Tag: wordpress

Blogger Conferences?

conferences

This may already exist, making this post completely irrelevant in which case you could be doing something more valuable with your time. Though I do hope you’re sacrificing a minute or two to hear this amazing idea of mine that probably already exist. 🙂

What if someone could organize a Bloggers Conference? I know there are a lot of them, but this is not just any conference. Not just a community of writers sitting around tables listening to boring PowerPoint presentations from “professionals” that cost you rent money to attend, I’m talking about a fun meet-up of the bloggers you interact with daily. A stream of writing activities, individual business workshops for you to sell your material, and exciting activities against the backdrop of a relaxed atmosphere. A place where bloggers, who may not be writers in the organized sense, can come together and meet face to face. And to top it all off this is an event that is funded & supported by….you guessed it: Bloggers. We can set a date (preferably in the summer) and vote on a central location that could better assist our goals for this event. We can set up committees to assist with food, funding, transportation, activities, & promotion. A conference like this can even give us the opportunity to have an Award ceremony in which we are able to give each other tangible awards. Depending on its success, this can be something for bloggers to repeat once a year and be less expensive to attend.

 

Welcome

150315_0003

I picked up your scent going out the door this morning. I should have known that the impulse of a summer dress, short sleeved and cool, and the sliding of my foot into sneakers meant you were not far away. Instead, I would let my sweater drape over my arm and sniff the moisture you left hanging in the air. It wasn’t very bright out, but budding flowers and children laughing was enough. Did not need to see the sun lean its body dramatically over the clouds to feel the heat of spring on my skin. Bright colored birds sang a joyful tune on into the sky, and the curtains moved against the window sill just as seductively as the tree branches swayed leaves to and fro. And as my husband presents me with a pot of African violet, with petals all soft and blooming, and my neighbors resurrect house chairs for a spot on the porch, I know that spring has arrived. Welcome.

Lasting Marriages – Miracles in Disguise

Circa: 2012, me and Hubby on the way to New Orleans to port for our 7 day Cruise
Circa: 2012, me and Hubby on the way to New Orleans to port for our 7 day Cruise

“As far as I’m concerned, if a Black man and woman make marriage work in amerika, they’ve accomplished a miracle. Because everything is against them. Just being poor is one of the biggest obstacles. Most of the arguments are about money. It’s hard to be loving and caring when you can’t pay the bills and you don’t know where the next dollar is coming from”

– Assata Shakur

This excerpt from Assata’s autobiography is so on point that I had to share it with you. This I do not limit to Black people but all people. Marriage is something I think we take highly for granted. It is one of the oldest institutions in which requires so much work and yet receives so little praise. I just want to take the time to encourage all of my married people, especially my married Black people, since our divorce rates are higher than any ethnic group. As Assata has mentioned, it is a struggle to focus on the love you have with one another when there are so many other distractions surrounding the basics. Trying to live life, fulfill a career, rear the children, pay bills, it all gets cloudy sometimes. But we cannot allow this to damage the beauty of the coming together of man and woman. I have been married for seven years now and we’ve been together eight total. One of the things we love to do together (aside from travel) is movie night. It started as something sporadic and has now become a tradition. Now movie night is every night! Lol. It gives us the opportunity to enjoy each others company after a long day with life. When we come into the door and we finish our dinner and all the miscellaneous things in preparation for the next day; when the lights dim and the surround sound begins, we try to leave everything else behind us. No smartphone. No internet. No talk about work and bills and blah blah blah, just me and him. It nurtures our relationship in ways that are probably far more impactful than we can realize at this moment. While I still consider myself a newlywed as compared to some of you veterans, I just want to encourage you to find an activity you share with your hubby or wifey that no matter what happens in the world, it does not get in the way of your bond. In the words of Lena Horne “It’s not the load that weighs you down, it’s the way you carry it”. So shift some of that weight, get rid of some even. But find something to do together that makes the whirling world stand still. Be honest and open with each other concerning your flaws and doubts and feelings and allow the love that brought you together to be a kind of therapy within not just your marriage, but in your life. Marriage is work and anyone who tells you different is a liar. It is not easy and sometimes it can be a real struggle. It is for this reason that if you are married and have been for some time, across nationalities, if you are still married, then you are a living miracle. Never underestimate that.

Womanhood Don’t Begin in Menstrual Cycles

Yecheilyah-72dpi-1500x2000-e-bookIs a collection of poems and inspirational quotes that focuses on womanhood. Scheduled for release at the end of this month, this book combines poetry with the strength of true womanhood. It will also feature an audio book of a selection of pieces. It will be available as an e-book as well as in print. I will also present opportunities for free copies to be given in exchange for a review. Details on that coming soon.

From Girlhood to Womanhood

When I got my first menstrual cycle at thirteen, I remember everyone being very excited. I remember them hugging me and explaining things I did not wholly understand. I was not very excited, but they were. This was obviously a very important part of my life that the adult women before me had apparently made clear. “Why was everyone so happy about this?”  I thought.

Today, the menstrual cycle is no longer symbolic of the great “Welcome to Womanhood” or “Rite of Passage” as it once was. Women are not excited to speak about it. They may feel it exposes the “nastiness” of too much information. And in most extreme cases, many young women do not understand what it is. What has degraded a woman’s transition from girlhood to womanhood? We do know one thing for sure: the maturity of a young woman’s mind yesterday as compared to today. It seems that at some point in our history, the growth of our little girls, especially within the black community, has depended so much on the shape of the body, that it has stumped mental growth. Young women walk around here today and they think turning eighteen or twenty-one automatically gives them a right to womanhood, although the cultivation of their mind is stuck in childhood. Many of them do not understand that womanhood is not just the outer appearance of what makes up a female. It is not breast, booty, vagina and hips, and it does not arrive necessarily with age. Though with age comes wisdom, not everyone who is of age is wise, and as such not even age itself can alone define womanhood. For this reason we cannot assume, for today’s woman, that her womanhood began the moment she bled her first menstrual cycle.

Writer’s Quote Wednesday – Teaching

Yea yea, I took the easy route this week. I snagged this picture from Google lol. I do have a loaded schedule, but I did not want to miss out on one of my favorite weekly activities, Writer’s Quote Wednesday.  I titled today’s quote teaching, but it is not the kind of teaching you may think. I titled this post Teaching from the perspective that you are the teacher of how other people treat you:

you-teach-people

In truth, people will take advantage of you. You don’t have to do anything to deserve it. You can be the nicest, sweetest person in the world and still suffer this fate. This is not an endeavor any of us can escape. At some point in our lives and without our permission, someone somewhere will take from us. What they take varies. But in some point in your life you will come across those who do not have the same level of appreciation for who you are. Now, this is, in my opinion,  two fold. On the one end, no matter what you do or say and how you say it, you cannot control how others see you. That’s their business and theirs to deal with.

On the other hand, what you allow in your space is a personal responsibility. Whereas we cannot control how people see us and whether or not they choose to appreciate what they see, we can however control our reactions. You have the right to let people know for example, when they have offended you. It does not mean your level of love has diminished or that you are enemies with the offender, it’s just that you are teaching this person who YOU are. Many of the people who will hurt and offend you first are those who will possibly be among your best friends. That’s because they have gone through the course of getting to know you, in which case you have taught them.

“Don’t misinterpret your lyrics, expect some criticism. That’s a part of the gift, so I gladly accept it. You don’t have to agree, but you gotta respect it.”

No one should have to be mistreated. But while that fault is on the person doing the mistreating, the victim (of sorts) still has to bear a portion of that responsibility, and he or she does not have to be mean or loud and obnoxious to do it. Kindly and gracefully you can teach people what you will and will not accept.

We cannot control others views of us, but we do have the right to intervene any situation that causes someone to bring that negative energy into our space. We do this by what we allow, what we stop, and what we reinforce.

writers-quote-wed-20151

Don’t forget to check out Writer’s Quote Wednesday every Wednesday, hosted by Silver Threading.

Photography

My beautiful sister Pamela
My beautiful sister Pamela, Photo by EC

Honestly, I can’t teach your ways to anyone, nor do I know much about you. I don’t talk about you a lot either, or cough up revelations about how I came to enjoy the way your eyes capture and then freeze our lives. I do remember however our first real encounter. It was the 11th grade. Mrs. Luno coupled us for the school yearbook, and we walked the hallways of Harper High School like we had been together for years. You wrapped your arms around my neck and let my pupils kiss your face. Together we recorded, froze, and transformed time into memory. We followed Jesse Jackson and Arnie Duncan through interviews and meetings. You even let me choose what to see and hold you in my arms during assemblies, plays, and basketball games. Letting me control the way your body felt in my hands, and in seconds we created images both tangible and symbolic; both real and fantasy. It was the first time I came to appreciate this kind of relationship with technology. We had so much in common: Your shutter and my pupil, your film and my retina, and our capacity to record the past; your memory card, and my brain. I still don’t completely understand you, but goodness, don’t I love holding the camera!