I wasn't sure if I should include this blog post as one of the Ultimate Blog Challenge "blogboost" entries. It isn't a how-to, it isn't a business-y post. It is everyday life poetic: where does that fit amongst social media - how-to's - build your blog I see there so much? Then I decided "This is me. This is what I love to write. Someone out there must need to read this so-be-it, amen!" So here you have it.
“I early learned to love birds
the light of birds the kingdom of birds
in the high treetops
stricken with light.”
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, “The Light of Birds”
This morning I sat on my porch, my bottom held in place in a chair not unlike a baby’s sling as it holds her close to her Mommy’s heartbeat. The pure pleasure in the closeness the baby feels is not unlike the pure pleasure I felt as I read Lawrence Ferlinghetti poetry. My silent joy gained the trust and presence of a family of house finches who feed from the small wood house I filled with hopeful seeds yesterday, the ones I bought at the discount store and mixed diligently with a brown paper bag of cracked corn.
Samuel comes to me after I have moved inside to bring you into the Ferlinghetti meets my bird loving experience.
“Breakfast” he whispers into my right ear.
“8:00” I whisper back. “It is 7:42.”
“I am hungry,” he says plainly.
“7:50” I counter. He nods and moves to the kitchen, giving me room to speak with you.
I hear him fill a cup with ice and then water.
It reminds me how you and I and Samuel and the sleeping Emma are each and all our own light.
Like Ferlinghetti writes in his poems about the light of different places, the light of birds, overheard conversations of Indiana, we could each write a poem of light of Samuel or the light of the birdfeeder or the light within the discount store. That last one seems like a stretch but I am sure with the right frame of mind, even that is possible.
I know I used to habitually limit myself to the obvious.
Life has gotten so much sweeter since I changed that habit and recognized light, instead, in the gash on the prostitute’s calf as she works a side street in West Oakland and the light in the eyes of the young mother, so tired and lonely as she pushes her two babies in the shopping card in another nameless – characterless – grocery store in another nameless –characterless town in Central California.
Writers – you and I – are the stewards of light. We are offered the privilege of seeing it and translating it to others. Our words are an invitation to sight not unlike the eyeglasses perched on the edge of my seventh grade social studies teacher’s nose.
I have forgotten her name but I remember her eyeglasses and her demand, “Whoever is out there, clicking your pen, stop right now.”
It was me. She hadn’t or couldn’t see me clicking as I concentrated on the blank map of Africa which I was supposed to be filling in with names of countries I had yet to know.
She hadn’t learned to translate the light of these newly free countries: Ghana and Togo and Mozambique with their newly minted independence. Instead she gave us newly minted papers still smelling from the mimeography ink, still damp, still hungry to feel the light of our pencils.
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© 2012 by Julie Jordan Scott
Julie Jordan Scott has been a Life & Creativity Coach, Writer, Facilitator and Teleclass Leader since 1999. She is also an award winning Actor, Director, Artist and Mother Extraordinaire. She was twice the StoryTelling Slam champion in Bakersfield. She leads Writing Camp with JJS & this Summer will be traveling throughout the US to bring this unique, fun filled creative experience to the people wherever she finds the passion & the interest.
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This is my Ultimate Blog Challenge Writing for the Day. Be watching for my challenge posts which will include Writing Prompts, Writing Tips and General Life Tips and Essays. This is Blog 5/31 for July!
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