The following is a recommendation letter I had the honor of writing for my mother, Cynthia Blomquist Gustavson — she’s the best! Read on…

Had I not grown up steeped in the rich brown sun-tea-poems of my mother’s careful pen-stroked emotions, only slightly sweetened with a bit of mint and honey-tongued words, thrown into the air with a mix of spit and green…

Had I not wallowed in the sopping wine-colored piles of simple words my mother collected in quart-sized berry pails out past the Red Wheelbarrow’s place next door, on the bushes hidden from tourists’ raspberry-thorn cut fingers…

Had she not been my first memory…

Had she not taught me to love others and myself…

…then maybe I could give you an impartial recommendation, or paint with true colors…

But of course I’m not perfect, so here goes… a fully partial recommendation!

I will list my impressions of her in my life first as I stumbled over them; each of them is a found agate-rock in the dusty stretch of road up the hill from my grandmother’s house in Minnesota, where my mother had walked tar-footed as a kid:

(Aside: One of the most amusing stories my mother tells is of her tar-feet. She didn’t know until sitting on the bed of her dorm room at Boston University in the mid-sixties that her feet were supposed to be white on the bottom. Hers were, as they always had been, black as a bear’s behind…)

1) She is my mother. The best mother anyone could hope for.
2) She is my friend. She sat through hours upon hours of colic, and yet she still loved me, still sat with me, still walked with me, and still does…
3) She is my teacher. She taught me to see, not to copy. She taught me to listen, not to speak. She taught me to cry instead of scream…
4) She is my guide. We all use her to find a steady keel in the water. Somehow she always knows where the even center is, and tells us how much to trim the sails and turn the rudder.
5) She is my catalyst. She wrote a poem for me when I left home in high school called ‘Clawing at the Lower Bark.’ I left my cicada shell behind… She gave me the organs of a poet and the lungs of a sparrow. Now I breathe, sing and write.

And now I see my mother in a different way, as we tend to do as we add years like inches to our belts. She has become my friend and my collaborator, and at times, just as she teaches me, she is my student… I realize now that my mother is the reason I’m alive today in so many capacities. Her once troubled child has now blossomed into a professional musician, author, publisher, PhD composer and more…

She gave me a voice to shout with… though it didn’t come through my lungs. She showed me a way to pull that shout out through my fingers… Through her I found poetry, music and art. She gave that to me, but not just me. It is her method of working. It is now as much a part of her as the spleen, toes and heart she was born with…

She sees the world through her pen, blindly stumbling through its cheap rolled ink into the bliss of understanding. And she uses that blind stumble in her therapy on a daily basis. Her plentiful poetry books are all lovingly dog-eared and beautifully beaten from sharing them with clients over 25 years, and making smashed-into-the-laser-beam photocopies…

Though I wasn’t her client, I had the privilege of receiving many of those poems, with notes hastily scrawled on the side or back… Many of those poems are still tacked on my office and bedroom walls… My favorite is the hand-typed version of Robert Bly’s poem “People Like Us” – I feel like my mom sent it to me because we are a unique breed; we who give freely of our love.

My mother gives love all the time… and what’s best, there seems to be no end to it. Believe me, I’ve tried to test its limits! But there is a trick to it. When she was a child, she could sit in any grassy field and find dozens of four-leafed clovers. If you ask her, she’ll tell you about the 8, 7, 6, and 5-leaf clovers she found, too. She searches until she finds the lucky clover in the grass. That’s the same way she searched until she found the heart of a boy (me) who did nothing but cry and scream for a year, no matter how much love she showed.

And today, she gently folds back the parched southern grass in rural Oklahoma and finds the hearts of the Oaks Mission Indian (they prefer that term to Native American) children, and the many other little ones that come into her practice in Tulsa.

My mother is married to a physician – they live in a nice house, surrounded by nice things, and pleasant people. Her own life today is very far from the stories of the children she takes care of every day – girls pregnant before their teens, mothers who aren’t there for their children, kids in trouble with the law, children that have been abused into silence. But there is a hunger inside of her for healing, and to give these kids a chance for escape. She gives that to them with her whispered and woven words, and with the gift of the pen. She gives these red-dirt kids a chance…

Cynthia Blomquist grew up a tar-footed kid, dirty-cheeked and happy, until she realized her own poverty. She saw the kids on the other side of the fence, tourists from the big city, and she dreamed her way out… Like me, and like the kids my mother teaches and counsels every day, my mother got lucky. She found her pen, and her little leather book of poetry that she still carries embedded just behind her left shoulder blade. The wound doesn’t bleed anymore, and now the poetry is just part of her…

Cynthia Blomquist Gustavson devotes nearly all of her professional time to finding the smiles of small Oaks children, just as poetry found her own dirty, mischievous sand-hills grin, while she was hunting for agates as a corn-silk-haired little girl, boldly reciting Casey at the Bat and Halfway Down the Stairs…

There could be no better recipient for an award of love for children through active therapy. She has worked with children for 25 years using the medium of poetry, and has written the only two existing poetry workbooks that I know about for working with children in therapy using specifically poetry.

And I know from personal experience that her love and her words can heal, and bring new life. She is indeed a great poetry therapist, and I hope she can receive this small reward for her long, passionate and caring service to children within this field.