Here's to you, Steve Jobs!

Funniest thing, Steve Jobs started following me on Pinterest today. It's funny because, well you know...

But honestly, it's great that it occurred just as I was trying to summon up the courage to pick this blog back up. Sometimes we take ourselves so seriously (preaching to myself here:) that we let valuable opportunities, connections, and maybe even relationships pass us by because we're too concerned with image rather than with what's real beneath our image.

The truth is that I lost the joy of blogging a long time ago. I used to blog faithfully and loved every single, tortuous minute of it. It was a great escape, a place to log thoughts, ideas, feelings, and life happenings. Some days I wrote about things that touched my soul, other days I chronicled funny events from the day. Some days were all about poetry and, still others, were nothing more than a collection of pictures that spoke to me.

And then I became a teacher and began to teach writing to a bunch of high school kids. I went in SO STINKING CONFIDENT, just knowing - knowing - that I was going to single-handedly inspire the next generation of writers.

It didn't take long for me to tuck my tail and head for shelter and - for me - that shelter was somewhere far, far away from the blogging world. My confidence in my own abilities, talents, and gifts was severely tested inside those first few years of teaching. I quickly realized that writing according to TEA standards was nothing like writing from the heart - probably the one thing I wanted most to impart to my classroom of budding writers.

Instead I had to learn to staunch my own creative urges in order to learn to teach writing in a whole new "barbaric" way. I was faced with the challenge of teaching students how to write expository and persuasive essay writing within the confines of a stringent, strangely forulaic rubric that included a length of only 26 lines.

It doesn't take an English teacher to tell you that an essay is so, so much more than 26 lines. It's about the "soul" that is discovered through writing. 26 lines leave very little room for soul. Instead, it is too often one-dimensional and lacks that certain something that has readers going back for second - and third - reads.

Pascal said, "When we see a natural style, we are astonished and delighted; for we expected to see an author, and we find a man." Soul writing is human. It is a person with ideas and emotions who captures our attention - not because he or she has all the answers - but rather because their writing is authentic, honest, messy, and even contradictory at times.

Somewhere in those first few months of teaching I allowed that spark of creativity to become dampened by the reality of what teaching meant. I still strove for creativity in my classroom; I just borrowed others' creative ideas instead of trusting my own. I still spent long, taxing hours pouring over lesson plans; they "ticked all the boxes" but still left me feeling as if there were more I could do.

More I could be.

I forgot how to write soulfully because I was so busy learning how to "teach" writing.

Over time, I have tried to pick up blogging again, simply because I love to write, love to play with words and emotions and events and - in the end - have left a stamp that is uniquely me upon the blogosphere. I failed. More than once. Okay...more than twice.

And that it okay.

I recently found a Pinterest project that has been calling my name ever since. If is a homemade rustic headboard with tiny words up in one corner that say "Awake my soul." I intend to make that headboard and stencil those words.

I want my soul to be fully awake. Then - and only then can I share my best self with those around me.

My life is full. I'm a wife, mom, a Nana, a writer, a teacher, a caretaker of too many animals to name, Thoreau's owner; a woman who has been transplanted from the big 'ole Dallas Metroplex to the rural community of Naples, TX.

Otherwise, now known as "home."

So even though I know Steve Jobs is not really following me on Pinterest, here's to his wisdom - both in business and in life - that is certainly quotable. Today was a timely reminder.

This is my story. My adventures. Written and recorded with no rules.

Awake my soul.