Poetic One Little Word

             Tara Smith at A Teaching Life is hosting Poetry Friday today from the snowy east, and it's her birthday!  Thanks Tara, and happiest of birthdays to you this special Friday!

         At the beginning of the month, when I shared my One Little Word here, more than one person shared a poem with me that connected, and several times since I have discovered other references to my word, which is wander.  I now have, through my own discovery and through gifts, a growing file of poems and a few quotes that have some connection to wander. The word is "hanging on", so much that some poems have been now appearing more than once! Serendipity, destiny?  Whatever the reason, I am thrilled to have discovered so much just here in January, and I'm starting a scrapbook of sorts about the word in all its permutations.
photo credit: rottnapples via photopin cc

Okay-It wandered in!

The Tuesday Slice of Life is hosted by the Two Writing Teachers blog.  Go there to visit the other"slicers"! I'm looking forward to more great posts from Stacey, Tara, Dana, Betsy, Anna, and Elisabeth!

  Hurrah!  The Cybil's finalists are HERE!  Great lists of books to discover!

It's been a struggle for me to continue with my One Little Word these past two years.  I signed up for the class, purchased the pages, found a nice binder, and created pages through January, then stopped. During the years, I thought sometimes of my OLW, but not with much enthusiasm for doing anything. Sometimes I was too busy, or I made myself be busy with other things.  It's rather like my sewing. I used to sew a lot, and am fairly competent at it, but days hold only so many hours, and I prefer reading, writing and working for my job, so I do have time to sew, if I make the time, but I'd rather be elsewhere.  
           Back to the OLW.  I've read many posts in the past week about people choosing or discovering and the posts have been inspiring. I loved hearing from Dana recently, and remember Claire and Tammy's, Terje's, Deb's, Jennifer M.'s…  I really do love the idea!  But this time I thought I wouldn't do it. I don't have a good track record as you can see.

Beginnings of my One Little Word

The slice of life meme is hosted by Ruth Ayres and Stacey Shubitz at their blog, Two Writing Teachers.  Come see what others are sharing today!  We are grateful for the work they do to make this happen every Tuesday!

On twitter, use #Slice2013

       Be sure to check out Ruth's post about the March Slice of Life Challenge!  I hope to see all of you every single day!

         My OLW this year is Possibilities, defined online by Merriam-Webster:

1

: the condition or fact of being possible

2

  archaic : one's utmost power, capacity, or ability

Slice of Life Number Eleven - My OLW - Looking for the Ordinary

  The SOLSC Challenge is at the Two Writing Teachers blog hosted by Ruth and Stacey - Come read!

   Last Thursday, Ruth Ayres wrote this post on her blog, Ruth Ayres Writes-Discover Play Build, about the power of the ordinary, writing about mundane topics that shine in one’s life as important.  It’s a wonderful post about those little things that often go unnoticed.

My One Little Word this year is comfort.  I have written about it a couple of times, how I chose it and poems that comfort me in my life.  Today I have tried to find those tiny things that give comfort in the most unassuming ways.  They are there and we take them into our lives gladly, but mostly without noticing.  As a writer, I am now giving power to them, as Ruth writes, power to the ordinary.

These things add to my comfort:

• a new bar of soap
• the newspaper on the driveway
• a dishwasher I don’t have to unload
• a message on Facebook from a former student
• the smell of shampoo
• more than one coupon in the newspaper I can use
• a chickadee’s call
• pictures on my frig
• a new quote I like
• my flannel sheets
• a pink lady apple
• a visit from a neighbor
• a basketball game when my team wins
• a full gas tank
• finding a bird's feather on a walk
• a glass of iced tea

I’ll keep watching for more!  What little things make your life more livable?

Comfort - My One Little Word - In the classroom

Tuesday Slice of Life Is Hosted by Ruth and Stacey at Two Writing Teachers.  Check It Out!

Toward the end of October 2011, Ruth Ayres wrote on her own blog, Ruth Ayres Writes-Discover, Play, Build of the importance of noticing the tiny things.  One line from Ruth continues to strike me as important in the classroom as it is important in the details of our lives.  She writes:  This is true in life, teaching, and writing. So I decided to challenge myself to writing small, looking for the tiny in order to make big realizations. 

            Whenever I am struggling to find a topic on which to write, I return to that post to re-read it.  I have copied it to put into my writer’s notebook.  This time, like so many other times in my posts, I am making connections.  I’m connecting again to Ruth’s ideas, I’m connecting to my One Little Word, Comfort, and I’m connecting to the classroom and teaching.  The quote I chose for my first page in my One Little Word book is this: Life is made up, not of great sacrifices or duties, but of little things in which smiles, and kindnesses, and small obligations, given habitually, are what win and preserve the heart and secure comfort- Humphrey Davy.  I am also connecting to Diana and her blog, One Literacy Coach because she sometimes posts such creative and thoughtful graphics like Wordles or something from Tagxedo in her posts. 

My One Little Word - Needed Exploring

           I signed up for the One Little Word class, and have completed the first assignment, have found some few quotations I like, and written about poems that give me comfort, just as writing poems do, too.  I have read others’ posts that talk about their word, and have been interested in what they have invited into their lives because of that word.  The posts have been heartfelt, full of feeling and purpose and inspiration.

            My word is COMFORT, and the quote I chose is:  LIfe is made up, not of great sacrifices or duties, but of little things in which smiles, and kindnesses, and small obligations, given habitually, are what win and preserve the heart and secure comfort, by Humphrey Davy.  I have since discovered that Davy was a British chemist who is known for discovering the anesthetic effect of laughing gas (nitrous oxide), among other things.  It gives me a laugh, not kidding, that the quote I chose was spoken by the guy that discovered the properties of laughing gas.  Terrific, quite an invention.   

            And so I begin thinking of all the things, like this quirky fact, that means COMFORT to me.  I have chosen to tie some things in my life to the synonyms of COMFORT in Webster’s Online Dictionary.   

            Assurance –  That the coffee will be made when I arise in the am, that the water in the shower will be hot and that the sun will rise.  There is a Mescalero Apache Song I used to read on campouts with my students when we rose with the sun to set off on our adventures:

                        The sunbeams stream forward, dawn boys,

                        with shimmering shoes of yellow.

Poems Can Bring Comfort

I'm participating in the twenty-one day comment challenge at Mother Reader.  It's been terrific to meet new people! Check it out here.

Poetry Friday today is hosted by Tara at A Teaching Life – Enjoy all the wonderful words!

In addition to enjoying Poetry Friday for the recent months, I have this year chosen a One Little Word, COMFORT, for the year.  It is hosted by Ali Edwards of the Memory Keeping Website.  In this process, we are given monthly challenges, like at this beginning time, to define the word, find an appropriate quote, and so on.  I love poetry, and feel it holds a positive place in the lives of men and women, and since I’m a teacher, for children, too.  So in addition to directions for a cover page, I’ve decided to begin collecting poems that offer comfort.  I don’t mean exactly those one might send to someone with great loss or need, but those that when you read them, you sigh and say ‘this is just great’, and then you read again.  Sometimes comfort means tea and sympathy, and sometimes it means looking outside at a snowstorm from inside a warm house, but many times for me it is a poem, or a line, or a particular rhythm and rhyme that touches my heart.  I copy and carry poems around with me in a little notebook so I can just pull them out and read them again.   Here’s a bit of comfort for you all today:

Sandinista Avioncitos
        Lawrence Ferlinghetti

The Little airplanes of the heart
with their brave little propellers

                     The rest is here.