What I do is me: for that I came

Last Tuesday, I attended an National Speakers Association New Zealand meeting and the wonderful Irina Yashin Shaw was the speaker. She spoke about how, as speakers, we need to look to our own lives, our own stories, histories and the things we have around us to provide our topics, and enliven our speeches. Irina has been described as a "pocket dynamo", she talks about how the brain works, and creativity (my favourite areas) and I have found another role-model for my "role-model wall" along with Marcia Reynolds (see her sites Outsmart Your Brain and Burden of Greatness ) and Michael Bungay-Stanier of Box of Crayons and ( The 8 Principles of Fun)

As she spoke, I realised how much this particular poem, is one of my "touchstones". It's by Gerard Manly Hopkins, an hedonist aesthete turned ascetic who apparently destroyed much of his early poetry after entering a monastry. I am pretty sure I first studied it in the 7th form, with Roderick Lonsdale, my English Teacher who made sure we did far more poetry than many other classes.

As kingfishers catch fire

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying What I do is me: for that I came.

I say more: the just man justices;
Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is—
Christ—for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

My choice to move away from a secure career as a lawyer, to pursue new avenues, to train as an actor, a coach, to work as a speechwriter, speaker and workshop leader, to throw my cap over the wall in many ways stems from an underlying belief that there was more to my talents and skills than I was exercising. What I do is me: and I choose to seek out my purpose rather than stay in a secure rut.