The Gift of Bad Spelling

I am not a very good speller; you may have noticed.  One of the comments on one of my assignment submissions said “Rather marred by grammatical errors”.  This was on the one paper which I never double checked with another, before submitting.  It is not that what I have to say is not intelligent else full of knowledge, you don’t after all have to be an academic to live, feel, observe or understand intelligent things in an intelligible manner.  If I went through the school system today I would almost definitely be diagnosed with mild dyslexia.  I know this because when I was enrolled on an art course, I was tested as part of a university’s research paper on dyslexia in those with an artistic nature.  I did a test, it became evident. If I type fast I frequently get my letters back to front, I mis-spell the same simple words over and over again, even though I have taught myself the correct spelling, and when I type a blog, you have never seen so many red lines!  Literally thank God for spell check!

This causes a few embarrassing problems, sometimes spell-check changes my words to words that I did not mean to use, and I don’t always notice.  On rare occasions this can change the whole meaning of a sentence.  Sometimes I use words that I think mean one thing only to find out it was a similar sounding word that meant something else all together, I think this causes people much enjoyment.   Thankfully I am almost sure that much of the time I remain ignorant, and am relieved from much of the embarrassment that would be caused with knowing.  I’s and e’s, and s’s and c’s are continually muddled, double or single letters are too.  This is why frequently I correct/update/make changes to my blog and put the number of changes in brackets.  Even blogs from years back and I can still find mistakes today.  Usually I publish and then I sometimes see the previously unseen errors.  My school reports were all average, I was to watch my spelling.

I have absolutely no doubt in my mind that this is a gift;

Despite what could be a humiliating flaw.  I have had to learn to question and engage and listen intensley, and question again where others would remain quiet.  I am often the person in class that asks the question that everyone wanted to ask, but wouldn’t dare through fear of being judged.  Despite the spelling flaw I still know that I am very bright.  (Go on, go and look up the definition of bright).  I have had to learn to shine in other ways, else I could have been mistakenly judged as dense.  As well as being bright by nature, I can also seemingly read someone elses piece of work and spot the errors/typos a mile off.  It also means like a child I often look up words in the dictionary to double-check the accuracy of my understanding, this is where all number of wonderful discoveries are made, and new understandings are discovered and gleaned.  It means I get away with some things, it also means I have a blessed skill in word play which is perfect for my poetic mind.

It has been put to me before that I must feel else see things ‘in Technicolor’, when I have reflected back on certain moments by painting the experience into a picture made with words.  I feel things deeply, it provokes great compassion within.  Often in my descriptive writing I can paint a picture like an artist, a complete holistic picture drawn upon by gathering evocative moments from the world around me, and then describe what it is that I ‘see’. Having to describe the knowledge received makes for great poetry.  Just like all people of faith, who see things not necessarily academically, but instead feel them through the senses, and beyond, through extra sensory ways, provoked into awareness through inspiration.  My personal understanding is measured and relayed with the unfailing integrity of my deepest intuition, secured by my poignantly lived experience of Truth.  The Word heard and seen through the spirit is True and beautiful and of God, and once written can not be unwritten.

Numbers are fascinating to me.  I Love their order and magic, I can basically add, subtract, times and divide, the same ‘average’ as everyone else.  I am skilled with money, and canny when it comes to survival. My proudest financial moment was rescuing a very special broken property (which even the builders rejected) as a single mother with two children under 3.  I brought it for cash at £40.000 renovated it on a £15.000 mortgage, and sold it for almost triple the buying price 2 years later.  I can take risks with/without money as I did in purchasing the property, because when you have nothing and have to survive, you have nothing to fear in loosing. However one does have to have finance, else to be in a position to buy a property in order to take the risk in the first instance, and it is no easy route.  It takes bartering and creativity and skill and stamina and accurate judgement and much Love. Bless St Francis who rebuilt that church with his own Love.

However ask me to help the children with their maths homework and I am flummoxed. Ask me to add many figures or mathematical puzzles in front of another person and I go blank, something switches off, shuts down and looses.  And yet as a child, put me in front of a class at school and ask a tricky random question, and by pure fluke and not by conscious understanding I could come up with the right answer when no-one else could. My twin daughter has the same blessing too.  Yesterday she came home from school with a ‘Golden Headteacher’s Sticker’ she got all 25 questions right in the verbal reasoning paper, and yet her twin brother is the academic mathematician, who excels in the classroom (he won a sticker too).  But she for once by the most artistic sweetest nature, triumphed.   She is quietly uncompetitive, unlike her twin and happy and confident with her own successes and abilities, and so being happy with her lot, she feels as though she wins even when others beat her.

Yesterday I was looking online for some extended meaning of words, and I discovered an amazing tool.  It is the brilliant Visual Thesaurus.  It works perfectly for my kind of brain. There is only one snag,  it was a freebie (an example of which is below), and on further investigation you have to purchase the tool.  Imagine if this tool was available when I was at school, maybe I would have learnt in a dynamic way, but then maybe my bad spelling would not have highlighted and heightened my precious gift of seeing the world other.  It looks like a little map of a constellation of stars.

Operating on a different level beside the beguiling disguise of a learned intelligence, shines another brightness.  It may or may not be academic, but it is rooted right back to Love and Truth, and it seeks the Love and Truth in others, in fact in All things.                 And it is of God.