Keepgoing !

Some people say mistakes can be the best teachers...

Adversity can also help contribute to greatness!

I’ll never forget the day I heard that Maya Angelou had had a difficult time being accepted by her writing group in a playwriting /fiction salon when she first started showcasing her own writing for critiquing sessions. I was sitting in a classroom myself, and feeling a bit intimidated by everything around me. Our professor told us that Maya Angelou used to gather in a room of someone she knew’s home with other writers with all different experiences and experience levels and they’d read aloud and then give their opinion on one another’s writing, whether it be playwriting or fiction. Often after Angelou read the room would be silent, and then someone would cough or something. Even though some people didn’t like what she was writing at the time, much of which was never published, that fact did not stop her from participating in the salon, learning , taking some great wisdom from the experience, and especially from keeping up with her own studying and writing. (What a sad loss it would have been to the world had Angelou simply stopped writing before she had really even started).

Some of the greatest women and men in their areas of interest: whether athletes, artists, presidents, began by being discouraged by circumstances or even by others at times….Sometimes because of their own inexperience…or sometimes because of any other host of reasons. But that’s just part of living and learning. Don’t ever let it stop you.








Discipline

Heart

Art

Drive…

Determination.

Bravery

Wisdom

A love of life

The ability to see mistakes as lessons,
and risks as opportunitues.

Imagination

Wings

Courage….you’ve got them in your pocket.
Whatever your dream is today: go for it.


(here's a cool gymnastics video)

Odyssey

I still remember the first day when I walked into freshman English -- my very first class at my brand new high school. Tucked beneath my arm was a very heavy copy of what then seemed to me to be a very very large book -- in many different ways. It was Homer’s “The Odyssey.” Everything right then was new to me: the other girls, the classrooms, the uniforms the rules and even the buildings. My classes amazed and interested me. Still, I guess I was a bit distracted by life in general, even into the second week of school, on a day when we were supposed to turn in our first two page paper about our reading of the beginning of Homer’s Odyssey. That morning, though I searched my binders and inside my book I realized did not have our first paper for the year -- my first-ever paper as a new student --- with me. By the time the teacher came around to my desk I was terrified. I had to tell her that I would bring my thoughts-on-the-Odyssey in the next day though, in all the excitement of activities, etc. I really dreaded going home and, on top of everything else that was already due, feverishly writing a paper on the Odyssey again when I could hardly even think of what I had said in it.

The thing is, though, we had been talking about how the Odyssey, like many things in life, starts out “en media res,” or: in the middle of things. Sitting in my room at my desk that night, I felt like I had too started in the middle of things, showing up at a school that began in pre-kindergarten. In a personal way, The Odyssey started making some sense to me.

Suffice to say, there are mentors in strange places, even in people who are at the moment complete strangers. (I’m talking about my teacher, who, right then, didn’t really even know the slightest thing about me). But I was very lucky to have her teaching me. When I finally turned in my paper I did not get in trouble for my lateness. Instead, she encouraged me with what I turned in, and suddenly – rather than feeling defeated before I had even begun it seemed to me like a whole world full of possibilities suddenly opened up to me. I became hopeful and determined. At school, I was never once late in turning in a paper again.

At that girls’ school, I was suddenly becoming aware of girl power and girls in literature and society and the possibilities awaiting them. Simultaneously I was reading other big books like the Odyssey. Though I liked the idea of going on a great odyssey, the character of Penelope, Odysseus’ wife, was a letdown to me. While Odysseus sought adventure and dreams, Penelope simply stayed at home constantly waiting for something. Each night, Penelope wove a beautiful tapestry, which was like a visual representation for her own creativity and story it seemed to me. But if Odysseus hadn’t come back yet, she always just un-wove or erased it. It seemed like she was just waiting for life to happen to her. At least, that’s the way I remembered it.

So..what does this have to do with my blog? Well, several years and lifetimes later I was working on my first book called “girls rule…a very special book created especially for girls” and I was also reading a book of poetry by Edna St. Vincent Millay for graduate school when I came across a poem about the Odyssey’s Penelope. Apparently the book had made such an impression on me that twelve years later it was still bothering me.

Why did Penelope not create her own adventures and do things on her own? Why did she remain so inactive just waiting and waiting, for years and years it seemed? If there’s one thing I know it’s that if you inactively wait for your life and for “things” to come around, your “life” and “things” will never “happen.” So, in looking for a character to narrate my book of poems “girls rule” I decided to kinda “reinvent” Penelope. My Penelope though was and is always only herself (not a spinoff of a character). She’s got a middle and last name (when signing things officially, she adds J. Miller). She creates her own path. She is brave and ten years old and spunky. She learns from her own mistakes, doesn’t take life for granted, and inspires other people too, even me sometimes. Kind of like my freshman year English teacher did when she allowed for me to begin “en media res,” and gave me a chance – distractions and
all.

Penelope J. Miller (my Penelope)never discounts the great, odyssey-like inspiring power of her own and other girls’ creativity, drive, and imagination. Because creativity, imagination, and drive – well: as long as you believe in them with all your heart…they can help you, as a girl, as a person, and as a citizen of this world, to do and create just about anything.