Dream Job by Sheila Bender

I was reading a magnificent book this past week and came across the essay below. I gasped when I read it because it's my dream job, too, just like the author's! I could have written this myself, but she did such an amazing job of it, I'm posting her essay. I love Sheila Bender's writing and this book in particular which I highly recommend: "Writing Personal Essays: How to Shape Your Life Experiences for the Page". It's helped me a lot in my writing of my memoirs. I'm trying to get down the important stuff for my children and grandchildren and this book has been a huge inspiration and aid. I hope you all have a blessed day and a wonderful, peaceful weekend. Blessings! ~*~Marion~*~



Dream Job: A Day in the Life of a Resident Poet
By Sheila Bender


"I was reminded of a dream….I had years ago. In it, I’d hung a shingle outside my house. Sheila Bender, R.P., it said in black calligraphic letters on a white board. R. P. meant Resident Poet. On the second story of my house, at my desk under the eaves, I would work on my poetry. The many books of poems I knew and loved would surround me on shelves. From time to time I’d hear my doorbell ring.


I’d descend the stairs and let the person in. We would enter my writing room and sit at a small table and have tea. The caller would describe why he or she had come to see me. It might be the grief of losing someone dear, the uncertainty of parenting, the concentration-breaking joy of newfound love, the awkwardness of wanting to talk to an old lover, the loneliness of perceiving differently than one’s family. I would go to my bookshelves, my pharmacy of poems, and I would pull a book down, open it to where I knew the right poem lay. I’d watch my caller read the poem and, watching the muscles of his or her face, I would know the poem was right. I would hand my client a pen and sheets of paper with instructions to copy the poem and the author’s name from the book, word for word. After that, we’d read the work together once and sit a moment more.


My caller would take the poem home to memorize. To whisper at night, to belt out under the sun, to recite while driving. Poems require looking past anger and hate and irritation, loneliness and grief. Though many a poem is planted in the soil of such emotions, a poem bursts through that soil and flowers. It is, to paraphrase William Wordsworth, one person’s insides speaking to another’s and so it provides the intimate contact we need for healing and for growth, for knowing what is human in our lives.


There are feelings and longings we understand and accept in ourselves only when we recognize them in someone else’s words, words that would never have been ours to speak until we saw them written out of someone else’s life. Words come from another’s experience in a place and in a time that miraculously match our experience in our own place and time.


As my callers would leave, they would place payment in a white porcelain bowl on the post at the bottom of my staircase. With the money, I’d buy more poetry books and the time to read them."


~Sheila Bender, “Writing Personal Essays: How to Shape Your Life Experiences for the Page”, page 154




Prayer of St. Francis of Assisi


Lord, make me an instrument of your peace,
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
where there is sadness, joy;


O Divine Master, grant that
I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console;
to be understood as to understand;
to be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive;
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.