hope

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I've heard it in the chilliest land
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

-Emily Dickenson
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I had an appointment with Tiffany today. My body actually was sore, which I guess reflects tension. She did some acupuncture points for stress-relief, too.

At the end of the sessions she has this deck of cards in a basket to choose from. They are similar to tarot cards but they are each about well being somehow. Today the card I selected actually gave me a task: to be positive for the rest of the day. It said to pay attention to what this feels like for me, especially if and when it is difficult.

The poem came to me earlier today. I was thumbing through an old magazine and part of the poem was in some art somewhere.

Dickenson has always been among my favorite poets. I was absolutely obsessed with her when I was 15. I was captivated by poetry that year, and I read tons of her poems and wrote a paper about her for my honors American Lit. class. I tried to get out of that class at the semester because I was taking so many hard classes and was feeling stretched beyond my limits (started getting sick, but wouldn't stay home from school...my neck even went out--and I was just 15!). My teacher wouldn't let me drop the class. She said that she had never had a student who understood poetry to the depth that I did and that the rest of the students in the class benefited from my contributions. She also said that since she knew that I would have an art class in the second semester that she believed that it would make all the difference for me to have that outlet. As it turned out, she was right. She became the first in a string of English teachers to try to persuade me to follow it as a major (all of my English/Lit teachers in college did as well). I resisted, all of the way through. To this day I still haven't finished the paper work toward my endorsement to teach English. My resistance to it stems from my belief that if I were endorsed to teach English then I would be *forced* to teach it (as many teachers who are endorsed to teach subjects in addition to art end up teaching the other subjects instead). As it is, I already teach the humanities (English + Social Studies) class as well as art.

But I've gone off on a tangent...

Oh I do love the bird imagery.

And this poem is very positive, as the card I drew today encouraged me to be.

Now I am off to the Mars Bar once again, this time I will go alone. Mr. C's band, the drop, is playing again. Angie said for weeks that she would go, but called this morning to say that she can't make it. Mr. C doesn't like the idea of me going alone so much because he worries about me walking to and from my car in the dark alone. I'm not worried, though. I will park along the street and there is light.