Inspiration in a pharase

you know how some phrases haunt you, are touching in their feeling and mood? The Writer's Almanac had a poem today by Jane Hirshfield titled "Hope and love"
(go read the whole poem writersalmanac.org/  here)

She writes of a heron who sleeps amid horses, and the sentence,
"...hope is the hardest
love we carry.
He slept
with his long neck
folded, like a letter
put away"

touches my soft inner heart. The tender heart that sighs at a well turned phrase. 

My friend Sonja in HI turned me on to this newsletter read by Garrison Keilor each day.

I look forward to it each day, and remember the time I met him in DC at the Library of Congress book festival. He did not look like I pictured, and he is older than he sounds. He has such presence and many nights have been spent listening to his show, singing along, dancing to the music.

On our first anniversary we were nearly the only people in the restaurant that night, his show was playing and we stood from our dinner and danced to the music with waiters watching. 

He reminds me that there are many authors out there, there are many many speakers from which to choose, there are many radio broadcasts and a person who also wants to be an author, a speaker or have a show may feel as I did that there is not room for another.

There is always room for another. It's the spirit of a person shining through that makes them attractive to an audience. It's their words, their opinions and the way they present them surely, but it's sometimes just the person. Think of the people you most enjoy reading or hearing or seeing in a show. You'll watch them in pretty much any venue because you don't know why, but you like them.

Them.

It's a lesson to me to be myself. To bravely be myself when others don't like me, or possibly worse ignore me. When some one person tells me I am "too" something and I am judged, I must remember to continue to be myself.
 I am the only one who can... the only one with my exact beliefs and delivery, my humor and my past, my thoughts and my feelings and my abilities. That mix is unique.

the top poster says "I am an artist & I'm proud!"

 And you are the only you too. 

Just for today, be brave, be you.