Jodi Hills

So this is who I am – a writer that paints, a painter that writes…

Category Archives: life, inspiration, art, painting, living, brave, bravery, courage, heart, deeper, still


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The visit.

I tell you that I’ve seen her face before. Of course I have no proof because she lived in my head.

It was in the first grade when she quietly took up residency. Mrs. Bergstrom was perhaps the first to tie words and art together for me. She joyfully released us downstairs to Mr. Opsahl’s art room. Never unarmed, she sent us off with the discipline of a single file and the mission to create a puppet for a show during our next story time. I see her more clearly now, as this mixture of fairytale and educator. Because didn’t they both give us something to dream of, something to aspire to — and didn’t they both bun their hair, sleek, and tight, I imagined to cut the resistance of all the reality sent to weigh us down. 

So this was my puppet. Part princess, part Mrs. Bergstrom, full-on my imagination. With an empty toilet paper roll, a mound of papier mâché, covered in acrylic paint, she came to life. She later sang and recited words from the chalk board, and she was alive. 

I haven’t seen her for years, not until yesterday when she appeared in my sketchbook. Did she know she was needed? I think so. Did she arrive right on time to cut through all the weight? Yes. 

She reminds me that maybe you need to hear it. Because sometimes you need to hear it from someone who has been there. That nothing is going to be easy, but everything is going to be ok. I smile and know, yes, this is why she came. 

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It’s coming.

I suppose it’s always easier to see it in others when you’ve worn the same face they are wearing. He was waiting for the school bus. Clearly it was the first day. All the clues were there. Just after Labor Day. His hair parted and combed. Book bag empty and pristine. Clothing ironed. He shifted his weight from foot to foot. Clearly he had been standing on the sidewalk for a while. Early on this first morning. He turned his head from side to side. Quickly, as if he could have missed a glimpse of the big yellow wheeled beast in mid turn. 

Empathy is a powerful force. I’m certain he had a lump in his throat, because I could feel one in mine. 

It’s funny how uncertainty works. Because I didn’t begin that way. My first days of school I easily flung myself out to the end of our driveway. Wet hair in the wind. Racing to a bus I knew would be there. A bus I knew would wait for my scurry. A bus I knew , if I were running really late, would go down the road, pick up the wet-headed Norton girls and turn around and stop for me again. 

I suppose it was my father leaving that rolled uncertainty, like a river, into everything I had known for sure. I went earlier to the bus stop. Would it be there? On time? Would I trip? Would it know that I needed it to pick me up, now more than ever?

Because it did, every day. Because my mother was as reliable as that big, yellow bus. Because she flung her doors wide open for me. Waited for me. I became certain again. I stood strong on two legs. Filled with the knowledge that things, people, could be counted on. 

I slowed down long enough yesterday to tell the young boy, “It’s coming.” He smiled. We both stepped into the certainty of the day. 

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Be brave.

I have always written straight from my heart, ever since Mrs. Bergstrom first began scattering the letters to us in my first grade classroom of Washington Elementary. I looked around at the others hunched over in their desks. Didn’t they see it? The gift that she was giving us??? I just couldn’t imagine my good fortune. She wasn’t just giving me a language, she was giving me my voice. 

I began writing poems for my mother. Poems for baby dolls. I penciled them in my Big Chief notebook. I painted them on scraps of material. On my pants. As the need arose to go deeper, I found my brother’s wood burning kit hidden in the back of the garage. I plugged it in by the open door. The dust that had gathered began to smoke. I watched the trail of it go down the driveway, then I burned the words slowly into the plywood. I traced the words that said go deeper, still.

All of my suspicions were confirmed when I went to college. In my first creative writing class, I hinted at my heart. Did I dare? The paper came back with a response — “You can never be too personal.” All gates and garage doors to my heart were open wide. 

I’m not saying that it’s always easy. Sometimes it’s terrifying to expose your heart. But that’s what courage means. The actual root comes from the Latin word meaning heart. To have courage meant to share the stories of your heart. The act of being vulnerable. This, by definition, is what it means to have courage. Somewhere along the line it got mixed up with wielding weapons, or soaring great heights. It became entangled with go higher, go faster, go further…when all it meant to say was go deeper. 

I suppose it’s much bigger now, this classroom I wander, but still, I look around, wondering, “Do you see it? The gifts we have been given?”

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