ymarellimMemoirsUsingImages

Review of  my first three posts:

In Post 1: I wrote a bit about myself and introduced the focus of this blog which is Creating Memoirs using both words and images. I gave a quick look at the process of  SoulCollage®, describing the  six suits ( categories of cards ) that I use in my SoulCollage® deck (and with my clients in outpatient psychotherapy).  In Post 2: I  wrote about some of  the kinds of activities we can do with our cards (or with photos or other images for those who don’t have the inclination or time to make collaged cards). The activities of Interview and  Dialogues were briefly described and in Post 3: I wrote about the albums made by my parents and then I  made a connection from their creations to  my interest in photography and writing as tools for self-exploration and memoir.

Here are some of the topics for  future posts on this blog.

Making Cards for self-exploration, creating Smash books on your life, Setting up your Life Cycle  Stages for writing your memoir,  the three types of memoir writing as you begin Writing your Life Cycle Stages Memoir, the creation of Life Cycle Stages Cards from your photos and other images, Using Dialogue with Images, adding categories of cards,  and  separate posts on the different categories of cards…….

For those of you who are interested in using some of my suggestions for journaling I will be including ways to use some of  the structures of the Intensive Journal, SoulCollage® and phototherapy for writing memoir and journals. Making SoulCollage® cards is a fantastic process but many people don’t have the time in their lives to make cards.

Life Cycle Stage 14

ALBUMS

On  a shelf in my computer room sit five large, shiny, red loose-leaf photo albums. Most of the photos of family and friends contained within their pages were taken by my father, who placed typed descriptions below each image. The albums are organized chronologically, from the late 1880s to the early 1970s. These albums were put together when my father was retiring from his paid-work, moving with my mother, then 55, from New York to their newly built retirement house in Florida. He was 59 years old. I like to think that he was making sense with photos and snippets of where he came from and where he had been over the six decades of his life to that time and that he was thinking as he entered retirement that he was on the cusp of a new life cycle stage.

On another shelf in my home is an old, brown, 12” by 12” scrapbook made by my mother; this album begins in 1939 with her first meeting my father and continues through to the birth and early months of the life of her first child, my older sister.. She did brief journal entries in black ink under each small square black and white photo (taken and printed by my father) and, with a friend, drew simple line designs around the pages and the photos, making each page a unique, visual treat. Though some of the tape she used to fasten the photos to the buff colored pages is now yellowed and some of the pieces of tape no longer stick, the images remain vibrant, still there to provide glimpses into the community into which I would be born, just a few short years later.

Recently I came upon a photo I saved of six stacked upon each other, large, shiny industrial cans, to which I associated the decades of my lived life to date. How interesting that just the other day I returned to this image, which I had saved for some future SoulCollage® card. I sensed that it would be useful to me but not yet connecting it to the five red albums.

This morning as I sat down to write and glanced at the grouping of my father’s albums —-In a Flash—- I made the connection to the cans. How wonderful that the image of the cans representing my own decades connects to those five -also shiny and red- albums so carefully prepared by my father!

Now, as I look back on what I have done with words and images since my parents’ deaths, I see what I have inherited from them:  I am left not only with their photo albums, but also with their modeling  of both “making memories” and recording these in words and images. I add another piece to this inheritance : the connecting  dots of experience by  the combination of  words and images  and using the resulting creations  to gain a perspective on one’s life  and its stages. Writing memoir and using SoulCollage® cards with Life Cycle Stages are useful tools for my doing the self-reflection  I find necessary as I enter into my elder  years.