You can turn a grape into a raisin, but you can't vice versa

Sorry about the delay between posts. It is has been a interesting week.

On Friday, I went to a luncheon for the arts education program for the music center. Last week they were having a workshop for teachers interesting in incorporating more art into their classrooms, and they had a lot of interactive activities that required the teachers to create their own art. In one class, they had teachers do interpretive movement to this poem:

Dream Deferred

What happens to a dream deferred?
 
 Does it dry up
  like a raisin in the sun?
  Or fester like a sore--
  and then run?
  Does it stink like rotten meat?
  Or crust and sugar over--
  like a syrupy sweet?
 Maybe it just sags
  like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

Naturally, when the teachers got to the part about the raisin in the sun, they crumpled to the ground. The second time they were asked to do the exercise, they were prohibited from crumpling to the ground to show a raisin drying up in the sun. The result was a tableau, the teacher of the workshop said, of the human emotions of pain and loss. Another workshop leader expanded on the idea of the raisin as what we become after years of negative messages. She was specifically relating it to our individual artistic talents. We all start out as these big, juicy grapes, she said, full of possibilities. We think we can sing, paint, draw and dance, because no one tells us we cannot. Then, she continued, as we go through our lives, we receive direct and indirect messages that we are not good enough. Someone turns off the radio as you are singing to a song. You get a look as you move to a certain beat. And after all of these experiences, our desire to express ourselves through art shrivels up, because we are afraid to fail. She said that all teachers, not just art teachers, need to work on this.

I think it is a good lesson for everyone. After all, as madame collinsina said, raisins are still sweet. Personally, I like them in my cream of wheat every Sunday.