Anne Marie Bennett interviewed at Writer Apprentice

Today at my other blog I'm interviewing Kaleidosoul founder and SoulCollage(R) facilitator Anne Marie Bennett about the release of her new book, Bright Side of the Road: A Spiritual Journey Through Breast Cancer. Anne Marie talks about her journey and shares about her writing process. I'm honored to interview her. She's a delightful lady. Stop by!

The Writer Apprentice

New Year, looking for a new card...

It's a new year, and I thought I'd make a new commitment to SoulCollage.

To begin I have an "I am the One Who" without a card! But I will obviously have to make one. This just kind of bubbled up while I was writing the first draft of my Holocaust novel in November:

I am the confusion. I am the appeal to unity. I am the need for stability in chaos. I am the spirit of the monolith that is afraid of change. I am the spirit of the Reich.

I am the one who was cheated. I am the anger. I am the one who is mad as hell. I am the scrambling for scraps. I am the one who is paying a million marks for a loaf of bread. I am the one who was tricked by the lies of the military who said the Great War was a cakewalk, and we were winning it. I am the one who was cheated by the Treaty of Versailles and the concessions of the statesmen. I was the one who was blamed and sanctioned by the rest of Europe when I was simply a participant. I am the one who is sure that the communists, Social Democrats and in particular the Jews are to blame.

I want to tell you that fear is not your friend. I want to tell you that disinformation and propaganda are a real threat. I want to tell you not to give in to archetypal "good vs evil" forces that would put your human impulses to sleep. I want to tell you that any time someone says "you're for us or you're against us," fight it with every inch of your being. I want to tell you there is more color and nuance to the world than black, white and shades of red. There are more solutions than a Final solution, and if you kill what you project as your shadow you will never have any integration.

I am the ultimate proof that the Saboteur exists, and can take a whole people down with it.

Robert: I Am the One Who...

I am the Boy with the Blue Eyes.
I am the One who has haunted you for twenty years.
I am the One who inspired you to write long fiction and attempt a novel.
I am the One who like Prometheus brought fire to the human race and paid for it.
I am the One who made you read all of Proust.
I am the One who opened again your multifaceted intellect.
I am the One who was raised to do great things in my society.
I am the One who nearly committed suicide at twenty-one, from the sheer pain of becoming.
I am the One who learned to see individual genius in a group and became a great administrator.
I am the One you fell in love with, despite my deadly legacy, which I could not control.

What do you have to give me?

I give you confidence in your intellect, that you are smart enough to write about physics.
I give you the joy of mastering things, disciplines, art forms for their own sake.
I give you the joy of eternal learning and knowledge.
I give you knowledge of your contribution as an individual.

What do you want from me?

I want you to tell the multifacetness of my story.
I want you to remind others that what we think of as evil sometimes has a genesis in great humanity and care for humanity.
I want you to remind others of the greatness of the Manhattan Project story, and how we can use our intellect and technology to enhance mankind, to overcome greed, anger, war and deadness.
I want you to remind others of the importance more than ever of an open society of ideas for the betterment of all life.
I want you to finish my story.

Is there anything else you want to tell me?

Remember that the Atomic Age was ushered in on sacred ground.
Remember to ground yourself in horses and the mountains and the sea…
Remember to pick flowers to make it an occasion.
Remember to love your younger siblings and meet people where they are.
Remember to guard against the seduction of power and intellectual arrogance.
Remember humility, which politicians easily forget. It is not a weakness.
Remember there are scientists and people out there who look for the truth, who love life and are trying to preserve it.
Remember death, the dark silent companion, has always been present; live life while you can.

How will I remember?

When you see the mountains and sacred places, when you smell pinon and hear the sea.
When you see “thunderstorms and sunsets comparison the sky.”
When you hear the distinctive cadence of my voice in your head.
When you read Baudelaire and the Bhagavad Gita.
Don’t worry. You will know.

Character/Community Suit: Robert

There are four card suits for SoulCollage--Committee, Companion, Council and Community. These roughly correspond to inner personas, animal totems, archetypes and significant people in your life. Hope I have that right. In addition you can make your own suits. I started gathering images for what I call my Character suit--these are people from my fiction. If you write a work of some length, your characters have a tendency to take over part of your psyche. I was initially confused where to put them. Are they parts of my personality? Are they embodiments of archetypes? Are they as real as any people I've known? Yes to all three. Hence a new suit.

This is Robert Oppenheimer, father of the atomic bomb, as a young man, and the subject of my first novel.

More on what he has to say later...

This is My New Blog...

...dedicated to the process of SoulCollage(R) an inner work collage process developed by Seena Frost.

Here I will post my cards and the results of the very important "I am the One Who..." exercise.

More to be found at the excellent site of Anne Marie Bennett, who really makes the process accessible.