure anymore if I am in a real cave or still laying on my couch. I think I remember signing up for a psychology experiment involving deprivation and the prize of a BMW for who lasts the longest.

Getting weak, though, but, I can’t remember the safe word to get unplugged. My, this BMW is sooooo nice, I think I’ll just take it for a little drive.

~

The vision slips away and my head clears. What the hell was I thinking when I signed up for this?

Winning the BMW wasn’t my goal.

I wanted to prove a point – that I could endure this and more. To face up to and conquer my fears of the unknown, following the Van Dussen method of descending to the darkest depths, both physical and mental. I would show the world what I was made of and that macho husband of mine that I could get through this and win the prize that was his main goal.

A long sigh breaks the dark silence in the cave.

~

For a moment I thought the sigh belonged to someone else, hoped even. Then I realized it was mine. Despite my predicament, it was a sigh of relief for I’d also realized that the challenge was both literal and figurative. I’d taken it to its extreme and had descended to the darkest depths of my soul, searching for my truth.

It wasn’t the world or my husband that I was trying to prove myself to, it was me. I’d reached the point in my life where all the worldly goods, all the extravagances, yes, even the BMWs, meant nothing if I couldn’t reach down deep and find the real me. I could see now that most of my life had been spent trying to prove myself to the world, to my husband, my parents, my so-called friends and I’d failed miserably because none of them could know who I truly am. I was, have been, little more than a facade.

~

I’ve forgotten by now, what are the “rules” of this Challenge? Do they matter any more – really, truly? They’re ‘someone else’s’ rules, from a different world. I’m here, I’m doing this Work. It is important to Me, to my Heart, in the Now.

~

Yet, I’ve always longed to be able to sit down and sketch something from my own mind. My natural love for sketching got squelched in third grade when my science teacher sent me into the corner as punishment for laughing. I’d drawn some bold, bodacious, bawdy pictures of three movie stars in my art class and brought them with me into Science. The boys gathered around me and we were all laughing. That’s when the teacher’s need to control us hit the fan and I ended up languishing in the corner on a stool my paintings rolled up on her desk.

For whatever psychological reason, that incident interrupted my ability to draw confidently from my own mind. I never quite got my stride back after her uncalled for punishment.

About a month ago, I decided to give drawing a serious try. I want to do several things with my business that will require me to be able to draw with confidence. I wanted to learn what to see and what to ignore and then take the results and craft it into something new and inspirational.

I bought a great book to assist me on this adventure called Expressive Figure Drawing. It’s more than a book; it’s a series of exercises in learning to see what we want to see and not what we’ve been taught to see. The principles can be applied to anything in life.

Author Bill Buchman tells the reader to “trust the process” and that “the process will make the drawing.” What’s important is to develop your own process, the one that works for you, the one that has meaning for you.

We’re taught at an early age not to trust our own process, not to trust ourselves, and to instead trust some generic unprocess that has nothing to do with who we are or what we feel.

It’s not that I couldn’t draw, I just couldn’t trust myself to let go enough to draw. I’m happy to report that after doing a lot of the letting go/gesturing-type exercises I already feel more confident and free in my drawing.

Bill also says to look for the spirit in what you are drawing and use line and shape to express that aliveness. I’m learning to draw an idea or emotion – not a thing.  I’m learning to express my feelings through the drawing. It doesn’t have to be anatomically correct – that’s one of those myths.

It’s not about the product, it’s about the process. Decide before you start what you want to accomplish in terms of feelings. What do you want your viewer to feel?

I experienced a lot of angst when attempting to draw through the post-sit-in-the-corner years because I kept trying to force something onto the page that didn’t even exist, some emotional-less product. It corresponds well with what I’m trying to accomplish with my Muse life shops – to encourage folks to unlearn what you have learned and gravitate toward whatever makes you feel alive and the hell with those who want you to go through life like a zombie.

I’d love to hear about your own creative processes. What works for you?

Muse thx, G.

p.s. check out my first inspirational offering …

We subsidize farmers, pharmaceutical companies, oil companies and others. Why not subsidize people’s strengths? Why not take our soul crushing economic model of forcing folks into pre-existing job categories and change it up?

Yes, I know what the skeptics will say. It won’t make a profit.

How do we know that? What if paying folks to do what makes them come alive produced ideas and products and inventions that folks actually wanted. What if work became something uplifting? Wouldn’t that life the world up with it?

Take Steve Jobs. He was really an inventor but folks didn’t see him that way. They saw him as a computer guy. He needed to keep inventing new things.

Now, let’s take Buckminster Fuller. I knew about him only as the inventor who patented the geodesic dome. Recently, I started reading his biography, Buckminster Fuller’s Universe. In 1927, depressed and suicidal he stood before Lake Michigan and contemplated hurling himself in.

An idea stopped him.

What if he decided to think differently? What if he decided to embark on a experiment to see how one person could help humanity?

Despite being broke, he conducted his experiment to work without profit as his driving force. It lead him to create all sorts of inventions and theories. He also refused to be narrowly categorized instead describing his output as “an emerging synthesis of artist, inventor, mechanic, objective economist and evolutionary strategist.”

The experiment lasted 56 years during which he referred to himself as Guinea Pig B and the planet as Spaceship Earth. He chronicled his daily life, ideas and philosophies in a diary he called Dymaxion Chronofile. He remained a sought after speaker well into his 80′s.

Perhaps, we might start thinking in terms of human profit rather than monetary profit.

Here’s my question to you. What might your contribution to humanity be? I’m trying to reconnect folks with their creativity and strengths. I feel that once we do that, the world will lift itself up.

Thanks! G.