The Circle of Gratitude

in /by

My mother always said, “Gratitude begets gratitude.” I wondered what she meant.

I began writing daily gratitudes back in 2019 while my mom’s health was failing, and I hated facing the loss of her beautiful self. She had always listened like no one else. She had always understood. I knew her loss would be irreplaceable in my life. It was. But the gratitudes were a gift that helped me cope.

Gratitudes lifted me up each morning. They taught me to notice tiny, beautiful things–the cardinal who stopped to sing to me at the top of the juniper tree, the sunlight that surprised me on my hike by painting a kaleidoscope of orange and yellow dancing across the red rocks. With gratitude I learned to stretch and breathe deeply as I practiced my simple yoga. With gratitude I learned to light candles as a ritual to honor the people and writings that walk the path into my heart.

Of course, I began sharing my gratitude writing practice with my students. I learned when we share gratitudes we increase the positive feelings that come of it. Last week I wrote this gratitude in my journal.

From Sandra–I am grateful for my writers. Teaching them is my passion. My love of teaching centers on the fact that I am always the student. Learning from my writers. Inspired by my students.

That same morning, I began sifting through gratitudes I had collected from students. I read and reread Martha Bonnie’s gratitudes. I am a bit star-struck with her words. They are heartfelt, meaningful, and artful. I always want to stick them on a billboard for others to see or convince the New York Times that these words should grace their pages. While humble with her work, she allowed me to show you just these few. Perhaps the beautiful words that weave themselves through our class are the real teachers. Words that teach us to find and hold our gratitude.

From Martha–I am grateful for–finding a monarch butterfly while hiking today. Monarchs symbolize transformation and are also seen as spirit guides. I’ve always loved butterflies–so has my daughter– we’re both drawn to them. This one was stuck on the trail, so I picked it up to keep it from being trampled. It crawled into my hands, up my wrist and delicately up my arm. It unfolded its paper-thin wings, pulled them back together and sat for a moment. Then it opened its wings and flew away. I feel as if I dreamed the moment. 

Martha and I have worked together off and on in writing groups for three years. She faced these years, like all of us, with the fear of COVID threaded into her days, but she also faced a difficult accident and a long-distance move to Arizona. While speaking does not come easily, her words filled with resilience flow onto the page.

From Martha–I am grateful for my courage because this recovery is grueling, and I have never once considered giving up on myself or my family or my fight.

Last week when we chatted on Zoom, Martha read a new poem to me. I cried. The words were that good. While she is not ready to release her poem yet, she gave me a greater gratitude.

From Martha–I am grateful for my writing class, the writing I’ve been doing through it, and the community of writers I am part of because of the class. I’m so grateful for all of the inspiration and the perspective I’ve gained just from being part of this group of writers. I’m grateful for my own courage and the courage of all of the other women, when we choose to share a piece of ourselves through our writing. I’m even more grateful for the kindness in the feedback of others after the sharing.

My students, like Martha, have taught me that in finding our words together we can create a space where we write and share and grow. We can even make it a circle of gratitude.

In this month of Thanksgiving I wanted to share this with you. My gratitudes have  taught me to hold a light up to the blessings in my life. They have made my life brighter. May you find your gratitude. May it surround you.

A New Voice

in /by

I have always loved words. But I did not always love poems. It took years before the brilliant insights embedded in a poem began to seep into me. It would take another decade before I would dare to share poems with my students. Now when I find a quote or poem rich in wisdom, I like sharing them with others. But they are not always well received. A lesson I learned from Emma.

A few weeks ago, I was caught up in teaching story writing to a dynamic group of fifteen storytellers. In this Zoom writing workshop there were eight women with cancer; two of them had stage four and were, of course, unsettled by their diagnosis. Three women, all from California, were cancer survivors who wanted to write their stories. Two women had lost their spouses and wanted to write about their dramatically different losses–one wanted to honor her loss, and the other wanted to help others escape the nightmare she had endured. There was Maria with razor sharp insights, and there was Emma, both beautiful and a bit befuddled.

One day I shared with them my favorite poem, “The Journey” by Mary Oliver. We read it. We wrote about it.  Midway through a robust discussion, Maria lifted her head, shoved a huge curl out of her face, and read these words,

“there was a new voice

which you slowly

recognized as your own,

“I love these words from the poem for this struggle is the struggle we all have. I think I am finding my voice, and it lifts you up, changes you, to find your voice.”

Emma’s turquoise eyes flickered, and then she unexpectedly popped on her Zoom mic, and her voice had an urgency that was new.  “I want a voice.  But I can’t always understand what is being said.  I read the poem, and I want it to make sense to me, but I don’t get it.” She paused and bit her lip, looking down with a shadow cutting across her face. “As a traumatic brain injury survivor, I get frustrated. When I don’t understand things, I don’t know how I can find my voice.”

I understood her pain. I think we all did. But her words carried me back to a time when I felt my voice had been ripped out of me. Haven’t we all had that experience? For me it was in a medical office, a box-like room that felt like a coffin, where I met an awkward radiologist who stammered my fate, “You—you—you have breast cancer.” In the coming days life became a dark rabbit’s hole that I had tumbled into.

For months I struggled to find the words to talk about my cancer. Indeed, I found solace in a bright red journal. On those pages I raised questions, poured out my fears, and shared painful memories of test after test, physician after physician, and surgery after surgery. In that time, I would see my ninety-year-old mother’s scars from losing her breasts. In that time, I would lose both my breasts. In that time, I would cry and struggle to find my way forward. But I did. Cancer changed me, and my writing in the bright red journal was a huge part of this. It took time, but word by word I found my way back. I found my voice, perhaps a new voice.

Yesterday, as I finished teaching my writers, each one read her story. Even Emma.  She read about her struggle with her traumatic brain injury. She explained that the biggest surprise came when she returned to her first-grade teaching job, a job she had loved. It proved impossible. She read of her struggle to make dinner for her three children. Possible but hard.  She talked of wanting to understand a beautiful poem but acknowledged she could only learn about it from others. She explained how hard it is to be this new person who tries to understand and often doesn’t—but sometimes surprises herself. She described her new life as a puzzle that needed to be put together. Some days the pieces fit. Some days not so much.

When she finished there were tears. Her tears. Our tears. In this way we welcomed another beautiful, reclaimed new voice.

The Little Orange Book

in /by

“Oh the places you will go!” said Dr Seuss. For me, books are a way of discovering new places. A way of meeting new and interesting people. A way of learning how to grow and change. Books can change us, but the path can be an uphill climb. Or not.

It did not start well for me. In first grade I was uprooted from a school I loved and moved to Southport Elementary. My dad’s dream of starting an engineering business with a friend vanished when his partner unexpectedly had a heart attack. Suddenly, Dad needed a paycheck. While his transition to an engineering job in Indianapolis went well, my transition was a bit bumpy.

At nearly six-feet-tall, Mrs. Walker, my new first grade teacher, intimidated me. Every strand of her blond hair was pulled into a tight bun. She tediously scratched her directions on the board. As Billy Schrader used to say, “She has a stare that can knock you flat.”

One day after reading groups, in front of the entire class, Mrs. Walker asked me, to read aloud from the yellow reader. I felt like she had spit nails at me. My face turned red, and I covered it with my hands to shield myself from the slings and arrows of her words–as well as the stares of my new peers. I could not move. I could not even open my mouth.

Immediately, Mrs. Walker explained she was moving me from one reading group to another.  She used names like, “You are moving from the red bird group to the blue birds.” While I was only six, I knew I was being demoted from the high reading group to a lower group—and all of my new classmates were staring at me with pity. Even Billy Schrader, the class bully.

To this day I can call up the shame of how that moment felt. At six, I was painfully shy, and I had no understanding of how to stand up for myself and explain that I could read every darn word (all 15 of them) in the yellow reader. But I was scared. I told no one. I harbored the pain of my shyness and a fear of reading or speaking in front of others for a long time.

Then I met my third-grade teacher, Mrs. Vawter.  She wore a ring through her nose. Billie Shrader called her “the bull” until he realized you don’t mess with Mrs. Vawter. It took a couple of weeks and several parent conferences, but the woman got Billy Schrader under control. In the end I think Billy liked her. No one had ever made him behave.

And no one read like Mrs. Vawter. After lunch she often read to us from the little orange biography books about the lives of Abe Lincoln or Betsy Ross. She pretended to be the characters, even the animals. When she would clomp across the room like a horse, we shrieked our approval.  I started checking out a little orange biography each night and reading it. On the day I turned in the book on Helen Keller, Mrs. Vawter announced to the class I was a “voracious reader.” Of course, no one knew what that meant, so she laughed and then asked me to share the story of Helen Keller.

For a moment I stood there frozen in my shyness. Now, I loved that little orange book, and Mrs. Vawter knew I did. It took a long hard moment, but somehow I broke past my wall of silence and began to tell that story like I had been born to tell it. With passion. I told about how illness at a young age had stripped Helen Keller of her sight and her hearing, and how Annie Sullivan came into her life and helped her learn words and how to communicate. I talked the longest I had ever talked in any class.  I spoke with the fire of inspiration, for I loved this story.

When I was done, I realized my classmates were staring at me in disbelief, and Billy Shrader announced, “Wow, she speaks!” There was laughter, and it is my first memory of my classmates smiling at me. It felt good.

Mrs. Vawter ushered me into books and stories that inspired me. She helped me to find and share my voice. The story of Helen Keller struggling to understand and communicate with others was an important one for me. Being painfully shy allowed me to relate with her communication struggle, and as I watched her overcome obstacles, I wanted to be like her and overcome my own struggles.  I am grateful for the inner courage she helped me find.