Plants and Pots

Plants in Pots

 

Excuse the typos and word choices my editor is asleep :)

 

After reading the Hub written by Rebecca Emrich regarding Men and writing I felt compelled to take time out from my work writing the novel we both are working on and say a few thing that where prompted by her Hub.

As a Poet & Writer I have a long story to tell regarding reading. It was my partner that prompted me to write in regard to the writers ability’s and environment.

We were talking about my three daughters when I read Rebecca’s Hub which was around the afternoon when they had just left us from having had just stayed over the past two nights and how the eldest seems to have become so smart and intelligent getting straight A’s every time in every exam and also wondering where I would find the money to pay for college..

I mentioned that she wasn’t like this when she was younger yet now at 17 she has so changed. I also noted that the youngest, Gabrielle who is 6 years old has a reading and comprehension way above her level and with a level of capacity that I find totally unbelievable.

Reading adult level books with words that I find difficult she just sounds them out to say the word and if she doesn’t get it right eventually says it right because she has comprehended the sentence and therefore assumes the word must be so. That for me was amazing. I was talking about this to my partner saying that the other two girls where never at this level s young.

My partner said that it may have been that my eldest daughter Catherine would have been even smarter in the write environment!

I thought to myself ‘what does she mean, didn’t both my ex and I rare them well?

The she went on to explain as a teacher she had seen this many times before..

What she meant was that Catherine had more restrictions with the family unit in some ways and that Gaby was being exposed to a lot more during her weekend stays me and my partner who is a teacher anyway and with myself being inclined towards being creative yet not academically smart. At first this raised a defensive red flag for me as an attack on Family values etc but it wasn’t an attack at all. Of course the family unit is best but some times it can just cause lack of growth if we aren’t careful. I will explain it like this and hope you get my drift. I don’t normally talk about my personal life and really don’t know why Rebecca’s Hub has prompted this but here goes.

I suddenly realised that my partner's comment on environments and growth was a really astute observation and that this had to apply to me. That the question I had asked myself the past few years as to why is it I only started to write from 2006 and got published and so well received locally in Ireland etc.

I mean I was born in 1966 and remember only war in Northern Ireland was I suddenly a writer after nearly 40 years? Or was it that I had it always but never used it? The answer lay in front of me. It was my environment.

The gene pf creativity was there in me from birth like a seed but in a pot with no room for the roots to expand to allow leaves to open and expose the beautify of the ability it had to grow bigger plus like a plan I had no awareness of this ability to grow, I just was! It was also that maybe the pot wasn’t so bad but that it was placed not just in the right light for my particular flower to bloom to full potential.

Like Catherine she was confined in some ways, not out of bad parenting but circumstance and the confinement of family, responsibilities, neighbourhood, country, tradition genetics controlled by the grower (parent) We sometime want to re-live our lives through our kids) etc.

Don’t get me wrong marriage break-up isn’t what I condone it isn’t write but again it isn’t always wrong or for the worst. It is life and it happened. We make our choices and we decided, sometime the right way sometimes not the right way, however we do decide and we live.

Yes the break up wasn’t good it shattered everyone and I am not saying it should have been so but in some ways it also broke the pot. In fact it broke a lot of pots for everyone. (And I don’t mean the pots that broke over my head)

The roots could grow and find new unseen soil new sustainance that was living right outside of the pot all the time.

This was like my writing too I had never read books from a child except when forced with school. I hated novels they required concentration and commitment both of which I seemed to lack., I liked to stay in my little family pot and be one branch of one plant showing some nice flowers at times being read too and reading only when I had too. As for poetry that was for fool it was laim no boy would read poetry it was a girly thing. It goes to show how stupid I had become in my confinement. Almost constitutionalised.

Now I have become a poet & writer here in Ireland and have been published I have realised a few things.

This was the reason why I wasn’t reading or writing I had no need to. I was provided what I needed and because I didn’t want to know there was a need outside of my family or should I say environment. I never did well in school I hated, as I say poetry, the teachers had set criteria I didn’t fit into so I failed and they caused me to close down the gift because they worked from their set rules also in their pots. I didn’t fit the predetermined mould of the education system they had no time to see my possible potential out side of the system or glimmer of the gift because they had a tick box to mark my work with, which I didn’t comply with or understand so I was missed.

How many have been missed this way I ask. Think about it, Most discoveries were made by accident while the discoverer was looking for something else. What makes the genius? (P.S. I realise I am no genius, I wish J )

It isn’t always that he solves the problem because he is smart according to the system although sometimes this is the case. It is because a genius never attacks a problem the same way more than once. They use a different way every time looking for a crack in the pot from different angles.

The education system doesn’t look for cracks they don’t have time it is a system with tick boxes and compartments and structure that 60% of the time works just fine.

Let me make one thing clear, I am not a genius nor am I saying I am one but I can understand what genius is and how it is found. My gift is just an ability that was found in the same manor only it took 40 years which if found sooner might have given me a whole new life. But then I wouldn’t have my daughters maybe and for that reason its fine. I just wish that we had a system that seem everyone’s extra hidden potential. We arn't all academics and anyway look at the world right now and where that got us with the recession of so called bright people.

So remember plants in pots can be nice but pots are man made. A garden allows a lot more growth too sometimes we have to take the pot away and divide the plants inside which can be a bit damaging but ultimately when they take root in free space with other and newer soil the outcome can be beautiful.