Today is the day after I heard my voice on the radio. (I am hoping the link below takes you to the interview if you would like to hear my voice)

Click here to listen:  http://blogs.abc.net.au/queensland/2016/01/forest-lake-colouring-in-book-struggles-to-compete-but-given-boost-with-new-website.html?site=brisbane&program=612_breakfast

For a minute I wasn’t sure it was my voice but it was. We hear ourselves inside our heads but not as we sound to others except occasionally when we hear a phone message or like me made it to the radio. It took me a minute to understand the words I was hearing were coming from me. It left me feeling excited and then really vulnerable. You know how, you try to say the right thing and remember to tick all the boxes and make sure you say what is needed and without saying anything that could imply the wrong idea… but there is a microphone in my face (very close). Yep! that was it….and when I get anxious now everything swirls inside my brain and go at light speed and I just have to hope they were the right ones, all the words that came out of my mouth. We talked a little about my book, Journey to Beautiful but mostly we talked about Coffee and Colouring In for Grown Ups.

It left me feeling vulnerable. In life it is rare to have the opportunity to be heard by more than the immediate crowd of people around you. Most adults avoid public speaking and many become tongue tied and deeply shy at the thought of it to the point they won’t even speak up in a meeting. Laughing right here because that has never been me. I was addressing crowds of peers and adults when I was a child with some confidence. As a teen and adult I spoke in churches frequently. Words just simply pour out as a topic unfolds. I have to admit that in those scenarios the agenda was mine or the organisations, but the topic was mine and I could let it flow.

Being interviewed is different because it is about me but the questions are someone else’s looking for truth in my situation. He asked me questions and I answered them but then the interviewer edited them. It felt true to the spirit of me. Jill and Martin were there too and spoke with eloquence about their colouring in experience and the mindfulness benefits of colouring in. It is all in the adventure.

Spencer Howson, the interviewer asked me about my book and its sales. Everyone assumes because it is a colouring in book that it should just fly off the shelves. Maybe they are right and there is an issue with my book or maybe there isn’t and it is just a matter of marketing. I don’t have an answer. I do know that I didn’t set out to graphically design a book four years plus years before the book was published I picked up my pencil and an old black pen I had laying around and drew….and drew and drew on all kinds of paper about this thing that needed to come out of my being, a rendering of years of walking through big life ‘stuff’ and as a result finding myself ‘unwell’ and knowing that if someone did not believe me then I didn’t know what I was going to do. At that time I was so tired I would cry as I cut up the vegetables for dinner at night and on my way to work in the heavy traffic in the morning, then suck in the moisture leaking from my eyes, smile and just do what I needed to do for the day. People tried to diagnose it as being depressed but there was something so wrong with my body it could have easily killed me if it hadn’t finally been found….thank God for swollen feet. I drew all of that, all that was inside me.

Journey to Beautiful is my soul’s voice and whenever I get to look at the pictures and walk through the pages I can hear it. It is ok if other people just see it as ‘designs’ for them to do something to. Words said out loud sort of work that way to. Journey to Beautiful will always be more than images for me. There are special words for what I experience when i drew like mindfulness, and meditation, and deep inner hush that is gentle and sweet. It is a solitary place of quiet respite and what remains when I finish remains. At times when I colour the images I remember the moment of drawing or what fell away from me without effort. Sometimes there is a new insight I didn’t get at the time of drawing that is now so obvious I can’t believe I missed it.  That revelation of hearing my voice, really hearing it always makes me smile and cringe a occasionally and mostly understand what words can’t always hold.

At the time I started touching the pictures again to put them in the book I was breathing high in my chest, my yoga teacher tells me that is the area we breathe in when we are anxious or emotive. I have to walk through memories of people and places and huge letting go moments. Colouring them makes me linger too long in some of the pictures still. When I look at what I draw now, it is different but I am different. my voice may sound similar but the space from which I breathe is lower and more grounded. Spencer asked me if I and missed the boat in the world of colouring and I laughed. No I haven’t but Journey to Beautiful is the telling of a story as much as it is images and I always knew it wasn’t a book everyone would resonate with. To me it isn’t a consumable thing to be seen as pleasing shapes. I have drawn other things that are more that since….bumble bees….I can’t explain bumble bees and their appeal.

I understand that some of the images seem dark but that is where it began, trying to find the light switch in a dark basement so I could find the door. Some of the lines are untidy and the symmetry off (I am always a bit symmetrically challenged), but it is true. The lines inside the lines and the marks inside the shapes were my shadowing, I was drawing for me and what needed to come out. To those brave enough to venture in the images change as the pages fill. You bring your own colour and moment to the spaces, interpreting my ‘words’ to find what you want to find. I love to see my soul’d voice coloured through the eyes of other people they do such beautiful and personal things with it. I had simply determined that no matter what I drew I wanted it to end up being beautiful.

Now is a different time and well reality in my life but after colouring in sometimes it is like the day after I heard my voice everyday. I am well blessed to colouring in with the people I do and more blessed to have a book as it is. It is always a vulnerable thing to be open among others and let them hear your voice and listen to theirs. It is part of the specialness of having our place in a tribe and having our tribe replay our voice to us.

I always feels kind of serious when i finish a blog. You would think on a colouring page I would talk about pencils and shapes but they are not the topics that we talk about throughout a morning….pencils and colours and the fact the weather is playing havoc with some of them….is where the conversation usually begins but then we get real.  Laughter can be followed by deep vulnerability which is then followed by caring silence and life woes are aired and joys celebrated and …… the feelings are all held in the colours and how they end up on the page. This is the deep privilege of colouring with others: caring and hearing our own voices echoed back to us.

with gratitude

Happy Day, Sandy!