Talk Thursday – How I Make The World A Better Place

Butcher, baker, candlestick maker – when I grow up I want to be a Playboy Bunny. Awe, the dreams and wants of a five-year, how did that become so complicated with growth? Why? These and many other burning questions are want of answers by the thinking minds bogged in desperate contemplation. And it’s all in the search to make our own indelible impression on the inhabitants of this spinning blue orb we call home.

There is nothing especially wonderful about me. There is nothing special except my willingness to learn, to grow, to change. To give what I bring to this earth happens one person at a time. While my voice may touch thousands each day, my heart, mind, and soul only touch one at any given time, or a few if I’m particularly shiny at that moment. If I am gifted, it is in the arts of listening, acceptance, and logic.

My father said, shortly before his death, something that let me know I’d made a difference in his life. In speaking about his Hispanic nurse (and the Hispanic portion of this discussion was the point) he said, “See it just proves you have to take each person; one by one on their own merit.”

In my ‘tweens, teens, and early twenties my father and I often argued hatreds, prejudice, politics, and religion. My stance was accepting each on their own merit; his was judging a man by the tint of his skin. Now don’t get me wrong, I love my father dearly, he was an amazing and brilliant man, but he’d always had that flaw; a flaw that disappeared before my eyes. I don’t think I’m responsible for this, it is my mother who raised me to be the way I am, but I think between the two of us we helped my father see below the skin to a person’s heart.

Our personal strength lays in our self-belief and worth. I do not think I am greater than the whole; I am a tool of the whole, a cog along the gears of life. The world will not quit spinning when I pass from this plane to the next. Maybe even a tear won’t fall when I am gone. But my poetry will remain, possibly even a memory of my kindness, or an annoyance at my logical attitude.

My measure won’t be in deeds done, but maybe in grace and words said. What I bring to this world is belief, grace, even some bitchiness (I am a female, c’mon) and my ability to honor people for themselves and cherish their warts. To listen to them and hear them. To touch each of them inside their need, to help chase away some of the shadows, or at least share the areas between black and white with them, and give them a piece of my heart. Sing it Janis.

I’m not changing the world; I’m just mutating humanity a single cell at a time.

Sith,
Cele