There is no prompt up yet, and I have to head to school. I’ll do a second post later today with the poem.
Gratitude List:
1. Awakenings: Yesterday in a short story, the girl’s boyfriend and his mother offered to help in a chaotic moment at the restaurant. The dad went out to wait in the car. This was an incidental sentence in the story, but two of my classes stopped the story and complained about the dad. They expect more of men these days.
2. Companionship: This bright boy sitting beside me and reading as I write.
3. Redemption. Grace. Restoration: We don’t always live up to the possibilities. The people we care for sometimes break or trample the trust we put in them. Still, we find room for grace. Today’s grace may be fragile, may be temporary, but I will nurture the hope it offers with everything I can give it, like the tiny, impossible flame we tended at the fire pit a couple weeks ago, giving it our breath, feeding it, believing it would catch.
4. Solitude: Not yet, not yet. But last night I began my first dreamings for my contemplative solitude retreat this summer.
5. Growth: Sometimes the daily minutiae of teacher-work can make it seem like there is no growth, or that the growth is too small, too slow. When I step back and look at the progress of students’ work from last year to this, it suddenly becomes clear, like looking at that small oak tree out on the hill. I cannot see its day-to-day growth, but when I look at it over time, I can see the miracle of its growth.
May we walk in Beauty!
Mockingbird Chronicles 