I have been so genuinely happy the past few days that it is almost overwhelming. I’d been struggling with my anxiety getting bad again and decided to get on medication a little while ago. I feel so glad that I made that decision for myself because I’ve since seen such a difference in my general mood and energy level.
I’m taking advantage of the good place that I am in by making the most of every opportunity I am given in terms of both social life and career. I love my internship at Connecticut Public. They have had me playing around with photography recently and I’ve found it’s something that I feel passionate out and could be good at with practice. Even though I am not by any means an expert at some aspects of the job, like video editing or camera equipment or audio design, I am eager to learn and approach tasks with a positive outlook. I wake up each day excited to go in to my internship because I enjoy it so much that it almost doesn’t feel like work to me; I didn’t know that could be possible in a job.
My internship at The Hill-Stead Museum also brings me a lot of joy. We had our second Sunken Garden Poetry Festival tonight starting at 6 pm, featuring Molly McCully Brown and Margaret Gibson. It was hosted on the houses’ front porch to provide easier handicap access to the festival. I, along with my fellow interns, ran admissions and made sure the event progressed smoothly.
The night was perfect: hot and sunny. There was a point in the festival were it sprinkled rain, but the weather quickly cleared and the result was a beautiful double rainbow and an unforgettable sunset spilling across the grounds of the historic home. The poetry was also incredible. Both poets wrote about heart wrenching, often bleak topics with sharp insight and rhetoric.
I was partial to Margaret Gibson because of her poignant prose about her husband who died of Alzheimer’s and the progression of his deterioration. Her poems perfectly balanced the difficulty and tragedy of that experience with levity, humor, and gratitude. In turn, her voice had a soothing quality that made her reading particularly captivating. My favorite poem of her’s was Broken Cup. My favorite lines of the poem are near it’s ending: “Who knows how love will hold, or if we will ever be all right. Who knows what wrong tastes like or how much emptiness the cup will hold as we share it — who knows?” Here is a link to the full poem for you to read (I recommend that you do): http://www.courant.com/entertainment/arts-theater/hc-ct-poets-corner-february-20160218-story.html.
I felt so inspired leaving the festival, seeing the natural beauty of The Hill-Stead estate at sunset after hearing the inner musings of poets. I had been struggling with some writer’s block with my poetry, but that moment after the festival ended, sitting in my car, lines of poetry came to me with ease. It wasn’t the best thing I’ve ever written, but it felt right for the moment. I’ve inserted my unfinished poem from tonight below as my final thoughts of the day, accompanied with a few pictures:
I catch the first signs of rain in my palms.
Thumbing over damp skin, the flesh puckers,
aging before my eyes.
The rain knows no difference between my body
and the tree by the stone wall.
We are given vitality just the same.
I squeeze fists tight till
slices settle into the creases of my hands.
I want to feel something sharp.
The dying light makes me fear
that I too am dimming,
snuffed through suffocation.
The sky scalds, deepening like paper browning in open flame.
The rain has dried, but air hangs heavy,
holding on to phantom moisture.
I long to exist in the space between rain and rainbow that follows,
when warm light floods the startled world.
Eyes cast wayward and wander
and I stand, paralyzed by possibility.
The Bucketlister 