Reactions: Part One
Energy Reactions – Part One
Reaction
Before you,
I was in the dark,
Just another tiny spec,
Orbiting around the hub.
And then you arrived.
A different type of energy,
a new light,
One that only I could react to.
You made me jump,
move out of orbit.
I had no choice.
It was my reaction to you
The one I was born to have.
I was excited,
I was out of control.
I went into a different state of being.
I lit up!
And then you left.
You took your light away
It made me unstable,
You took me too far up.
I had no choice
It was my reaction to you
The one I was born to have.
There was only one place I could go,
I had to fall back
…. By Erin Barrett:
An excerpt from Chapter Ten, The Tandro Connections - Book One
This is a poem I wrote for my 15 year old character, Erin, in Book One. In this scene she is struggling with her emotional reactions to how her much-older boyfriend, Kieran, is puppet mastering her. She hates the control he has over her; how he gives her attention and then takes it away. She feels as though she has become that cliché girl; the one who is obsessed with checking her phone every two minutes! And, she is struggling with a crippling guilt anxiety for allowing herself to feel this way about him - when her brother is fighting for his life in hospital!
But new energies - new people- can exert an enormous power over us when they come into our lives, even if they do not mean to. And our first experience of this can be one of the most frightening of them all. I have my teenage diary to remind me of this – and a fantastic focus group of girls around Erin’s age who confirm that I was and am still not alone in having reacted this way: feeling as though you have gone into a different state of being!
To further set the scene: Erin is supposed to be studying energy reactions in her physics class. But instead of writing down scientific facts as instructed by her teacher, Erin writes a poem about her reaction to falling in love – and out of control – with Kieran. It later backfires on her when her teacher finds it and decides to humiliate her by reading her poem out to the rest of the class! A punishment that becomes worse when her classmates choose to turn her into the butt of the latest hash tag craze: #reaction!
It was important for me that Erin would be a character that people will engage with and hopefully root for as she deals with destructive forces around her. And as her character evolved I decided she needed to be a complex and deeply analytical character with an ability to see things in both a romantic and scientific way.
I wrote this poem for Erin’s character straight after finishing a key chapter of my non-fiction book: Our Diamond Connections: a Journey of Diamonds and People. This was all about exploring the reactions we have as people when introduced to new energies and comparatively how diamonds also react to new energy forces. It proved to be enormously helpful in transferring this thinking into Erin’s world – as you can see above!
It was also revelatory for me too. It challenged my own way of thinking about how we react to both events and people; how we can experience a physical reaction to energies being given to us, and also when they are taken away.
If someone had asked me two years ago if the disciplines of science were compatible with the art of romance I am pretty sure I would have been quick to answer: “No!”
But back then I had not been introduced to some of the most interesting people I have ever met: people who truly love and study diamonds! These are people who like to dig deep; and I don’t just mean in a diamond mining sense! I am referring to connecting the origins of diamonds and what they can tell us- or even teach us – about how we are connected to the stars; about our energies and our reactions.
My good friend Denis Bellesorte explained it like this:
“When you understand the diamond, you begin to understand the universe. It is like walking into a cinema for the first time and finally being able to see the big picture and what it all means; where we come from and what we are made of.”
To read more about Erin's world click on this link:
http://www.tandro.co.uk/erin
Next Blog Post: Energy Reactions Part II: Glowing People and Glowing Diamonds
