Shawn L. Bird

Original poetry, commentary, and fiction. All copyrights reserved.

Dancing in heaven May 12, 2010

Filed under: Commentary — Shawn L. Bird @ 5:58 am
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Doris Eaton Travis has passed away at 106. What a loss. What a life to celebrate. Who was Doris Travis, you ask? Quite simply, Doris was a legend. She was the last of the Ziegfield Follies and she was still dancing! What an inspiration.

Theatre gets in the blood, and the more you’re under those lights, sharing the rush of adrenaline with a company of like-minded souls and basking in the applause of an appreciative audience, the harder it is to escape the pull. I know why she loved Broadway and kept dancing throughout her life. It’s also no surprise that dancing kept her young and fit. Remember that episode of Fame from 1982 where the dancers left the rival school’s football team in the dust?

For years I struggled fitting exercise into my routine. I knew that I wouldn’t keep up a regime of jogging, swimming, cycling, or aerobics no matter how many people told me those were the best exercises for me. Yech. I have to be having fun with people I enjoy. I can’t socialize while swimming laps, and there’s no variety in jogging down the road. Dancing makes me happy. I love going to my twice weekly classes, laughing with good people as we try to learn new choreographies, and keeping fit in a fun way. It is always a rush when we perform. Oh, I know that I am not the best dancer and I struggle to remember everything I’m supposed to be doing from week to week, but that’s the laughter factor, and laughing is good for the heart, too.

I hope you’re dancing in heaven, Doris. Keep a place in your heavenly chorus line for me!

 

Fiction is truth May 11, 2010

Filed under: Grace Awakening,Literature — Shawn L. Bird @ 5:08 am
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Biographies bore me. I don’t care how insightful a biographer is, no one knows what’s going on inside someone else’s head. Autobiographies bore me, too, because we lie to ourselves even more than a biographer does. Here’s what I think the bottom line is: if you’re looking for truth, try fiction…. I’ve always believed that the lies we use to make our fictions reveal the truth with far more honesty than any history or herstory or life story. (Charles de Lint, Memory and Dreams, p. 186)

I love this book and over time here in the blog I’ll visit some of the many quotations I recorded. This Canadian fantasy writer has some brilliant observations.

When I was at a writing workshop with Gail Anderson-Dargatz last fall, she commented on how sometimes truth is too strange to make into a book. Think about that. She meant that truth really is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to be plausible. A reader will suspend belief just so far, and if an author pushes them too far past that, they dismiss it. Is this the ‘creative’ part of creative non-fiction? The population really can’t handle the truth. (This is too much cliché, isn’t it?)

Like de Lint intimates, fiction reveals truth. I know it. My novel is fiction. Mostly. It started as a true story, but then Grace shoved me out of the way and had her own story to tell. Grace’s biography isn’t my autobiography, but we do have a lot in common. There are lots of people who have read the manuscript and were able to recognize some of my secrets lurking between the pages. Some of the most bizarre moments on the pages are the truest, but you won’t believe it, so it’ll be okay.

 

Seizing the dream May 10, 2010

Filed under: Pondering,Reading — Shawn L. Bird @ 3:01 am
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Before I had the blog up and running, I was writing blog entries. Here’s one from a month ago.

April 11, 2010
Dream that dream

Yesterday I picked up the unauthorized biography of Susan Boyle by Alice Montgomery, called Dreams Can Come True. Today I was reading the back. It begins, “On 11 April 2009, forty-eight year old spinster Susan Magdalane Boyle stepped out on to the stage of Britain’s Got Talent to jeers and sniggers.” I’m sure you’ve seen the You Tube video. It probably hit you in the gut just as it hit me and thousands (if not millions) of people around the world. We know Susan Boyle’s story by now.

Check the date. April 11, 2009. Exactly one year ago today shy Susan Boyle, unemployed, gathered her courage dared the “jeers and sniggers” to stand on that stage and take another stab at her dream. She opened her mouth and captivated the world. Look what has happened in that year.

She has rocketed from obscurity to world renown. She has travelled the world singing to thousands of people, and broken records for pre-order CD sales. She has been interviewed, photographed, and become the subject of an unauthorized biography.

What a difference a year makes.

In a year, a baby can be conceived, carried, delivered. A book can be conceived, written, published and on book shelves. A hundred pounds can be lost at a healthy two pounds a week. A student can earn an A and secure a scholarship. A career can be made. A dream can come true.

What will happen to you in the next year? What can you do to make your dreams come true? Are you brave enough to take the steps to see your dreams realized by this time next year? You don’t need New Year’s Eve to make a life change, spring is a wonderful time to make a new beginning.

Is it time to seize your dream?

 

Mother’s day of anguish May 9, 2010

Filed under: Commentary — Shawn L. Bird @ 5:24 am
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Mothers’ Day: another artificial holiday meant to cause disappointment in the population.

Mothers deserve a day, sure, but it is an awful thing to arbitrarily create a day that is bound to cause pain in so much of the population. We already have Christmas for that. Do we really need another day of anguish?

So here’s thinking of those who’ve lost their mothers either to death, disease, or dementia.  Here’s  to those whose memories of mother is one of abuse or neglect.  Here’s also to those who’ve lost their babies, whether before birth, just after, to childhood disease or trauma, or as adults. Here’s to those with empty arms who long to hold a babyof their own. Here’s to those whose living children are lost to them.

To my friends and all of you with hurting hearts this day, I send you all my love.  Today let us celebrate the strength of the human spirit to rise above our pain and sadness and  to carry on day by day striving to find joy and love wherever we can.

 

Altering perspectives on the self

Filed under: Pondering — Shawn L. Bird @ 1:41 am
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I rolled my tongue across my front teeth the other day and for the first time since I was twelve, it was a smooth path. No lump. No left front tooth jutting diagonally over top the right front tooth. All smooth. Wow.

It felt weird. I looked in the mirror and my mouth was different. It was an odd sensation, like a part of me had altered in a way that would never return. That is the point, of course. I didn’t begin the process of getting Invisalign braces with the idea of my teeth remaining the same, and yet here I am, only six weeks into the process and my front teeth are completely changed.

I was surprised at the way it challenged my visual self-image. If something as simple as a straightened tooth can cause this re-alignment of my self-awareness, what happens to someone who re-builds her nose or sculpts a new chin?  How do people take the image they’ve always seen in the mirror and equate the new person they see there? Can they even really see the new person or is the image altered by expectation of what has always been before? How about people who have been heavy their entire life, after they lose 100 lbs? What about someone who has had facial reconstruction after an accident?  What about a burn victim?

How does the new person in the mirror become ‘me’ for these people?  Do they ever feel like the outside and the inside don’t match anymore? Do they doubt the sincerity of the people they meet? Do they live in terror that someone will figure out the ‘real’ them isn’t the person that is visible in the mirror?  Or is it just the opposite: the mirror finally matches the person they knew they were inside?

A re-alignment of teeth is a pretty minor adjustment really, and yet it’s altering my perspective. I’d love to hear from others who’ve gone through some altering of their perspective on themselves.  Is it as difficult a process as I imagine?

© Shawn Bird 2010

 

I am myself May 8, 2010

Filed under: Poetry — Shawn L. Bird @ 2:30 am
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I am myself
No secrets left
My heart is bared
My soul bereft

I am myself
Open to you
Whate’er may be
Whate’er is true

I am myself
Given with joy
No hidden place
Naught to annoy

I am myself
Just as I am
I give my heart
Be mine, madame.

05/09

(c) Shawn Bird

Just having some fun with iambic dimeter in quatrains.  ‘4X4ing’ in an ABCB pattern 😉

 

Spring haiku May 7, 2010

Filed under: Poetry — Shawn L. Bird @ 3:49 am
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Evening sky blushes

Scent of blossoms on the breeze

Above lake and hills

 

Sasquatch Hunting May 6, 2010

Filed under: Grace Awakening,Mythology — Shawn L. Bird @ 8:24 pm
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It was drawn to my attention by an alert member of the Grace Awakening Facebook group  that it is illegal to kill a Sasquatch in the province of British Columbia. It makes sense. Obviously, when one considers how difficult it is to find Sasquatches in the woods, and how many crypto-zoologists are out looking for them, they have to be an endangered species. No one wants people with guns out shooting at endangered creatures.

Still. That law suggests severe ramifications for Grace. If she were discovered by the authorities to have killed a Sasquatch on that logging road above Bastion Mountain, would it matter that it was in self-defence? Endangered species have such special protections that I suspect self-defence is not a mitigating factor and she would still be liable for prosecution.

On the other hand, who is likely to find out about it? Josh isn’t going to talk, and Bright should be a safe confidante. If a tree falls in the forest…

How about Cyclopes? They haven’t been seen in a few thousand years. I don’t believe there is a law making them a protected species in B.C. No one is out looking for them, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t out there. Their increased forge activity could explain the increase of forest fires in British Columbia, couldn’t it? How about that eruption of Eyjafjallajokull volcano in Iceland? Angry Cyclopes is my bet. They are pretty good at making trouble for people, and they are really irritated with Zeus. Zeus is responsible for air travel. Uh huh. Making the connection? Disrupted air travellers have no clue about the real source of the problem, but now you know the truth.

Now the question is what did Grace kill on Bastion Mountain?

What is your guess?

——————————————————————————————-
To those of you south of the Canadian border: a Sasquatch is also known as Bigfoot.

 

Beautiful People

Filed under: Grace Awakening,Pondering — Shawn L. Bird @ 5:41 pm
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I’ve been thinking about beauty lately.

A couple of years ago, I decided that I wasn’t going to bring anything into my house that wasn’t aesthetically beautiful. Following that “A thing of beauty is a joy forever” model, I determined that if an object can be beautiful, why choose the ugly one over a beautiful one for the sake of a few dollars? So far this has worked out very well with objects, but an obsession with beauty poses some complications when dealing with real people.

We have such a love/hate turmoil over the concept of beauty. Most of us equate beauty with attractiveness. Attractiveness seems to be a ephemeral thing, yet studies say it can be measured on an attractiveness scale that relies on symmetry .  Other studies suggest the key to beauty is being absolutely average (a fascinating phenomenon called koinophilia that I will explore in another blog entry). I’m not sure that attractiveness is truly synonymous with beauty.

Attractiveness suggests a drawing in of others. To attract is to pull others to you, and our society has made it easy to become attractive. Miracles are promised by this cream or that potion. Surgeons are ready and more than willing to prey on the desire of people to lose their uniqueness, to be so average that they become pretty. Bigger breasts, flatter tummies, straighter noses, and firmer chins are all for sale. Everyone looks like everyone else and theoretically people are being drawn to each other like bees to flowers.

The wonder of beauty is that it has an air of the unattainable. It is distant. Physical beauty is to be worshipped and admired, not to be possessed. It’s not about drawing in; it’s about standing apart. In people attractiveness exists briefly and then fades as sexual virility is lost to age. It is temporal. But there is a beauty in form and movement which reveals a special grace beyond time. In an elegant elder, grace shows in a spirit of beauty that is completely indefinable. There is nothing symmetrical about it. It is far from average. It is a beauty that grabs you and leaves your heart glowing in your chest. That’s real beauty. It is unique, creative, and eternal.

True beauty is grace.

© Shawn Bird 2010

 

Ecstatic Ideas May 4, 2010

Filed under: Commentary,Literature — Shawn L. Bird @ 8:36 pm
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Last year by recommendation of my student Robyn, I read Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief. As I read, as is my habit, I dog eared the pages where I found wonderful thoughts. When I finished the book, I went back through all those dog eared pages to copy down the quotations that had struck me as being particularly profound. When I finished, I returned the book to Robyn.

A few days later, I went to post all those quotes, and they were gone! Somehow the computer had not saved them. Only the first two quotes remained. That means all the brilliance of Zusak’s prose was distilled into two thoughts. That is profound in itself.  Of the two, here’s the one that strikes me most deeply today:

“He was…enjoying the ecstasy of an idea, not daring just yet to envision its complications, dangers, and vicious absurdities. For now, the idea was enough. It was indestructible. Transforming it into reality, well, that was something else altogether. For now, though, let’s let him enjoy it.” (Zusak, Markus. The Book Thief. p 128)

So what is the idea that fills you with ecstasy? What indestructible idea of a dream tantalizes you between waking and dreaming?

Stay away from complications, dangers, absurdities and realities. Allow yourself to bask in the euphoria of possibility. Where could those ideas take you?

My ideas have brought me here.

Reality is a dream awoken.