Monthly Archives: December 2016

Let there be…

candle

This is a post I wrote this week for the wonderful blog From the Mixed Up Files.  Sharing it here with love and hope:

This shortest day of a too-dark year seems like a good time to share a story I sometimes tell on school visits. I can’t remember where I first heard or read it, and I change it a bit every time.

Once there was a king who was growing old. Soon it would be time to leave his kingdom to one of his three daughters, so he called them to him. Which of them could fill the throne room, wall to wall and ceiling to floor with something precious? She would inherit the crown.

The first daughter ran to the royal coffers and had the servants drag in bag upon bag of gold coins and spill them out. Yet they did not fill the room.

The second daughter ran to the royal wardrobe and had the maids carry in piles of gowns and jewels and dancing shoes. They did not fill the room either.

The third daughter stood before her father and quietly smiled. She reached into her pocket, making her big sisters laugh and sneer. As if a person could fill this grand room with something small enough to fit into her hand.

But they stopped laughing when their sister drew out …a candle. For when she lit it, its yellow glow grew and grew till it reached every corner of the room, spreading its golden warmth everywhere.

A book, I tell the kids, is like that candle. Stories and poems glow and spark and warm the world with their shining light. They show us the way. They make us less afraid. They fit in our pockets, yet their light fills hearts. A book, a great poet once said, “should be a ball of light in one’s hands.”

So on this longest night of the year, let’s light candles, let’s warm ourselves by fires, let’s write and read and share stories. Let’s remember again some of the wisest words ever spoken. “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that,” wrote Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. “Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”

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Warmest, brightest holidays to you and those you love

 

Some Things I Was Thinking About As I Lay Awake at 3AM or…

…a look into a disordered mind:

***Whether my two daughters who are applying to grad schools will get their applications done in time

***If I will ever give up the delusion I have any control over my children’s lives

***What the fate of Hanne, a character in my new novel, should be

***How much I admire women who wear lipstick while they work out

***The election (again and yet again)

***Names for the fictional country in my new novel. Discarded: Amitria and Skylland

***If we should get a big or small Christmas tree this year

***How much more I would love the holidays if they only came every other year

***If I really needed to get up to pee or could make it till morning

***this face

linnea-in-karstins-clothes

…and so, at last, to sleep.