Writing

I love to write. Not just poetry, but honestly just to sit and contemplate a subject or a person or something completely relevant or irrelevant. I love the feeling of pondering a place or an emotion. I think my favorite piece of my own writing is something I wrote about a year ago called Waiting for Wonder (thus the name of my other blog). It felt like it just flowed out of me. I was reading a kids book about a man who raised sled dogs and did the Alaskan Iditarod and it brought back such memories of Alaska that I simply sat down at my computer and that was the result. I remember how it felt. Like there was this thing inside of me just pouring itself out on paper, yelling for me to write its story. I've felt that at other times too, but just never quite as strong or as eloquent. But I figure if I keep writing I'll have more and more times like that.

I feel as though my poetry doesn't really truthfully tell anything about me anymore. It used to. When I was younger and all my emotions were raw and unhappy, my poetry expressed emotions I didn't know how to share. But now, when there is so much more to me than raw emotion, writing feels much more natural.

A few weeks ago I was thinking about this book that I really love called "Speak" in which the main character is given an assignment in art. Her teacher makes her pick a word from a basket and she has to focus her entire semester to understanding that word. She picks "tree" and has quite a profound experience with it, but I was wondering what would happen if someone made me do the same thing. What would I have to say if I picked my own name out of a basket? What would I learn by trying to to find my own true meaning and nature? I wrote a lot of things down but I'll only share two of them because the list was really long!

- I am deeply and truly affected by nature. Mountains, water, grass, pine trees, snow, butterflies, birds chirping, eagles, dolphins, cool breezes on beautiful days, deep blue skies, dark nights with bright close stars, the moon, rain, thunder and lightning, the sound of wind moving through the trees and grass, the silence you can only hear in nature away from the sounds of human civilization, glaciers, the warmth of the sun on a cool day, the calm of watching snow fall, the chirping of crickets, sitting in a flower filled field of grass, are all a part of who I am and without some of these things in my life, I have more and more difficulty being truly happy.
- I really enjoy being happy and excited. And I love making other people happy.


I feel like everyone should get the chance to sit down and make a list of the things that truly make them happy and keep them sane, because once you know what these things are you will always have something to turn to when your life gets rough. A list of the things that will help you to regain the stability that may have been lost for a while. Happiness is important and someone who doesn't know what makes them happy, will have a lot of trouble in life.

I took this picture in Juneau, Ak at the glacier! This is probably the place in the entire world that makes me the happiest!