I raise to wakefulness
on the strains of your piano
that pull me to consciousness.
The stumbled notes
of the imperfect rendering
reminds that only God is perfect,
and yet
as the imperfect notes carry me along
I can’t help thinking
that the iimperfection
makes you the most perfect
musician for me.
Ungrateful children
for whom sacrifice and affection
flowed over like water
but left no impression.
Ungrateful children
to whom motherhood is
an inconvenient barrier
to strange freedoms.
Ungrateful children
in whom hopes were planted
that have withered:
stony ground.
Ungrateful children
who do not call
their mothers on
Mothers’ Day.
Ungrateful children.
Think with your pen, not your brain.
Little things kind of reveal themselves to me in the (process of) writing. A lot of people think that magic happens when you write, and it does, but they think, “Well you must be struck by inspiration, this magic bolt hits you and then you just sit down and … it must just pour out of you.” Well no. First you work and then the magic happens, if you’re lucky. (Diana Gabaldon podcast Episode 3: The “Kernel Process”)
You have to write to find the words. I tell my high school students to “think with your pen, not your brain.” It’s an odd concept at first, but once the pen is moving (or the keyboard is clicking), the words tend to find their way onto the page (or screen). If you wait for the thunderclap of inspiration, you’ll never get the words. If you sit, ready to work, they flow…
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Who you are
is who you are
and you are perfect
as you are.
.
The reality of
who you are
is your reality,
and you are perfect
as you are.
.
The complications of
who you are
are a reality.
So?
You are
complicated,
that’s perfect, too.
.
When you embrace
all you are,
each complicated
component of your reality,
others will embrace it, too,
because you are perfectly
complicated,
and complicated
is really cool.
.
Who you are
is who you are
and you are perfect
as you are.
I asked the few 16 to 18 year old students here today in my Communications 11 and 12 (non-academic English) class what they appreciate about their teachers. We had a little fun rephrasing things into positive statements. 🙂
.
Many students were away today on field trips or work experience, so it was a small class!
.
Personally, I appreciated when my teachers were enthusiastic and knowledgeable about their subject, beyond the curriculum.
What do/did you appreciate most in your teachers?
A post from last November…
“A story can be new and yet tell about olden times. The past comes into existence with the story… Beginning at the moment when you gave it its name…it has existed forever.”
Michael Ende. The Neverending Story (Large print edition, p. 305).
I’ve been reading The Neverending Story for the last few days. I came across this quote today, and it struck me as being rather profound within the context of the historical fiction workshops I attended at SIWC.
The history described may be factual, but its interpretation is imagined. Scenarios are created. Some may have happened ‘sort of’ like the author imagined, or maybe not. However, once the reader has that account in his head, it becomes the story of the history. It becomes the reader’s experience and it colours his/her understanding of history.
I was on London’s Tower Hill last spring, and saw a plaque commemorating the…
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Today I watched beavers
busily engaged in beaver chores:
swimming the branches to the lodge
packing mud in the dam
waddling from one pond to another.
A rodent family at work,
improving their neighbourhood
thinning the trees that keep out the sun
and improving water habitat.
It was worth
the blisters and the swollen feet
now soaking in Epsom salts.
.
.
News article about this beaver family:
http://www.saobserver.net/news/138054823.html
A youtube video about habitat restoration by beavers:
Here’s a re-blog of a post from last year.
poetry is art in words:
the visual spoken,
essence distilled,
passion
revealed.
You stand against the
wall, arms crossed, sardonic smile
immune to laughter.
.
You’ve seen darkness that
they can only imagine,
and you are hardened
.
from the admiration
of flirting gazes because
your heart is cold,
.
Frozen by bad maternity
and noncommittal
paternity.
.
Their bad judgements burn
within your heart until
destroying misery
.
means destroying
everything you should love,
innocent or guilty,
.
and then it means
flash firing your future,
scarring your life upon ours,
.
like a victim of
Hiroshima’s bombs whose life
vanishes in an
.
instant, leaving only
a silhouette, burnt white
on blackened walls.
.
.
I’m still processing the recent murder/suicide of a former student. The idea of an image being frozen in memory by tragedy called to mind the silhouettes created in Hiroshima when people’s shadoes were left, though their bodies were vaporized. While at first glance a free verse, the poem has some form: each triplet stanza follows the haiku syllable count (17 syllables per stanza) to reiterate this idea.
‘Neath Cold night stars
that come undone
they glow afar
new life begun.
Breathe, you’re alive!
Ignore the scars
Rain washes sighs
making time ours
new life begun
‘neath cold night stars.
Shawn L. Bird 