Gratitude List:
1. Wise and compassionate friends who help me to explore and understand my rage, to settle it, to channel it, to use it.
2. There are always so many new things to learn, so many steps to learn.
3. Sun and shadows on snow.
4. Rest
5. Flan–One of my students brought me a huge slice today. Heaven.
May we walk in Beauty!
The birdwatcher. Even the arthritis didn’t keep him from a little birdwatching during the storm. (Yes, the chair is getting pretty beat-up. Still, it has a shabby charm that we can’t give up just yet.)
We walk the Coyote Road.
Our eyes are full of night.
A thousand sacred sounds
fill the soft bowls of our ears.
That’s the start of something. I’ll get back to it, find its rhythm. I tend to write poems in snatches and dribs these days, between a stack of student essays, or after reading another chapter to the boys.
Gratitude List:
1. Strengthening–I am adding a little extra exercise to my day. Little but little, I feel myself strengthening.
2. That pasta with cream sauce and spinach and peas that Jon makes.
3. The two-hour delay today was especially needed after last night’s insomnia. I had a craving for some cheese, and that seemed to help me to get back to sleep. Maybe i’ll try warmed milk next time.
4. Tree shadows on snow
5. Passing blessings around
May we walk in Beauty!
A little ditty:
in the space between
we settle in
to watch for visitors
seen and unseen
we offer tea
and conversation,
ask our questions
and tell our dreams
Gratitude List:
1. The chortling whistle of a blue jay
2. The call of the white-throated sparrow is the definition of plaintive. If the womenfolk don’t respond to that cry of longing, they must be deaf. Even I want to be a sparrow and fly to his side when Sweet George Peabody sings his spring song.
3. A second day in Time Out of Time. Blessings on the snow
4. The wisdom and resilience of teenagers. I don’t know how I would have gotten all those Memoirs graded without the two extra days. I needed to give them their full time, such precious tellings of their lives. I am honored to be the teacher of this bunch of young folk.
5. Hot tea. One of the great pleasures of my life these days. Coffee is my drug, but tea is my comfort.
May we walk in Beauty!
Gratitude List:
1. An extra day at home. Time to get more grading completed. Time with the kids. Time out of time.
2. The elegance of blackbirds. Those grackles with their white eyes, silhouetted on snow.
3. Yesterday morning’s moon. I forgot to talk about it yesterday, so I will remember it today, how it was caught in the branches of the walnut tree, how–above the round bales of straw on Picking Rd.–it was itself a round bale in the sky, how later it was alone, a single eye above us.
4. Snow. This was a lovely storm, and we didn’t even lose power.
5. The chicken-dance of fox sparrows.
May we walk in Beauty!
I found this in my little zen garden in the classroom today. I love to watch what happens within its boundaries throughout the day. Some students have to work it every day, ordering it to their perfect idea of what it should look like. Others seem to have a need to make it messy, to jumble the stones, or bury them, spilling the sand over the edges. This used to bother me, until I realized that the need to disorder is also a type of ordering, a shifting of energies, and a necessary one in a day which is regimented by 45-minute blocks, and assignments that must be done, and attention that must be paid. Disordering the zen garden is its own way of taking control. I still can’t quite reconcile myself to the seeming-wanton spilling of sand over the edges, and the ones who scrape the rake harshly against the bottom of the tray. Still, even those who do that have their purposes, and I am committed to be an observer at this point, and not a director of the zen garden. Lately, they have taken to leaving messages. I am partial to “Dragons and fish.”
The strange dreams continue. Last night there was a lion in my tent. I tried growling at it to scare it away. It just became more aggressive. Fortunately, Jon was there to wake me up. Only half an hour later, I had the chance to return the favor and wake him up from a fearful dream, too.
My next dream was less intense, but equally appalling–lost at sea in a little island archipelago. One of our party found a little boat and rowed off to see if he could find a mainland somewhere. When he came back, I paddled off in the opposite direction and found Finland–there was a sign right on the beach: FINLAND. So I knew we were saved.
Gratitude List:
1. Snow Day coming up
2. The boys might be fighting more these days, but at least they’re talking about it, trying to figure out what sets them off, so maybe there’s some learning taking place.
3. How ideas birth ideas
4. Resolve, determination, grit
5. Someone to wake me from the nightmares
May we walk in Beauty!
“Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.” –David White (via Toko-pa Turner)
In the dream, I am visiting a doctor. She is surprised that I still have my uterus and recommends a hysterectomy. I am relieved in the dream to be rid of the burden of it.
What change is on the horizon? Perhaps something of the first part of my adult life needs to be relinquished in order for me to find ease and relief for the next stages of the journey. My womb was the soil in which my four children were grown. Even the two it was unable to keep for the full term, it struggled to hold onto even when it was clear that they were unviable. The two that grew to full term, it refused to relinquish. The story of my womb has been one of not letting go, of holding on even when hope is lost. Perhaps the next stage of my life will be one of learning to let go of hope, to release hold of my identity as fertile soil and life-giver.
That seems to be the way of it: At the turnings of our lives, we are asked to give up something that has served us, that has given us great gifts, in order to find the wisdom that approaches when we have met the challenges and tasks of the next stage. Like the child in the woods in every fairy tale, we leave behind an innocence, an old identity that has served us, and pick up a new name, a new skin to travel in.
Gratitude List:
1. Auntie and Uncle Goose paddling on the postage-stamp of a pond.
2. That grove of trees in the field on the detour. I complain about Ducktown being closed for bridge repairs, but the new road offers delights of its own: the way the sun shines through the grove, the view of the ridge where I make my home, the horses, the field of giant round hay bales.
3. That song this morning–the Prokeimenon (I love that word), with the high A, and the brave voices who sang it.
4. The way clouds create the perspective of distance, diminishing toward the horizon.
5. The Word, the Wisdom, and the Way
May we walk in Beauty!
Some of us in this family don’t handle the cold so well.
Gratitude List:
1. Getting organized. I am finally transferring my calendars completely to computer/phone. No more half and half, forgetting to copy something out.
2. Chili, bread, and cheese. And GREENS!
3. Red-bellied woodpecker at the feeder
4. Sufficiency
5. Laughter
May we walk in Beauty!
Loving this filter.
snow, then warm breezes
I’m tired of waiting for March
to make up its mind
Gratitude List:
1. Cedar waxwings in a tree by the old haunted farm
2. Corn stubble field full of grackles
3. Horses playing in the snow
4. The way the morning sun draws lines across the fields and hollows with the trees
5. Another fine music chapel this morning. LMH students are incredibly gifted, from the haunting version of “Scarborough Fair” in Simon and Garfunkel mode to a heavy metal guitar solo that set the stage on fire (not literally) and everything in between. Brilliant.
May we walk in Beauty!
Gratitude List:
1. It makes for a long and tiring day without much time to plan for tomorrow or to be with my family, but I do love talking to parents about their marvelous young people. Parent-Teacher Conferences have been going really well.
2. The chapel speaker this morning, Father Peck from the St. Thomas Episcopal church, spoke on the importance of contemplation. He had us meditate in silence for five whole minutes, and students DID it. He is on my page–he talked about how contemplation is as important as activism.
3. Citrus
4. Potato chips
5. Filters
May we walk in Beauty!
Gratitude List:
1. A visiting student from Chile told me today that his favorite poet is Gabriela Mistral, so I looked her up. Her name was sort of vaguely familiar. Now I am loving diving into her work.
2. A bare treeful of redwinged blackbirds.
3. Buds! The trees are budding!
4. The green! Oh, the green! The hills surrounding my hollow are Brigadoon-green.
5. The way this cat loves his purple blanket. We keep this purple bedspread in the living room for snuggling on cold evenings. No matter where in the room it is, that’s where Fred chooses to sleep these days.
May we walk in Beauty!
Mockingbird Chronicles 