Fool's Gold: Making Something From Nothing and Freeing Your Creative Process

Susan G. Wooldridge conducts writing workshops privately, through Poets & Writers, Inc., and with the California Poets in the Schools program. She is also the author of poemcrazy: freeing your life with words.In this frolicsome work, Wooldridge calls upon her creativity to help carry her through the death of her father, the grieving of her mother, the end of a long marriage, and the breakup of a subsequent romance. Here is one of the first things she did:

"I decided to make a small collage box each day for a year with what I found on my walks — often the most ordinary, seemingly worthless bits of nothing. That's when fool's gold became foolsgold for me, a field around us, or state of being, where everything can be transformed by our seeing and creativity. Merged into one word, foolsgold describes a paradox, the value in what may seem to be worthless. Foolsgold reminds us to look beyond appearances, even in ourselves. What seems to loom in us most darkly may finally be what brings the most light. Everything can be transmuted by attention, play, love."