Tag Archives: hope

Date: by | Categories: Being Different, Empathy, Memories, Misfits, My Childhood, Things We Learn, Uncategorized

Life, Death, And Everything In Between

“Living is abnormal.” – Eugene Ionesco

I came across Ionesco’s quote right around the first of the year and I thought about sharing it then as my own personal inspiration for how to approach the new year, but in the end I just couldn’t get myself to delve too deeply (and I admit, I was afraid of exploring the idea too much). 

After all, I spent most of my childhood terrified (not hyperbole) of death. 

I spent much of my young life (up until the age of six) in oxygen tents in hospitals with all those beeps and blips and machines gasping and wheezing so that I didn’t have to . . . and over the years since I have jokingly (sort of) referred to myself as a bubble boy, an allusion to the rather cheesy Travolta movie that came out during my adolescence. 

I Was a Bills and Dolphins Fan Back Then

I was somewhat sickly as a boy, and when I was thirteen I became so ill (with such an abnormal illness it’s very name began with the word “Atypical”) that one of my doctors told my family, “It’s just a matter of time.”

Yep! He said it while standing next to my ice bed. 

Those words, that doctor’s face, are still etched into my memory. Lucky for me another of my doctors sought outside help, found someone who figured out what was wrong.

And you know what that someone (an intern at another hospital, a student no less) told me to do? Fight! In essence, he told me to keep on living. I heeded his advice with every fiber of my being. 
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Date: by | Categories: Being Different, Empathy, Loss, Uncategorized

Life, Love, Death, Dreams, Hope

We Must Ourselves Become The LightI picked up my cell phone just now to text a friend. Then I remembered, she’s gone . . . two weeks already. It’s the fifth time I’ve done that. An idea sparked a laugh, made me think of her, made me want to share a chuckle.

That’s how it was for 28 years, since long before cell phones.

But that’s the thing about the love we have for friends, for family, the way we want to share it, the way we continue to share it . . . even after they’ve gone.

Aside from my mom, Jeannie read more of my writing than anyone. Always supportive. Always reminding me that this thing I love, this thing that is part of who I am, is important. That I need to share my voice. That I owe it to myself, and to others.

Of course, she always added that she’d love to see more happy poems, more happy scenes. She didn’t hesitate to ask, “when are you going to write a poem about love?”

And I would remind her, that is how I try to live my life – full of laughter, of love, of positive thoughts. With my writing, though, that’s me exploring the darkness, the underneath. Trying, at the very least, to understand. To throw light upon it for others to explore.

“Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?”  – Mary Oliver

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Date: by | Categories: Misfits, Other Cool Birds, Poetry, Projects, The Writer's Quest, Uncategorized

For Love of Art

Other Cool Birds "Painted Egret" by Gretchen Deahl

Other Cool Birds “Painted Egret” by Gretchen Deahl

“Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.” – Thomas Merton

I’ll admit this up front. I don’t know art lingo. I’m not familiar with technical traits that make a work of art a “masterpiece” aside from the way it makes me feel, and perhaps think, but mostly feel.

Last weekend a new project of mine took flight, one that’s been fluttering around inside the cave of my head for a couple years now. It has to do with my appreciation for art. For the way art impacts my life.

Art in its various forms is an expression of the self, a communication through a unique language (whether that’s actual words used by writers, or images or sounds or movement). I appreciate all types of art, from literary to dance to musical to visual, for the same reason and for different reasons as well. The primary reason, however, is the way it makes me feel.

My new project, called Other Cool Birds, is my attempt to pay homage to artists working in all those aforementioned media through one – visual art.

Not the visual art, I create, but visual art I have come across and have brought together for the purpose of creating a virtual forest where artists gather to share their unique and sundry voices.

Plain and simple, art relies on emotion, evokes emotion, is a means of communicating emotion . . . a way of connecting audience and artist, of connecting the imagination and memory and ideas of one to the other.
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