Inspiring Women: Jessica Kristie: Journey through poetry

I’ve read Jessica’s blog and poems for a while now and what inspires me is the life journey that she records and transforms through her writing and with many voices.

Jessica’s motto is: “Poetry is my heart, anchors my soul, and documents my journey.” Next to these words on her site is the following cluster: “Learn Forgive Grow Hope Remember Love.” Quite a constellation of life directions, isn’t it? Or again in Jessica’s words, confronted with death, “Living – is where we find our verse.”

Especially facing painful memories:

"The sounds of each letter find their way to a piece of me –
I have been trying to forget." (Shades of You and Me)

"I beg for revolving doors.
Pain in: my journey in life.
Pain out: to grow and change." (Love Letter)

At the same time, appreciation for connection with others in pain:

"In an instant you breathe hope

while standing still in this suffocation.

Restoring my soul

and making me

intimately whole.

With no hesitation you breathe love.

Bringing back my estranged comfort.

Reminding me of who I can be."

(Hidden Hero)

When pain seems unending and change seems impossible:

“When I get up from this bed – all the pain,
it will,

still be there.”

(Empty)

“Change becomes the expectation
When reality plays out

It is only the exception”

(A Day Like Any Other)

Then there is the realization that change must come from within and through action:

“We Walk on Water”

"Down on bended knee, as my bluest aqua blue,

reminds me of a bitter truth -

I must change."

“Tragedy’s Room”

"Today I want to put skin around my words,

turn sentences into limbs,

and reach across the seas."

Also from “We Walk on Water”

"What a masterpiece I have created in my soul’s foliage.

It is shaped of stars with scented breezes."

"Today is the day you make a mark. Change. Years go by in moments and death replaces life. Today is the day you fix this. There is an expiration date that for this moment has been delayed, but someday, we will be out of appeals. Live. Now."

Similarly, not only changing moving forward but changing the past and how we see it, “What we think we know will halt us in our tracks, but when we move in the water as smooth as dolphins – our history can change.” (Eyes Wide Open)

Jessica’s dramatic and heartfelt first poetry collection, Dreaming in Darkness, will soon be followed by a second, Threads of Life, evidently exploring dysfunctional relationships. Jessica’s generosity to fellow artists and writers on parallel journeys is also evident from her Inspiring Ink series the open mic poetry reading she’s hosting.

Keep writing, Beautiful Butterfly, you’re something else.

Inspiring Women: Barrie Davenport: Action

Years ago, someone said to me "Are you going to remain passive to your life or become active to it," or something to that effect. And I remained so for years, and perhaps so still to this day to a certain degree or a point on the continuum.

However, this isn't about me. This about Barrie who exemplifies being active to one's life and being bold, embodying the well known Marianne Williamson quote which says that one serves no one by shrinking and denying oneself.

Through her blog and her course materials and coaching Barrie offers practical ideas for taking action and changing one's life. Whether it's earning more money in any kind of situation, planning for the future, or giving mindful gifts to people in one's life, Barrie thinks of everything.

While Barrie gives instructions on self-examination and self-discovery, she also emphasizes focusing on the present moment and not losing sight of appreciation for where one is right now, as in this blog post which stands productivity and to-do-lists on its head. I think of the Frog and Toad books and how Toad made a list of what to do one day, invited Frog to join him, the list blew away and Toad refused to chase after it because that activity was not on his list. I know Barrie would kindly and humorously counsel us against such rigidity.

I'm also grateful for what Barrie writes about life transitions and her simple instructions emphasizing self-care, keeping up practices that work, letting go of why and obsessive thinking, using a journal and asking for help.

I'm fortunate to take a course from Barrie and Erin Falconer this month, challenged by the exercises, realizing how much work I need to do, and grateful for the support from the teachers and my fellow participants. Meanwhile, I cannot recommend enough this gorgeous blog by a lovely woman who recognized the need to change, and took the initiative and used the resources available to her to make it happen. I want what you have, Barrie.

Inspiring Women: Belle Pirri: Gratitude

A post from Kind Over Matter, pointed me to Belle's gratitude list blog, which was then called Good List Daily, succeeded by We Love Gratitude. What a great idea, I thought, and after lurking and posting as a guest for awhile, I joined the site.

The daily practice of a gratitude list, which I strive at, and which is always incomplete for me, teaches me no matter how bad something is in my life, on balance there is so much is that is good. Furthermore, it is the result of what is before me, around me, how much bigger life is than me, what I take for granted, that I cannot control. There it is for me, the question: What are you grateful for today?

Especially gratifying is encountering a supportive cast of similarly grateful people, complementing each other in our gratitude and offering encouragement as our paths change and turn.

And it is amazing to see Belle’s evolution from her doodles to her discoveries about changing her attitude through practice, and ultimately her gratitude upon giving birth to Ava.

I had the good fortune to meet Belle several months ago when she and Marc, her husband, took a vacation trip to my part of the country. It was great to see she was not only the gal in the picture and also very much the person she presents in her writing and artwork, grateful, inquisitive and open-hearted.

Recently, Belle launched Creative Spiritual Women, another site to inspire and encourage her community of friends by sharing her life lessons and discoveries of wonderful things. What stands out for me right now is Belle emphasizing that it is not so much the things that happen to us as the stories we tell ourselves about what happened and what is. Gratitude (or as Belle writes, “radical gratitude”) goes a long way towards reframing these stories. And courage, as Belle writes here: “It’s an act of trust to yourself to tell the truth.”

I cannot be grateful enough for Belle living in the world.

Reverb6 Ease

6. Ease

What can you do to add ease to 2012?

Honesty

Speak directly, answer the question that is asked and deal with concerns as they happen and not procrastinate or obfuscate. It will make my life much simpler.

Service

Think of how I can help someone else, what I can add to life, what do others in my life need, when I come home what needs doing, could be as simple as vacuuming or cutting the grass, especially rather than reaching for my MacBook Air or my iPhone and getting buried in blogs and feeds.

Letting go

I don’t need to be part of every conversation or read every post on the web.

Self care

Accept that I will make mistakes and rather than berating myself, think of another way for next time. For instance, at my college we were interviewing candidates for a fellowship. The criterion was to ask the same questions of each for fairness’s sake. The question I had was about service beyond self. Instead of considering the candidate, an infantryman who’d served his country for half a dozen years, I read from the script and made it sound like I was blind, not paying attention, or tone deaf. Upon further review, I might have said, tell us more or tell us some stories about your experience and what they mean to you or what you learned, rather than just repeating the generic question verbatim. (Take the wisdom from the situation and accept the humorous side.)

Smile more.

My favorite story

This may be my favorite story.

I heard it in January 2010 at a storytelling event held at the Monti in Durham, North Carolina.
Scott Huler, an author of several books, talks about a time when he was "so thoroughly unhappy," "exiled to the state news desk" at the News & Observer. Why was he unhappy? Because journalism, at least what was expected or required of him, moved from telling stories to providing information ("Get statistics and write stories in the passive voice.") Through the experience, closeness with the escaped chimp, and writing the story, he discovers how he needs to change his life. He's just doing his job and doing it, figures out it no longer feeds him. The warmth, the humor, the surprise, the unexpected conclusion, all make it continue to resonate with me. Mixed in are some horrifying aspects, the prospect of an escaped chimp on the loose in Charlotte for a week, the roadside zoo in light of the recent tragedy in Ohio, the chimp biting the cameraman down to the bone, the chimp chain smoking. I forget these shocking details as I feel the storyteller's anger when the newspaper truncates the story which described an amazing day shared by many people. I like his description of how he checks his version of events with what others' experienced, it's a community storytelling, not something he feels possessive about.

What about me? Do I have a cage to break out of, or is it self imposed, like Blake's mind-forg'd manacles? Maybe that's an illusion, as Belle shows us. It's love and service. And gratitude. And doing what's worked before and may work again.

And what about what I call "my story?" An illusion too, maybe, just signifying the parts that I can recall at this moment, forgetting that I'm part of something greater?

Change

I'm not taking this personally, and I've been treated with respect throughout the process. My job, Librarian in the Rowland Institute at Harvard, is ending. The library is closing, and I do not know whether Rowland will keep the books and journals, but for new information sources the scientists will be on their own (maugre the fact that they have access to possibly the richest electronic collections in the world.)

I have no argument with the decision, given the Institute's financial constraints, while I am mindful of a conversation with friend where I was complaining about work. "Is your name on the sign outside?" he asked. "No." I replied. "Then you have no say," he told me.

I've been at Rowland for just under twelve years, my first professional job following library school. It's a one of a kind institution, conceived as a scientific "Noah's ark" by Edwin H Land after he left Polaroid. At that time, the scientists had free reign to do basic research and try experiments that might not have been funded or possible elsewhere. After the merger with Harvard in 2002, the focus shifted, and the Junior Fellows program was created, giving newly-minted PhDs five years to set up a lab and run experiments with full institute support.


When I got to Rowland, I knew something about science libraries and database searching, but I really didn't know beans about science. At my college, there was "Middle Path, " and on the left side were the humanities departments and on the right side the sciences. With few exceptions, I stayed on the left side. Marshall Frady quotes a story told by Jesse Jackson, that when Jesse was young he got bad grades in French, and his mother admonished him to learn French. When Jesse travelled to Africa, to his dismay, most of the people he met with were speaking French. It was sort of like that for me my first days at Rowland.

But direct contact with the scientists, in the library, at lunch, in the halls of the building, gradually educated me. I learned about their experiments, what they published, what they read, and began to deliver a constant stream of related information to them that I discovered through browsing journals, new sites, email alerts, catalogs and eventually rss feeds and social networks.

I was able to buy whatever books or journals the scientists wanted, and organize database and electronic journal access for the Institute. When we merged with Harvard, the scientists now had access to Harvard Libraries' volumnious resources, and the library budget and subscriptions decreased. Having access to so much information made my job easier, but I received fewer requests and fewer people came to the library.

I'm not a developer or an engineer, but rather a consumer of technology. When blogs and social networks became commonplace, I adopted these tools first as information sources and second as a way of marketing the library and making connections with like-(or even different-)minded people for potentially mutual benefit.

My friend Bill Mayer, librarian of American University, visited me in September, and said "you could do great things with this space." In many ways, I missed opportunities and didn't take full advantage of the freedoms and resources at Rowland. However, I was focused on my patrons, any bit of information that might help them, and I didn't wait for them to come to me. What I've done at Rowland, getting an intimate and detailed knowledge of my patrons' work, can be replicated throughout Harvard and anywhere else, I know.

So what lies ahead? A period of uncertainty (life is uncertain), an opportunity to figure out what I want to do next, and, I've been told, some work for me at the Harvard College Library. No guarantees, but a chance.

I'm a lucky man. What a beautiful building and what great people I've worked with, and the science, especially by the fellows, has been nothing short of extraordinary. Nothing like it in the world, that I know of.

Life on life's terms.