Love and Friendship 4

Friends are the Elixir of Life! 

 

 

Whether it is Pooh Bear and Piglet, Charlotte and Wilbur, or Amos and Boris, we know that good friends can look very different on the outside - after all, opposites attract! 

 

We also know that good friends make life worth living - they help us love more and see life from a different angle.

 

 

In fact, good friends are a lot like good books.

 

They encourage us.

 

 

They help us see the world a little differently.

 

 

They can make us feel bold and brave.

 

 

They can make us laugh or cry.

 

 

They can make us wonder.

 

They remind us that we are not alone in this world.

 

Margaret Drabble maintained that we were put on this earth to "endeavor in the face of the impossible."  Good friends help us do just that - endeavor!!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



Love and Friendship 3

"The best way to know God is to love many things."

Vincent Van Gogh

 

 

 

 

I love pondering the infinite aspect of love and creativity.  It is easy for children to understand when I tell them that my grandmother had nine children, and my mother had three children, but my grandmother did not love her nine children any less than my mother loved her three children.  It is a bit like the magic well in the fairy tales.  As long as you keep dipping your ladle into the well, it will never run dry.  So too with our hearts, as long as we choose to keep loving, then our magic wells - our hearts - will never run dry!  And as long as we keep creating, we will never run out of things to create.

 

A LOVELY writing and life exercise for children and adults - at end of every day:

 

Write down three things that you LOVED about your day.

 

You should really never run out of things to write about!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



Love and Friendship 2

Love inspires

 

 

 

 

 

 

My second book, Inventor McGregor, is all about a jolly fellow by the name of Hector McGregor who discovers that the source of inspiration lies in the heart of his happy, happy home - surrounded by his cheery wife, five children and a hen called Hattie.  In other words LOVE inspires him, as it does all of us, I believe.

 

 

Inspire is a Latin word - INSPIRARE - and it means to breath life into.  Isn't that a powerful definition?

 

 

So while it is love that inspires us all, it will be a different love for different people.  But whether it is science, baseball, dinosaurs, Mozart, hiking, swimming, baking, painting, or writing, these loves make us want to live more, they put us in touch with our better selves and help us make the world a better place. 

 

“Love the earth and sun and animals.  Despise riches.  Give alms to anyone who asks.  Stand up for the stupid and the crazy.  Devote your income and labor to others......and your very flesh shall be a great poem”  Whitman

 

                                                                                  

 

 

A good question to end each day -

 

"What breathed life into me?"



Love and Friendship 1

"All I want to say in books, all I ever wanted to say in books, is I LOVE THE WORLD" E.B. White

                                                                                                                    
When I talk to children about LOVE, I tell them I do not mean the sappy soppy Hollywood version. Rather I mean something else-another kind of love that has to do with what you are ready to give up for another person.


 Writers for children usually write from some love they feel for the world around them.  And when we love something, we automatically want to share it with others.




During my school visits, I will explain to children that I did not grow up in a very demonstrative culture.  For the most part, Scottish people do not indulge in public displays of affection as they might do here in the States - we are after all a nation of introverts!




A story about LOVE that I share with children:

Although my parents were not in the habit of saying, "We love you," to their children, I still knew that I was loved, because of what my parents did.  I give this example of my father and I.  One day we were at the local library where I was foraging for my books of fairy tales - always a favorite of mine.  Back in those days, children were given two library tickets that allowed them to check out two books for a two week period.  Adults were given four tickets.  But on this particular day, I was desperately yearning for more books: I knew that I would rapidly devour these two books long before I could make another trip to the library.  My dad, seeing my crest-fallen face, put aside two of his books, and gave me his two tickets.

So, as I walked out of that library with four books under my arms instead of two, there wasn't a shred of doubt in my little book lover's heart that I was loved, because what greater love could there be, I reasoned, than to give up your library books for another?

Wisdom 4

Good Stories and Wise People have much in Common



Good stories and wise people foster a state of wonder



Wislawa Szymborska, the Pulitzer prize winning poet from Poland, said in her acceptance speech, "Poets, if they are genuine, must keep repeating, I don't know.....each poem marks an effort to answer this statement." (and I would say the same can be said of children's stories and children's authors)  Each story, in some way, is an attempt to wrestle with what we do not know, with what we wonder about.  As Katherine Paterson, Newberry medalist, says, "Story is the way we make sense of life."


Of course, WONDER is rather counter-cultural in our age of Google and Wikipedia.  But good stories and wise people encourage us to bask in mystery, to see, in the words of Browning, that "all of earth is crammed with Heaven," and to know that the best things in life are meant not to be measured, but treasured.


Nor is it the kind of wonder that marvels at the extraordinary or unusual, but rather the kind of wonder that Dr. Dorian refers to in Charlotte's Web....

When Mrs. Arable asks him if he understands how there can be writing in the spider's web, he answers,

" Oh no, I don't understand it.  But for that matter I don't understand how a spider learned to spin a web in the first place.  When the words appeared everyone said they were a miracle.  But nobody pointed out that the web itself is a miracle."

Some of my favorite words of wisdom to ponder this week

"Literature is prismatic. Light shines through the excellent books or dances off and the rainbow it gives shine on and on in a child's life in a thousand different ways."  Jane Yolen


"To be Irish is to know that in the end the world will break your heart." Unknown







"Show me a day when the world wasn't new"

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 







 

 

 



Wisdom 3

So, what does all this talk about Wisdom have to do with stories?

Well, I like to think that good stories and wise people have much in common.

Good stories and wise people help us to love more

A wise African proverb tells us, "what you help a child to LOVE is more important than what you help them to learn."  And E.B. White, that marvelous author of Charlotte's Web maintained that, "All I want to say in books, all I ever wanted to say, is - I love the world!"  Now of course, the love we are referring to here is not the sappy, soppy Hollywood version.  No!  The love we mean is the nitty, gritty, sacrificial kind that makes a spider called, Charlotte, use her last reserves of strength to save the life of her best friend, a pig called, Wilbur!


Good stories and wise people give us courage

The word courage comes from the French word, La Coeur, meaning, HEART.  Wise people and good stories FEED OUR HEARTS with beauty, truth and goodness.  So they strengthen our hearts, and help us in the words of Blake's beautiful poem, to "burn bright in the forests of the night."  We know our job as parents and teachers is not to eradicate all the trials and troubles for our children, but rather, it is to give them what they need to face their dark days and troubled times - COURAGE, that will help them feel bold and brave and unafraid!



Good stories and wise people impart an "all wellness"

Madeleine L'Engle maintained that this "all wellness" should be at the core of ALL children's stories.  It does not mean that there cannot be sad stories, but simply that there must be some glimmer of hope, some pinprick of light simmering there beneath the sadness.  She was referring to the words of Julian of Norwich, the medieval mystic, who maintained, "all shall be well, all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well."  This is not a Pollyanna, naïve disregard for the sadnesses in our lives, but rather a stalwart belief in what all good stories tell us- GOOD will triumph - LOVE will conquer! (more on this topic in April)


Some of my favorite words of wisdom to ponder this week

"Be the change you want to see in the world."  Gandhi

"Beneath the muck and scum of things, there something always always sings." Emerson

"See our children as they are - unique persons with a song to sing, a dream to live.  Children are endowed with an inner power that can guide us to a more luminous future."  Maria Montessori.

Wisdom 2

As a parent and a teacher, I have often tried to give some piece of wisdom to the children in my care, and when they ignored it, or just seemed incapable of incorporating it into their lives, I found myself frustrated and bewildered, until....

One year, I heard a wise homilist explain the meaning of the Parable of the Ten Foolish Virgins - a parable that likens Heaven to the story of the ten virgins/bridesmaids who carry a lamp as they await the coming of the bridegroom which they expect at some time during the night.  Five of the virgins are wise and have brought extra oil for their lamps in case they have to wait longer than anticipated.  Five are foolish and have only brought their lamps.  At midnight, all the virgins hear the call to come out to meet the bridegroom.  Realizing that their lamps have gone out, the foolish virgins ask the wise ones for oil, but they refuse, saying that there will certainly not be enough for them to share.  While the foolish virgins are away trying to get more oil, the bridegroom arrives.  The wise virgins then accompany him to the celebration.  The others arrive too late and are excluded.

I had always found this parable to be somewhat mean-spirited and could never understand why those wise virgins couldn't be kinder and share their oil!  But the homilist explained that the reason the wise virgins did not share the oil, was not that they were selfish or judgmental, but rather, that it was simply impossible for them to do so.  The "oil" represents their spirituality, and spirituality, like wisdom, is something unique and particular to each individual - it is not a commodity that can be bought or bartered or just instantly handed over to another.  Again, a counter-cultural notion in our world of instant gratification and ubiquitous consumerism.



Some of my favorite words of wisdom to ponder this week


"The color of your thought dyes your soul."  Marcus Aurelius

"Beware of the barrenness of a busy life."  Socrates

"Be kind to one another for we do not know the burdens another may carry"  (a friend of mine)