You know when you’ve been hit…hard. Hit so hard you call up your favorite friend who you know will feel the impact as well and say, “Listen to THIS…”. Or, when you dance into class so excited to share [with students] you don’t even wait until the bell has ceased ringing to start reading the opening line. Or, in those wildly personal moments when you quietly take to your Writer’s Notebook and allow your heart to connect to words you never knew how to form yourself.
Welcome to The Subtle Art of Breathing.
There is so much power, resiliency, and breathtaking beauty found within every, single page of this compilation. The way asha details the real, raw, and rendering experiences she, and those she writes about, leaves me awed.
She annihilates barriers with a writer’s craft that caterwauls to be reread over and over again: never to be forgotten. You cannot help but to highlight and underline and annotate and scribble ideas on post-its while making sure, before you leave the page, you have dog-eared it so you can find your way directly back to where you were hit….stopped in your tracks…changed.
Here’s an excerpt from asha’s brilliant piece titled Resolve :
against our childhoods
with their shifty foundations
and their creaking floors
our childhoods with their cobwebbed
corners and their rattling chains
I was 14 then, I think, maybe 15
You were 16, maybe 17
but that is not the important part
the important part is
you were my first love
It would not be fair of me to give anymore away. But, you can imagine how asha traverses through time, not in ballet slippers, but with steel-toed boots tiptoeing her way through the most vulnerable moments of human existence: love.
Tagged: books, craft study, Mentor Texts, Mentor Texts, student engagement
What are you thinking?