WOW!"What I Learned From My Mother"Poem by Julia Kasdorf-Offer Healing and Blessing

5 / 11 / 2014

Poem of the Day: What I Learned From My Mother BY JULIA KASDORF I learned from my mother how to love the living, to have plenty of vases on hand in case you have to rush to the hospital with peonies cut from the lawn, black ants still stuck to the buds. I learned to save jars large enough to hold fruit salad for a whole grieving household, to cube home-canned pears and peaches, to slice through maroon grape skins and flick out the sexual seeds with a knife point. I learned to attend viewings even if I didn't know the deceased, to press the moist hands of the living, to look in their eyes and offer sympathy, as though I understood loss even then. I learned that whatever we say means nothing, what anyone will remember is that we came. I learned to believe I had the power to ease awful pains materially like an angel. Like a doctor, I learned to create from another's suffering my own usefulness, and once you know how to do this, you can never refuse. To every house you enter, you must offer healing: a chocolate cake you baked yourself, the blessing of your voice, your chaste touch. Reprinted from Sleeping Preacher, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992, by permission of the publisher. First printed in West Branch, Vol. 30, 1992. Copyright © 1992 by Julia Kasdorf. Source: Sleeping Preacher (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992) JULIA KASDORF Biography  More poems by this author

Healing And Hope:Expressing Grief Through Art Exhibit

    All phone numbers have a 717 area code 

Recurring Events 

11/22/2013–11/30/2013 

Healing and Hope: Expressing Grief Through Art Exhibit @ SHAPE Gallery 

Gallery hours: Wed-Fri 4:00 to 7:00 PM & Sat 11:00 AM to 4:00 PM 

The Drew Michael Taylor Foundation (www.drewmichaeltaylor.org) of Shippensburg and Shippensburg 

Arts Programming and Education (SHAPE), have teamed up to present the powerful “Healing and 

Hope: Expressing Grief Through Art” exhibit which will feature art and poetry created by individuals and 

families in the Drew’s Hope grief and loss support program, a local Bereaved Parent Support Group and 

Bereaved Spouse Support Group, the Sweet Grace Ministries stillborn and infant loss support group and 

other local grievers. Memory boxes, sand art, painted canvases, scrapbook pages, poems and butterfly 

collages will be featured. A Rainbow Bridge piece will represent pet loss. For Children’s Grief Awareness 

Day, on Thursday, November 21st, 4-7 p.m., Shippensburg Arts Programming and Education (SHAPE) will 

host a Holiday Remembrance Ornament Making workshop. Hosted by Marcie Taylor, of the Drew 

Michael Taylor Foundation, activity can be very healing for individuals or families that are facing the 

holiday season without the physical presence of a loved one (including beloved pets). Participants will 

create a holiday ornament in memory of a loved one to serve as a symbolic reminder that they are still 

with you in spirit. This is a free workshop; ornaments and materials will be supplied. To register, please call 

SHAPE at 532-2559.  

Location: 20 West King St.,  Shippensburg • 532-2559 • www.shapeart.org 

Life Celebration-Theater Brings Goodness & Healing

philly.com, Philadelphia Inquirer, Opinion/Viewpoints Section, Friday, February 15, 2013, Page A23:

An engaged chronicle of the time

POSTED: Friday, February 15, 2013, 3:01 AM

By David Bradley

Shakespeare's Hamlet tells us actors are the "brief chronicles of the time." If so, the record left by Ceal Phelan, the actor, teacher, and director who moved Philadelphia audiences for decades and died this month at 63, points us to what a life in our time can be when lived with imagination, sensitivity, and conviction.

Ceal believed theatre belonged in the heart of a community, that telling stories of mothers and queens and even fantastical creatures, and teaching others how to inhabit those characters, was a way to build understanding, connection, and peace. Her life was a testament to enduring values - relationship, truth, and the call of conscience.

She and her husband Peter DeLaurier cofounded the Delaware Theatre Company, and have been central ensemble members at People's Light and Theatre in Malvern since 1989. She acted and directed throughout the region, and taught special-needs students, college kids, and senior citizens from Germantown to Kimberton. She moved among these varied stages with quiet purpose, her path charting a vision of a larger stage - one that made room for voices from all walks of life.

Her 40-plus-year career included numerous standout performances. Yet I'm drawn to a moment far removed from the spotlight. We were at a vocational high school in Chester County, creating a student production of Brecht's The Good Person of Setzuan, in which the gods come to earth looking for just one good person who can convince them the world is worth saving.

At the dress rehearsal, the girl playing the lead didn't show up. Ceal did the role, script in hand. She, of course, delivered, her final scene a heartfelt plea to the gods to give goodness a chance. A student approached her afterwards. "You were really crying," he said, amazed she could so fully embody feelings that weren't even hers.

For Ceal, theater was an opportunity to walk in someone else's shoes. It was an act of empathy and connection and embracing difference. It was her heartfelt plea for goodness and healing a broken world.

From the News Desk

One of Ceal's characters, the 88-year-old April Williams in He Held Me Grand, stared down her prodigal sister with the line, "Life is not about your good intentions. It's about your choices. It's about what you do." To an actor, intention is everything: You must know what you want in a scene, what you are trying to do. That was never a problem for Ceal, onstage or in life.

But unlike April, Ceal would never proclaim it. She just did it. She wrote letters to Congress and did community organizing with the Willistown Monthly Meeting. She was honest to her core, with an integrity that combined art, education, and activism as a single act of passionate imagination.

At People's Light in 1999, Ceal played Miss Helen, the reclusive artist in Athol Fugard's The Road to Mecca. In her art, Miss Helen strives for "a city of light and color more splendid than anything I ever imagined." The indelible final scene had Ceal illuminating the stage, candle by candle, as she defended her vision. This was Ceal: a Quaker forever holding people "in the light," a woman who lived with cancer for 10½ years and still worked with fervor as an artist and citizen.

Fully aware of the shadows, and of the time it takes to truly light a path through a broken world, Ceal Phelan offered an affirming flame. Our own chronicle may be too brief, she knew, but it can be a worthwhile story if it makes a long-term commitment to place, to learning, to greater understanding, and, finally, to imagining what can change.

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David Bradley is a longtime company member at People's Light and Theatre. E-mail him at bradleydt@gmail.com.