SDG

As I drive about town in the day, I scope out places to light up at night. It’s not easy to find spots where lots of people are outside evenings of our cold Canadian November, but I found potential at Kelowna’s Adventure Fitness Centre H2O. There, people come and go to the pool and gym for several hours each day after dark.

So yesterday I headed to the H2O and found a little tree just outside the glow of streetlights and ambient light from windows, and there I hung some paper luminaires. I also placed a sign to help folk make sense of the spontaneously lit tree. In a basket beneath the tree were poems and tea lights for people to take home. I left everything there for a couple of hours. It’s hard to say what the impact was… part of the mystery, I guess. But I did see a mom with kids stop at the tree, read the sign, walk on.

Tonight I’ll install light at another location. Maybe outside a Mall, if I don’t get security after me!!!

Black Friday… I think not! (this is Canada, right?) Bringing light,

Lesley-Anne, SDG

As much as I spend time alone, create alone, work and think and pour out alone, there’s part of me that wants to know… others, their thoughts, their responses to my words. I create to express, work to sharpen myself as an artist, but also to share. And when I share there’s absolutely nothing more catch-my-breath-in-my-throat, than to really really know I am become a small part in someones life, a link in a chain strung from here to eternity.

Pop-up-poetry may just be a small miracle. I remember reading Stephen Kings book “On Writing” years ago, and resonating with Kings thoughts (I must look at it again!) that writing somehow transcends time and space. He says, “Books are a uniquely portable magic.” To be a writer, to commit words to paper/internet, and then moments, days, years from now, someone reads those words, in a connection across time and space… is miraculous! And so I press on and pop up.

Thursday of last week I pinned poems on Cawston Ave. in Kelowna. I imagined how the words might impact… how God might take what I wrote and begin something or heal something or continue a thought process… with someone I didn’t yet know.

That my poem pinned to a gateway would be welcome home. That my poem pinned to a bench would be rest. That my poem pinned to a community garden would be food.

And I went home believing.

I received a comment here at the bottom of my “About” page that quickened my heart upon reading it. The joy… in knowing… just a glimpse.

Here are some photos of my pop-up-poems, scattered to the wind, looking to land.

All SDG,

Lesley-Anne