TToT: Being the Heroine of My Own Story – Lucky, #EarthDay2017 #WorldBookDay #10Thankful

“There, sitting on the warm grass, I had my first lessons in the beneficence of nature. I learned how the sun and the rain make to grow out of the ground every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food, how birds build their nests and live and thrive from land to land, how the squirrel, the deer, the lion and every other creature finds food and shelter. As my knowledge of things grew I felt more and more the delight of the world I was in. Long before I learned to do a sum in arithmetic or describe the shape of the earth, Miss Sullivan had taught me to find beauty in the fragrant woods, in every blade of grass, and in the curves and dimples of my baby sister’s hand. She linked my earliest thoughts with nature and made me feel that ‘birds and flowers and I were happy peers.”

—Helen Keller, The Story of My Life

I’m trying to have the sense to live in the moment and to enjoy myself in that moment, whatever it might be, like Helen Keller and her teacher Miss Sullivan.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rlQqWbp7rY

The only time things seem to make any sense is when I am with my nieces or nephews, holding my niece.

Ten Things of Thankful

I am thankful for more time spent, just myself and my little buddy Mya.

She didn’t want to sleep the entire time. She didn’t want to miss one second of her time with Auntie Kerry.

Then Kim told me there are a few photos recently taken where Mya looks like me. I may never have my own children. My sister will never know how much this small thing, one I won’t ever likely fully understand because I can’t see the pictures, means to me anyway.

I am thankful for my last violin lesson for a few weeks.

Last time we missed multiple weeks it was I who was going away. This time my teacher is traveling.

I hope, like last time, I don’t fall too far back in my progress.

I hope her trip is everything mine was to me, all she hopes.

I am thankful for my return to the library.

I haven’t been to my writing group (The Elsewhere Region like I like to refer to it) since February, for a few reasons.

Everyone there seemed pleased to see me, a few even saying they missed me. I missed them and their wonderful imaginations.

We had little scraps of paper with a few lines of story prompt written on them, thanks to one of the members of our group, and mine included: a frog prince, a talking donkey, a cloud castle, and Betty’s wish list.

Who is Betty you ask…well I asked myself that same question. It was the first try for me, in a while or at all really, at writing fantasy. I liked what I came up with, though I have no idea where I was headed with it, but then my equipment decided to cause a problem.

I was reading my story in progress out loud to the group, they were riveted, and then the second half of what I’d written seemed to vanish. I am sure I wrote it, but my technology doesn’t always cooperate.

I am thankful I could answer a few questions about how I’ve learned and lived as a blind person, for a good cause.

My sister’s sister-in-law works with a young boy who is blind. She helps him in his neighbourhood school, but she had some questions about how I’ve grown up, how I learned, and how my mom saw it all from the parent perspective.

She had the coolest keychain on her keys. Instead of a cube with coloured squares, she has three blocks that move from one side to another, and they contain tactile dots. They are braille dots and they make different letters in braille when you mix and match them.

A fun thing to do with your hands. She sounds like an excellent teacher who wants to keep learning the best possible ways to teach her student to be as successful in his life as possible and it seems he is lucky to have her.

I am thankful for a friend reaching out, mentioning me to her friend, and a new and possible connection made in the world of women writing and women’s storytelling.

Thank you Lizzi. Women helping and supporting other women. We can always use the help. I appreciate it.

Who knows what will or will not come of it, but that is what making connections is all about.

I am thankful for a lovely first visit with my new neighbour in my home.

We had a nice talk. Many more to come.

She even warned me about the roofers coming to her house and called me this evening, to check on me, when she thought she heard a noise over here.

I am thankful for this earth.

I watched Bill Maher say that 45 needs to forget “Make America Great Again” and instead “Make Earth Great Again.”

I totally agree. Mars is cool and everything (says this fan of planets since childhood) but we don’t have licence to be careless, reckless, and destroy this planet, just because some want to get there. It is not the answer to our problems of environmental and climate changes. Taking care of this place, the one already with plenty of water and life and the air we breathe, that will benefit us all in the end.

As many said, every day should be Earth Day for us all.

I am thankful for science.

All Around Us and Everything Essential

I thank all the scientists in my life: my oldest friend, my many excellent doctors over the years, my cousin and his wife, my new friend who is also a writer, Bill Nye The Science Guy (for teaching me to love our solar system when I was a child), and to so many who are much smarter than I am in these matters.

I owe science big and I believe those who marched all around the world were warranted in doing so. We need to make a statement. Science is worth fighting for.

I am thankful for another excellent episode of Anne The Series.

A young girl runs through a dark, snow covered forrest, carrying a lantern and wearing only a thin layer of night clothes.

Ahead By A Century.

I am glad Anne and Diana are allowed to be friends again so soon, but I didn’t expect these three things to happen, all in this one episode of Anne The Series: Diana’s sister almost dying, Anne meeting Great Aunt Miss Josephine Barry, and Gilbert suffering a huge loss.

The fist fight is one of the memorable parts of this one, likely brought on by grief and a need to defend a newly growing love and respect, even if the source of that love and respect doesn’t make it easy, like one before her.

Though Anne is conflicted about what her future should be, between romance that most young girls are desperate for and her strong ambition, she knows when she listens to her heart.

This episode is all about letters, long lost pleas that will now never be addressed and unfinished business and apologies.

More flashback with Marilla this time, as a young girl, about Anne’s age. Sadly, youth cannot last and family obligations altered everything, but not necessarily for the worse, for some more than others.

Matthew offers to help Gilbert, Marilla and Gilbert have a enlightening conversation about place and time, and Anne finds a kindred spirit in old Miss Barry, who the writing hints as having had a long same sex relationship with another woman. This was never even alluded to in the series I loved growing up, but the times are changing and I am glad for that. It was one of the pleasant surprises of this week’s instalment.

Some of my favourite themes explored in this narrative are those exploring grief, loss, stubbornness, regret, and how decisions can or may influence the future.

Anne goes to give her apology when she finds an abandoned house, Marilla is stuck with her regrets, and Matthew goes to the bank to make some mysterious financial transaction.

Season finale already next Sunday. That went fast and I hope the break isn’t too long, that a second season is in the works.

“Romance is a pesky business. No sense to be made of it.”
—Miss Josephine Barry

I am thankful for books, but not only them, but books in accessible formats.

On World Book Day, I am not just thankful for books, though I am always thankful for those. It’s being able to read them, hold them, learn from them, and to access them in either e-format, audiobooks, or in braille.

This wasn’t always possible if you couldn’t see to read and it still isn’t always made easy. I just want to be like Helen, with her love of reading and learning. Or Anne and hers.

And so one more week ends and another begins. It’s all still an endless, giant enigma to me.

TToT: Woman In Black Blouse Holding Black Bow – Shadow Bowing, #10Thankful

“I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself on all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.”

–Sylvia Plath, “The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath”

Caption: Woman in black shirt smiling and standing.)

There is an App for the visually impaired where you can take a photo of anything you are in need of describing and send it away and, within seconds, an answer is given by someone somewhere who has viewed it and explained it to the best of their ability. Well, that’s the first reply given when I asked what the above photo showed. The second I used for the title of this week’s TToT because I thought it strangely eerie.

🙂

Have you heard of “shadow bowing”?

That is what I am doing. Supposedly, (as YouTube is a totally reliable source on this), I’m quite sure – if you want to practice moving your violin’s bow in a perfectly straight line, you take an empty toilet paper roll and work at moving the bow through it, over and over again. Well, let’s just say, I thought it worth a try, yet highly amusing at the same time.

The week started out badly. It wasn’t a great week at all, to be frank, but I still think I can come up with 10 things to be thankful for. Come along with me and let’s see if I can.

🙂

I made a decision, as February and its extra day came and went and March began, that I will cut back from the daily blogging I’ve been doing since the start of 2016, and will cut back to only weekends and these blogging hops and link ups I so enjoy.

I will use my weekdays to focus on my violin and writing for other places, specifically the memoir I’ve wanted to write since I was fourteen years old.

TEN THINGS OF THANKFUL

For rare disease awareness.

I shared, back when it first came out, an article I wrote which was published on The Mighty:

Rare Disease Day, 2016: Even Rarer Than A Leap Year

Well, the official day of recognition was on a leap year this time round, making it extra special.

For a song that inspires me.

Scars – Emmanuel Jal Feat. Nelly Furtado

I was shown this one by a friend, but although I could tell just by listening that there was depth and significance in the words, the music, and in the visuals, I could not see what was taking place in the video for the song.

Well, my friend explained what happens throughout. I could tell it was important, with the sound of the train at the beginning, but I now listen to this every night before I go to bed. It reminds me that we all have our struggles and our burdens to shoulder. I want to write my story, to tell of my particular tale, while this song plays on repeat in the background in my head.

Check it out if you have a moment. It’s beautiful.

For books and their creators.

As the quote at the start of this post shows, I love books for so many things. I will never be all the things I want to be, but books get me a lot closer.

This week was World Book Day.

I found myself in my nephew’s room, one day in the middle of the week, and my mom began reading “What Pet Should I Get?”, unaware that its author was celebrating a birthday on that exact same day. I celebrate Dr. Seuss and the genus he was with words.

He was highly skilled with them, words that is. He was able to stand out, reach children, and as I would love to write a children’s book someday, I try to study his brilliance, hoping always that something of it may rub off on me.

For a much needed laugh or two to brighten up a rough week. I love the coming together of a child’s imagination and the acting talents to bring it to my screen.

I did not watch anything surrounding Academy Awards mania, but I think this is better than any of the movies that actually got nominated for a trophy.

🙂

I was riveted by both these performances.

Kid Theater with Tom Hanks (Bridge of Spies)

Hanks deserves the award for that, don’t you agree? Possibly even Jimmy. If you need to smile, watch only this one Oscar performance.

For a hot shower to help with head and limb pain.

For another chance to share my writing, as part of a wonderfully important blogger series:

#BeReal – KERRY KIJEWSKI

I was glad to get some of my feelings out and on the page in a supportive environment like Hasty’s blog.

For new car smell.

I don’t know exactly what that fragrance consists of, so feel free to enlighten me, but I know it is in the materials of a newish car and it doesn’t last forever – just like most things in life.

🙂

Whatever it emanates from, it brings back nostalgic feelings that are indefinable, but warmly welcome.

For my first actual violin recital.

Not playing. Oh hell no!

🙂

Just attending, but it was highly inspiring and motivating.

I write about the experience here:

Flower of the Night

For the chance to work creatively with my musically talented brother.

Caption: Smiling man playing violin.

🙂

This was the explanation we received for the photo of my brother holding my violin.

He is a guitar player mainly. He and I decided we would try to write a song together. He has written the music and now I am faced with the new challenge of listening to it, letting the music move through me, and feeling the words and letting them come to me.

I try to lighten the mood because I have written lots of things, but never song lyrics. It’s a bit like poetry and I always doubted my skill with that. I hope it is something I can do. The challenge to myself is a tough one. I just think it would be neat to do that with him.

For beautiful pieces of writing, from such creative and talented bloggers and writers. This lovely memoir post I just had to share.

Where Is Home – Yvonne Spence

Several months back I came across multiple beautifully written blog posts and shared them here, stating my intention to share a couple that were particularly influential on me, here on the TToT every week.

Well, I didn’t follow through, but better to do it when inspiration strikes.

Home – Phillip Phillips

“You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose. You’re on your own. And you know what you know. And you are the one who’ll decide where to go.”

–Dr. Seuss, “Oh, The Places You’ll Go!”

How I Celebrated World Book Day 2015

What was I doing here?

It felt like a strange fish-out-of-water state to be in, but there I was.

I’ve already jammed so much into less than a week over this first week of March: a visit to Ottawa, seeing my aunt in her new home, and last night I visited Lucinda House.

I have wanted to write about all these things and more, but it all feels like too much for me to focus in on any of it.

My original statement today applies to all of these, but I must find a way to narrow it down somehow here tonight.

And so, as I asked myself once more, for the umpteenth time in less than a week:

What am I doing here?

I realized, so many times since March began that I have been weighed down by discomfort, but often the most important and valuable experiences in life will do this.

***

On World Book Day, 2015, I sat in an old house, now a part of a university, but in the moment it almost felt like I was transported back one hundred years.

Just being in an old house like that, surrounded by a room full of mostly women and reading to each other…

Wrong or right, I pictured the one scene from Gone with the Wind, where the ladies are tensely awaiting the return of their men.

The husbands were off, somewhere, taking justice into their own hands to defend their women.

As they were doing this, to make things safer, the ladies sat with their knitting as one proceeded to read aloud to the group.

Yes, the strangest thoughts come into my mind at the oddest of moments.

Yes, I can admit that, but being that yesterday was World Book Day and Sunday is International Women’s Day I had both books and women’s issues on my mind.

Of course, there were a few guys in the room this time, which made them the minority in my particular case.

Recently, I heard there was going to be a reading going on from a blogger I follow. I have been trying to read more Canadian and local literature lately. This particular blogger and writer does readings around the area and I wanted to show my support to her, to thank a female writer of books, something and someone I greatly admire.

I have been reading her blog for a while now, but I wanted to have the chance to put a voice to the words, an actual voice to the writer’s voice I have come to know so well on her website.

The evening started off on, what I can admit wasn’t the best note when I showed up in the middle of her reading. Not a great first impression to put forth toward someone I admire for the work she does.

I know what it must be like to be in the middle of speaking about that kind of hard work, a person’s life’s work and one’s passion and to have people walk in right in the midst of that.

I apologized upon meeting her, at the end of the evening, for doing this. She was quite gracious about it, but I made sure to let her know I did not intend to be at all disrespectful. I wanted her to know how much I really did want to hear her read from her newest novel, to meet her after reading so much about her life all these months.

She was great and she even made sure to signed one of her books for me: just one Carrie to another Kerry.

🙂

I am not a people person. I am not naturally outgoing and felt awkward all evening. This started, after walking in and hoping to be quiet while removing all winter items of clothing and taking a seat in the room, trying hard to disrupt the reading in progress as little as humanly possible.

I had been dealing with my issues with being arround old buildings all week long, facing them head-on.

First, through spending time in secondhand stores and old jails in Ottawa…to this particular evening, in an old house.

I could hear the age of the house I was in with every creek the floors made under my own feet and under the feet of the authors who shared their readings throughout the night.

I heard the floorboards make that signature creaky old house noise with every side-step each speaker took while standing at the front of the room.

I felt out of place. This was mostly a university setting, on a campus, attended overall by professors and literature students.

The professors were older and the students were younger. I did not feel like I belonged there; hovering, by myself, somewhere in between these two demographics.

As I stood in the kitchen, I felt a little less awkward getting a drink and some fruit because I had a brief break from having to feel like I fit in with those of academia out in the other room.

Suddenly, one of the only few guys in attendance spoke up to a few early-twenty-something female students. Apparently I wasn’t quite as alone as I’d first thought.

There was a hint of flirting I detected in his voice and also a hint of his own awkwardness, as he spoke to these young women. He was a poet, yet not a university student like they were. He clearly loved literature, or he wouldn’t have been there at all, but in his voice and in the words he spoke was obvious his own feelings that I too had been feeling.

Apparently, we all had our own version of the fish-out-of-water feeling going on.

I didn’t want to feel any pretension or any inadequacy. I didn’t want to feel like the act of writing and sharing that writing with others, female or not, was at all frivolous or pretentious.

I didn’t want to feel like it could have been one hundred years ago: either because of what women chose to do back then was treated less than at that time or even still today, in my own mind. I wanted to feel like what I was doing was worthwhile.

So why then did I feel like I was having to justify my own reasons for being there to myself or to some unnamed observer?

As I listened to others read aloud to the group I thought about my own writing and that need to write I feel pressing on my soul, stronger and stronger all the time.

I felt the discomfort of the words Carrie read from the pages of her own novel ring true in my own life. It all felt way too universal, these feelings, as she read a segment where her female protagonist is more than one hundred years old and living in a nursing home. I felt her words touching a nerve still much too raw in my own heart, after visiting a female family member of my own just the other day, currently living in just such a place.

This was perhaps only some fictional character in a book, but it was real to me and those I love, and more than likely to the writer/reader/speaker herself.

I did not get a chance, due to my high level of awkwardness in social settings, to let her know just how much her words had affected me. I don’t think I could have put it into words there and then, even if I’d wanted to. I am barely doing a coherent job of that here and now.

Next, I listened to the way the professor in residence went on to read her poems, which she had turned from academic, scientific journals and articles she’d come across from others, into the most beautiful lyrical, literary writing of her own making.

She had written about the type of symbiotic biological relationships that go on in nature, and something about pollination, the sorts of relationships I’d written about on visiting the creatures at the aquarium that opened in Toronto a few years ago.

Then she read us a poem she’d composed about the way different bee colonies fight for supremacy (not all creatures choosing to live such a symbiotic existence alongside each other.

Finally, I listened to some of her young creative writing students stand up in front of a bunch of strangers and lay it all out there.

They spoke about going out on their own for the first time and about unwanted attention from the opposite sex.

They shared short stories/poems about things I could hardly relate to, such as homelessness and living and surviving out on the streets.

One of the girls had even coined herself:

“the unofficial poet of the bus”,

as the place she’d found time or inspiration to write had been on Greyhound trips.

From the pain of lost love, the pressure to try and live up to society’s pressures and norms, and horrible tales of experiences with crackers and bedbugs…all terribly relatable to me or stuff made up of my worst nightmares.

This was all with such truth and vulnerability that I had to stop myself from physically shifting in my seat with discomfort. It made me really focus on the glaring obviousness of revealing things so real and personal in such a public manner, to a living room full of strangers.

It made me wonder if I could do that. Could I share things just as private and personal? Would I have the same raw nerve and guts?

How much of it was about themselves personally and how much of what they were speaking was about someone else?

I wondered who the one girl was referring to when she spoke of broken promises and one-sided love. Did the person she’d written about know she had done so and was, at that very moment, divulging so many intimate details that likely only the two of them had yet shared?

Then I imagined myself up there and how I would myself handle the nervousness and all those people staring and listening so intently. I could imagine, amongst all that, at the same time a huge rush that must be produced from doing something so freeing and open-ended.

It’s interesting to observe those listening around me in a situation like that. I suppose, to show that they are being heard and have had some kind of a positive effect, some people feel like it is only polite to produce even some small noise of appreciation, a murmur of awareness.

I shifted my eyes and attention: from the one speaking to us all about their writing, around to my fellow listeners, and back again.

I think it’s happening more and more as I feel I have lost more sight, but often, as in cases such as last night, I feel more and more self-conscious about where it is I am looking. It seems like I have less and less to focus my limited vision on.

This simply added to the feeling I often have, again like last night, where I feel both invisible and like I am standing out horribly in a group of people. The only way, I’ve been told I can possibly eliminate this, is to keep repeating this again and again.

I suppose this is why I read and why I write.

This all played back to the fact that I wasn’t sure I belonged there at the author’s readings, or literary evening, or whatever it is you want to call what last night was.

How important was what we were all doing there last night and the work and the time and energy people put into revealing such stories about ourselves?

I wish I could have held off to write all this down until I was certain I could place each point I wanted to make into its proper day’s blog post, with the correct topic, on the appropriate and the best day for each.

However, I waited this long before posting on my blog this week, not because I didn’t have enough things to write about or enough to say, but because I’ve simply found I’ve had too much.

I can always find enough topics to write about, even if I wrote for one hundred World Book Days. The same goes for International Women’s Day a couple days from now.

***

I did find myself sitting in my nephew’s bedroom the other day, watching him pulling his books down and tossing them this way and that as I pondered my relationship with books and why I love them so much.

Then, I thought about the same questions last night as I held my newly signed Carrie Snyder original in my hands all the way home from the reading.

I miss sunny mornings in the library when I was a kid, surrounded by the innocence of children’s literature. I sat and held a copy of a Grover storybook for much too much time the other morning and I capped off World Book Day holding a book from a local, Canadian author for my collection, thinking that I may not be able to read print books like I used to as a child, but that on a day like March 5th, they are no less valuable and meaningful to me now than they were to me back then.

Maybe I will find the courage, because that is what it is, to read my stuff in front of a group of my peers some day.

And maybe I will have books of my own to give to someone requesting them, who may just have come out to meet me and to hear my words on a World Book Day in the future, just like I did for Carrie last night.

For more on Carrie Snyder check out her website below:

http://carriesnyder.com

Happy World Book Day and International Women’s Day to you all.