Colors- Daija Banks, Intern 20/21
The warmth I feel when I see colors. Everyone is so centered and balanced with nothing but a smile to great you. We all make each other feel as if we belong here and there is no divide. The rainbow is welcoming and inviting, it’s telling me to come home. It’s not so scary, it’s actually inviting. I think we should all have just a little more color in our life.
Slices of Happy- Daija Banks, Intern 20/21
I finally got my own slice of happiness. It’s finally all mine. It wasn’t given to me by anyone, so nobody can take it away from me. My own slice of happy, it feels to good to be real. My own slice of happy , could it be that I’m finally healed? I dont want to rush because it could be to good to be true, but I finally have my own slice of happy . How about you?
A project for the way home, I note – Clare Scantling, Mentor 20/21
Glowing beneath the blue of my surgical mask,
I’m humming to myself, swaying in my clogs,
thumbing the two green hues with soft, bare palms.
Almost aloe. Donegal.
My eyes gently close and try to imagine –
Donegal, maybe. The land of my kin.
Pubs: dark, wood, loud, smoky. Fiddles: folk, laughter,
hearty, soothe. Almost like aloe – just what the doctor ordered
to heal a bad burn: dry, sun, sand, water, clear skies, blue.
Blue: the color that always calls out to me. But today, hues of green.
The green of Ireland. The place I was to go this summer.
To live and to build community. To sit in the earth.
To heal division through encounter. To the land
my spirit claims home. To where I feel the balm of aloe,
nourished and replenished.
Holding warm tea cupped by my soft, bare palms.
The wandering green landscape, the gray misty sky hugging it.
No sun or sand or blue or burn in sight.
Donegal – where love and rain and moss seep
into my bones.
Where we can sit wake together through the night,
warmed by the yellowed light and infused with tea
to fill the bony cavities the love and rain and moss exposed,
as we stitch together the fragments of our mourning bodies,
storytelling about the human we just lost –
“What are you hoping to paint, ma’am?”
Another cup of tea, please?
Fearless Writers Toledo 