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| EARTH DOG WHITE BIRD, 1988. (Art by Hallelujah Truth) |
Today in response to the prompt on THE DAILY CREATIVE PRACTICE, my group on Facebook (join us here), I would like to tell the story of how I became Earth Dog White Bird long before I became Hallelujah Truth (see prompt below).
In the beginning was me, Ruth Schowalter, a journalist and poet, who one day decided to take her words and fashion them into images. I was 30 years old, and three decades of living seemed to weigh heavy on me.
Nontraditional, unmarried, curious, well-educated, but directionless, I peered into meditation and my dreams for answers. I had returned to meeting with a mentor, Dr. James Yhu, to continue understanding the principles of Buddhism. We had met when I was 25 and rooming with Wu Mei Qin, a PhD candidate majoring in Noise Control Engineering and one of the first young mainland Chinese scholars allowed to pursue her studies in the United States. We lived in Auburn, Alabama. How far away that time seems now!
Chinese culture and language engulfed me throughout my 20s--the time I spent in Auburn, Alabama, and I studied as much as I could of both but never got to travel to China. However, I did choose to claim my Chinese horoscope with an open heart. Based on the year and month I was born in, I was the EARTH DOG!
Then because my life was rich with Chinese friends, teachers, and students (who I tutored English), I gained another identity! My name RUTH poses a pronunciation challenge for many language speakers, and Chinese speakers pronounce the "r" as an "l" and the "th" as an "s." RUTH then became pronounced as "loose." Since I was tall and white, the bird, my Chinese tutor, Michele, associated me with was the white heron. Surprisingly, the Chinese word for this white bird is pronounced "Loo Se."
I was WHITE BIRD!
Delighted that I identified with two animals that fit quite well into the Yinyang symbol, I decided to create a logo to represent ME! Grounded in the EARTH and flying in the SKY, seeds of one another, perpetually shifting flowing and becoming.
And that is how I became EARTH DOG WHITE BIRD when I was 30 years old, long before I named myself Hallelujah Truth.
MONDAY FUNDAY BLOG PROMPT #10 YOUR CREATION STORY
(A collaborative prompt between me an anonymous geologist):
Create anything. Then in writing, describe the process, in any fashion, how you conceived, manipulated, and/or were influenced.
Think of this as your CREATION STORY. You are invited to let your response be reflective and historic—giving us a sense of something that already happened.
Your CREATION STORY helps everyone in the group to become aware of the context in which your creative work is made.
“Telling CREATION STORIES is a rite of passage that initiates outsiders into theinner context of the image.” --Sean McNiff
That's Coffee with Hallelujah! SOUL BLOG with me and share your CREATION STORY with me. I also invite you to join my Facebook group, The Daily Creative Practice, and share your story with others there. Big Love to you all.
