Gratitude List:
1. This pre-dawn moment: Me. Crickets. Owl.
2. Creativity. Making. The Will to Create.
3. Cold front. Thermal comfort.
4. The reverent wisdom and irreverent humor of teenagers.
5. Did I mention that owl? Messages.
May we walk in Beauty!
Feathers
I have written before about the feathers. Two years ago, it began in mid-July: I realized one day that I had been finding a feather every single day for about two weeks. I kept watch, then, and realized that, until early September, I found a feather almost every single day.
Last year, it was longer: early July through the end of September. I needed feathers then. I was jumping off a cliff into a new and unknown wind, and I needed the reminder that my wings would carry me. They did. I used the idea to talk to my students about how we make the meaning in our lives, how the Science me said, “Yes, there are owls hard at work in the holler, and the little birds are feeding the next generation of owlets.” But the Poet me said, “Yes, I needed an affirmation from outside myself that I had wings that would catch the wind, and the message was feathers.” I get to choose the meaning for my own story. And both meanings carry a certain truth, enriching each other. We all choose our meanings, even when we’re not aware of consciously doing so.
This year, back in early August, I had a run of about a week of feather-finding. I thought I was back in business, but then I didn’t find any for a couple weeks. Now again, for the past ten days or so, I have found a feather every day, sometimes at home, and sometimes at school.
******
Palimpsest
Another shifting meaning story that came my way again today is that of the Palimpsest, the old vellum manuscripts which were scraped when one text was no longer necessary, and new words written on the pages. Highly valued by modern researchers, the re-appearance of the “under-text” gives historians not one but two texts to work with.
When reading a palimpsest, you must look beyond the surface text to read the deeper meaning. A colleague of mine today showed me his journal, an altered book, in which he is using gesso to white out old text and writing his own text on top. We got to talking about how people are palimpsests, too–how important it is to read beneath the surface to the deeper “text” that shines through the surface layers.
Gratitude List:
1. Challenging conversations. I am learning to balance the speaking and the listening, I think. Still, there is so much to learn, so much to practice.
2. The miracle of the heart, of the heartbeat.
3. Collaboration.
4. Feathers and flight.
5. Palimpsest.
May we walk in Beauty!
Gratitude List:
1. Something I had been hoping for has come to be.
2. The medical technology that saved a friend’s life this weekend.
3. Truth and Beauty. All you need to know, says John Keats.
4. Sleep
5. Jicama
May we walk in Beauty!
You can’t unsee things. I would not have chosen to see that picture of the baby on the beach, but it popped up on my screen when a well-meaning friend put it on Facebook. I can’t scratch it out of my brain, and the more I try to unsee it, the more it appears, unbidden. Yesterday, it appeared in my head as I was playing in the water with my own children. A sudden chill overtook me, left me gasping, barely able to restrain myself from reaching out and grabbing my own laughing children, to pull them both from the water to safety. When I was in college, I had a series of nightmares about seriously injured children asking me for help, and I couldn’t help them. I could swear that this very image was in those dreams.
Other layers of worry catch me, too–the thought of all my shining teenagers with their phones, slipping like swimmers through the waters of the images that appear there, stumbling upon horror and gore: the world’s realities that they will not be able to unsee. How will a photo of a drowned child compound their anxieties, their despairs, their rage? How will such a picture drown their sense of safety and holiness and wonder about the world around them?
I want to know about the troubles of the world. I think we need to, if we are to participate in the Work of changing the world. I think my students need to know that we do not live in a perfect world–they, too, will need the information in order to become participants with us in the business of creating a more just and compassionate future. Still, I do not want to see them stumbling into these terrifying boundary-lands. I do not want to wander here myself.
Yesterday, during our Staff Development Day at LMS, historian John Roth (our input speaker for the day) told a story of an Amishman quizzing a group of Mennonites about television.
“How many of you own a TV?” he asked. Every hand went up.
“How many of you think you probably watch too much TV?” Again, every hand went up.
“How many of you think that your children watch too much TV?” Every hand.
“How many of you will go home today and get rid of your televisions?” Nobody raised a hand.
I am not ready to simply accept the inevitability that my children will be witness to murder and tragedy via the screens that surround us. I don’t want to accept that inevitability for my students, either, though I have less influence on that sphere.
I don’t know how to end this, how to wrap it up. The loose ends are all over the place. Pandora’s box is virtual, but it’s been opened, and a host of terrors and rages and sadnesses have been unleashed upon us.
After all that, I need a
Gratitude List:
1. That box of yarn that came in the mail today. Watching how the boys couldn’t keep their hands off it, how they immediately developed projects and plans for the different balls of yarn. One small boy is planning to weave many, many little patches that he will sew together into a woven blanket. The other made me show him how to crochet.
2. Music. One boy is learning cello for the orchestra and trombone for the band. And after my rant about technology, I must also note that I am grateful for the ability to use a computer program that helps him to listen for the pitch.
3. Monarchs. I saw two adults today, and two caterpillars.
4. Yesterday’s John Roth lectures on Teaching to Transform. His final point of the day was an eloquent examination of a spiritual practice that I call Holding the Bowl of the Heart, and that he called something like Being Attentive to the Beauty of Holiness. It’s about expansively opening oneself to wonder and awe, compassion and love, while recognizing that for humans, these experiences are intermixed with death and grief and shame and anger. So one holds them all together, with an attentive awareness that both sides of experience inform and shape each other. Beauty is another of my names for God.
5. Quartz and kyanite, garnet and serpentine.
May we walk in Beauty.
Today you are God the Wolf,
howling down the forest pathways of my memory,
padding through purple shadows into moonlight,
elusive as the fogs which drift into the clearings
where I listen for you calling,
calling me from comfort into wildness.
Gratitude List:
1. Wildness
2. Philosophizing about time with teenagers.
3. This Pope. He called today a Day of Prayer of for the Environment, and he’s declaring a Jubilee Year of Mercy for next year. Perhaps the rest of us will learn something, too.
4. The Heart. Abstractly and physically. Too many people in my village are experiencing heart trouble right now for my comfort. May their hearts beat with strength and fortitude, and bring them life. And your heart, too–may it be strong and full of life.
5. The heat will break, and cooler days will come again. (Yes, that was a back-handed gratitude, if I ever wrote one.)
May we walk in Beauty!
Gratitude List:
1. “Transforming Memory.” Thank you, Mindy!
2. Boy and his Grandma watching Little League championships together.
3. Reading the FB page for this weekend’s poetry tent. The posts: one line from the poet’s pieces, and then a photo of the poet. The lines themselves became poems of the poems, packing the meaning more tightly, into one crystal moment. Powerful stuff.
4. New ideas, how they sprout in the unconscious like those sweet potatoes in the basement, sending sprouts straight up to the sunlight.
5. Sight, vision, observation
May we walk in Beauty!
Gratitude List:
1.The Poetry Spoken Here Tent at York Arts Fest:
The prophets are out in the streets
picking up the threads of the story.
The shamans, the healers,
the truth-tellers all,
singing and howling,
whispering at the top of their lungs.
This is how the wind changes, my people.
This is how the paradigm shifts.
Give my poets a megaphone.
2. Last night, we discovered a little online program-thing called Noteflight, which I can use to separate the tenor or bass line from a hymn so Ellis can see it by itself to make for easier reading. Also, yesterday, he got his trombone at school. After an hour or more of playing our instruments along with the tenor line of Ode to Joy, an exhausted and light-headed boy rhapsodized, “I love this! I love this program! I love music!” May it be ever so.
3. Sandra. Thank you for folding the laundry. My goodness. Thank you for inspiring my boys. Thank you for being part of our village.
4. Heather Shining Stone Woman. So good to see you. Thankyou for the treasures. My heart is over-flowing. You gave me so much more than stones. . .
5. Creativity and the Muses. That Radiolab moment today when they interviewed Elizabeth Gilbert. I almost needed to park the car by the side of the road so I could get out and jump up and down.
May we all find our voices.
Gratitude List:
1. Monty Python
2. The Amish girl with the ancient violet eyes who smiled at me almost conspiratorially–we both know where Mrs. M keeps her key. Her eyes matched her dress, and she was a whiz on the scooter.
3. Hummingbirds in the morning glories.
4. Weekend
5. Friday morning Faculty Hymn Sing. We suggest songs, we sing, we talk about our associations and ideas about the songs. I have missed this over the summer.
May we walk in Song.
Gratitude List:
1. The electric color of those morning glories. Vivid. Dazzling. Heart-stopping.
2. Yesterday morning at about this time, Joss and I were hanging out in the living room, like we are now, and he looked at the balcony window beside my head and gasped. Mama Hummingbird was hovering outside, looking in at us. (Bonus gratitude: weekend mornings with my boy. I write. He plays trains.)
3. How people hold each other in times of tragedy.
4. Having so many opportunities to do the things I love to do.
5. You and You and You. You inspire me so much. Even (or especially) when you say you don’t think you’re very strong, because you’re stronger than you realize. Trust me on that. You’re a survivor. You are truly resilient, and it shows, even when it doesn’t feel like it to you. You make that decision every day to do the one thing you know to do.
May we walk in Beauty. Beauty Ever Ancient, Ever New.
Yesterday tended to be a little overwhelming in so many ways. Mostly in that joyous, sort of out-of-body way that happens at any marvelous beginning. It was delightful to be back in that garden of shining flowers, all those eager and timid and excited and anxious faces. Each one carrying a web of associations and connections.
The heat, also, was overwhelming. I think of myself as pretty tough in a hot situation, but it did almost conquer me by seventh period. I need to drink more, I suppose. The thought of adding another fan on top of my air conditioning unit and my other fan makes my voice ache. I need to do some more strategizing about how to manage it. I’ll use the computer labs every time they’re free, for one, though students tend to focus on the computer rather than on the other types of work when we’re in the labs.
Gratitude List:
1. There might be rain today–perhaps a break in the heat?
2. All those beautiful faces.
3. Being in a place where the work is the Work.
4. Beginning with a three-day week–slow starts.
5. My own children seem to have had a wonderful start to their year, too.
May we walk in Beauty!
Mockingbird Chronicles 