Five Minute Friday - Prepare

On Fridays a bunch of brave writers gather here to all spend five collective minutes writing on a single prompt. It’s a great way to catch your breath at the end of a long week. This blessed, beautiful place where we open our hearts and let words and tears and the inner workings of our lives bleed and flow and dance across the virtual pages. Yes, this community opens wide and invites you in to share. Come and visit and read. You will be blessed.

You’ll forgive me if I steer gently around the holidays for this post. It’s drawing me – so much to say – so much goodness. I’ve been writing about this a little already – I fact, my second Advent post spoke to exactly this. Maybe that’s why I’m pulling myself in another direction. Besides, it was art class today.

This week: Prepare

Go

They are so small: these tiny hands that grasp gently at the elegant length of deep oxford blue drawing pencils. I sped so little time in the world of children – despite having my own. Her life as an only lends itself towards more grown up conversations and themes – though I fight hard for every inch of childhood.

I sometimes forget the precious lives that inhabit the world two feet below my shoulders. But these children have utterly enchanted me. I have the privilege of sharing art with them once a week and I dearly wish it were more.

Our public schools have been losing curriculum they consider superfluous or unnecessary. Or simply not cost effective. These learning pillars that fall? They’re art; music; library – sometimes even physical education. Despite learned knowledge that these pillars shore up and round out an education as much as math, science, and writing.

So in I go every Tuesday morning. Heart pounding and completely terrified that they’ll look up; see beneath my carefully prepared lessons; and discover that while I might have a passion for arts and a flair for the creative, I am not actually a trained artist. My diligently packed 31 Gifts bag overflows with pens, pencils, color in many mediums, sandpaper, scissors and clips, paintbrushes, and books.  But is that enough?

After much thought and still with some trembling, I must say yes. Solidly. Completely. Confidently. While I might not have credentials behind my passion, I have a dedication to the craft and a deep desire to prepare their young hearts and minds to understand that they too are artists.

Soon enough, they will come crashing headlong into the naysayers and critics – those who will tell them they are not good enough; that their lines are wobbly; that their colors don’t work, and that cats simply cannot appear in every piece of art they create. They will face a lifetime of detractors and barricades – they may even find those barriers surfacing out of pools of worry and anxiety in their own hearts.

It is my deepest hope and prayer that in those moment, they will have a memory – something from way back – when someone leaned into them, believing, and said, “great job – I love what you’ve done with light and shadow there.” I hope they’ll remember a compliment of color, standing around images of the galaxy and learning about grayscale, putting pen to paper and making their first zentangle.

I hope my hour a week gives them the launching pad they need to leap deep into the pools of creativity to discover and navigate confidently through those waters on a lifelong journey.

Stop



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