Mindfulness and Poetry: Delicious Word Awareness

Written by Maya Talisman Frost


Everyone's a poet.

Of course, everyone's a critic, too! This means that there are plenty of opportunities to heighten our awareness of words and how we use them.

Words create pictures, and just as a painter uses a combination of colors and strokes to express a concept, we offer an artistic rendering of thoughts through carefully chosen words.

Our linguistic intelligence is what allows us to both recognize and generate vivid word vignettes. Whether you enjoy novels, biographies, mysteries, sonnets, haiku, song lyrics, conversations, soliloquies, or newspaper stories, you can develop greater word awareness by focusing on descriptive phrases.

In our everyday speech, we tend to speak in phrases and punctuate these with expressions, pauses, gestures, or laughter. Althoughrepparttar words themselves convey meaning,repparttar 142067 total picture we create is a combination of inflection, context, juxtaposition, and even eye contact.

Don't think you have your own personal poetry style? Think again. You use words in your own way, and it's likely that, given an assignment to express a particular concept, your version would have recognizable elements.

Try this test: describe a birthday cake.

There's a good chance that you would use words to expressrepparttar 142068 shape, flavor, color, decoration, ingredients, size, and presentation of a cake, and thatrepparttar 142069 precise way you do that would be unique when compared to others' descriptions. In addition, you're likely to come up with a different description if asked to do so a month from now.

I Can Do That!

Written by Joi Sigers


My daughter, Emily, atrepparttar learned age of 8 taught me a lesson that has never left me.

The church we were attending atrepparttar 142017 time was planning a huge Christmas play. They were pulling out allrepparttar 142018 stops and were abuzz with excitement. Mary,repparttar 142019 pastor's wife/casting director was in hot pursuit ofrepparttar 142020 lead role: A young girl with many, many lines. In factrepparttar 142021 character appeared in every scene and spoke in all but one.

It was my understanding that she wanted a teenager, but girls weren't exactly lining up in front of her. A. Practices would take place each Friday and Saturday night for a month. B. Forget a line + suffer humiliation = life's over.

Then one Sunday evening, Mary headed toward me smiling like a cat with salmon on its breath. My first thought was, "Has she gotten that desperate?" I started filing through my mental files forrepparttar 142022 folder marked EXCUSES, but realized soon enough I didn't need excuses because she didn't need a 28 year old teenager.

She: "Sweet Emily has savedrepparttar 142023 day!" Me: "My sweet Emily?" She: "Of course. She wantsrepparttar 142024 role. She's so excited. I showed herrepparttar 142025 script, and how many pages there are to memorize. She said she could do it."

Me: "Then she'll do it."

My freckle faced, beautiful little girl who had never done anything remotely like this had just signed on for something realistically over her head. Realistically. But 8 year olds don't think realistically. They'd never stoop to that.

When I first asked her about it and offered to loan her my EXCUSES folder, she told me what she had apparently told Mary, "Oh, I can do that." She even seemed incredulous that we adults hadn't thought of this before -repparttar 142026 obvious solution.

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