Serendipity and Karma

I received an email a while ago from someone who visited the Woods Hole Aquarium in Falmouth, MA. While there she happened to spy a tiny piece of paper on the floor, and picked it up to see what it was. It was a poem about a skunk cabbage, hand-written in tiny letters on the front and back of a little scrap of paper. The poem? My poem, "Song for the Skunk Cabbage.”  The finder was thoughtful enough to look me up online, and send me an email to tell me about it. That email really made my day!

So often we all go about our business, day to day, and never really think about the fact that something we have done, said, or written, might actually be rippling out away from us and touching people beyond our doorstep. Or windshield. Or desktop.  As someone who writes, I can say that I often wonder if anything I have thought out loud “on paper” has touched anyone or even been heard. I write because I love to and also, quite frankly, because I can’t help it. But I have to confess that knowing someone liked that little poem of mine enough to take the time to hand-write it out on a little piece of paper is very heartening. And the fact that someone had an inkling I’d feel that way and cared enough to let me know – really just, well, it kind of blew me away. I have just been walking around grinning over this for days and days.

The other day my editor at Moon Pie Press forwarded an envelope to me. The finder of the poem had forwarded that little piece of paper with my poem on it to her (with the return address: "a lover of serendipity and karma,") and my editor, in turn, forwarded it to me. This is such a gift! My poems are like children to me; I do the best I can with them and then send them out into the world. This one traveled to the Woods Hole Aquarium on a tiny piece of paper, then came back home to mama for a visit, thanks to a few lovers of serendipity and karma.

If you are a lover of serendipity and karma, wear it proud! I know it might be more hip to instant-message, insta-gram and reach out and touch technologically. But don’t forget to hand-write, send something snail mail, stick a poem under someone’s windshield wiper, print out a photograph and give it to someone to magnet onto their fridge. I know it is the thought that counts, but for my money a thought in the hand is worth two in the cloud.

A Sign of Acceptance

I have a wall in my office where I post pictures and notes that my clients (all troubled kids and their caregivers) have given me. One of them says "YOUR AWESOME!" Some days I find myself fighting the urge to "correct" that note. What would it hurt? A crayoned apostrophe, an added letter "e," to make things tidy and "correct?" My undergraduate degree was in English and I have corrected grammar and spelling right along with the best of them. I am sure I have been plenty annoying to perfectly well-meaning folks who have no need to know what an infinitive is, let alone what it means to split one. So that's why I have left that note on my office wall exactly as it is. It's a reminder to myself. When I get that urge to "correct" I can be almost certain I am not focusing on what is really important. I am not doing my job. I am trying to “fix” things, and it is not my job to “fix.” It’s my job to help people find more effective ways to navigate through this life, not to show them the “right” way.

I have started to wonder about this habit of correcting others and what it says about who we are. I have seen conversations among friends come to a dead stop when someone interrupts to say "It's LIE not LAY!" I have watched people completely miss the point of a heartfelt expression, because someone used "ain't." It makes me a little sad. Not because the English language is being "mangled" or that "those kids today" sound "ignorant." It makes me sad that we can become so focused on a colloquialism or punctuation mark that we forget the original point of language which is to communicate. Can you really not get past the grammar to continue the communication? This is my gentle challenge to think about why. Why is it so important to correct that you can no longer be present, can no longer listen to your fellow human? I get it -- some of us are editors, proofreaders, writers. We have to have an awareness of these things. Yeah, I know sometimes we think we are "helping." We are not. My challenge to you, fellow writers, editors, proofreaders, is to keep the work at work and not bring it to the coffee klatsch where "correcting" is just superior douchebaggery.

As for myself I am not perfect but it has been months now and I am almost at the point I can look at "YOUR AWESOME!" and not feel the urge to “fix” it. Some days I still see a “mistake,” but most days I see an opportunity to let go of the need to be right. I see an opportunity to accept that things are messy. People are flawed. Have I ever helped even one person by pointing out their flaws? The only person that ever helps is me, and it's a temporary buzz for sure. When the self-righteousness of “correcting” someone wears off, all you're left with is the discomfort of knowing you're still firmly ensconced in an imperfect world in which no one gives a shit where you put your apostrophe.

When I can completely let go of that need for everything to be "right," I am going to celebrate and make my own sign, adding an R at the end. "YOUR AWESOMER," it will say. "YOUR TOTALLY AWESOMER RIGHT NOW."

I have my 64 pack of crayolas and a poster board at the ready.

WHO'S WITH ME?!*

*totally had to resist the temptation to write "WHOSE WITH ME?" Just to mess with you.

resurrection of the blog.

Something happened after I finished graduate school and got my license and got a new job and got married. I was TIRED. So many wonderful things happening all at once but with new beginnings other things must come to an end and for me that was a lot of things. To make room in my life for an all-encompassing job that requires 40-50 hours a week, I had to let a lot of things go. You would think that would be liberating, but frankly, there were things I was not prepared to let go of and things I could not. I left them hanging, suspended, unfinished. Because saying goodbye was too hard.

Some of the main reasons I kept a blog then became moot - I had been using this blog to promote my sewing and crafts, to share process, to talk about poetry and the arts and my family. FUN STUFF!! So, dear readers, you can imagine what my life looked like that I could no longer participate in those things, let alone have the time to blog about them.

let me pause here to google-image a visual for you:

The straight line of a week of work heading off into a bleak distance of Friday. This will not do. This will not do at all.

Persistence is a virtue, but so is knowing when you are no longer on your own life path but need to find your way back to your own. It's time to get out the compass, watch the weathervane, measure the caterpillar's stripes.