“Our days are happier when we give people a bit of our heart, rather than a piece of our mind.” – unknown
My daughter, Miss O, wrote a poem for her fifth grade class. She will be graduating tomorrow and is on to middle school. Her experience at our neighborhood elementary school has been enriching, rewarding, and sweet. We’ve all made so many great friends and connections — which is amazing given that she started as a pandemic kindergartner doing classes online at age five.
Here’s Miss O’s poem. I’ll just sit off to the side with a box of tissues while you read it… 🙂
I am from love from patience and kindness
I am from the grass in the backyard crisp fresh always green
I am from The purple flowers down the block Lavender-colored and filled with sweet honey
I am from Christmas eve in church singing and holding candles up to the sky
And doing crazy things just because we feel like it from going on adventures and celebrating holidays
I’m from the place where there is always good food and where projects are our love language
From “Miss O, can you go help your brother?” and “When I’m gone do this list of 3,000 chores!”
I’m from Rainy days with Puddling jumping Hot chocolate Heated blankets Movies And love
I’m from A chill neighborhood In Seattle
And Fresh baked Cookies And ice cream
(featured photo is Miss O on her first day of Kindergarten and last week)
“Shallow waters don’t lead to new continents.” – Constance Friday
In the Pacific Northwest where I live, we are blessed with beautiful lakes filled with fresh, clear water. Seeing the bottom gives me such a great sense of depth and stillness. When I spend any time near a PNW lake, I come away with a better feel for my life in reflection.
There are some people that are just like these lakes. I don’t know if you’ve experienced this, but when I’ve met these remarkable individuals, I come away feeling that same sense of refreshing depth and reflection.
It’s how I felt after Vicki Atkinson and I recorded a podcast with Cindy Georgakas, Episode 93: Celebrating Poetry with Cindy Georgakas. In this vibrant conversation we get such a wonderful taste of Cindy’s energized and connected presence. She tells us how Covid was the impetus of starting to share wellness information in a different format.
That led to her book released last year in the Happiness Category, Re-Create & Celebrate: 7 Steps to Live the Life of Your Dreams. In the process of releasing that book, she planned a second release of a book of poetry she wasn’t able to include in Re-Create & Celebrate. Her poetry book, Celebrating Poetry is due out this month!
Hearing Cindy tell these stories underscores the rich lessons of learning to adjust when what we’ve planned turns out to be different in timing and format.
Speaking of planning, Vicki and I ask Cindy about what else she has planned on her creative radar.
This is a great episode because all of Cindy’s answers are so full of heart. She is an inspiring author to listen to – because she’s so interested in creating a-ha moments for others. Cindy is a well-spring of wisdom that speaks to the essence of who we are.
I’m confident you’ll love the scenic and beautiful places we explore as we share the power of storytelling – in podcasts, in poetry, and in conversation.
“When anxious, uneasy and bad thoughts come, I go to the sea, and the sea drowns them out with its great wide sounds, cleanses me with its noise, and imposes a rhythm upon everything in me that is bewildered and confused.” – Rainier Maria Rilke
On my first mountain climbing attempt, a guided climb of Mt. Rainier in the summer of 1998, the lead guide introduced us to the poetry of Robert Service. Whether you or not you like his poetry, he delivers a cadence that I found helpful in keeping a climbing rhythm:
“There’s a race of man who won’t give in A race that can’t stand still. So they break the heart of kith and kin And roam the world at will.”
The Men Who Don’t Fit In by Robert Service
Climbing depends on a steady pace. If you go too fast when roped to your teammates, you create too much slack ahead, and end up pulling the climber behind. If you go too slow, you create drag on someone else. When climbs would get tough, I’d recite the poems in my head and it would regulate my head, heart, and feet.
Thought I don’t climb any more, I still find evidence of pacing in all of the rest of my life. At work, knowing the cadence of team meetings helps to know when we can address issues. At home, rhythm is such a large part of how my little family stays stable. The waking up, eating breakfast, packing lunches, off to school rhythm is the cornerstone of our weekdays. When we get out of sync, it’s like a band that’s lost the beat.
Miss O recently learned to play Ode to Joy on the piano. When feeling like she wants to show off her mastery, she plays it somewhere between double and triple time. Played like that, it quickly becomes Ode to Indigestion.
Jack describes himself as a rhythmic writer. I’m thinking of You Make a Mean Salad as an example of his writing and humor. Or perhaps it’s best heard in a play. Step 9 is available as a theatrical podcast.
Thinking of my own writing as someone who tends to extended sentences, I have a lot to learn about calibrating sentences from Jack. Here’s a clip from our podcast where he talks about how Shakespeare balances sentences.
“Don’t set yourself on fire to keep others warm” – Rumi
We traveled this weekend to visit a friend in Eastern Washington. On Saturday morning, I crawled out of bed early for my sacred meditation time. After I meditated, I built a fire in the wood stove to take off the chill of the early morning in the woods.
The sequence made me realize the similarities between meditation and fire building.
We accumulate the debris from our lived days – the celebrations, the joys, the annoyances, the worries. It sits like stacked wood until we are ready to coax out the heat and the warmth. Somethings are easier to ignite than others while others need some tending to burn.
It requires a spark to convert it to something other than dead wood that we carry around. The spark can come from something like writing, introspection, or meditation. It can come from people around us or circumstances can set us off. But one way or another something is likely to light us up in good ways or in bad.
Some sort of ventilation is necessary in order for the process to work. We can talk it out, sweat it out, write it out, pray it out, cry it out, or some combo of it all.
Thinking about these parallels as I sat watching the fire in the stove, I found myself mesmerized by the beauty and warmth. But there are few things that scare me as much as when fire escapes its boundaries and roars out of control.
I came home from the weekend with a new motto: Be a campfire, not a conflagration.
Surprised By Joy 