Inner Excavate-along: I gather and I see me

On to Chapters 3 and 4 of Liz Lamoreux’s Inner Excavation: Exploring Your Self Through Photography, Poetry and Mixed Media.  Liz is leading a couple hundred of her friends through seven weeks of inner excavation on Flickr, on her blog, and through subscribed posts.  I’ve met some wonderful new friends already through this process and am enjoying seeing how they progress through the prompts.

In chapter 3 (“I gather…”), Liz prompts us to look at what we gather to ourselves and what we are drawn to repeatedly that fills the world we inhabit, gaining insight into who we are and who we want to be.  She asks “who are you?” “what inspires you?” and “how do you nurture yourself?” She is pushing us to “find clues and claim the truths within our thoughts that become tangible on paper.”

I chose to work on the writing exploration segment of this chapter, answering these questions “in poem” about the images and textures of my world right now.

I enjoyed a rare few minutes of quiet when my daughter fell asleep in the car last week.  When we got to our destination, I picked up a scrap piece of paper (yes, my car is a mess!) and jotted this down…

Having looked into our past in Chapter 2, Chapter 4 (“I See Me”) is about where we currently “stand in our lives.” I had fun with a photography series that literally captured my path… my feet and the ground beneath me, “playing with the idea of being rooted in the moment.”

I will be starting a self-portraiture class soon (“Now You“), which is not at all about the photos but more about how we see our authentic selves, and I am nervous.  It’s very difficult for me to be comfortable in front of the camera.  Liz reminds us here that we are in control of how we see our own beauty.  “Give yourself permission to let go of [the assumptions you might have about what photos of our bodies have to look like.”

In the poetry section, we “delve deeper into what the body says, how the body feels, what the body knows.”  It’s a way of looking at ourselves in a different light.

Here are links to previous chapter posts: “I begin” and “I seek.”