“From the Desk of Linda Goodman”
Inspiration, handed along

by Maria Barron

Nobel Prize-winning poet Rabindranath Tagore once wrote about a songbird heralding a dawn that must surely be coming. When a relative of Linda Goodman’s sent her a greeting card highlighting Tagore’s words of faith, Linda found a frame of gentle colors for it, with artwork to match the theme.

The card and frame are somewhat scuffed and damaged now, after years of storage with other personal items from the esoteric writer’s estate. But graphics software enabled the picture to be cleaned up nicely enough to share with others who admire Linda and who might enjoy seeing something that meant enough to her to frame and save.

This memento was included with some other things left over from an estate sale of Linda’s belongings July 13 in Florence, Colorado. After the public sale, I was able to purchase some of Linda’s home office furniture, along with a few of her framed inspirational pictures, which seemed meant to go atop the desk. A few little surprises that I found tucked here and there added to my delight by offering both confirmation and new clues into some of the intriguing details of Linda’s life.

While it is not surprising or especially significant that Linda would frame a Tagore quote, still, it does seem fitting. The life works of the two writers share a mystical/activist overlap that might have inclined Linda to take heart from Tagore’s words. Sadly, each of them also experienced the anguish of parents who have lost children to untimely death.

Tagore wrote many poems with spiritual themes and was known not only as a poet but also as a philosopher, social reformer, playwright, musician, and creator of dance dramas. His work was an inspiration to Mahatma Gandhi, and the two were friends, although they did not always see eye-to-eye. When India achieved the independence Gandhi led it toward, the country adopted a Tagore composition as its national anthem. Bangladesh also took a Tagore work for its anthem.

Tagore was born in Calcutta, India, in 1861 and died in 1941. In 1913 he became the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, for the poetry collection Gitanjali.

Like the books and poems Linda wrote, and the loving social conscience she sought to inspire, Tagore’s works also live on, inspiring people to feel the light; to sing when dawn is yet dark. May we all be so blessed.