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I subscribe to Choice Literacy’s Big Fresh newsletter. This month Brenda Power writes about ambition versus aspiration. She also opens with a Mary Oliver quote, “Joy is not made to be a crumb.”
Tricia Stohr-Hunt’s prompt on Laura Shovan’s February Poetry Project was a variety of birthday cakes. (This year we are writing about food.) I thought of a Facebook post I had seen of a baby eating his first birthday cake. This is apparently a thing, first birthday cake smash.
Smashing all of those things together made a poem that I am pleased with, if only for the pleasure it evokes.
Joy is not a crumb; it is the whole cake eaten by a child on his first birthday digging with his cake-filled hand bite by bite, grip by grip until the cake and icing cover every part of his head seeping up into his nostrils. That kind of joy is your Aspiration Go for it!
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EnneaThought® for the Day
Type Two EnneaThought® for March 4th
Everyone has positive qualities that they usually do not recognize in themselves. Today, can you see your own strength which is at the center of your love for others—and for yourself?
photo from Pixabay.com
I subscribe to EnneaThought for the Day from the Enneagram Institute. The small messages come daily to my inbox. It’s usually the first email I open expecting it to inform my day. I’ve used the messages for writing prompts in my notebook, and today when a little stuck about what to write, I copied and pasted the message into the blank page in WordPress.
I know that everyone has positive qualities, and especially in teaching, I look for those in others. But how often do I focus on my own positive qualities? This message reminds me that my strength is at the center of my love for others. Without it, I am useless.
Finding a sense of peace through forgiveness of myself is a daily exercise. Nobody is perfect, but I tend to stew on stuff, especially if I feel I have hurt someone or given a false impression of myself. Stewing is not productive. It keeps me from moving forward. It weakens rather than strengthens.
Writing helps me sort through the muck of my mind. I feel strong and productive when I write. When I wasn’t sure what to write this morning, I jumped into the page and just.did.it. Is this the best I’ve got? No. But here it is and that’s enough.
Monday should be Forgive Yourself Day because we all need to start our week off with a positive outlook, a show of strength, and a sense of self-love. Give that to yourself today.
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Carnival season in New Orleans is unique. Like other celebrations, families gather, food is abundant, and happiness abounds. But in New Orleans at Carnival time, there is something else in the air. Not something I can name exactly. It’s a mixture of decadence and absurdity. Sometimes the more absurd, the better. There is definitely too much drinking, especially from the “frat boys,” as my children call them. And the costumes run the gamut. But it’s the complete regard for absurdity that fascinates me.
I didn’t get a picture of myself, but I wore a pair of purple, gold, and green sparkly swirly sunglasses. I pinned a tiny top hat to my hair. My son-in-law had a pair of whacky sunglasses that he tried on Leo, my grandson.
Leo’s Mardi Gras shades. (photo by Katherine Simon Andry)
Here’s a picture of another baby we saw walking about. She didn’t seem to mind the wig.
Mardi Gras baby
You don’t quite know what you will see on the streets. Most people are kind and full of cheer. In my many years of attending New Orleans parades, I have never seen any violence. There are rampant rumors about it, but from my experience, Carnival is about having fun and the more absurd, the better.
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In addition to the Slice of Life Challenge, I am writing a poem each day with a Facebook group for Laura Shovan’s annual birthday project. This year we are writing about food. The prompt yesterday from Laura herself was sourdough bread. Not having much experience in sourdough bread, the baking or the eating of it, I took the option to write about any bread.
I am currently in New Orleans with my girls celebrating Mardi Gras. A staple pastry during the Mardi Gras season is King cake. King Cake is symbolic of Epiphany, the season of the church year following Christmas. On Epiphany, the three kings arrived to worship Jesus. The dough is baked in a circle symbolizing unity of faith. The frosting is colored sugar in purple, gold, and green. Gold represents power, green is associated with faith, and purple illustrates justice. (Southern Living)
Of the many Mardi Gras traditions, this is one of my favorite. In our small town of New Iberia, there is a donut bakery that makes King Cakes like a donut. My son-in-law brought one yesterday that he swears weighs more than his 2 month old. It’s infused with cream cheese and strawberry jam. There are two more on the kitchen counter each with its own flavoring and pastry recipe. The tradition is that a plastic baby is placed inside the King Cake to symbolize the search for baby Jesus. Whomever gets the baby in their piece is obligated to buy the next King Cake for the next celebration.
I’ve decided to forego my no carb diet just for this weekend. Let the good times roll!
See more posts at Two Writing Teachers Slice of Life Poetry Friday round-up is with Linda at Teacher Dance.
Today is the first day of March, so you know what that means: The annual March Slice of Life Challenge at the Two Writing Teachers! I will be writing a blog post every day and linking it up to Two Writing Teachers. What’s the point?
Writing every day is an important discipline for a writer and for a teacher of writing.
Connecting to other teacher-writers inspires and informs my teaching and writing, and I usually make new friends along the way.
I first met Jen Vincent through Kate Messner’s Teachers Write, a virtual summer camp for teachers who want to write. If I remember correctly, we did a Google Hangout with other writers and read a section of our work. I further connected with Jen through blogging and Twitter and met up with her at NCTE in 2014. These connections are invaluable to me as a teacher and a writer.
One day I saw that Jen was teaching a workshop. Silly me, I thought it was virtual, so I replied to her message on Facebook, “I want to come.” Since Chicago and South Louisiana are pretty far apart, that was not feasible, but Jen thought of a way. She created a virtual workshop.
We met one Saturday morning by Zoom meeting. She led me through an exercise from Teachers Write by Tracey Baptiste. We made a graphic organizer in our notebooks and labeled three places we had been recently. We then divided each column into two columns. On one side we wrote descriptions about the places and the other side we wrote emotions we felt about the places.
I chose school, dance lessons, and a restaurant where we go dancing. I decided to connect the three places with the thread of dancing.
Dancing Days
I dance through my days…
Halls of smiling teachers greet my wobbly walk weighed down with backpack, lunch bag and Yeti cup. Miss Marie says, Show me that grandbaby! After we view the latest pic on my phone, I dance down the hall to my classroom.
At Dance Around the World studio, bright purple walls of mirror on mirror reflect my partner and me. Miss Lou says, Right. Left. Back step. We follow along,
find our balance– weightless in a jitterbug twirl.
I dance my way to Friday night, Nouveau String Band at Joie de Vivre, wooden floors echo the sounds of greetings, giggles, and two-steps. Buck says, This waltz is for you. The weight of the week disappears to the beat of fiddle, mandolin, and drum.
(c) Margaret Simon
This workshop was a test run for Jen for her new Patreon page, Story Exploratory. If you’d like to find more ways to write, I highly recommend Jen as an instructor. You can view this workshop and others by visiting Jen’s patreon page, Story Exploratory.
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Living on the Bayou Teche has many benefits. In the fall we joined the T.E.C.H.E. Project, a nonprofit dedicated to the preservation of the Bayou Teche. In January, my husband Jeff attended one of their workshops on wood duck houses. When he came home and started talking about it, I knew this was something we needed to do. But the idea brewed for a while until I got a text from a friend who lives downstream. She had set up a Ring camera in her wood duck house and a hen had come in. She sent me the video, and I was sold.
The next day we toured her wood duck set up, and Jeff said, “We can do this!” He found the wood he needed and got to work. We took a trip to Costco to buy the Ring device. It’s intended for use as a doorbell. So genius! It connects through your Wifi and sends motion detection with video to your phone. What will they think of next?!
This weekend Jeff finished the house and got the pole in the ground. We set up the Ring device and had it all ready by 4:00 PM on Sunday.
On Monday morning while I was hurriedly getting ready for school (I always run late on Monday!), I got an alert on my phone, “Movement detected at the wood duck house!” Already!
Sure enough, a hen had come inside and posed for the camera. When we looked outside, though, we noticed Buzz, our outside cat guarding with watchful eye. “On Jump Day, Buzz will be in the shed,” Jeff said. Jump Day happens on the day after the eggs hatch. All the little ducks jump out to the water. I’m so glad we invested in the camera, so we can keep an eye on this whole process.
Poetry Friday round-up is with Robyn at Life on the Deckle Edge
I am participating in a book study called “A Course in Miracles.” It is quite an amazing journey of meditations that lead to self-awareness and ultimately to inner peace. Each day there is a new mantra. One of the mantras for this week was “God is the love in which I forgive myself.” I was drawn to creating a golden shovel poem and used Canva.com to design the graphic.
In my classroom, we have been using the golden shovel form to respond to quotes. Invented by Nikki Grimes, a golden shovel form begins with writing the words of the quote down the right hand margin of the page. Then you write a poem around the words, incorporating the quote into the poem. On Martin Luther King, Jr. Day I wrote one together with Jayden around this quote, “The time is always right to do what is right.”
When someone knows the
right thing but time
goes too fast, and is
never around long enough, always
do what’s right
even when it’s hard to.
No matter what you do
Listen to what
your heart
knows is right.
The golden shovel form is a way to honor the words of another while making them your own. Next time you read an inspiring quote, try to write a poem around it.
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On Valentine’s Day last Thursday, I challenged my students to write a love poem without using the word love. On Facebook I had read Charles Ghinga’s poem for his wife Debra. I used it as a mentor text.
After we read this poem, we brainstormed a list of things in nature that could serve as a metaphor as moon does in Charles’ poem. I pushed my students to be specific. Some of the more interesting things they listed:
Page of word groups from Writing Poetry From the Inside Out by Sandford Lyne.
I used a poetry resource by Sandford Lyne called Writing Poetry from the Inside Out. In this book, Sandy writes about “Poem Sketching” with word groups. The back is full of pages of word groups. I photocopied one of these pages to give to my students. Each student chose a word group to write from.
Magic happened. Was it writing about love without using the word? the model poem from Charles? the word groups from Sandy? or the magic that happens when writing in a safe community?
We cut out construction paper hearts and wrote our poems on them to give to someone special. I gave mine to Madison because I used a quote of hers. Chloe gave hers to me, probably because I loved it. And Madison gave hers to Chloe. Poetry gifts from the heart.
She says, “Did you know the sea eagle
has a wingspan of eight feet?”
I write it down in my notebook
realizing that her knowledge
opens the surface
of our classroom
like the blossom of a tulip.
Digging into depths
of learning
makes everyday
as fascinating
as the sea eagle.
Poetry Friday round-up is with Jone this week at Check it Out!
I read the above quote in a post from Smack Dab in the Middle. (Image made in Canva) If you are a writer, take a minute to read the post. Darlene Jacobson wrote, “For me, and I suspect for many of us who write for children, EVERYTHING is a miracle.”
I write with children, not just for children, and feel that every time we write together, a miracle happens. Lately I have been writing skinny poems, multiple skinnies a day. I’ve gotten into the rhythm. Starting with a simple line leading to single words is a quick and inspirational way to write. Like haiku, a skinny poem is a short form, but unlike haiku that focuses on a single moment, a skinny can focus on a single thought or idea. (See more about the form on my PF post last week.)
Taking inspiration from the above quote, I wrote the following:
Everything is a miracle
touched
by
God’s
hand
touched
by
my
holiness
touched
by a miracle is everything.
Today, after a stormy day yesterday, the sky is clear and the sun is shining, a daily miracle. There are fields of butterweed blooming.
CREDIT:Jeff Lepore/Science Source
Sunshine is a daily miracle
a
meadow
of
gold
a
glow
of
grass
a
daily miracle in the Sun.
What miracles do you see every day? Can you write a simple skinny poem?
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In my classroom, we pick a quote of the day and write it on a clean notebook page. Sometimes the quote leads to writing, but not always. As I write alongside my students, I find the quotes influencing the flow of my pen. As I gear up for the March Slice of Life Challenge, I like that I can find inspiration for writing in quotes.
From my notebook page:
The opposite is also true, Pablo, that everything real is imagined. All meaning comes from our past experiences. Take this writing pen, for example. I watch the teal blue ink flow onto the page. I know that when I form these motions these letters will be created. The practice of my writing creates the writing before me.
Imagine the tiny seed that lies beneath the earth grows minute by minute into a flower you will notice in spring.
Everything you can imagine is real
as
the
ink
here
as
my
hand
moves
as
real as everything you can imagine.
I can’t stop writing skinny poems. The rhythm of them. The simplicity. See directions and more skinny poems here.
Margaret Simon lives on the Bayou Teche in New Iberia, Louisiana. She is a retired elementary gifted teacher who writes poetry and children's books. Welcome to a space of peace, poetry, and personal reflection. Walk in kindness.
Reflections on the Teche 