We filled up two seed trays with assorted flowers and vegetables – I remember Zinnia’s and Sunflowers but nothing else – and after one week, the tray is filled with sprouting flowers. I’m excited. The new garden is going all around the house and we got two more trays to add two it. I am liking this.
Red and I went to the Pig Barn at Bedlam Farm this weekend to pick up a table. I once wanted to use the Pig Barn as my office but Maria used it as an art gallery. I love the character of this barn, and every owner of the farm has signed his name in chalk in the rafters. I feel that the farm will sell this Spring, I just feel it in my bones, and so I need to get my name up in the rafters.
Teaching can be an inherently selfish process, it can do much more for the teacher than the student, but perhaps works best when it benefits both. Once in awhile you get to light the creative spark, or more often just encourage it when it appears. My Hubbard Hall Writer’s Workshop has been one such experience, everyone in it lighting up, sharing, freeing the inner spirits and lights that most people keep locked inside, and are rarely encouraged to free. Most of us are taught from our first days the great lie of our time – we can’t do what we love. It is a monstrous lie, and when we awaken, we see it for what it is.
When I met Rachel, she told me she never expected to get into my class. Battered by a series of writing workshop that made her feel dumb or hopeless, she was shocked to be accepted and I was shocked when I looked at her website and saw describe herself as a “wannabee writer.” What, I asked is a “wannabe writer?” Anybody who writes is a writer, and anyone who writes as well as Rachel is a writer period. We took it from there. Rachel started a blog, “Picking My Battles.” Then she told me she was an animator, but wasn’t drawing. Why?, I asked. Because, she said, an instructor told her she couldn’t be a writer and an animator at the same time. I spit up my soup at that, and she began drawing. She takes ads. She barters. She shares and links, searches and likes. She won an award. She is building an audience. Her sketches are on theater programs. One day, she wants to be a full-time writer. One day, she will be. If she can make this much progress in six months, I can’t even imagine what she will be doing in a year or so. She is working on e-books, children’s stories, themes that explore family life, and real life.
How do I know she will get where she wants to go? Because every single day, she asks her self what she can do to have the life she wants, to be a writer, to do what she loves. And everyday she does it. She has every gift she needs, every tool required. She needed only one thing, a thing we all need – encouragement, the most powerful fuel on the earth.
Like most real writers, she’s a bit crazy. She has the usual writerly neuroses, she has suffered from depression and anxiety disorders. She is funny and insightful. She is brave and determined. She doesn’t know it, but she is fearless. She is a devoted mother and wife. A good friend. She writes every day, grows every day. This week, I was shocked to go on her website and see that she was doing moving animation. She grows and grows, this great creative spirit inside of her finally free and cutting loose. She is not the only one, the other students are doing the same and I will get to them in good time. But I would encourage you to meet this remarkable person and see this sacred thing, her blog, her work, this creative spark – a gift given to all of us, I believe – glow and grow.
