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Colors of Life – Teddy A Children’s Story

A couple of years ago, I was thinking of writing children’s books; I came up with this story called Teddy. I named it after a teddy bear that I’ve had for many years. Not that creative with the name.

I recorded the story at the SAG AFTRA Voiceover lab. At the time I was practicing being a reader of audiobooks.

Today’s mood I wanted it to be uplifted and have something children can listen to. Self-reflection is always a good thing, but today we’re going to have fun with a simple rhyming children’s story. Enjoy the story of Teddy and his friends. Please let me know what you think in the comments. Have a blessed day.

Teddy bear sits on a chair
Sees me and stares
What will we do today?
Can we go out and play?

Yes, we can, little one
Let’s go out and have some fun
The day is sunny
Teddy says, “I want some honey.”

Walking down a forest path,
Suddenly we hear a splash
“Help me please!” yells the bee
I can’t swim in the sea

Teddy grabs a stick
Bee asks, “Is this a trick?”
“No, grab on, I’m here to help.”
The stick is what the bee held

Out the bee came soaked
The bee dried himself and spoke
“Thank you for saving me
Can I offer you some tea?

“I don’t have any money,
Do you want some honey?”
Yes, I do
For my tea brew

Tea party and all are happy
Time to go home for nappy
The day was fun
Being out in the sun

Thank you, sunshine
For my lunchtime
This beautiful day
In the month of May

https://poeticresurrection.podbean.com/e/colors-of-life-teddy-a-children-s-story/

Until I release this children’s book check out my other books here.

Happy Ukulele Children Party by MusicLFiles
Link: https://filmmusic.io/song/6302-happy-ukulele-children-party
License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

One of the most difficult issues of letting go has been acting.  I was grieving my dreams. I love it and I have a passion for it, but realizing I wasn’t going to be making a living from it was heartbreaking. If it comes up I’ll be happy to be on the set. I discuss this in the episode.

Grieving Dreams is when we review our lives and realize a dream we have pursued so long doesn’t benefit us anymore.

I recorded an episode of my other podcast, Chica and the Man with my co-host Alex Greenwood. We talked about career changes and how it affected us. (Listen to that episode here).

How we grieve when we have pursued a job, career, or a business and gave our heart and soul to it only to have to let it go. We know it’s the right thing to do, but yet there’s this sadness of letting go. We think what-if I could have done more? Where did I go wrong? Was I just not good enough? In reality, I feel the lessons and importance of it have run its course. When we feel this way, it is a form of grieving. We need to address it. As Eleanor Haley from Grieving the Loss of Hopes and Dreams states: When we care deeply about something, it can be difficult to know when to let go. Sometimes our hopes are all we have to keep us getting out of bed in the morning. People always like to say things like, It’s never too late to follow your dreams and many times this is true. When there’s a chance to see your dreams through or there is still joy in the journey, by all means, keep going.

I grieved letting go of acting. There was no more joy in the journey. I knew I couldn’t make a living at it, yet I pursued it for many years. I was in disbelief because I had invested so many years and my soul in it. How can I love acting and the career doesn’t love me back? Nowadays, if it comes my way, I’ll be happy to do it. It’s the pursuit of it I have released. It was heartbreaking and liberating at the same time.

Grief is a normal response to loss during or after a disaster or other traumatic event. Grief can happen in response to loss of life, as well as to drastic changes to daily routines and ways of life that usually bring us comfort and a feeling of stability. Common grief reactions include:

• Shock, disbelief, or denial
• Anxiety
• Distress
• Anger
• Periods of sadness
• Loss of sleep and loss of appetite

CDC on grief and Loss (see link below)

Regardless of the scenario, the loss of hopes and dreams can be incredibly hard to accept and cope with. Eleanor Haley.

Deep listening is the practice of turning toward your feelings and emotions. 

Most of us have the tendency to run away from anything uncomfortable within us. It’s only natural. But numbing, avoiding, and rejecting our pain only makes what we feel larger and ‘scarier’ than it truly is. When we turn toward our pain with curiosity and gentleness, we often find an immediate sense of relief. Aletheia Luna

What I’ve learned through grief is to accept, be kind, and love myself. Life will have its moments, it’s part of living. Learn to ride the beautiful, never-ending passions and gifts of life.

The poem for this week is Quiet from Inspire Me: Perception

Black and white
Chrome bedroom
Reflects silvery gray moods of
The uncharted mind

Incandescent garden lights
Shine through the blinds
Marking lines on face
Stares at the light

Answers from another realm
Beyond our three dimensions
Silence prey’s existence of
Yearning questions

An essence enters
Smoky figure gazes
Into questioning eyes
Serene presence felt

Changing monochrome
Movie of thoughts and dreams
Reflect on cheeks and lips
Grin extends to essence

Crimson smile, blushing face
Sends joy to ashen figure as
Chromatic shades appear and
Smoky image disperses

Lights fade into darkness
REM creating memories of
Longevity with peaceful
Nightfall sleep

Goodnight

 

Music by: Ocean Bliss by Gotama

https://gotama-music.bandcamp.co

https://lonerwolf.com/deep-listening/

https://whatsyourgrief.com/loss-of-hopes-and-dreams/  (Eleanor Haley)

https://www.cdc.gov/mentalhealth/stress-coping/grief-loss/index.html

https://www.helpguide.org/articles/grief/coping-with-grief-and-loss.htm

 

Yearend episode 2021

Here we are at the end of 2021. Another year of the pandemic. When this pandemic started, it was a time to reflect. Reflect, I did and now in the second year–I’d like it to end. I’ve been vaccinated and boosted and, to be honest, I don’t want any more vaccinations, but it’s not about me—it’s about those around me. I want the pandemic to end.

These last two years have been a challenging and trying time. I had a friend die this year of covid. I’ve had a scare with my elderly parents and I’m grateful they’re okay. I feel blessed that everyone and I are healthy. I was hoping the pandemic would have ended with herd immunity, but we never got to the 70% vaccinated to have that occur. I wish I had an answer to what is happening; I don’t think anyone knows.

My year in review.

I started a second podcast called Chica and the Man with podcaster and friend Alex Greenwood of the Mysterious Goings On podcast. It’s so much fun to just talk about anything that comes to mind. The subtitle of Chica and the Man is As Unscripted as it Gets. It’s different from the Poetic Resurrection podcast. Doing this podcast has been slow in editing as my computer crashed and it’s taken me about a month to retrieve my information. I was shocked but can’t complain the computer lasted seven years.

I’m on vacation now and I’m working on my fourth book—Inspire Me: In Time of Need, still. I have a new editor; Ruben Rodriguez and I’m looking forward to the release—early next year. Fingers crossed. I love writing poetry and the last two years have put a slight halt in writing. I guess the pandemic has affected me more than I thought. So many deaths, sending blessings to families for your healing. The dichotomy of this nation and others. This is a world healing time and even though we would like to get back to normal, what is normal anymore?

I’m an avid researcher. I feel exhilarated when I learn a new concept, belief, or skill, and yet I’m exhausted this year. I used to feel I knew what I wanted and now it’s all in question. Do I want to continue acting? I love being on the set, so if it comes up, I’ll be happy to do it. I had two photoshoots this year. One was headshots with Mark Atteberry, which I also use for my podcast, and the other was an artsy shoot with Ken Sawyer. I had a great time doing both. I booked a print job and have auditioned for many shows.

Poetry, another passion of mine since childhood, still exists but it’s changed what I want to write. I’ve gone from writing about acceptance and life to a surreal style. A style I find challenging to write since the reader needs to visualize and understand it.

The Poetic Resurrection Podcast has reached over fifty episodes and has over 1500 downloads and as Alex Greenwood informed me, that’s fantastic for a podcast without an advertising budget. I’m on season three of the podcast and I want to say thank you to all the guests for honoring me with your presence and knowledge.

I meditate every day and decided to become a teacher on the Insight Timer app I have talks and meditations.

The poem for this week is Love and Blessings, recorded in 2020 and is available to see and hear on YouTube. It’s from my upcoming book Inspire Me: In Time of Need.

When thoughts
Overwhelm your being
Send love

When worrying about the family
And wanting to care for them
Send love

When sleep evades
When thoughts repeat
Send love

When finances diminish
And needs remain unmet
Send love

When feeling defeated
When feeling alone
Send love

When feeling fear
That life isn’t fair
Send love

Sending love
Doesn’t cost anything
Sending love
Brings us to the present

Happy New Year–love and blessings.

In the meantime, check out my other poetry books here.

Music by: Bensound.com
Song: Love

It’s been over a month since I posted. Not because I didn’t want to but because my desktop computer crashed. As an actor, your videos, pictures, and social media posts are so important. Gratefully, I have cloud backup and a laptop to download my media. It takes time and can be frustrating, but at least I have a way of retrieving my information. I’ve decided to upload all my new photos to this site (coming soon).

My suggestion to all entertainment people backup your computer. Be it to an external hard drive or a cloud service.  You have too much to lose.

Have a great weekend.

Check out my gallery.

Check out my poetry and podcast at Poetic Resurrection.

This week I had an in-person audition. It was great to get out and go to a casting office. While I was waiting to see the casting director. He came out and informed his assistant how rude the previous actor was in the room. I was surprised by this. I’ve never heard someone be rude in the room. Most of the time actors are doing everything they can think of to be friendly since they want the job and want to show they’re easy to work with.  My advice to anyone – actor or not is to be kind. Your situation is your situation. Yes, we all have bad days but an audition is a job interview. Being rude at a job interview isn’t going to get you the job. Take a deep breath and smile before entering the room.

Enjoy your week and be kind.

Check out my other blog postings here.

In the meantime,  my poetry books and  the Poetic Resurrection Podcast here or at PR Podcast

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Lately, I haven’t posted too much about acting since it’s continuous self-tapings. I actually had an in-person audition this week. It was fun.  I forgot what it was like to interact with other actors. The drive to the audition is always a challenge in Los Angeles. Friday during rush hour is one of the worse times if not the worse time to have to drive.  I was amazed I got there in 35 minutes, not so going home – 75 minutes home.

I’ve been working on another podcast with Alex Greenwood of Mysterious Goings On and this week we’re going to launch Chica and the Man Podcast. The podcast is as unscripted as it gets.  We’re both podcasters (Poetic Resurrection Podcast), and we pick a subject and go for it. It is basically about everything and nothing at the same time.  We laugh and banter.  I’ll keep you posted when the show is released.

Check out my other blog postings here.

Have a great week!

 

I watched an entire season of Ram Dass teachings and all the quotes this week are his.

The teachings had everything in it from his disliking of people, to his sexuality, to his questioning of Enlightenment. But what I noticed throughout the entire season it’s about being. He was just being.

How difficult it is for most of us to just be. Just sit still to quiet the mind and just be. So much of what we learn is to be a doer or a thinker or a seeker.

“The thinking mind is what is busy. You have to stay in your heart. You have to be in your heart. Be in your heart. The rest is up here in your head where you are doing, doing, doing.” 

The idea of being is just being. We have the answers to our lives, but we don’t sit quietly to hear what they are saying. There is more to us than this three-dimensional physical plane. We see this in our dreams, meditations and sometimes we get that aha moment when we talk to somebody or watch a TV show or overhear someone speaking. It’s amazing to me when you get those little nudges and I don’t know where they come from. Is it intuition? Is it our higher self, our angels, spirit guides? In the past, when I have fought these nudges, I will fall flat on my face. So, follow that intuition, Spirit guides, higher self, etc. because it’s usually right. “Remember, we are all affecting the world every moment, whether we mean to or not. Our actions and states of mind matter, because we’re so deeply interconnected with one another. Working on our own consciousness is the most important thing that we are doing at any moment, and being love is the supreme creative act.”

These nudges told me to write and publish my poetry. I was scared to do that because yes; I was exposing who I was. I was afraid I would not be accepted. The opposite happened. I was accepted. This same little nudge came to me constantly for two years to start up the Poetic Resurrection podcast. I didn’t know what the podcast should be about. I knew it would not be about acting. Then, during the pandemic, I saw people marching and helping at food banks and I thought, how wonderful would life be if we had self-love and self-acceptance? With these acceptances, it would be easy to accept and love others. There would be no fear of loss. Whichever direction these nudges are directing you, they need to be of a kind heart.

“Unconditional love really exists in each of us. It is part of our deep inner being. It is not so much an active emotion as a state of being. It’s not ‘I love you’ for this or that reason, not ‘I love you if you love me.’ It’s love for no reason, love without an object.”

The poem for this week is Continuum from Inspire Me: Perception.

Continuum

Spring florets glimmer
In afternoon light
Scent of fresh tulips
Myths of existence—fables

Trembling in 90 degrees
Veneer of tears
Illusions of turmoil
Created by self
Head spins—Pandora’s Box

Seven sins tap across the stage of
A cardinal songbird
As the earthfall cleanses itself
Hope gathers irises
For a rainbow bridge

Oyá* conjures and flees storm
Yemaya*—mother disapproves
Amazon and Niger Rivers
Dominated
Femininity protected

Travel—Antipodes
Indian ocean with full moonlight
Glistens as the waves erupt
Hera’s* vengeful heart
Aches from illegitimate family

Crumbled mirror of water
Tears cascade past seven years,
Moisture blooms lilies of death
Phoenix’s ashes resurrected
In endless evolution

Listen to the Poetic Resurrection Podcast here or at PR Podcast

Get Ram Dass life-changing book Be Here Now at https://amzn.to/2ZQ6iuW

Check out his website: https://www.ramdass.org/

Please note we are an Amazon Associate and receive commissions that help support our podcast.

• Oyá uses tornados as her weapon and raises dead armies to use as her warriors.
• Yemaya is a powerful orisha who’s the mother of living things.
• Hera is Zeus’ wife, best known for her jealousy of Zeus’s other family.

 

Yesterday, I was honored to once again interview Luis J. Rodriguez for an upcoming episode on Poetic Resurrection. We spoke for about two hours and we had an amazing conversation about many subjects, including sexual abuse. Being a survivor of this, I had written the poem The Little Girl featured in my first book, Inspire Me: Raw. I’m grateful to my parents for being there for me. It was an experience I thought I had overcome since I could talk about the situation. But, I hadn’t.

It wasn’t until I wrote the poem that I could release the shame and trauma I was holding onto. It served no purpose but to keep me down. Why would I want to hold on to that? The situation is that we sometimes don’t know we’re still holding onto the past. It has a way of showing up as a trigger and that’s when I knew I had to work on letting go. I don’t believe in “forgive and forget”. Yes, I can forgive, but you don’t forget. You learn to forgive them and yourself for holding onto so much pain throughout your life.

I’ve noticed many survivors talk about their experience and I wanted to do the same; I just wrote from the perspective of the child, because the child doesn’t understand.

Listen to the Poetic Resurrection Podcast here or at PR Podcast

Buy Inspire Me: Raw on Amazon

The Little Girl from Inspire Me: Raw

The little girl walks to school
Tenements line gray streets
She does well in school
Her five-year-old stature
Shows resistance & strength

Drawings of prismic colors
Joy and glee adorn her face
Hesitant to show teacher
Waiting for praise—teacher questions
She understood but couldn’t answer

Teacher screams at her
Points—to disappear into
The sea of moveable desk
She gazes at her tattered shoes
Her friend speaks English, she does not

Colorless teacher was unkind
To the little girl
Who only speaks Spanish
Tears flow down her face
She hides – the teasing kids

Goes home, keeps to herself
Pretends to be an actress
Living a world that wasn’t her own
Only hearing voices of a different land
Citizens we are, but not considered same

Pretending so young to be okay
Her seven-year-old friend
Said she wanted to play
A store basement, dark and clammy
Her friend gazes on while she screams
“It hurts,”. “Why did you do this?”

A teenage boy
Took friend’s innocence and
Now he’s taken the little girl’s
Her soul and worth
But she doesn’t understand

The store owner saves her,
Atop soaring stairs
Bold voice of disgust
Vibrates the crypt
Boy halts, he runs

She now rests at home
A peeling grey wood porch
Third-floor view—sits on step
Sunless hallway
Looking at the sky so blue

Doesn’t know how she got there
Mind’s a haze of events
Discolored panties, hand washed often
Advertise the status of her little life

The bandages trying to hold
The innocence lost. It’s too late
Mom looks at her—
Turns away and cries.
Did she do something wrong?
Sorry you’re hurting; doesn’t know what to do

I’m sorry mom
Don’t mean to make you cry
Don’t mean to make you cry
Tears never came to me
The little girl who didn’t understand

 

It was an honor to be a featured speaker at the 2nd Annual Ashe Academy Mentors & Mimosas Gala. It was a festive and insightful gala with speakers, awards, and scholarships.  Please check out and donate to The Ashe Academy as they are doing great things for the community.

You can read about  Samuel Ashe II’s interview and listen to it here.

 

As promised from last week’s post. Here’s a second picture from the photoshoot. This is impromptu. Again, thanks Ken for the picture. I’ll be updating my gallery section soon. In the meantime, check out the gallery.