Tending the Gardens of the Margins

flickr photo shared by Kirt Edblom under a Creative Commons ( BY-SA ) license

Terry Elliott used the sharing of photos and the #silentsunday tag the other day to write in the margins of his blog (with the Hypothesis annotation tool) about a flower left standing in the weed patch and invited readers into the margins, too. I went in, wondering, and planted a few poems along the way around his use of the One, Two, Three, Four.

A sample of one of my poems, built around the word “Three”:

I remember the juggler
with Three balls in the air
His eyes like flashlights,
blowing beams into the sky
Ignoring us watching him
Three ideas held simultaneously in motion

Terry then posted a second post at his blog, in which he sought to differentiate “the signal from the noise,” this time providing a space in the collaborative Hackpad for folks to add to the writing from the margins. It was as if he had clipped a few buds, and put them in a vase, and invited the world to add some more flowers.

So, I did. This time, I focused on the element of the story of his wife, saving the flower that became the image he shared for #silentsunday that kicked off the whole shebang.

What I like about this playfulness is the give and take, and the way Terry hid his writing away from the image, and that by stumbling into his story of the flower in the margins of the text, I was inspired to write, too. Not just inspired; Invited. And the notion of taking the writing from the margins, and pulling it back into a post, open to the world, is the sort of connecting spirit that I seek out as a writer.

We’re all jugglers, using words as props. Or gardners, seeking flowers amid the weeds. Use your own metaphor. And write.

Peace (as flowers amid weeds),
Kevin