A Day!: Emily Dickinson

A Day! Help! Help! Another Day!
Your prayers, oh Passer by!
From such a common ball as this
Might date a Victory!
From marshallings as simple
The flags of nations swang.
Steady—my soul: What issues
Upon thine arrow hang!

Yeah. Um, I don't know what the rest of the poem means, but I love the first line. I think I might have to print that out and post it at my desk at work. Help! Help! Another Day!

I looked up Miss Emily Dickinson because I've been thinking about expression, and being your own true self (regardless of what that may look like on the outside), and how each of our gifts, no matter how small, matters in the world somehow.

Take Miss D. She, by all accounts, was a housemouse. She wrote short, spare poetry. And yet, over 100 years later, her poems are taught in every high school, and are an inspiration to introverts everywhere. I wonder if she longed for fame, or if she just wrote because she liked it, and the (posthumous?) fame was incidental? I should look up her history.

I've just been thinking about my own talents, small (or big) as they may be. Sometimes I get sucked into thinking that I need to Make Something Of Myself. When really, maybe just being myself as I am, and helping others as I can, and doing what pleases me, is good enough (or better!).

To be a geek and quote The Lord Of The Rings: "Even the smallest person can change the course of the future." Or, can change somebody's life. Even their own.

To continue on the geeky quote train, Carlos Castenada says, "The basic difference between an ordinary person and a warrior is that a warrior takes everything as a challenge while an ordinary person takes everything as a blessing or a curse." --Don Juan

So that even if it's a Help! Help! kind of day, the challenge is there. Do I take it as a curse? Or do I take it as a challenge? Maybe that's the challenge itself: to face things as challenges, rather than sink into victimhood.

But that's a topic for another day.