Articles | Jeannette Encinias

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Articles & stories written
by Jeannette encinias

Should you wait to feel inspired before writing?

Inspiration is a startling thing. It can show up through scent and sound, during a conversation, while walking in the park, in a dream...

Trust yourself

I’ve received a lot of advice over the years about many things. Some asked for. Some not. I bet you have too. Human beings grow and form ideas and then hand them out like flowers. Some are very beautiful and still not for you. You must build your own bouquet...

What a woman in San Francisco taught me about my shoulders

North Beach_Photo by Zornitsa Shahanska.jpg

I used to live in North Beach, San Francisco. A small and quirky part of the world where I felt at home among the old Italians and jazz musicians. In those days I slept in a closet lined with bookshelves. I frequented a neighborhood bar where the bartender, Jim, never let me pay for my drinks. There was a jukebox and classmates to drink with....

Don't be afraid to fail

I know this to be true: fear of failure will keep us stuck forever. We don't have forever. We have now...

What the heart carries

Every day the human heart beats around 100,000 times and creates enough energy to drive a truck 20 miles. In an average lifetime that is 2.5 billion heartbeats, creating the energy equivalent to driving to the moon and back. The heart has its own electrical impulse and can continue beating outside of the body, impressively independent of our own desires...

The curated life

We are a culture that has become distracted. Every tweet, email, blinking, beeping light serves to perk up our ears and demand some attention from our already overextended minds. "Worry about me" shrieks the news. "Like me!," hollers Facebook. "Oh, you haven't checked me in an hour? Better get on that right now!" scolds email. On and on it goes until our brains are full of flashing lights in a weird, dark sky...

How to love your first drafts

First of all, take the pressure off. This is your first coat of paint. This is a gathering of ingredients. It's not the finished portrait. It's not the meal...

Be gentle

You don’t need to fit into any particular mold or stand beside any kind of trend. You are far too unique for that sort of thing. Your face, your hands, and your heart are perfect as they are, naturally. The world will tell you differently, I assure you. Do not listen. The world does not know you. You must introduce yourself to the world...

The senses

You are a sensual creature and your soul lives in a magical body. You have five senses that serve as a portal into our world. When we allow ourselves to slow down and drop deep into our bodies, true magic is always close at hand...

Are you a creator who does not create?

Several years ago a funny thing happened: I stopped writing for myself. I became so engaged in helping other people write and in making a living that I neglected the one craft that has helped me breathe easier in our world. I never stopped looking at things and wondering about them, but I stopped building homes for my experiences...

Table

Sometimes I write fiction. This is one of those times.

Create a world you can create in

Maya Angelou kept a small hotel room down the street from her "normal life" that she traveled to every morning to write. Inside she made sure to have a dictionary, a bible, a deck of cards, and a bottle of sherry. Ernest Hemingway wrote standing up, hammering out words on a Royal typewriter placed chest high on top of a bookcase. When Joan Didion was nearing the end of writing a book, she slept with it...

In one life there are many endings. Begin again.

At some point in your life, you may find that you have come to an end. You may realize that the life you have built no longer makes sense to who you are becoming, and no matter how much you rearrange the furniture of your everyday existence, there is a deeper longing for significant change...

What did you love as a kid?

For me it was poetry. I can remember being in third grade and writing a poem called "Flowers" in the new cursive I had learned. Soon after, I sat across from two classmates and tried to describe the color of their eyes through a poem. In contemplating them in this way, they both became something other than sweaty boys with tricks up their sleeves. Instead, their eyes were telling me stories that their mouths never could. Such is the magic of poetry...

You have a contribution to make

In Japanese culture there is a concept called ikigai and you have one. Your ikigai is the sense that you have a contribution to make and that the actions you take throughout the day matter. It's the feeling of being useful, not only to others but to the industry of your own self...

Small details matter

The love letter you leave by the coffee maker for your friend who invited you into her home for a long weekend...

Women

Women are amazing creatures. We are resilient and resourceful. We work hard and love deeply. We are soft and strong and steady as sunrise. We carry babies and jobs and the weight of a world that underestimates our innate power. I have never underestimated what a woman can do. I knew from the very beginning of my life the power of women...

Practice

So much of life is practice...

Let your prayers be heard

I prayed silently before a test with my eyes closed in a 7th-grade math class. My teacher asked me what I was doing and I told her. "Stop it," she said, annoyed. Her hair so shiny, her math skills impeccable. But numbers are a language I don't understand. They float through my brain and turn upside down and so I need to call on the parts of myself that have not been born yet. The mind that can grab numbers from the well of this impossible test and turn them right side up. Your chalkboard is covering my days with misery...

Poetry writing tips

Move the body. Be weird ( I just high-fived myself in the air in a room by myself. WHATEVER). Get out of the house, neighborhood, state, country. Music. Listen to it. Dance. Swim. bathe. Water is your friend...

What part of your story are you leaving out?

My dad went back to his hometown in New Mexico when he was 61 years old. There he had a dream to grow his hair out long like our great, great, great grandfather and he came back home vowing to never cut his hair again...

Mess

Emotion

Being human! Whew, it’s a lot. There is the sorrow that leveled you. The desire that drew you. The anger that flared like a fire in your chest. There is the fear that warned you. The pleasure that moved you. The shame that hollowed you right out. There are moments of true peace strung across the days of your life among the deep grief and vast joy...

Break it up

Slowly, after many months, it will almost leave you. You will look around at first, stumbling into things, falling and then expecting it to come pick you up and coo at your bruises. You will wait for it to come carry you, just like it did before. All of that love, body curled into arm, a small weight. You will end up looking around, wide eyed and heavy until you finally decide that you must not stay there on the ground...

Words are my delight

I play with them. I pour them. I prepare them. I potion them.

Fever

Here's the truth: I did not like being young. I was perpetually restless, jumping through hoops and windows and eyes. I did not yet know my worth. I did not know how to harness my passion. I was like a three ring circus: all fire and tightrope and makeup, never knowing when to close. It was exhausting. Take me back 10/20 years and I would PRAY to be catapulted into the woman I am today. This is the gift of time that I will never take for granted. We earn ourselves one way or another as the years go by...

Golden Dove

I can't save you from your death and I can't save you from your life but I will walk beside you on those days when a weary mind gets more worn...

Leonard Cohen

Poetry is just the evidence of life...

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