I Am Cynthia, the Strange Place

Ok don't get mad at me.  I know most of you are my Facebook friend, and if you're coming here from Facebook then you obviously either look at my profile or get my posts in your news feed.

However, please indulge my pride once again.  It'll only be like 5 seconds.

I MADE THIS THING.

I drew it and then I painted it.

I DID ART.

On to more important things!

To be honest, I haven't been very inspired when it comes to writing blog entries lately, if you couldn't tell.  I took a big ol' break for a few weeks because I simply didn't have anything to say.  Usually, I can come up with something that can formulate itself into a blog post.

Alas, I'm still in the mire when it comes to blogging, so I've resorted to something incredibly dull.  

I have this here journal prompt, and since my blog is practically a journal I figured I might as well use it anyway. (Thanks to Katelyn Thomas at Suite101 for the prompt.)

Pick a verse or quote that inspires you and talk about why it means so much to you.

There's so much I would share with you if I had all of the time in the world to talk about the music, art, and literature that has inspired me over the years.  I'm an artist.  I love art.  Not that difficult to understand.  However, there are a few verses and quotes that have shaped my life, whether I intended them to or not.  Here are little secrets about what makes me, me.

[She] had these tawny gold eyes like some member of the cat family, as certain fair-haired people do.  But unlike most people she could look you straight in the eye and stay there.

Now what, you'd like to know, is so special about that?

That is a quote from The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver.  I first read it in the sixth grade for a summer reading assignment.  I read it through once, enjoyed it, put it on my bookshelf and didn't pick it up for years. For some reason, this quote stuck with me.  I labored over the fuzzy memory for days until I could remember what book it was from, and where the excerpt had come from.  It's the description of a minor character named Cynthia, someone who comes and goes quickly from the story, barely noticed.  

I don't know why I noticed this in the 6th grade, and why the back of my brain attached to it so strongly that I remembered it years later.  I do know that when I found it again, I wrote it on a piece of paper and pinned it to my wall.

It's been an odd little goal of mine to be Cynthia from The Bean Trees ever since.  The first half of the quote I clearly can't do much about, other than hope and pray that my eyes continue to get lighter until they're tawny gold and the passport people will let me mark "amber" as my eye color.  (I tried once, but they changed it to brown.  I also tried for hazel on my driver's license.  Brown again.)

The mark of a great author, in my opinion, is one that doesn't need a whole thesaurus full of words to describe things.  In two sentences, Barbara Kingsolver changed my life ever-so-slightly.  She created the essence of a character in 34 words.

"But unlike most people she could look you straight in the eye and stay there."  That's the point I was trying to get at.  This is my goal.  Tawny gold eyes or not, I want to look you straight in the eye and stay there.  I want to have that much serenity and confidence inside of me that I can look somebody straight in the eye and stay there.  Kingsolver didn't say anything about Cynthia's "challenging stare" or "arrogant gaze".  There's no challenge or arrogance behind it.  Cynthia doesn't look people straight in the eye to intimidate them or get a rise out of them.  She looks because she is unafraid.  She is comfortable with who she is and doesn't have anything to hide.

Once in a while you get shown the light / In the strangest of places if you look at it right

That, I just recently found out, is a bit of the lyrics of "Scarlet Begonias" by the Grateful Dead.  I first heard it when my sophomore year English teacher wrote it in my "yearbook" (a bunch of notebook papers stapled together).

I'll make no bones about high school.  It was a turbulent time for me, as I'm sure it was for most.  I was a poor student and a poor excuse for a human being, if I do say so myself.  The only thing I had going for me was my Honors English class, which I was lucky to get into.  I loved that class because I felt smart, but also because of my teacher.

Stritt is a cool man.  There's no other way to describe him.  He was the teacher who shouted poetry from atop the radiator.  He made us listen to Eddie Vedder and Marvin Gaye.  He took our Honors English class and forced creativity upon us, forced us to love it.  He's the one who taught me how to express myself in writing, and how to love words.

He's also the one who wasn't afraid to set me straight, and I appreciate him more for that than anything else. When my assignments were rushed and poorly formed, he told me.  He pulled me out into the hall in the middle of class and told me that I wasn't doing what I should.  He told me to quit moping and start working, and I did.  I've never been as prolific in my writing as I was my sophomore year of high school.

I was one of those strange places where Stritt saw a little light.  I was a difficult teenager, I've no doubts about that.  Still, he saw a little glimmer in me, beneath my stubborn impassiveness, a spark of creativity waiting for some fuel.  He opened me up and let the oxygen in so that spark could burn.  He was patient with me.

Now I've got a bonfire in my body and I'm not fighting against the world anymore.  I'm stable.  I'm on steady ground, and I'm looking at all of the strange places where that little tiny light is hiding.  Now I'm in a position to open them out and see if their spark can grow like mine did.

I guess, if anything, you nurture that spark.  If you haven't taken an art class since grade school but you want to major in art, go for it.  Open up your chest and see if the little guy grows or goes out.  Don't shut down because you're afraid of failure like I was.  Try and work and fail and try again, because every time you fall you'll learn something, and you'll be a little smarter when you try again.

Rock on, mates.  Stay golden.