It was early June I first read Alice Walker’s Poem, “Reassurance.” I didn’t read it in the conventional way, in a book, I read it on the sidewalk. Berkeley’s version of the Hollywood Walk of Fame is a Poetry Walk, with famous and not-so-famous poems lining the sidewalk on Addison Street between Shattuck and Milvia. I was convinced it wouldn’t be all that great, after all, I bet there would be more male poets than women, I thought.
I walked down Addison street looking at my feet, reading. Laughing, crying, photographing. I ooohed and ahhhhed and counted how many male poets and how many female poets.
I was wrong.
I was moved, I was delighted. Through some of the poetry, I was changed.
Alice Walker’s poem was the one I have held onto this Summer as I waited for the big transition which begins tomorrow to take form. Emma is starting high school. Samuel is back into a school he started in May due to having some fairly significant problems at his old school following four very successful years.
I have spent much of the Summer in a fairly even keeled manner but lately I have felt emotionally rocked and rolled.
Yesterday I facilitated a writing group at a local hospital’s Art and Spirituality Center. We used Alice Walker’s words paired with Rilke’s famous quotation about questions:
“Have patience toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and books written in a foreign language. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now.”
Rainer Rilke
Here are a couple questions I poked and prodded.
“What can I do, as a mother, to help my children through these transitions?”
I’ve done all I possibly could, short of being a helicopter parent which I won’t do.
“What can I do, as a mother, to feel peace with whatever happens to either of them, since it their path is their path and my path is my path and I can’t walk their path for them?”
There is the question to live.
How may I effectively encourage Emma, Samuel and Katherine to fully live their life path?
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© 2011
Julie Jordan Scott
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