I laugh about it now but it hasn’t always been funny to me. In fact for much of my life it has been something that was painful and crippling. I was always a pretty good student. I enjoyed the challenge and reward that came from conquering new material. But my nemesis in school became the English language. At an early age the insecurity sprouted of an inadequacy or incompetency when it came to reading, writing, grammar or spelling. Math seemed to fit my brain well, but words were illusive to me. When I took the abilities potential test last fall, the lady was interested in my educational experience as it pertained to the non specialized vocabulary portion of the test, because my scores were so low. I remember looking through the words on the test sheet, is it possible to give a definition of a word you can’t even pronounce? I worked hard in most subjects in school, but with English, I did enough to just get by. The feeling of inadequacy kept me from investing myself into the learning process. And frankly, grammar, spelling and even reading seemed rather boring at that age. I remember my 6th grade language arts class, we would go around the room with whatever book we were reading at the time. Each student had to read a paragraph. I would get so worked up about my paragraph (try reading in public when you have a fear of reading and a fear of the public) that I would count ten people ahead of me and figure out which paragraph I would read. I would practice reading that paragraph over and over again so that I would know all the words. It never really worked, I would always fumble over the sentences, studdering on the words while my face got red knowing all the ears in the classroom were witness to this debacle. If I got big paragraphs the teacher would sometimes stop me in the middle of the paragraph and give the rest of it to another student to finish. Yes it was that bad. So you might understand why it would be a scary thing to put my words to a public blog. There is an insecurity that everything I write is worthless, but I have learned through the last few years that that is a lie. I can only express myself in the best words I know how, but my thoughts, feelings, inspirations and creations are valuable. I am so valuable to the Father and who else do I need acceptance from. In who else’s love do I rest in. So with this blog, I will jot down thoughts, stories, poems, lyrics about whatever has inspired me and fueled my creative energies.
When we bring to the table only what we have, in honest vulnerability, it subtly works through the barriers and walls of life and slowly you find that others around you are freed to bring what they have also. I love art (all art forms but for me particularly literature and music) for this same reason. It has a sneaky way of pulling us into the artist story. In that space, the ‘art’ has a way of creeping in and out of the crevices of the soul. Behind the layers that we have built to protect ourselves from the hurt and pain of the world it works. It has the power to touch spaces in our lives that we can’t or don’t know how to reach and stir up dust, brush off cob-webs of places that matter to our Father. Lenard Cohen says that you should say a poem and get out of the way. My hope is that this blog has that feeling to it. So enjoy and feel free to comment or email me with any questions, thoughts or follow ups.
As some of you might know Josh Ritter is one of my favorite artists (yes Amy, I know I like old soul music), you can follow this link to one of the songs of his I have been listening to a lot recently http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYLBoBtszDg&feature=related . At first listen, I wasn’t really drawn to the song, but after a few more listens the song has grown on me. Listen to it while reading Edger Allen Poe’s poem Annabele Lee http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Annabel_Lee , which seems to have inspired a lot of the imagery and feel of the song.
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