Let Me Introduce Myself on Illumination

First, let me start by saying how grateful I am to Dr. Mehmet Yildiz, the tireless founder and visionary behind Illumination and to all the writers, editors, and readers who make Illumination a thriving, exciting community.

I remember in the mid-70’s when I was in library graduate school, my father, a computer engineer, said to me, “Debbie, have you taken any computer courses at graduate school yet?” With amused impatience I replied to my father, “Oh, Daddy. I am going to be a librarian. Why would I need to know about computers?”

So obviously, I am no futurist!

What, then, am I?

Well, I am a recently retired librarian who passionately believes in the vital importance of libraries in a free society.

I am a mother of an adult son with whom I share an appreciation for blue grass music, hikes on Audubon trails, Christopher Guest movies, and cats (our own cats and the silly ones on YouTube.)

I was one of those children who loved books. Every week all through my childhood I would pedal the five mile round trip back and forth to my local library on my oversize, dented Raleigh bike. I returned with the wire bike basket loaded to the brim with ten books, the maximum we were allowed to borrow each week.

I still love to read. I am one of those people who read anything they can get their hands on, even if there are no books available. I have been known when desperate to read bread wrappers, shampoo bottles, and toothpaste cartons if nothing else is available.

But my real passion is nature: reading about it, observing it, and writing about it. This has been true since I was a little girl roaming around the vacant lots on my street. Always one to live in my book-inspired fantasies, I would roam these wooded lots pretending I was a jungle explorer, a runaway princess, or a castaway having to survive in the wilderness.

I would love to say that I took a scientific approach to learning the flora and fauna. But in fact, I never did learn many of the names of the birds, butterflies, and flowers at that point in my life. I merely loved them and waited every year for them to return.

Now many years later, I do know a little more about the natural world and cherish every bit of information or insight I can glean from my reading and observations.

But I am still that girl who laughs out loud when she finds a familiar flower making its annual spring appearance. And I am still that girl who listens to the owls calling on a still winter’s night; or the wind that sounds like surf high in the trees; or the tiny tap of an autumn leaf falling on the pavement.

Best of all, I am still that girl whose heart swells with gratitude, thinking, “how lucky I am, right now, to be alive.”

Here’s a poem published on Medium that gives you a peak inside my mind: