Another message in the classroom Zen Garden: “Don’t touch me. I’m Beautiful.”
Gratitude List after Senior Presentations:
1. Families blessing their children
2. A son weeping with the power of his emotions when he tells of his loving mother and wise grandmother
3. The shining eyes of friends supporting their friends
4. Teachers and administrators preparing to help young people launch
5. Life stories
May we walk in Beauty!
A couple photos from the goat-petting party at Sonya’s yesterday. I’m still pretty awkward with the whole selfie thing, but I do like that there’s a rainbow on my face.
Somehow, it feels more like spring because we’re having an actual thaw on this day before the Equinox. That last blast of winter stood right on the doorstep of spring, and this morning brought the sound of water dripping from the trees. When we peeked outside this morning, it looked like sun through a rain-shower, but the rain was falling from the trees and nowhere else. Thaw.
Oh, how I need a thaw! I need to get the juices flowing, get the good mojo moving, get the fierce and raw energies of the season swinging brilliantly into the sunlight. Can you feel the balance approaching?
What is being born in you now? What new thing arises, like the little flowers that are suddenly free of their snowy encumbrance to pop into the sun?
Was it only three years ago that I put a little prayer bundle out into the elements on Spring Equinox, setting my intentions to get a job within the next six weeks? It was a reminder for me to keep my head and my heart in the process of the job search. And within a couple weeks, my friend Ryan suggested I contact a certain school. Now I work there, and my life is full–so full–and rich in ways I could not have imagined.
I have new intentions this year, new goals for where I want to go with the things that I am writing. And so tomorrow I will place another bundle out into the elements, with the prayerful intention to keep my head and my heart in the process of writing and submitting work for publication.
Gratitude List:
1. Balance
2. Thaw
3. Intention
4. Energy
5. Birth
May we walk in Beauty!
Someone was walking through the snow beside the porch today, taking the Coyote Road.
Gratitude List:
1. Petting two-day-old goats at Sonya’s today. Precious babies.
2. Afternoon nap
3. Charcoal. Slow, controlled burn.
4. Blue Heron sighting. I always feel a blessing when one flies above.
5. The satisfaction of submitting poems for publication.
May we walk in Beauty!
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!
Mockingbird Chronicles 