Dreaming Out Loud

I’ve noticed a trend in popular music of today involving a reverie for the younger years in life. Every song tells a story of its writer, who was inspired by any variation of emotional situations. The Lumineers tell us to keep our heads up and remember when we were young in “Stubborn Love.” Fun. suggests we are young “so let’s set the world on fire, we can burn brighter than the sun.” Lyrics like these bring to poetry to life.

Every now and then it happens to me too. I’ll be going about my day sleeping in my doggie bed, monitoring the neighborhood from my perch in the bay window, or playing with my forever people and BAM! Poetry comes to life before me. I blame author and poet Susan G. Wooldridge for this (dare I say) habit of mine. It’s no secret I’m a lover of words, but I’m also a believer in the theory that sometimes it takes a little crazy to create a unique masterpiece.

So today, I embraced my inner “crazy” by opening to a random page of Wooldridge’s “Poemcrazy: Freeing Your Life with Words,” and vowing to write a blog post about the words that followed.

“When I saw my son, Daniel, shaking our new lilac bush the spring he was three, I managed to keep myself from shrieking ‘Stop it, you’re going to kill the bush!’ Instead I asked him what he was doing,” Wooldridge writes. “‘I’m stirring the sky, Mama,’ he told me. I only asked that he stir it gently. How can you tell a child to stop stirring the sky?”

I’ve said before that little people are wise beyond their years. They are also poets. They are honest. They love unconditionally. They are wise. I’ve learned many important lessons from the little people in my life, but one of the most meaningful is their perspective on the world. Like me, they see joy from the ground up. Unlike most adults, who look down on life…in more ways than one.

Wooldridge suggests a solution to this that aligns very well with the popular lyrics of the Lumineers and Fun. “Seek out children. Jot down what they say,” Wooldridge writes. “We can find poems just by listening, being a scribe and catching the words.”

Poetry is life dreaming out loud. Let’s dream in verse…let’s look up.