Tag: Inspiration

Human Interaction

Savannah BP pic 2

Okefenokee Swamp. Folkston, GA. Everyday life

There are some people that without ever having met, you just know. You watch their movie or hear their music and you just think “I relate to you; we could be friends, even.” You know facts about them and try to emulate their positive traits. This is most common with celebrities, specifically those who are masters of our individual trade. Athletes look up to other athletes, writers to other writers, businessmen to Donald Trump. As a writer –and a teenage girl- there are many people that I idolize and from them draw inspiration. I tried to think of the one person who inspired me the most, who handed me life’s lessons one at a time until I really felt that I found my footing. If you talk to as many people as I have, you’ll realize that this is nearly an impossible task.

I thought that I could cite Emily Dickinson, who made me first want to be a poet with “Hope is the Thing With Feathers,” or Mrs. Melanson who taught me to be who you are unapologetically, even if at times that means you have to be a little cynical. I thought about my mother, who –despite her shortcomings- implanted within me a set of morals that can’t be messed with, no matter who I talk to or what I do in my future. I started jotting down every Walt Disney fact that I know. How can one not draw inspiration from the original voice of Mickey himself?

But then I realized that maybe I don’t have to write a miniature feature on any one individual. We learn from one another all the time; that is the silver lining of constant human interaction. During the hum drum of day to day life, we steadily gain lessons from those that we watch on TV, those who we read in books or on websites, if we only keep our eyes and ears open.

-Savannah Thanscheidt, Web Editor 

A Lotus in Muddy Waters

Anna BP pic 2I have never been the type of girl that liked flowers. To me they were always over used and underappreciated. I didn’t have a need for them. But last year my grandmother took me down to black creek and listened to the water flow by and I saw a pink Lotus. It was the first flower that I had ever seen that made me feel something. I felt at peace. Before we left I plucked it from the water and took it home with me. I let it dry out and kept it in a jar on my dresser.

After awhile of waking up to it every morning I started to become curious of its meaning. I learned that the lotus represented being at peace in muddy waters. Those few words sparked something in me.

I had always been the most negative, cynical person in the room, never giving anything a chance to work out. I was tired of feeling that way but I didn’t know how to separate myself from that familiar, warm lifestyle but that flower and its secret meaning showed me that there could be beauty in the murky as long as you could be at ease with your surroundings.

I began to carry that meaning around with me everywhere I went. I let that entire philosophy tangle its way into my life because I had nothing left to lose if it didn’t work out. That was the best decision I ever made. Ever since then I’ve taught myself to breathe before stressing, listen before speaking. I’ve taught myself to accept things as they come and look at things in the brightest light possible. I’ve changed so much in the best year and all my changes have been for the better all because of one simple dried up flower.

-Anna Dominguez, Junior Poetry Editor 

Kid of A Thousand Careers

Chrissy 1I was a kid of a thousand careers. Growing up I pretended to be every job imaginable. I tried my hand being a gardener, tending to the over grown flowers beds in my front yard.  I took the role of a priest, breaking half a loaf of wonder bread and giving out swigs of apple juice to my small pretend congregation. I used my mother’s old college text books and scribbled on a chalk board pretending to be a teacher to my stuffed animals. I was a nurse checking the blood pressure, listening to hearts, and administering shots to any willing patients. But eventually I traded these imaginative days with academic classes and hours of homework.

As I go through senior year with the illuminating expiration date of my time at Douglas Anderson flashing over head I feel pressured to have it all figured out. The biggest thing that I feel compelled to have mapped out before I graduate is what career path I want to chain myself to for the rest of my life. But in these dwindling hours of high school I draw inspiration from my childhood and how I would get caught up in a whirl wind of imagination filled passion. Through the fog of stress that is senior year I see my childhood imagination as a beacon of light guiding me through the never ending pages of college applications, numerous activates, and the dwindling  year.

-Chrissy Thelemann, Submissions Editor