Hey I'm Daniel

ID: An upset yellow person looking at their arm, with a pastel rainbow circle around it. There is a rainbow tag hanging off of the circle. End ID.

Somatoparaphrenia

Snail crossing

My right hand has written all the poems that I have composed. My left hand has not written a single poem. But my right hand does not think, "Left Hand, you are good for nothing."

My right hand does not have a superiority complex. That is why it is very happy. My left hand does not have any complex at all. In my two hands there is the kind of wisdom called the wisdom of nondiscrimination.

One day I was hammering a nail and my right hand was not very accurate and instead of pounding on the nail it pounded on my finger.

It put the hammer down and took care of my left hand in a very tender way, as if it were taking care of itself.

It did not say, "Left Hand, you have to remember that I have taken good care of you and you have to pay me back in the future." There was no such thinking…

And my left hand did not say, "Right Hand, you have done me a lot of harm — give me that hammer, I want justice."

My two hands know that they are members of one body; they are in each other.

Thich Nhat Hanh

In my heart plays an orchestra of silence every sound a word I cannot speak the melody in my soul rises toward the sky yet silence keeps me in place

I am like a poem missing its lines like a book I cannot finish I love you – these are notes frozen in my throat like an unfinished painting that will never see the light

You are like a piano with every key that resonates the moment I look at you but my hands cannot touch you I cannot play, I cannot speak

I am like a string on a bow, stretched waiting for your touch to sound but I will never resonate fully because in my silence is all of my love

What a heartbreaking song 💔🕊️

But Fanny Crosby sat straighter, fingers grazing the edge of the piano, her unseeing eyes steady.

The room smelled of ink, lamp oil, and freshly planed wood. Outside, carriages rattled down Manhattan streets, the city pulsing with noise she could only feel through floorboards and memory.

Fanny lifted her chin. “Then the hymn stays,” she said softly.

And the editor surprised by her certainty did not argue again. Before she became the most prolific hymnwriter in American history, before churches around the world sang her verses, before millions whispered her words in grief and in joy, Fanny J. Crosby was a tiny girl in rural New York with a future no one expected.

At six weeks old, illness struck. A careless doctor prescribed a mustard poultice that burned her eyes. Darkness fell.

Her father died soon after. Her mother worked constantly. Her grandmother became her world describing sunsets, teaching plants by touch, lifting her into treetops so she could “see” the wind.

Where others saw tragedy, Fanny saw possibility. “I have the world inside me,” she whispered once, running her hands over the bark of an old oak tree.

At eight, she wrote her first poem a fierce refusal of pity:

Oh what a happy soul am I! Although I cannot see…

It startled her family. It startled the village. It startled even her teachers.

Because here was a child boldly claiming joy where sorrow was expected. When she entered the New York Institute for the Blind, her talent exploded.

She mastered literature, memorized entire books of the Bible, learned music, and filled notebooks with lyrics that fluttered like wings. Her voice was precise. Her style rhythmic, emotional, unforgettable.

She became a beloved teacher at the Institute, but her world widened when she met presidents, generals, reformers people drawn to her wit and intelligence.

She wrote poems for Henry Clay. Corresponded with Grover Cleveland, once a school administrator. Read her verses at major public events.

But something deeper stirred within her: a calling not to impress the elite, but to comfort the masses.

Her life changed in the dim basement of a mission hall, where she heard the cries of homeless men broken voices trembling through the floorboards.

Fanny felt their grief in her chest like a bruise. She prayed with them. Wept with them. Promised she would write words they could cling to when darkness felt endless.

And she did.

Under dozens of pseudonyms to keep publishers from realizing how much she produced she wrote more than 8,000 hymns.

Yes, 8,000. Some dashed off in minutes. Others wrestled into being during sleepless nights.

She wrote:

Blessed Assurance. Rescue the Perishing. Pass Me Not, O Gentle Savior. Safe in the Arms of Jesus.

Songs sung in hospitals, fields, prisons, churches, ships. Songs carried through generations like lanterns passed from hand to hand.

But alongside praise came opposition. Some called her hymns too emotional. Too feminine. Too simple.

They mocked her reliance on feeling. Dismissed her as a sentimentalist.

Fanny didn’t blink. “The heart needs food,” she replied. “And simplicity is the bread.”

She kept writing. She kept visiting the poor. She kept filling mission halls with songs that felt like doors opening.

In her old age white-haired, still smiling someone asked if she regretted being blind.

Fanny shook her head gently. “If I had been given sight,” she said, “I might not have sung God’s praises.”

She believed darkness had been her gift the space where her voice grew clear.

When she died in 1915, her funeral filled with thousands mission workers, factory women, children she’d prayed over, strangers whose hopes had once depended on her words.

Her tombstone bore only: “Aunt Fanny She Did What She Could.” But what she did became far more than anyone imagined.

One of the 103 Ukrainian defenders released from Russian captivity reads a poem to his mother and tells her of his return.