You Get Proud by Practicing - A poem by Laura Hershey

I feel sad that I found Laura Hershey's work so late in the day, after she had passed on. I have not been able to let go of this poem since I read it, and felt it really needed to just keep spreading.

You Get Proud by Practicing
by Laura Hershey

If you are not proud
For who you are, for what you say, for how you look;
If every time you stop
To think of yourself, you do not see yourself glowing
With golden light; do not, therefore, give up on yourself.
You can get proud.

You do not need
A better body, a purer spirit, or a Ph.D.
To be proud.
You do not need
A lot of money, a handsome boyfriend, or a nice car.
You do not need
To be able to walk, or see, or hear,
Or use big, complicated words,
Or do any of those things that you just can’t do
To be proud. A caseworker
Cannot make you proud,
Or a doctor.
You only need more practice.
You get proud by practicing.

There are many many ways to get proud.
You can try riding a horse, or skiing on one leg,
Or playing guitar,
And do well or not so well,
And be glad you tried
Either way.
You can show
Something you’ve made
To someone you respect
And be happy with it no matter
What they say.
You can say
What you think, though you know
Other people do not think the same way, and you can
keep saying it, even if they tell you
You are crazy.

You can add your voice
All night to the voices
Of a hundred and fifty others
In a circle
Around a jailhouse
Where your brothers and sisters are being held
For blocking buses with no lifts,
Or you can be one of the ones
Inside the jailhouse,
Knowing of the circle outside.
You can speak your love
To a friend
Without fear.
You can find someone who will listen to you
Without judging you or doubting you or being
Afraid of you
And let you hear yourself perhaps
For the very first time.
These are all ways
Of getting proud.
None of them
Are easy, but all of them
Are possible. You can do all of these things,
Or just one of them again and again.
You get proud
By practicing.

Power makes you proud, and power
Comes in many fine forms
Supple and rich as butterfly wings.
It is music
when you practice opening your mouth
And liking what you hear
Because it is the sound of your own
True voice.

It is sunlight
Wen you practice seeing
Strength and beauty in everyone,
Including yourself.
It is dance
when you practice knowing
That what you do
And the way you do it
Is the right way for you
And cannot be called wrong.
All these hold
More power than weapons or money
Or lies.
All these practices bring power, and power
Makes you proud.
You get proud
By practicing.

Remember, you weren’t the one
Who made you ashamed,
But you are the one
Who can make you proud.
Just practice,
Practice until you get proud, and once you are proud,
Keep practicing so you won’t forget.
You get proud
By practicing.


More can be found about Laura Hershey, including her publications and how to order them, on her webpage: www.laurahershey.com

Remembering Usama…

“I should go…”, still seated, he pauses for a moment, looks towards the people walking in and out, almost as if he expects to see Usama among them, then finding him in a unique Usama-story or fond memory, he turns back to tell me all about it. He needed to talk about you, and I needed to listen and remember you and mirror the conservative smile lightening his sad grey face. It felt like we were two survivalists huddling around our memories of you to keep warm. The somber arrangements were very fitting of your stature, but they were too contradictorily dark to your generally buoyant nature. We missed you and we needed to bring you back through your stories.

It was natural that you were thus the hero of our stories, but what quickly emerged was that you were a hero in each of the stories. Calming one crisis with absolute logic, or wittily restoring dignity in another; deflecting our irrationality with kind humour, and encouraging us instead to colour outside the line and look at it all a little differently. When my brother first met you and asked what it was that you did, your spontaneous response was “I play”, and that’s how you made everything seem. I always thought I’d arrived on the scene too late to have had stories with you, but as I started to cling on to what my memory contained of you, I was happy to find that there were a few there… What I will hold on to most avidly is that excited feeling in the last few minutes as I would be approaching your house, when the same thought always came to my mind: “I wonder what Usama will be teaching me today…” Any day that revived my anticipation of wonder and reminded me just how vast the world was, was a good day.

I will miss you, Usama.

Abandoning Hope

I am going to throw out a theory that collections are outcomes of good intentions. Perhaps a better, and less politically correct, synonym for collections is ‘piles’. The piles that grow around your desk, next to your favourite armchair, or on top of the laundry hamper in the bathroom, on the kitchen counter, next to the washing machine, or just behind the door. These piles of newspapers, articles, missing parts, slightly broken pieces of unrecognizable function, bags, gift-wrapping paper, ribbons, half-used notepads, pens you didn’t like and have been meaning to pass on to someone who might – let’s face it, they really are just piles of stuff. They were not accumulated with the mind of a collector or archive-r or any such noble notion, but simply out of the pure good intention that they will be read, used, fixed, distributed.

In my attempt to organize one such pile, I bought a new wicker basket, carried it by hand when I travelled, and arrived to find that it did not fit under my coffee table, nor was it sufficient to hold my dusty and overflowing collection of newspaper supplements and magazines. Acting of their own accord, my hands smoothly switched from packing to throwing away. The time had come to abandon all hope – I was never going to find the time or the motivation to read all that was contained in what had become more than 5-years’ worth of collecting, nor was it necessarily interesting to read any more. It was time.

Having spent years with the misguided belief that I would miss these papers, or miss out on some nugget of wisdom or crucial knowledge for not having read them, I was a little surprised to find how oddly (and paradoxically) liberating it was to just eliminate them completely. This little epiphany unraveled an ‘energizer bunny’ sweep of the house and all its crevices as all piles, in all their different shapes, forms and functions, were duly eliminated or downsized to a bare minimum. And let me tell you something, not only did I feel liberated, but equally refreshed and rejuvenated.

As it turns out, abandoning hope is the flip side of embracing clean slates and clearing the ‘pending’ guilty conscience checklist, and truly could not have felt better. This got me to wonder what else was piling up somewhere in our worlds and would inevitably lighten our load and spirits if we were to abandon it?

Not surprisingly when living in a country such as mine, my first thoughts strayed to politics and politicians, and the daydream led me through the possibility of pressing an imaginary ‘reset’ button (more like an ‘eject’ button) and the clean slate that would follow. I am sure that we, as citizens and voters, would soon fall into the same patterns as I will with my slowly creeping piles, but I also know that having gone through the purging process, we would be wiser as to what we would choose to take a chance on and keep, and what we would throw out on the spot. Just picture the process devoid of any additional considerations of the length of time we’d held on to it/them, or the single creative but impractical idea (or hope) we’d had when we stumbled on it/them – elements that frequently give piles a false sense of value.

So before you discount abandoning hope as an escapist, defeatist measure, I suggest that you first gauge its ‘purging’ value, and assess if you really are holding onto treasures, or just deadweights.