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Explore poems read by the two authors in conversation with each other, then follow your own fish to unlock your own creativity, and share it with us.
Welcome back to our second season of Follow A Fish poetry podcast and conversations with my friend and neighbor, Deborah Backel Schmidt. Last week, we talked about aging, and this week, we are looking at life's journey through the gorgeous poem read by Terry Edlinger at our first Poetry Open Mic in El Sobrante, California. It's a long one, but it held us all spellbound. Terri is a major player in the El Sobrante community. She volunteers in many nonprofits and is the mover and shaker for many of those.
Sue:Teri, I wonder if you could tell us a little bit more about your life in our community.
Teri:I cut hair for fifty years and in 2020 I retired because of COVID. I didn't want to put my clientele through the rigmarole that you had to go through to get a haircut. And when I retired, I started wondering what I was going to do with my life because I had no intention of retiring. So I was already involved in the green team and I was on the MAC board and I looked around and thought the one thing that's missing in El Cebronte is there's all these nonprofits and groups, but they're not cohesively connected. And so I made it my mission to make everything more connected.
Teri:And so I'm on a lot of committees and different groups and things just so that I can remind each other that we're all in this together.
Sue:Yes, yes and you absolutely do do that. I wasn't aware of quite how intentional that all was. It was very intentional. Yeah. Well, we're going to get right to it and we'll be chatting about your beautiful poem afterwards.
Sue:How you came to write it, the process that you went through, and how the poem itself has changed her and leads into her future after a devastating loss. Terry, I wonder if you would mind reading your poem now. Sure. Everything started off kinda wild. I had
Teri:a kid when I was just a child. Barely knew how to raise myself, much less how to care for someone else. School was out because my baby was here. I didn't have time to hang with my peers. Faced with many responsibilities, my baby's sick, hospital's billing me.
Teri:I had a lot of help, but nonetheless, life was challenging, filled with tests. Some I'd pass, some I'd fail. I often felt like I was locked in jail. I had to find a job I was really good at so I wouldn't feel like I was always trapped. Still quite young with many bills to pay, but I didn't want to do it the welfare way.
Teri:I learned to cut hair, which was just my style, because I wanted to do something that was versatile. Being a single parent was not my bag. To tell you the truth, it was quite a drag. Started setting my sights on something bigger. I had to find my son a father figure.
Teri:Craig was the man who fulfilled the role. I liked that he was cool and in control. His family was one in a million, very responsible and good with children. Then came the day that we finally got married until it fell apart because our opinions varied. From him, I'm grateful for the things I've learned and also for the respect that I earned.
Teri:First verse. Second verse. Met my teacher when I was 25. From that point on, I learned about life. I often wonder how I got to this place because from where I had been, I had to earn my grace.
Teri:My faith has been tested in numerous ways, but I've learned to stick with it because I'm here to stay. The game of life I've learned is endless, so I have to pick my time and know how to spend it. Esoteric studies is my point of focus, Been part of many groups with a teacher to show us. Everything from the birth of the universe to the value of life and how much humans are worth. What I do with my life is important to me because for now it clears up my uncertainties.
Teri:I'm a role model for people to follow, but it's hard for some to swallow if their minds are hollow. Alternate realities are part of the plan. I'm looking for people who will take a stand for what they know is right and let truth prevail instead of denial or self betrayal. My spirit is longing for people to hear it. The message is clear, yet some people fear it.
Teri:To keep your mind open, you possess the key. The thing to remember is that you must keep looking for a place that will honor the space for the life force to flow through the whole human race where dreams come true and peace is a virtue. No worries about violence because no one will hurt you. The message is clear for those who will listen. The knowledge I seek is for our spiritual condition.
Teri:All the goals I set take a lot of dedication to get through each day on prayers and meditation.
Sue:Thank you, Teri. Teri, these words were written by you and could you tell us a little bit more about who it was written with?
Teri:I wrote the words with my son Greg and he was 25 when we wrote this. It was basically I was in a a class for self discovery, and the teacher challenged us to do something that was very challenging. He gave us six weeks to come up with something to perform in in a musical sense. I don't play any instruments, don't know anything about tones or notes or anything, but I used to play with words a lot. So Greg came over one night and I told him the dilemma that I had.
Teri:He said, well, I can help you. So he started coming over and we just started writing. He asked me what I wanted to write about. And I said, I don't know much except maybe my own life story. And he said, well, come up with something.
Teri:So I come up with the first few lines and then he and I built on it the rest of the way.
Sue:Oh, Through it. And his name is was? Greg Sase. Greg Sase. And it says it's performed as well.
Sue:So this isn't really exactly a just a straight poem, is it?
Teri:It was originally written as a performance that was to to be performed in front of the colleagues that were also doing other things in a on a stage. Then he set it to music and then he taught me how to perform it as a rap artist. And I was in my forties at the time. So I was called Esoteric Terry and I had everything that was performed didn't get recorded.
Sue:Could you tell us a little bit about because you did actually perform this a second time, right?
Teri:So what I call performing now is I am just reading it as poetry. Right. So I don't consider that performing it. I consider it just sharing. Performing is a different thing for me.
Teri:Right. This really comes from my heart when I'm sharing it as a poem.
Sue:Yes. Yes. And you shared this at your son's memorial. Right?
Teri:Yes. I read it because I felt like that was the best way I could honor his memory and our connection. My son and I were extremely close.
Deborah:I had him, three weeks before my fifteenth birthday, and,
Teri:we had quite a quite a journey together. And he died last year in May. And I he before he died, he he and I talked and he basically said, you go on living, you know, you just be happy. Do what you need to do in the world. Don't let this be you know one of those things that takes you down.
Teri:You live through a lot. And I mean there was more to it but yeah. He encouraged
Sue:me. The line that you had at the near the beginning, school was out because my baby was here. So when you were going to school at that point, couldn't couldn't stay in school as a new mother?
Teri:In 1969, when Greg was born, you could not be pregnant and be in school. I had to have a home school teacher and I was only in the ninth grade. So for the year of the ninth grade, I had the best teacher on the planet. Her name was Carolyn Johnson. She encouraged me to to be the intelligent person that she saw instead of the history that I was.
Teri:Does that make sense?
Sue:It so makes sense.
Teri:Oh, she was she was my one of my pivot points of going in another direction of where my life had been. She taught me until I had Greg and then I went to Gompers High School. And I got straight A's in school just for showing up and being a good girl. I really didn't learn a whole lot after that.
Deborah:Right.
Teri:And then I dropped out of school, that school in the middle of my eleventh grade year to go to Barber College.
Deborah:Mhmm.
Teri:And so from 1973.
Sue:So you said faced with many responsibilities, my baby's sick, hospital's billing me?
Teri:Ouch. When Greg was six weeks old he had spinal meningitis and he was in the hospital for six weeks. And it was a rough period.
Sue:Yeah. And then plus you had bills on top of that. They billed you?
Teri:Kind of yeah. I mean it was a lot. Oh God. But he survived his spinal meningitis.
Sue:So you said also, I am looking for people who will take a stand for what they know is right and let truth prevail. I wonder if you could say a little bit more about what you're looking for in people.
Teri:I want people to be more authentic. I want people to be more genuine. I want people to come more from their heart instead of their ego. Mhmm. And to really look around the world that they're in and take it in and exemplify the beauty instead of the negativity.
Teri:I feel like a lot of people focus on the negative and believe that energy creates energy and so whatever we focus our attention on basically can create our reality to some extent. And so it's important to me to have positive vibes or positive energy around me because I feel like that's the world I want to live in.
Sue:And I, and that chimes really well with the reason that we're doing this poetry podcast and that we run the open mics, is to try and encourage people who don't necessarily see themselves as poets, but the way in which you can see the world when you're paying attention to small things, bits of beauty in the everyday moments or a bit of poignancy. It's a huge benefit to me. It's a little bit about listening but not just listening to others but also listening to the world around me, paying attention. It seems like it kind of fits together nicely.
Teri:When I was at the open mic that you did that I was at, I was very impressed with all the different perspectives of how people can create reality for themselves. I mean it was very impressive to sit and listen to a group of people with all kinds of divergent ways of thinking and and creating words.
Sue:Yeah and as as we're going through those we're in we just did the third one. Yeah. And we're both get learning to relax a bit and to listen more carefully and Deborah's particularly talented at that, finding the best in people and then burnishing it up and bringing it out.
Teri:Yeah. And that's very encouraging for people. Yeah. As you know it's very vulnerable to, I mean this is one of the hardest things I've ever challenged myself to do honestly.
Sue:To write the poem or to read it or
Teri:To do the podcast. Really?
Deborah:Yes.
Sue:You're doing fantastically. Sound very relaxed. So because when you read this out at the open mic, it left a moment of stunned silence before the applause, and the raw honesty of it, the sly humor, the sense of being, that I felt of being brought along in your life's journey. I learned much more about you, but I unders also understood that this was the first poem you ever wrote, making it even more amazing, and I love that you did it in conjunction with with your son. This and this poem really seems to distill so much of what I love about you.
Sue:You are a role model for me. Your patience, your ability to deeply listen, to see the best in people in all their complexity, I really admire that. You've told us already a little bit about how you came to write this poem. The process was quite involved and unusual. How did you guys work together on this?
Sue:Did you write bits and then hang out with him, or did you write it together? How did that work?
Teri:Both. When we first we started writing it together, and then, he's really he was a lot better with words than rhyming words than I was. So he would take it home and then come back. And we did this over a three week period. He'd come over after work and stay for a couple of hours.
Teri:So the wording was really written between us. And of course, what happened with that is this is just snippets of the life story. So in between these words, he got to hear a lot of what he didn't know as growing up. So it was the most intense period between the two of us because he was an adult taking in his mother's life. And he didn't back away from it.
Teri:He didn't you know, he was intrigued. He was he liked hearing all the in betweens because he was very coddled as a child. I married his father. I met Greg's dad that I married when Greg was two and a half years old. We married when Greg was four and he was adopted into that family immediately and he had the best childhood of anybody that I can I mean, I was so grateful that he got the kind of childhood he got?
Teri:So he didn't hear a lot of what happened with me earlier until he was an adult.
Sue:Wow, that's wonderful. That's so fortunate. Well
Teri:the confusing thing is my son is half Chinese and I married a Japanese man. So my half Chinese son was raised in a Japanese household. He was the first born son in the family until he was nine years old. And if you know anything about Asian culture, he was coddled. He had an aunt and uncle and you know me and his dad and his grandparents and we did a lot of really fun family things as he was growing up and extended family cousins, aunts, uncles, the whole shebang.
Sue:Oh wow.
Teri:Yeah. I did not have any of that growing up.
Sue:It must have been quite quite surprising, maybe even shocking for him to hear some of the pieces of of your life.
Teri:Greg was always very stoic and very self contained. Mhmm. He never acted shocked or particularly rattled by much of anything that came his way.
Sue:And you used the word coddled, it doesn't sound to me like he was spoiled. It sounds like
Teri:He was spoiled rotten. I'm not kidding. He was spoiled rotten. But he but he also had good discipline and good integrity and good I mean, just good parenting all around. But maybe I think of it as spoiled again because I had such a different childhood.
Teri:But he had everything any child could imagine.
Sue:But he still had expectations on him he was expected to be polite and respectful. Oh
Teri:yeah I guess, yeah absolutely. There was discipline.
Sue:He wasn't entitled.
Teri:No not a he's never been and I don't I've never seen Greg feel entitled about much of anything in his life. He was always self assured and knew what his boundaries were, but he didn't infringe any of his stuff on other people.
Sue:Yeah, that's that's kind of what I was getting at. Yeah.
Teri:No, he was spoiled. Mean, talk about toys and trips and trips to Disneyland and all that.
Sue:I mean I think that there's a very strong stereotype of very young mothers.
Teri:I can tell you wholeheartedly it changed the trajectory of my life in ways that I can't even imagine where I would be if I hadn't had at such an early age. And hadn't had Carolyn Johnson, my teacher.
Sue:So what advice do you have for people thinking of writing about their own life's journey? How would you, I mean to me it feels really an overwhelming idea. So where where did you start? How did you keep going? What did you decide to include and what not to include?
Teri:When I realized it was just going to be for performance, and it wasn't it didn't need to be detailed. It made it a lot easier. Basically I love words and so it inspired me to try to find ways to put the words together when we'd come up with a sentence or something that didn't quite go right. So collaborating with Greg kept me going and just knowing that I had a deadline to do. Right.
Teri:Not only did I have to write the words and I had to find other things to do, it got more complicated because again music got written to it and then I had learn to perform it. So we did the first piece in three weeks and then did the other rest of it in the next three weeks.
Sue:So a kind of a playful piece of it? Yeah. And maybe not expecting everything to be perfect the first time out and then tweaking it a bit. Yeah, yeah exactly. Yeah.
Sue:And you did the same thing that I think both Deborah and I have found, which is that it really helps to be part of a class, to have a prompt, to have some kind of push, to have a sense that there is somewhere that wants this, makes certainly makes me more productive as well. So that's one of the reasons that we include at the end of the poems the prompts each And we're thinking about actually running a a generative workshop where we would maybe reuse those prompts that we've already thought about and put them out, maybe at the shed in El Sobrante. Give people twenty minutes and, you know, go sit someplace around the triangle works and then come back when they've written something and share it. You mentioned that
Teri:to me one of the last times we talked and I've been thinking about that a lot since you mentioned it.
Deborah:Really?
Teri:Yes, because you said to me why don't you continue your story? And I had never thought of that until you said it. So now it's like in the back of my mind, oh, oh, maybe I do have something in there. Yes. So you did plant the seed.
Teri:I want you to know. Alright.
Sue:Well, it is exciting. I'd love to do that.
Deborah:Dedication to my meditation. Everything started off kind of wild. I had a kid when I was just a child, barely knew how to raise myself, much less how to care for someone else. School was out because my baby was here. I didn't have time to hang with my peers, faced with many responsibilities, my baby's sick, hospitals billing me.
Deborah:I had a lot of help, but nonetheless, life was challenging, filled with tests. Some I'd pass, some I'd fail. I often felt like I was locked in jail. I had to find a job I was really good at so I wouldn't feel like I was always trapped. Still quite young with many bills to pay, but I didn't want to do it the welfare way.
Deborah:I learned to cut hair, which was just my style, because I wanted to do something that was versatile. Being a single parent was not my bag, to tell you the truth. It was quite a drag. Started setting my sights on something bigger. I had to find my son a father figure.
Deborah:Craig was the man who fulfilled the role. I liked that he was cool and in control. His family was one in a million, very responsible and good with children. Then came the day that we finally got married until it fell apart because our opinions varied. From him, I'm grateful for the things I've learned and also for the respect that I earned.
Deborah:Met my teacher when I was 25. From that point on, I learned about life. I often wonder how I got to this place because from where I had been, I had to earn my grace. My faith has been tested in numerous ways, but I've learned to stick with it because I'm here to stay. The game of life, I've learned, is endless, so I have to pick my time and know how to spend it.
Deborah:Esoteric studies is my point of focus, been part of many groups with a teacher to show us. Everything from the birth of the universe to the value of life and how much humans are worth. What I do with my life is important to me because for now, it clears up the uncertainties. I'm a role model for people to follow, but it's hard for some to swallow if their minds are hollow. Alternate realities are part of the plan.
Deborah:I'm looking for people who will take a stand for what they know is right and let truth prevail instead of denial or self betrayal. My spirit is longing for people to hear it. The message is clear, yet some people fear it. To keep your mind open, you possess the key. The thing to remember is that you must keep looking for a place that will honor the space for the life force to flow through the whole human race, where dreams come true and peace is a virtue.
Deborah:No worries about violence because no one will hurt you. The message is clear for those who will listen. The knowledge I seek is for our spiritual condition. All the goals I set take a lot of dedication to get through each day on prayers and meditation.
Sue:So our prompt today is life's journey. So play with that and just start somewhere. Pick up a little thread of your life, something that stands out in your memory, and and go from there. Make sure it's something that speaks a truth to you, of you, for you and something that might resonate with others. And it's really quite likely that first time through, it's gonna be like ouch, embarrassing or way too personal or confessional or something.
Sue:And you can always go back and edit it out and and tweak it around. And then send it in. This time, I wrote to the prompt and I'll be reading out my effort in our second episode. We love getting poems from our listeners and will be sure to respond with specific positive comments and perhaps inclusion in an upcoming episode.
Deborah:You can email your poems to curiositycatpodcast@gmail.com or send a voice recording as a dot WAV file, or let us know if you'd like us to record your poem for you. We may include your work in a future show. We will definitely respond to all submissions with pleasure. Also, at curiositycatpodcast.com, you can see the poems in print with the beautiful artwork that Sue chooses especially for them. You can read our show notes and find out more about our monthly live open mics.
Deborah:We'd love it if you would take a couple of minutes to rate or review us and or share us with your circle. Our theme music for season two is Emile Pessar's Andalus, played by me on flute accompanied by pianist Brian Baker. Production and editing are done by Sue Boudreaux here in El Sobrante, California. Thank you for listening.