Being a kindergarten teacher for over twenty years, glitter has been a huge part of my life. Show a kindergarten child how to make a thin line with Elmer’s glue, sprinkle some glitter on it, shake of the excess and voila! you’ve transformed plain pencil lines into a thing of beauty, translates as: squirt half a bottle of glue onto the paper, disregard the design, dump half a pound of glitter onto it and you’ve made the most beautiful blob of nothing you’ll ever see. Clearly there had to be rules and safeguards put in place so one holiday wouldn’t claim all ten pounds of glitter allotted for the year. First we learned how to open the glue cap halfway. Then I put the glitter in a shaker bottle with tiny holes so you had to shake pretty hard to get any out. I provided a large box cover for them to shake the excess in, and taught them to avoid having their creation slide off of the paper by drying it flat on the heater.
Glitter was not only a part of paper projects in my kindergarten classroom. Green glitter was sprinkled all over the room by the leprechauns on St. Patrick’s Day when they visited our classroom while we were at lunch, overturning chairs and whatnot while hiding their “gold” for us to find upon return. One of the properties of glitter is that even just a tiny bit spreads far and wide. I used glitter while teaching how colds spread by sprinkling a bit in my right hand and shaking hands with one student and instructing them to shake hands with others until we all had “germs” on our hands just from me.
So I guess by now, you don’t doubt that I am a glitter expert. Being such a glitter enthusiast, I couldn’t believed there was something I actually didn’t know about glitter. It belongs to certain people. Yesterday I ended a blog post with this pic:
I received comments saying wasn’t glitter Lady Gaga’s thing? (Not Kardashian) Didn’t Pink use glitter in an earlier tour?
All these years spent enhancing lives by using glitter, I never knew it actually belonged to certain people and maybe was off limits to others. I always thought glitter represented the carefree wonder of five year olds and when I was a little down, I’d do what they do – sprinkle some glitter and travel into their world of sheer delight at the sight of it.
Yesterday my post was about getting discouraged after putting in a lot of hours on something with slow or no results. That’s exactly the time you should break out the glitter. “Glitter” comes in many forms for me and, sorry, Lady G and Pink, you do not own it. My life is “glitterized” by a new top on sale in Marshall’s. By the cutest lace-up boots you ever saw, bought for mere pittance in Sears. By the sun glinting on the blue paint on my car, causing the glitter effect. Glitter appears on the condensation of a glass of white peach/strawberry sangria served in a jelly jar.
Glitter is essential to life and it belongs to all of us. Stuck? Down? Bummed? Discouraged? Go find some “glitter”. For a few moments you will be five again. You will smile, which will release sweet endorphins in your body, immediately lifting your dour mood.
And so, as another day goes by, I repeat, when in doubt, just add “glitter”, and…I have written.
“Anything or anyone that does not bring you alive is too small for you.” –David Whyte, poet
LOL… You are a glitter queen! I can see it…!