Yesterday’s pictures was last year’s poppies in the rain. This year’s picture was taken in the same week, but this is what they look like.
Gratitude List:
1. The profound effect of stories.
2. Stepping out of the doors, opening the windows, living in the big and vast and immeasurable realms
3. Teamwork and collaboration
4. All that is about to burst into bloom
5. Getting ready to turn the page
May we walk in Beauty!
Last year’s poppies in the rain. The poppies and peonies are just a little late this year.
Gratitude List:
1. (What has been satisfying?) The sounds of the birds–always, good chocolate and a colleague who shares handmade chocolates to get us through the week, finding a voice
2. (What have you been seeing?) The mist rising over the layers of valley in the mornings when I look out from the top of the ridge
3. (What challenge has helped you?) Being unsure whether I would get everything done caused me to create new and more effective systems
4. (Who has been helpful?) I admire the people who work with MSF/Doctors Without Borders–risking their lives for the good of others, several students who have gotten behind in their work this semester have suddenly kicked into working gear and gotten their homework to me
5. (Where do you turn for serenity?) A good book on tape, one more cup of coffee, moments of quiet contemplation, planning for my mini-course
May we walk in Beauty!
I can’t really add this to my gratitude list because some people did suffer damage. Several windows were broken or cracked at my children’s school. I am relieved, at least, that yesterday’s hail storm did not hit this side of the ridge and our tender plants.
Gratitude List:
1. (What do you notice?) That wren calling, tiredness in my bones, a sense of being past the most overwhelming parts of the end-of-semester skid
2. (What do you hunger for?) Solitude, quiet, sustenance, sustainedness, time to write and edit, time to ponder, decluttering
3. (Who has been helpful?) Those 12-year-olds in church yesterday–how they are growing!, the ones who create rites of passage and rituals to mark changes, the many names of God
4. (What are the themes?) The table: Alain’s sermon, Neruda’s poem (“For now, I ask no more than the justice of eating”), Joy Harjo’s “Perhaps the World Ends Here”)
5. (What draws you forward?) The rest that is coming, the rising sun–the way light filters in to the hollow, the calling of birds, the good Work to be done
May we walk in Beauty!
There is no other answer.
Not purity.
Not righteousness.
Not power.
Not rules.
No book or map.
No speaker.
No leader.
No thing you can buy.
No magic elixir.
Only love will guide you in the end.
Gratitude List:
1. (What do you hear?) Wren calling, coffee bubbling, cat purring, child playing with gnomes
2. (What do you see?) Green, rain, orange fur, deep shadow, reflections
3. (What do you smell?) Clean clear air, earth after rain, coffee
4. (What do you feel?) Chill on my skin, dampness of air, morning aches, tickle in my nose
5. (What do you remember?) Birds in the rain, nap with a warm cat, laughing children, chocolate bar
For all these I am grateful. May we walk in Beauty!
Rainy morning in Skunk Hollow. The birds and I are loving it. The farmer, not so much.
Gratitude List:
1. Bored Shorts: Kid History and Kidsnippets. I know, it’s weird to have a media thing for a gratitude, but I love this group of brothers and their friends who decided to not stop playing together even when they grew up, and so they get their kids to tell them stories, and then they act them out, using the kids’ voices and lip-syncing to the words. It’s one of those things that makes me want to be a more attentive and engaged parent, to make sure that I am offering my children plenty of safe and comfortable spaces to play and have fun with each other.
2. The lightheartedness and humor that my children’s teachers bring to them, the way they build classroom community. Laughter and joy are community-building. This is one of those things that makes me want to be a better teacher, to make sure that I am offering my students plenty of safe and comfortable moments to laugh and have fun with each other.
3. The activity of the Goldfinch Farm birds in the rain this morning: phoebe and oriole and wren, chickadee and titmouse, flitting through the raindrops.
4. Nettle tea and elderberry syrup. So far, I am mostly coping with allergy season again. Omitting dairy from my diet seems to help, too. (I know this helps because when I cheat and eat cheese, then I feel miserable.)
5. There is definitely a light at the end of the tunnel. I glimpsed it briefly yesterday.
May we walk in Beauty!
Gratitude List:
1. I guess I am grateful for the crunchy things, too. I’m trying, anyway, to find that space where I can say, “This will make me wiser. This will make me stronger. This will make me more compassionate, when I have reached the other side.” W must find the courage for the hard conversations, find the space between outrage and complacency, where the powers of heart and reason meet. Yes, I am grateful for the crunchy things, too.
2. Archetypes. I love the way our stories–across cultures and across times–share so many of the same archetypal elements: tricksters, shining children, witches (in many forms), heroic characters, wise mentors. . .
3. Friday. After today, only one more of these this school year. I love the closure of a Friday, and I love anticipating Friday morning hymn sings, which I will miss this summer.
4. Plugging away. Keep the tractor moving down the row, and eventually you get to the end.
5. Poetry. The way people respond to a poem, even when they say they hate poetry. Give them the right one, and you can see the Aha dawn in their eyes. Maybe there’s a poem out there for everyone–you just have to find out which one is for you. Some of us are greedy and think that every poem is somehow ours. Forgive us. We’ll share.
May we walk, each day, in Beauty.
One breath.
One heartbeat.
Another. Another.
The moment between the call of the wren
and the hush that follows.
Strands in the fabric
of your tapestry.
Gratitude List:
1. I can’t yet see that light at the end of the tunnel, but I can sense it if I sort of look to the side and imagine that it’s there.
2. There’s a dad in this house who keeps making little surprises to put into someone’s dollhouse. I wish I could be here this morning to see a small person notice the newest changes.
3. Seasoning. This is a great word. I love perfectly seasoned food–when just the right extra flavors have been added in balance. I am also feeling my own seasoning develop, bit by bit, in the high school. No matter how much teaching experience and energy I may have come to this school with, this is my first teaching experience with high school students, and it takes some seasoning to develop myself as a teacher. I am grateful to have two years under my belt. Each year adds new and more complex and intricate flavors.
4. Plans to organize and tidy up. This is born of my current low-grade frustration with the clutter and mess of the house. May is when I am in the final skid toward the end of the semester, and Jon is in the upward climb into the farm season, and the house is left to take care of herself. Add Little League to that mix, and we’re on a bit of a wild ride. So in odd moments, I calm myself by thinking of the de-cluttering I am going to begin the moment that my grades are in for this semester.
5. Deep breaths. They can calm you down, wake you up, give you a moment to gather your thoughts, center and ground you. Oxygen is a marvelous thing.
May we walk in Beauty!
I have oranges in the dogwood tree for Oriole, but he seems uninterested. He prefers the sycamore fluffs at the tops of the trees. The dogwoods have lost their pink in the three days since I took the photo.
Gratitude List:
1. Cool May–whenever I start to kvetch about being too cold, I remember the beastly heat at the end of the year last year, and I am grateful. I have not started up my classroom air conditioner at all this spring.
2. Deep, flowing conversations.
3. Your heart. My heart. The strands of love and compassion that connect those dots.
4. White fluffy clouds in blue sky.
5. Passing on the Flame.
May we walk in Beauty!
I guessed yesterday when my seven-year-old was playing with some other children during the Little League game, running up a dirt mound and jumping off, that he was feeling that flying feeling. I asked him, and he confirmed that it did feel like he really was flying. I remember running down the sloping front yard of our house in West Virginia, and knowing that my feet were actually skimming the earth, not really touching down. Or sliding my feet down the steps, knowing that I was actually in flight mode, not really bound completely to gravity.
But there’s more to it, because even lately, in my middle age, I have had moments when something in the back of my head believes that gravity has less hold on me than it appears. It’s not just whimsy, and it’s not that I am losing touch with reality. It has to do with the staying power of dreams. These days I rarely have the dreams where I am swooping and soaring, but I frequently have the skimming dreams, the walking on air. And each time it happens, there is a skeptical place in me that tells me it is impossible, but the wondering place in me reminds me that it has to be possible if it is happening, and so I wake up with a sense of knowing deep inside myself that I can walk on the air. I don’t know if it’s a vestigial memory of early learning related to walking, or whether it’s a deep internal awareness of inner capacities–that I dream these things when I am about to break through some barrier in waking life, to do something that seems impossible. I am fascinated by the way that the dream logic leaks into the waking world, the way that back part of my brain takes a moment to wake up and realize that the dream-reality and the waking-reality are different realms.
Gratitude List:
1. Walking on Air
2. Standing firmly on Earth
3. Being Immersed in the day
4. Being on Fire with an idea
5. Carrying on
May we walk in Beauty!
Gratitude List:
1. The boys’ choir yesterday morning. Sound surrounding us. Their songleader, Jim, and his delight in the music they made.
2. The little purring sound my car makes when I open the door, which is to say, I am grateful for whimsy.
3. Love wins. It is always the answer.
4. The things-come-together part of that cycle in which things fall apart and are rebuilt.
5. My students.
May we walk in Beauty!
Mockingbird Chronicles 