Circle of Stones
You there
in the center of the circle
and all of us gathered around
Silence
within the weight of the moment
and stillness in the bowl of time
We breathe
waiting, holding you inside us
and watching for what yet may be
Gratitude List:
1. Blessing each other in our transitions
2. Living into the questions
3. Holding the paradoxes
4. Preparing for winter
5. Listening for the messages
May we walk in Beauty!
Gratitude List:
1. The little zen sandgarden that my mother gave me years ago. I keep it on the desk in the front of my room and students often come up and rake it and talk to me. Some are incredibly careful and thoughtful, making order. Others come up and scrape and scratch with the little rake until I want to grind my teeth, but they’re working something out, too, as much as the order-makers.
2. Yesterday’s restorative circle work. It was painful and hopeful. There’s individual work to be done yet, but they’re moving toward healing. I now feel that this story is linked to my own, and I have a responsibility to keep my eye out for these particular students.
3. Being at a school where the work of restoration is taken so seriously. There was at least one other restorative conference yesterday, and I know that others occur regularly throughout the week. This is a community where I know that all students will be taken seriously and cared for, even when they mess up. Especially when they mess up.
4. I got home yesterday from school to see two pages of comic sketches that Joss had done after we left for school in the morning. I was really hoping that the graphic novels we have been eating up would inspire him, and they did.
5. Windy weather. Adventure weather. We’re going to my friend Marie’s sale today–that will be our adventure.
May we walk in Beauty!
Poor little Pippi encountered a deer in the morning gloaming on Ducktown Road yesterday. She’ll be out of commission for a little while.
Gratitude List:
1. Neither Ellis nor I were hurt in the collision. I am not so sure about the other guy, a large (8-point, perhaps?) buck. I thought he was dead. He just lay there where he had fallen, under the guard rail, but just as I had collected myself enough to think about getting out to check on him, he leaped up and dashed into the woods. Poor guy. I hope he survived.
2. Friends who help in a time of crisis. Julie Flinchbaugh, for comforting us and giving Ellis some apple cider. Erin Darby, who drove the carpool to Lancaster on a moment’s notice. Jon, who was my telephone anchor–I kept calling him because I didn’t know what to do. My parents, who gave us their second car while Pippi Prius is at the Dentist. (This is one of our favorite puns. Not only is she having her dents repaired, but the owner/operator of the garage that takes care of our vehicles is our neighbor, Den. Den-dent-dentist: get it?)
3. Restorative conversations. This morning I get to help with a restorative conference at school. I went into the Restorative Circle training a couple weeks ago with a little trepidation, worried that my anxieties about conflict would keep me from really being able to do this kind of work. This morning, I feel really ready to participate, to ask questions, to help facilitate this conversation. I am eager to be part of this kind of work.
4. Flaming trees. They say that the color will be sort of “meh” this season, after the summer’s dry weather, but the maples didn’t get the memo. They’re pulling out the stops.
5. Yesterday’s singing in chapel. We sang “Tu Eres Todopoderoso,” a song from Mennonite World Conference. I love that song.
May we walk in Beauty!
The maples at school are getting dressed up.
Gratitude List:
1. Doctors Without Borders / Medecin sans Frontieres
2. Mennonite Central Committee
3. The Nobel Women’s Initiative
4. Heifer International
5. You. And all the others who are really working to bring healing and hope to people in dire situations.
May we walk in Beauty.
What can we give besides our prayers and rage?
And what will that avail?
Send out the story on October winds.
Fling it high, where crows are flying.
Send the message echoing into earth
with every pounding step you take.
Listen.
Let the shells of your ears gather the story.
Reel in the gossamer strands of the tale
and weave them into the veil you wear.
Listen for the stories of those who weep,
those who rage, those who only speak
with the shrug of a shoulder,
with a sigh, with a shudder.
Listen, too, to those who walk right in,
who step into your circle without invitation.
Listen to the voices that are hard to hear.
Offer only the bread that is yours to give.
Be like the old gods, with the raven Wisdom
on one shoulder and Memory on the other,
and Reason perched upon your hat.
Offer what is yours:
your rage,
your prayer,
your watchful quiet heart.
Gratitude List:
1. Rage and prayer
2. Memory and Wisdom
3. Reason
4. Listening deeply. Being listened to deeply.
5. Graphic novels. I know this one is rather out of the context of the others, but the boys and I are really into graphic novels these days: the Amulet series, Zita the Spacegirl, Knights of the Lunch Table, and Mouse Guard. We really love Zita and her poor friend Randy who has a case of the squeaks.
May we walk in Beauty!
Here is another version of the Disibodenberg photo with a parchment paper look. I keep seeing faces in this this one. At first, I didn’t like it because the abbey ruins themselves sort of disappear into the sunlight, but as I consider it, that has become my favorite thing about it.
I am still working the dream from Sunday night. Sometimes dreams dissipate like smoke, and every attempt to grab and hold them down only scatters them further. Sometimes they recede until a random comment by someone in the day-life throws them in the pathway of the day. Sometimes they come back throughout the day, and grab you and grab you again, as this one has done.
In the dream I have been hiking on a trail with two other women. I don’t know them in waking life, but we are friends in the dream. We are resting in a little cafe, and the one woman will not stop talking, will not stop just hanging out. I want desperately to get back on the trail again, to get out in the wild, but they just keep telling me to wait. Finally I tell them that I am going out again, and they can catch up later. They’re as happy to see me leave as I am to get out of there.
I am heading down a precipitous rocky and dusty trail, so grateful to be out in the wilds again, so free. It must be noted that in the physical world, I tend to stumble and trip down mountainsides, but in this dream, I am elated and confident. I take a sort of leap down the mountainside. I don’t fly, exactly, but I catch air. I drift down. I feel air holding me as I glide down to the next dusty shelf. Again I leap and glide and land. Again. Again.
Then I am walking on flat land, in woods. I think this is another of those regular dreamscapes, one of those places that doesn’t look exactly like the previous woodsy dreamscape, but I know now, looking back at it, that it is the same one as in a previous dream.
Scene shift and I am in another cafe/store, gathering supplies to get back on the trail and try to meet up with my friends. I feel delayed again, but this time I want to get to them, not to get away. I walk out of the town, following small back roads through farmland. I cannot find the woods. I stop people and ask, but they say that the wild lands are really far away–how did I get all this way on foot? I stop at a farmhouse, and it happens to belong to friends. They offer me things to read, food to eat, and a lovely skirt and blouse that don’t actually match each other. But they can’t help me find the trail.
My dream is book-ended by impatience and dissatisfaction. But oh! The flight.
Gratitude List:
1. Dreams of flying
2. Wildlands
3. The Water Protectors
4. Deep sleep
5. The last hurrah of summer
May we walk in Beauty!
During yesterday’s day alone, I took a little time to play with the Dreamscope app. This is younger me as a mermaid.
Gratitude List:
1. Featherbed. The very definition of coziness. (Check out John McCutcheon singing Featherbed.)
2. Yesterday’s solitude. I feel prepared to be back among people.
3. The great-horned owl calling from the bosque.
4. Dreams of flying. In last night’s dream, I wasn’t actually flying, but jumping and gliding. Still, it fulfilled the wild feeling of catching the wind.
5. Stones. Prayers.
May we walk in Beauty!
This is one of my favorite views of the ruins of Disibodenberg, the abbey where Hildegard was brought as a girl. I ran it through a Mosaic filter on the Dreamscope app.
This is a poem I wrote several years ago. I am in the process of deciding whether there’s an essential wisdom to the poem that warrants revision and inclusion in my next book. Meanwhile, Google Translate and I are having a little fun with it. The stanzas in parentheses happened after I sent them through several languages in Google Translate.
Now I realize
that I must fling myself
into the center of my life
with a fierce intensity
and passionate joy
or risk dissipation.
(I was the center of my life,
and the joy and the pride
or the threat of violence,
I know the voice cast.)
And all while holding the center,
embodying the nature of the tree.
This, too, helps to hold it all together.
(Always occupied the center of the tree.
In addition, all to get together.)
That still small place
cannot exist for me
without the passion that feeds it.
Nor can I maintain the fire
without the quiet and glowing core.
(A small part of this feed
is not available to me without passion.
I am not alone and hearts glowing fire.)
Somehow, “nor can I maintain the fire” became “I am not alone.” I wonder how I can draw parallels between such thoughts. The tense shifts in the first stanza open up some interesting connections, too. Everything has layers of meaning. Does my friend Google Translate help me to elucidate or obfuscate my deeper meanings?
Gratitude List:
1. A day of solitude. The boys have gone to Diggerland for the day.
2. Coffee, socks, and a hat on a chilly day
3. My new fountain pen. The ink came yesterday, and I just want to write and write and write. I will use it for today’s grading. I am thinking of giving it a name: Kalamu, or Chemchemi, perhaps. (Pen and Fountain, respectively, in Kiswahili.)
4. Crows and blue jays. Messengers.
5. Toast and peanut butter.
May we walk in Beauty!
In Patricia Wrede’s Enchanted Forest Chronicles, the witch Morwen lives in a cottage in the woods with a large sign above the door which reads, “None of this Nonsense, Please!” I wonder if I ought to put one above my classroom door. . .
Gratitude List:
1. Saturday mornings when the boys play and play together. I am going to make oatmeal for breakfast.
2. A nice weekend with lots of space for getting my work done. Thinking of going to school on Monday with all my papers graded.
3. Characters from story that inspire me to take hold of my best self. For a little while now, I am going to be the No-nonsense witch.
4. The autumn slant of sunlight. How the hollow glows and then sparkles.
5. Titmice–this seems to be their season in the hollow. They’re not simply grey–there’s a subtle blue that shines in their feathers when they fly. And they have that little touch of russet on their flanks.
May we walk in Beauty!
I love these computer apps that turn a photo into a painting. The photo of the moment the vulture sat on the telephone pole and spread her wings does not do justice to the awe and wonder of the moment, but the painting version starts to add that layer.
<Post-publish edit: After I posted this, I went to my Facebook page and saw that on this same day last year I posted a gratitude reflection on the color indigo. I love that synchronicity. I wonder if mid-October is a particularly apt time to notice indigo.>
Gratitude List:
1. Parent-Teacher Conferences yesterday. It takes extra energy, and it’s a really long day, but I love the chance to tell parents how I see their student in classes. Yesterday one of my colleagues talked about the moments before a parent enters the room for a conference–he said, “You have to ‘put on the child.'” It may sound strange, but that’s exactly right. It feels almost like a prayer moment, that moment of breathing, of calling the image of the student into my head and heart, before we begin to talk. I often find myself glancing at the seat where the student sits when I am talking to the parents, as though the student is there in the room. This kind of awareness is particularly important, I think, when we are discussing difficulties, because conversations about challenges can veer into talking as though the student is the problem, but of course that isn’t it at all. The student may have a problem, and we are there to strategize solutions. Parent-teacher conferences are a kind of professional development–both for the parenting and the teaching. We both come away with ideas for supporting these marvelous young people.
2. The colors of sunset. I am still intrigued by the new research that says that scholars who have studied ancient languages can’t find a word for blue. If we don’t have a word for a thing, it usually means we do not conceptualize it. I am baffled by the lack of blue in ancient eyes. On the other hand, indigo seems to be a color that modern eyes struggle to see. We keep dropping it from the rainbow, or we substitute Prussian Blue. I keep going back to the interview I heard with Oliver Sacks on Radiolab where he discussed his search to truly see indigo, how he could only see it during a drug-induced hallucination. I feel like sunset is the time to settle the eyes and brain into a meditative state that might possibly be able to conceptualize and interpret the colors without the help of mind-altering substances. Sunset and sunrise are the moments when I think I am closest to understanding blue and indigo, to experiencing the shades and shifts of color throughout the spectrum.
3. The Moon, the First Star, and the Dragon-Shaped Cloud–these three accompanied me on the ride home as I drove into the sunset yesterday evening.
4. Literature and Story. When I got home last night, my kids were totally engrossed in their books. One of the reasons that I am an English teacher is that I want to give my students the gift of story. I don’t need them to all become voracious readers, but I want them all to learn to find satisfaction in story. The same goes for my boys–I love when they become involved in story. I suppose that the ability to get lost in a story is sort of like the ability to see certain colors. As we enter a story, we refine our internal perceptions of human experience, increasing our ability to conceptualize the shades and colors that fill the spectrum of what it means to be human. Let’s keep searching for each other’s indigo.
5. Michelle Obama. She is one of the most inspiring speech-makers I have listened to. I will miss her as First Lady.
May we walk in Beauty!
