Julie Unplugged

Grace Offered & Grace Received: Choose to Do the Receiving Dance

Julie Jordan Scott — Fri, 24 May 2013 11:17:59 -0700

Emma in a moment of frustration... circa 2009

Yesterday shifted from a maelstrom of frustration to a moment of grace right when my daughter Emma and I were ready to give up hope.

I had spent the two previous days dealing with bureaucracy and trying to get Emma enrolled in a Concepts of Biology course at our local community college. Because her high school schedule was completely impacted, it was a necessity to approach her course work differently than the norm. The plan has always been to have her attend Bakersfield College during the Summer.

She took the assessments, she did all the new student activities and then we discovered one of her assessment scores was lower than the required pre-requisites. It had appeared we had driven into a brick wall of bureaucratic ugliness. Our final strategy was to meet with an educational counselor and plead for mercy.

At the college level, the mother isn’t the driving force of one’s educational planning, it is the student.

The counselor asked Emma’s permission to be present. She sat me down in the corner and spoke directly with Emma. Emma would ask me questions occasionally, I would respond only to Emma. When it seemed as if we were not going to make progress, a very stressed out Emma stood up and said, “Let’s just get out of here.”

The counselor said, “Wait a minute, Emma, I have an idea. This is very unusual but since you scored in transfer level writing and you are only a sophomore in high school, let’s see if we can get something to work for you.”

This counselor called the people involved with assessment and pleaded Emma’s case.

Choose to Do the Receiving Dance of Grace

She said things like, “This young lady is exceptional” and “I will take full responsibility.” She got Emma the opportunity to re-take the test that was holding her back from registration.

Emma was ecstatic. I was frightened. My thoughts immediately floated into the “Oh, no, she can’t have another disappointment right now.” I asked the counselor for testing advice. She gave one simple thought, “Don’t rush. Take your time.”

Using her yearbook as her photo ID, Emma slid into her testing spot while I waited outside. An hour later she appeared with a very wide smile. “I did it!” she said. “Perfect score!” She soared up the score brackets going even higher than where she needed to be to register.

I believe part of the reason was this counselor – a woman who had only known her for a few minutes – believed in her enough to go to bat for her. A stranger advocated for her.

To say our days were made would be an understatement.

I call this short chapter, “Grace offered to Emma by a stranger.”

Grace arrives in an assortment of packages. When we are open to receiving it, it seems to magically appear. I like to think of it in this way: when I hold my arms open and raise them to the sky to receive, I am able to receive. When I cross my arms over my chest in a defensive position, I am less able to receive.

It makes perfect sense when I choose to remember this simple truth.

I hear a mourning dove and a starling singing together outside my window. A few moments ago I heard chickens clucking from across the street. They wander out of the chicken coop at my neighbor’s home on a somewhat regular basis.

These are the sweet moments when I settle my forehead into my hand and lean against it, allowing it to support my mind which is oftentimes thinking too much, to just take a short siesta. I fall off to sleep and suddenly I am dreaming in little dribs and drabs of dialogue and images.

It hasn’t been a week with many supersized doses of delight.

I have been facing each day, though, as if I am rushing through a revolving door.

Do you know the feeling?

It doesn’t give much time to be aware of slight moments of grace and wonder you can meet and together create a better feeling than I had the moment before.

I know the everything-is-perfect school of thought as I am sure you know it, too. Most of the time I can hang out there, but today, no way.

I have had enough of the unreturned phone calls, the times when people don’t respond and then a moment of grace appears and in an instant everything shifts.

The moments of grace I am choosing to build upon are the counselor’s defense of Emma, completely unexpected, and the birdsong, the chicken song, the sleeping of Walt on my toes as I took a rest yesterday.

You may have noticed the defensive, arms over my chest position in “today, no way.”

Drops of grace open those arms so that you and I may begin to receive more and more and more again and again and again.

I am open to more of that. How about you?

Are you ready to raise your arms to receiving?

Are you ready to do the receiving dance?

Let’s go there together. I look forward to hearing how it goes!

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A Simple, Quirky & Plain Old Fun Way to Feel Better & Better, Happier & Happier

Julie Jordan Scott — Mon, 20 May 2013 10:22:39 -0700

A Simple & Quirky Way to Feeling Better Every Day

Would you value discovering a way to move instantly from an anxious or worried space into a smiling, much happier, feeling better and better sort of space? I learned a trick to do that by accident recently that you can put into place as an immediate perk-up strategy.

Here’s the story:

Today I saw a double decker shopping cart, a lusty blue one, across the street from Lowe’s on Columbus. I pointed and with both loudness and glee announced to Samuel, “Shopping Cart!”

He laughed. Yes, he laughed at me.

“You sure do love shopping carts, Mommy.”

It’s a strange thing: quirky, I suppose, started by the discovery of what I called “a shopping cart convention” in an empty lot on the way to Emma’s high school. Since then, I have been alert to any unique arrangements of shopping carts in unexpected places. Now, the one across the street from Lowe’s was only exciting because I have not photographed one of that particular style yet.

I also photograph familiar images: sunrises and sunsets, birthday parties, children, but I find the most joy in discovering a fascination of some object or scenario that at first only seems to thrill me – which is all that matters in the moment of creativity. Then I discover in the sharing, other people also enjoy the image, other people find it fascinating. I’m not the only one who oooos and ahhhhs at the coincidental modern assemblage of shopping carts outside of the parking lot where they are supposed to live.

When Katherine was a baby, the fixation for many was cows: cow figurines, cow kitchen decorations, cow this and cow that. Later, it became sunflowers everywhere. Recently I have seen more chickens than I care to see. Ever. Again.

My love for cows during Kathie’s babydom had her name every large four legged animals “moos” and even her pillow pet today – at age twenty-one – is a cow.

This quirky love actually lifted me up this past week when I was feeling low. I would see a random shopping cart at a random, unexpected place and I would perk up. Insta-happy. If my mind veered away into sad-or-worried-or-fretful, it was as if a shopping cart angel would roll a cart out someplace for me to take note and smile.

Who would ever describe a shopping cart as “lusty” besides me?

Just choose a random something that catches your eye – you may even choose chickens if you like – and be aware to them when they pop into any of your senses: your view, your hearing, your smell, your touch – you know the drill.

Allow that momentary delight to flood your brain and wash away the other stuff that doesn’t serve you.

Two things will happen: you will suddenly feel better AND you will be able to steer yourself more easily toward a better day overall.

See? There is a reason for quirky shopping cart love.

Feeling better and better and better is one of the best reasons of all.

#####

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Creative Every Day Check In: From Stationery to Artsy Feelin' Groovy Medicine Box

Julie Jordan Scott — Sun, 19 May 2013 21:25:08 -0700

I’ve been having a lot of fun with my various creative projects this week. I have two finished projects.

Stationery box turned artful medicine box

This is the first one.

It was once a stationery box for a little girl that I morphed into a medicine box after going on a trip and while I was away, someone misplaced one of my pill bottles. That little misplacement cost me $30! Now I have a pretty little box – custom, naturally – to hold the pills my daughter and I take.

From this inside shot you get a hint at what the box once looked like.

Now, in the top photo, you see what it looks like now. It is a fun, abstract swish of yellow and pink with the ever appropriate words, FEELIN’ GROOVY on the lid. I thought it was perfect for medicine.

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Visit CreativeEveryDay.com to meet an incredibly talented group of artists. Post your own art there, too!

In the Heart of the Mishmash of Experience I Came to Forget: 2012/13 = Getting Up & Getting Up & Getting Up

Julie Jordan Scott — Sun, 19 May 2013 20:16:39 -0700

In theater and in life, its a mish mash of falling & getting up, over and over and over again

All week long I thought I “should” be writing about “it”: getting back on stage again after this tumultuous year.

It was my first “opening weekend” in a year. Sure, I have had spits and spurts of the theater world: I did VDay, I emceed a cabaret show, I did some storytelling and poetry gigs, but I didn’t allow myself the pleasure nor assign myself the responsibility of creating collaboratively over the long term. I didn’t say yes – nor did I audition to create any possibilities of the pleasure and the sadness I have come to know intimately during my last decade in local theater.

I was on a break from theater when I noticed the changes of what I thought was just another mole taking up real estate on my face. It was pink and therefore in the “not scary” category, but when it started puffing out I became curious. I almost didn’t go to the doctor about it, though, because I thought I was (literally) making a mountain out of a mole hill.

My doctor told me I was smart to come in to get the mystery mole checked. I didn’t realize there would be a parade of people photographing and measuring and clucking about my face as I sat there, somewhat inert, eyes wide and more than slightly curious.

I was sent to a dermatologist who informed me over the phone a week after biopsy that it was, in fact, melanoma, and to meet with the surgeon asap, they had set a date for me where I went and then a few days of testing for surgery prep – in which I also was sure to get my overdue mammogram. It seemed like I had time enough to sneeze between my first appointment and when I sat in the operating room saying to Ash the anesthesiologist, “This feels sort of like a massage table,” and waking up almost simultaneously staring at the ceiling back where it all started, a big bandage across my face.

That was nine months ago. It is equivalent to the time spent in pregnancy. Like pregnancy, no one tells you exactly what to expect mostly because while there is a vague blueprint, each patient and each cancer is different. My scar is finally maturing now – I can feel all of my face again and the glory of my smile lines disappearing is now more like my smile lines assimilating themselves into the heart shaped scar I now wear.

You might wonder what any of this has to do with opening weekend.

It has a lot to do with opening weekend for me. It has been my season of playing Sisyphus, the mountainous impossibility I believed cancer created yet no one else, it seemed, could see. I read the words of Albert Camus which read, “Where would his torture be, indeed, if at every step the hope of succeeding upheld him?”

I couldn’t, in the early days, imagine hope or success being intimates with me again.

Instead I had more than one verbal sparring match with friends I loved, lots of tears shed, intense disappointment of myself amidst some people reassuring me my scar was “practically invisible” to others curiously wondering, “Is that scar a result of trauma?” and probably hoping for a more dramatic story than noticing, doctoring and waking up as a cancer survivor.

Somewhere within the mishmash of experience I came to forget, most of the time, that I wore a heart shaped scar on my face. I started making conversation with strangers again, for example, even though they weren’t always as smooth as in the past. I started laughing loudly in public again. I even started agreeing to have my photo taken again.

I started giving myself permission to miss theater again, to long to be on stage again.

I was in the Berkshire Mountains when I got a text from my friend, Tim, saying he needed to find a wife for the play “The Nerd” and the director had asked for suggestions. He suggested me and I thought about it and said, “Hey, if they want me, I’m in but I can’t start for another week.”

I returned to rehearsal the day I returned home from my east coast travels.

The second day of rehearsal I decided I needed to give my directors a way out from under my scar. “If you want to find someone else who doesn’t have a scar, its fine with me. I understand. I wasn’t sure if you knew before asking me about my melanoma and surgery, so I just wanted to be sure you are comfortable…”

They said they were so I chose to believe them.

I survived worry about losing my abilities on stage. I survived worry about getting more corrective notes than I usually do. I survived worry about my daughter, Emma, who had a personal crisis throughout which came to a dramatic climax on the second day of tech week.

I remembered the lost art of getting back up. And getting back up. And getting back up.

It is Sunday morning of opening weekend.

I am exhausted and satisfied. I thought I wanted to get away to the beach or something similar today, but that just felt like too much effort. Instead, I am here, writing these words, processing all that has happened and allowing myself to continue opening more doors of possibility.

I am peeking in without attachment.

I am listening and accepting and growing without judging.

I am willing to dangle my feet into the flow without flinging my whole self back in until I feel “good and ready.”

I am even comfortable not coming up with “tying all of these thoughts in a carefully crafted red bow” and bringing it all to you in a caravan of word-pleasure.

I am here. This morning. You’ve read a snippet of what I have been doing.

That is more than enough.

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Fragmentary Yellow - A Magpie Tales Inspired Poem

Julie Jordan Scott — Sun, 19 May 2013 19:10:59 -0700

Lighthouse Dandelions by Jamie Wyeth - This week's poetry prompt from Magpie Tales

One of the things I love about writing poetry to prompts is I never know where the images or suggested words will take me. In this case – with Magpie Tales weekly prompt – it is nearly always an image either a painting or a photograph – and this week it was as if I cut a hole in my belly and let the stuff that had been sitting there, waiting, to pour forth.

Perhaps a bit “rough drafty” feeling to me – I offer you today’s (as of now untitled and raw, off my pencil) poem.

Oh - and please visit the Magpie Tales blog to check out other's interpretations of the same image. It always surprises me to see the directions we go... almost always completely different.

Overexposed and wan, smeared with butter

Shadows have snatched the scorched leaves

And stolen their voices whatever is old is new again

So the wrinkled cliché says

Mocks

Chants

Sings

Pallid, ashy, frail lyrics while

The space underneath her ear

aches, the space where the

last bit of skin was stretched

to cover the skin not so

magically evaporated with

The

Cancer

“We got it all,” they said

A pregnancy of time gone by

Leaving behind only

Trailing ribbons of ecru ache

Tied up behind her ear

The cries of the stillborn baby

Still ringing from her womb

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Falling off - and Climbing Back On - the Wagon: More from Stream of Consciousness Sunday

Julie Jordan Scott — Sun, 19 May 2013 09:47:50 -0700

Perfect moment for some stream of consciousness writing. Today's prompt is.....I have fallen off the wagon….

There are so many wagons I have fallen off I feel like this could be more like a long, slow freight train blocking traffic just going on and on and on and on and on…. so I type away thinking what other metaphors I might use or how specific I may get or how I used to play jacks on the kitchen floor with my mother and why did I fall off the wagon and never play jacks on the kitchen floor with my daughters?

Isn’t the lost art of jack playing worth something anymore?

I have fallen off the wagon of planting flowers in the Spring. I’m not exactly sure why because I really enjoy it. My best guess is my motivation to plant them has less fuel than my desire to do something else, instead. Primarily writing, I think. My favorite wagon which I hardly ever step off of except to check something off the gosh darn gotta do list or if one of my children is in a crisis.

There was a lot of that this week.

I would like to get OFF the children having repeated crises this week. You in on that one?

I am on the wagon of not leaping up to get donuts during a simple five minute write.

I am off the wagon of reading The Color Purple because I lost my copy somehow, I think I may go to the store and buy a brand new one – a NEW copy. That way my idol Alice Walker may get a little money to help feed her chickens, which is something she inspires me to do but then I think of my dogs and nah, not the greatest idea. That is more like a vague idea of traveling on a wagon and/or admiring other people’s wagons yet not having the envy-inspiration to do so myself.

I have fallen off the ezine publishing wagon. I want to get back to it, really. Really? How long has it been, anyway?

This all reminds me of my plan for June: to take a month long retreat-assessment time to see what wagons are worth my riding, which of my wagons need to go to the big loft in the sky, and which of my wagons may benefit from some resting time out in the field covered by weeping willows.

Five minutes is up?

Climbing down from this contemplative round about wagon and back into the rest of my day.

Happy Sunday!

(Timer sings!)

This was my 5 minute Stream of Consciousness Sunday post. It’s five minutes of your time and a brain dump. Want to try it? Here are the rules…

Set a timer and write for 5 minutes.
Write an intro to the post if you want but don’t edit the post. No proofreading or spellchecking. This is writing in the raw.
Publish it somewhere. Anywhere. The back door to your blog if you want. But make it accessible.
Add the Stream of Consciousness Sunday badge to your post (find it at Jana's Thinking Place).
Link up your post there, too.
Visit your fellow bloggers and show some love.

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Free Flow Writing: A "Magic Trick" of Not Only Higher Quantity of Words and Also a Higher Quality of Words

Julie Jordan Scott — Thu, 16 May 2013 09:28:32 -0700

Sometimes I forget the simple bubbles of contentment that float from my core when I sit at my kitchen table when the day is new and write, free flow, without thinking, for three pages. Julia Cameron taught me about “morning pages” about twelve years ago. I wish I could say in that entire time I have been completely faithful to the practice, but that would not be true.

Natalie Goldberg simplified it when I finally read her book, Writing Down the Bones. I resisted this book for the longest time because I didn’t like the title. When I finally surrendered to it because everyone told me I should read it, I not only liked it, I loved it. I cried when I was finished. She taught me I could write any time of day, with a timer perhaps, and aim to fill a 90 page notebook in a month. Basically, morning pages without the morning attached.

I got a new kitchen table at a yard sale last weekend and this morning was the first time I tried it out with my notebook. It felt beyond words wonderful.

It was like stacking all the notebooks I have loved and used up over these past twelve years were sitting in an audience applauding me for making the choice to sit at my kitchen table and write. Not to rush around vocalizing and annoying my children as they prepare for their school day, but to simply let things be and let words flow.

It doesn’t take a long time and I feel so much better all day long simply because I let those words fall off my pencil and onto the page. Not on a keyboard, but the old fashioned way.

I think back to the many writers across time who sat at kitchen tables and wrote in little snippets of time, selfishly unselfish when she or he might have been dusting or folding laundry or writing a business plan or corralling children.

Yes, I meant to say “selfishly, unselfish” because sometimes being selfish is the absolute least selfish thing we can do for the world. I know my contributions today will be offered with more positivity and love if I hadn’t simply taken the few moments to let the words inside me out, to set them free on the page, letter after letter after word after word after sentence after paragraph after page.

Writers and Non-writers alike - Tell me about your resistance or your enjoyment in daily free flow “without a purpose” writing.

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Dear Mom: Compelling is Written All Over Her -

Julie Jordan Scott — Wed, 15 May 2013 09:37:19 -0700

The backlight from the sun blocks the view of this enormous homeless city. I'll go back next week and photograph it when the light is better.

Dear Mom,

I wasn’t expecting to find you when I was focused on my search for a hiking trail recommended by my friend, Michelle. All I wanted to do was catch a good shot of the sunset. When I scrambled up the hill to what I thought was the path, I caught my breath. A virtual tent city, a shanty town – an enormous complex of people’s homes underneath this bridge I cross daily.

Other people might run away. I hesitated but I stayed. The lighting wasn’t good under there or I would have taken photos.

This sight had “compelling” written all over it and might wake some people up who are completely unaware of the homelessness right in their neighborhoods, hidden away.

You were waving your arms at me, to get my attention.

I saw you and could recognize the ravages of methamphetamine. “Can you take me to 19^th and M street please? They took all my things, all I have is here… they took all my clothes, everything,” you told me.

You had a suitcase.

You had a trashbag filled with recyclables.

You had no shame, no embarrassment at asking me: owner of a new car, an expensive smart phone and much more than I bet you remembered ever having.

I asked what was at 19^th and M. “My Uncle,” you told me. You mentioned your son, and your daughter, and your other children. I had no idea where they were, no idea how old they were because my guess is you were probably much younger than you looked with your hair neatly combed albeit in a very offbeat style.

“I built this place and they wrecked it!” you said, seeming to not want to stop talking for fear I might vaporize.

You do see things that aren’t real, you told me. You do hear things you don’t think are here.

We put your broken suitcase empty of clothes and your collection of cans and plastic in the back of my car.

We drove two miles to where you needed to go. I asked your name. You told me. I told you my name.

You said you recognized me. Perhaps you do. Or perhaps I am another of those things you have seen that aren’t real. It doesn’t matter to me. You had enough sense to not smoke your cigarette in my car and before we had gone a mile you started calling me your fairy godmother.

I took you where you asked to go and you surprised me when you pulled out a cell phone. I wondered if your children had called you today on this Mother’s Day. Maybe you weren't aware it was Mother’s day.

I took the suitcase out and carried it to the side of the building as you asked me.

I told you to take care. We hugged, a real heart-to-heart hug. “I guess I do believe in fairy godmothers,” you said.

I smiled and went about the rest of my business of the day.

You, dear Mom, will forever be a part of my lexicon now.

You are in my prayers as are your children.

Finding you and helping you, another mother, was so much more important than finding the perfect sunset shot – even though I managed to get a pretty cool image there as well.

Perhaps we were each others’ Fairy Godmother.

* * * * *

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Motherhood, Friendship & Literary Grannies – May We All Have Courage ~ Edna St. Vincent Millay & Elinor Wylie

Julie Jordan Scott — Sun, 12 May 2013 11:41:07 -0700

There is creative fire in friendships, just as there was between Elinor Wylie and Edna St. Vincent Millay

It has taken me longer than I thought to this experience on paper.

Sometimes it works like that for me: I find something too evocative to put into words, so I don’t. I wait for the right words to come. I wait longer. What I have discovered about myself is sometimes I never get to writing them down. I wait and then forget.

Slowly and meanderingly, the memory and the core feeling it brings up in my belly stops itching like it once did.

It was several weeks ago I sniffed out a place that has haunted me for at least eight years. Since the first time I “got to know” Edna St. Vincent Millay – because she haunted me and wouldn’t let go – I have had a yearning to visit her home at Steepletop.

The Home at Steepletop

In 2008 I wrote of her haunting:

“Someone from history will start tapping on my shoulder and over time I hear the name enough times that it becomes like a familiar song on the radio, the one you didn't know but all of a sudden could sing along quite well without even thinking about it. Edna St. Vincent Millay comes to mind as another woman who haunted me, as did Martha Graham for a time.”

I noted back then there was an artist’s colony there, but no tours of the home or grounds for literary travelers such as I. I tabled the thought, although the idea of an artist’s colony stuck with me. I still haven’t responded to that yearning: an artist’s colony for multi-generations so that parents and/or grandparents and caretakers who are responsible for their children could come and so could the children.

This is how my writing camp idea was initially born and now has been thriving for several years both virtually and in person.

So Lovely! The office across the street from Steepletop.

I also became a fan of Elinor Wylie via my series on Literary Grannies from 2012. I noted her friendship with Millay and I bought her poetry collection Trivial Breath. I was fascinated by her history as a mother and then, her many children that never came to be. I felt an odd kinship with her as I suppose was her haunting.

I literally stumbled and then tenaciously stalked Steepletop that day in April. I was so close I simply could not leave the Berkshires without a visit.

What I got was better than a visit.

I backtracked after reaching Auesterlitz and couldn’t find my way to Steepletop. I drove back to the hamlet and telephoned, expecting to get an answering machine. Instead, I got the warm voice of Peter Bergman, the Executive Director of the Edna St. Vincent Millay Society, although I didn’t know at the time to whom I was speaking. He gave me simple directions and invited me to tour the grounds “anytime”. With my heart pounding and my passion guiding the car’s forward movement, I found myself able to experience the grandeur and silent wonder of a place I have dreamed of visiting not on my own or with a crowd. I was blessed to experience Millay’s home on a one-on-one tour with the curator. When I found more of Elinor Wylie’s work on the shelves in the store I literally shouted, “Elinor!” as the reality of their friendship wasn’t at the forefront of my mind until I took her book off the shelf.

Millay was the more famous of the two women, but she loved Elinor with a strength beyond what many ever come to know. In the home at Steepletop there is a bottle of wine meant to be shared with Elinor but instead shared by her widowed husband and Millay shortly after Wylie’s death. It has been left empty on the mantel ever since as a forever altar in honor of their friendship.

I cried several times during the tour. There were times my feet seemed to be glued to the floorboards as I didn’t think I could take another step. When we arrived at the doorstep of Millay’s library, I literally thought I couldn’t go inside.

I’m not sure when you are reading this, but I am writing to you on Mother’s Day. It seems fitting I share this poem written by a woman who was never a mother – Millay, and her friend – who left her three-year-old son with his father and only faced stillbirth, miscarriage and infant loss after she left.

Mr. Bergman recited this poem as he stood next to the spot Millay was found dead on October 19, 1950.

“The courage my mother had," by Edna St. Vincent Millay from Collected Poems (Harper Collins).

The courage that my mother had

The courage that my mother had
Went with her, and is with her still:
Rock from New England quarried;
Now granite in a granite hill.

The golden brooch my mother wore
She left behind for me to wear;
I have no thing I treasure more:
Yet, it is something I could spare.

Oh, if instead she'd left to me
The thing she took into the grave!-
That courage like a rock, which she
Has no more need of, and I have.

Motherhood and friendship, friendship and motherhood weave through the lives of women whether their art form is poetry or mommying or quilting or being a book keeper.

May we all have courage like a rock – to remember our literary grannies and our sisters, mothers and friends of today with a similar passion as these remarkable women shared.

* * * * *

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"You are my deepening skies; Give me your stars to hold” & Other Quotes from Literary Granny, Sara Teasdale

Julie Jordan Scott — Sat, 11 May 2013 16:21:16 -0700

This young girl from St. Louis grew up to write “Life has loveliness to sell" and many others...

I remember when I first started discovering some of the women poets of the early twentieth century. It felt like I had found a huge room full of women who were like sisters, mothers, cousins and aunties to me.

Sara Teasdale was one of them. A lyrical poet whose work focused on words from a women’s perspective, she won the first Columbia Poetry Prize in 1918, a prize that would later be renamed the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

Today I was thumbing through my collection of “all things Sara” when I realized I have used her as an inspiration for creativity many, many times. She has showed up in lessons I have taught, she has appeared in essays, her images fill my photo album: how had I put those memories of our earliest “relationship” aside.

Sometimes that happens with passion: we fall head over heels in love with one.. and then another… and then another and while the one a few ones back is still tucked away back there, sometimes underneath the surface she is still doing her poetic best to awaken the memory.

Literary Grannies do that: they walk around in your thoughts, tip toe by tip toe, untraceable sometimes for years. When you do manage to notice, they are never angry. They may even give you candy and most definitely a hug or a kiss and a squeeze on the cheek.

If you haven’t “met” her before, please settle into your seat and allow her words to fill your breath, your heart and your mind.

“Life has loveliness to sell,
All beautiful and splendid things,
Blue waves whitened on a cliff,
Soaring fire that sways and sings,
And children's faces looking up,
Holding wonder like a cup.”

☼

“I shall have peace, as leafy trees are peaceful when rain bends down the bough.”

☼

“I make the most of all that comes and the least of all that goes.”

☼

“It is strange how often a heart must be broken before the years can make it wise.”

☼

“No one worth possessing can quite be possessed”

☼

“My soul is a broken field, plowed by pain.”

☼

“I am the pool of gold
When sunset burns and dies--
You are my deepening skies;
Give me your stars to hold”

☼

“Look for a lovely thing and you will find it, it is not far, it never will be far”

Sara Teasdale in Mixed Media: lyric poet with a sad end to her life.

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