"Won’t You Celebrate with Me?"

Thoughts on Shining "Your Light for the World to See"

Welcome to Pocketful of Prose, a community for sharing stories. As always, links are in bold, and there’s an audio of this post if that works better for your life. Thank you for celebrating with me and helping me grow this community. I appreciate each and every one of you who restacked my post, emailed me or shared my writing with a friend. As promised, I am raffling off a copy of The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse by Charlie Mackesy. I will announce the winner at the end of this post.

Because of your shares and kind words, we have lots of new readers this week. Welcome to Jen, Mia, Janine, Gilbert, Tanya and Lottie and many others. I’m so glad you could join us in this space. Last week, I promised that I would be baking Pocketful of Prose a cake, which I am happy to report that I did. My Substack friend Jolene Handy who writes Time Travel Kitchen gifted me a delicious recipe for a lemon olive oil cake. The cake required the zest of three lemons, so I knew it would be good. It also was a great opportunity for me to use my new springform pan. You may recall that one of the things I tossed off the balcony on New Year’s was my old spring form pan after I discovered that some of the paint from the pan baked into the cake.

I usually bake something for my kids on their birthdays, and I often bake things for my student/staff book club, but this was one of the first times I have ever baked something to celebrate my own accomplishments. The delicious sweet and tart cake was a reminder all week, well for a few days, the cake did not last long in our house, to take a moment to savor something I was proud of, rather than immediately jumping into thinking what next.

In her recent Substack post on vision boards, Kristy Acevedo wrote about choosing “Shine” as her word for the year. She said she chose it because she recognized that she “often holds herself back.” Each of us has a light inside of us. Sometimes, we think we should dim or even hide that light, maybe because we don’t want others to think that we are arrogant or conceited or maybe because we are afraid that are accomplishments aren’t such a big deal after all. We talk ourselves into thinking our light is not worth sharing, and we are not worthy of celebrating.

I have been thinking a lot this week about celebration. In addition to my Substack birthday, there was a lot to celebrate. I teach at a local high school, and our boys’ basketball team won a huge victory last Saturday which meant that they were going to State for the first time in 13 years. Our boys’ wrestling team had just come back from State with a few victories. I brought in cookies and Capris Suns to advisory and announced that we were celebrating. The kids’ eyes went wide, teenagers really like Capris Suns, and they asked me what we were celebrating. I told them we were celebrating everything and to think about things that had happened to them recently that were worth celebrating. So, in addition to celebrating our sports’ victories, we also celebrated college acceptances, birthdays and getting our grades up.

The thing is, there is usually something to celebrate. The great Rita Pearson in her Ted Talk, “Every Kid Needs a Champion,” reminds us of this when she celebrates her student who got a two out of twenty on a quiz. She put a plus two on his paper with a big smiley face.

Her student asked her, “Ms. Pearson, is this an F?”

And she said, “Yes.” '

“Then why did you put a smiley face on my paper,” he asked.

“Because you’re on the road,” she tells him. “You didn’t miss them all…and when we review won’t you do better?”

He affirms that he most certainly will, and she reminds her audience that “minus eighteen sucks all the life out of you. Plus two says I ain’t all bad.”

After the boys’ basketball game last week, Dan and I went out to dinner to celebrate with a large group of teachers and administrators from my school. One of the teachers ordered his food right when he sat down, so it arrived thirty minutes before everyone else’s. He knew what he wanted, and he had no qualms about choosing it and enjoying it even if it was against the norm. Later that week, in my Zumba class, there was a new attendee. He was the only man in the class that day. After about 45 minutes, he left early, saying thank you loudly as he left. He had come to the class, stayed for the amount of time that served his needs and made sure to show gratitude as he left.

I think that some people because of gender, privilege or circumstances are more comfortable shining their light than others, but we all deserve to shine our light on the world. We all deserve to celebrate the big and small moments. We all deserve to celebrate ourselves.

I am going to close out today with a poem by Lucille Clifton. It’s a poem which speaks to celebration and its importance especially for people who have been marginalized and oppressed.

“won’t you celebrate with me?

by Lucille Clifton

won't you celebrate with me

what i have shaped into

a kind of life? i had no model.

born in babylon

both nonwhite and woman

what did i see to be except myself?

i made it up

here on this bridge between

starshine and clay,

my one hand holding tight

my other hand; come celebrate

with me that everyday

something has tried to kill me

and has failed.

I hope you stick around today and join us for some conversation in the comments. How good are you at celebrating things, at letting your light shine? What is something you celebrated recently? What is something you could celebrate? As always, you can just say hi, and tell us about your favorite cake.

And finally, our raffle winner is… drumroll please… Betsy Morrow of Spark. Congratulations! I will be sending you a copy of this beautiful book.