LOOK AT WHAT OUR WONDERFUL Hawa Diallo IS UP TO! I always knew I had a drive to write, and a gift for it. My vocation as a teacher was completely hidden to me until Carol Gaddy (now and for many years Carol Graywing) heard me read poetry between sets of a bluegrass band, at a noisy bar called The Quiet Night, in Eureka Springs, when I was 19 (Im 61 now). Carol tapped me to become part of what was then the Arkansas Artists in Schools Program, which changed my life forever. (Thank you again, Carol. Again and again, always.) Over time, I have been amazed to discover how much I love teaching, how satisfying it is, and that, if I quiet down a little, I can really conduit and say or do, without knowing what or how, things that those who are my students are hungry to hear. It humbles and astonishes me, very similar to how I feel when I write something that I know very well is better than I am, and it has just come through me. Im not saying this as spiritual party line, its true. So its thrilling to somehow have a sense of what certain talented people who hold back are carrying --- maybe not what exactly theyre holding, but that there is something there --- and be inadvertently helpful in getting them to let it out... to assist them in bringing that seed already there, but latent, hidden in the deep inner soil, up and out into light and growth. I am overjoyed when one of my students gets green and lush and leafy and covered with fruit. Its a thrill every time. But with no one, perhaps, as much as Hawa, who generously made my mothers final years safe and love-filled... who had so much inside while she has had so much taken from her in her early life... I felt, too, that Charlotte encouraged her in the old-age equivalent of the way she encouraged her authors and illustrators, so there was a sense of lineage... Anyway, I am oh so happy... A talented, GOOD person is getting support and recognition from her own community... some ever-more-extraordinary art is finding its way into the world... Oh my... Carol helped me. Hawa helped Charlotte. I helped Hawa. What, what a world. muslimcommunityreport/2014/08/13/guinean-immigrant-discovers-hidden-talent-after-40-years/
Posted on: Fri, 22 Aug 2014 04:22:07 +0000
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