You’re here and I am happy to welcome you! I wish the deep and shining best for you in all the possible ways.
This week I’d like to share forever First Lady Michelle Obama’s ‘Becoming’. I watched the Netflix special. Then I got ‘Becoming: A Guided Journal’. Her work reminds me that there is such great value in digging deeper into my values, to help define the stuff that drives me. In fact, my first write led to this journal entry.
Journal Entry
Michelle asks: “What’s your story and how have you learned to embrace it?”
I am a punk hippie scholar poet.
The punk part is my rebellious nature.
I believe the various systems we live under, including the inevitability of death, are all flawed systems. The assumption, the deep frame in my life is to ignore that fact even while I am so so aware of it operating in my sometimes sick body and my achingly sick society. And so I rebel.
The hippie part is the other side, the balance, the deep conviction that since there's likely not a ‘god’ but there's a thing that animates us (spiritual, animal, vegetable, mineral, I don't give a damn which), I choose to (decorously) take off my tight-knit mental constraints and wallow madly in the joy of being here now in the time of chaos and good coffee, of the potential for racism solutions (honest citizen relationships that acknowledge the weight of what happened and why it matters), the ghastly glorious Internet, which is simply the human self, amplified for what it's worth.
Music, art, making, writing, digging deeper, oops! I have moved into scholar. I have always been an observer. I put myself in sketchy situations all down the line, watching how people respond. While sometimes I crave the center of attention, I always refocus to empathize with the next in line.
The scholar demands my acknowledgment that, knowing so little, it takes the poet in me to say so much.
Until next time.
Terri
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