Surprises

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Gratitude List:
1. When we all work together. . . There is just something about coming together with a group of people to accomplish a specific task that creates a sense of community and tribe.  I’ve experienced it in various ways this week–a listening committee, a group helping a friend move, being part of a web of people holding someone in prayer/love/light, classroom work, collegiality.
2. Mockingbird is beginning to welcome everyone back to the hollow in their own languages.  (Okay, I know he’s actually establishing territory, but the effect on my grateful ears is the same either way.)
3. Chocolate. Especially fair trade chocolate.  It is almost impossible for us in the US to extricate our pleasures and our luxuries from the economic and trade systems that oppress others around the world.  May we keep edging our way toward freedom and justice for all people.
4. This coming week.  I don’t know who to thank for the incredibly brilliant idea (whether it’s principals or superintendents)–padding the potential snow days into Easter Break, just after the switch to the final quarter–but it feels like I have been given extra days in the world, like I can slip between times for the next couple of days, get my work done, catch up on my rest, prepare for the coming month, and get back to work reinvigorated.
5. Needle felting.  I started making a couple teeny tiny totoros for a small boy’s upcoming birthday, and his older brother has become obsessed with helping with the needle felting.  I’m a little anxious about a nine-year-old and those tiny spears, but it is perhaps a good exercise in intent focus, and I love doing handwork with my kids.
6.  Hmmm.  I worked hard on this list just now, but I missed this one: new life, birth, how the heart is constantly being resurrected.
7.  Oh, and this one: My favorite Jesus stories are coming up, beginning today: Jesus surprises Mary in the garden. (My friend’s daughter also loves this story: he surprises”his best best best friend,” she says. Yes.)  Then he surprises Thomas and his terrified friends.  Then he surprises the walkers on the Emmaus Road.  Life-transforming surprises.
8. I’ll just keep going: The poetry of David Whyte, particularly Sweet Darkness and Easter Blessing.

May we walk in Beauty!

Conversing With Dragons

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Windflower

Gratitude List:
1. Reconnecting.  Reconnecting.  Reconnecting.
2. Crow’s Dragon.  You know the Ursula LeGuin idea about dragons?  They’re incredibly wise creatures–intelligent and compelling conversationalists, yet they’re tricksy and manipulative, and you have to be extremely careful or you may find yourself being subtly tricked into making promises you do not want to keep.  Someone has given me a dragon she drew that exquisitely captures this aspect of dragons.
3.  A clean house.  We need to have company more often.
4. Yoga.  I don’t do much, but I do a few minutes every day, and I continue to notice the small ways in which it helps me to be more connected with my body.  Balance, for one thing.
5. Windflowers.  Anemones.  Even more than the crocus, they ignore their boundaries.  They have much to say to me about respectfully blurring the edges of the box.

May we walk in Beauty!

Hearts in the Trees

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(I have a friend who takes pictures of hearts that she finds in the world, and another friend who takes pictures of trees that she loves.  Here is a heart.  And I love this tree.)

Gratitude List:
1. Hearts.  Trees.  Hearts in trees.   The friends who draw them to my attention.
2. All this blooming.  Everywhere.  You’re blooming too, I think.
3. A day off and hanging out with my muchachos.
4. Arts.  I have been thinking a lot lately about how the arts make us more fully human, more compassionate with ourselves and others, more able to deal with and comprehend our secret inner worlds.  I want to do more to incorporate more art into my teaching, to encourage my students to incorporate more art into their projects.
5. Stories of Holy Week.  I have always thought of Jesus as a revolutionary, but somehow this year I have been struck in a more powerful way with the way the stories of Holy Week portray him: the street theater of the donkey ride into the city, the anarchism of the temple cleansing, the subversive answers to the establishment, the way he turned everybody’s expectations upside-down. (How sad that this story is so often used instead to enforce the status quo.)

May we walk in Beauty!

Speak Out!

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Gratitude List:
1. Yesterday morning’s moon, hanging above the ridge behind the River.  I know that it is always the same size, but am always caught by wonder at the way it grows as it settles close to the horizon, how intimacy with the Earth makes it seem more itself.
2. Blue bells.  I know they’re called grape hyacinths, but we always called them bluebells.  Five of them along with a few spiky leaves, in a little pitcher of Grandma Messner’s–just the thing for a tiny spot of beauty.
3. Bumblebee!  Droning drunkenly past my head two or three times.  I felt inspected.  I don’t know whether or not I passed the inspection.
4. Your voice.  Even when it’s been quiet, even when it’s been silenced, you know it’s been there all along.  It will serve you.  Of course it might be rusty at first, a little creaky around the hinges, but it is a voice of beauty and power, and it has something to say.  Wail, holler, whisper, sing, moan, cajole, laugh, stutter, kvetch.  I will listen.
5. How our stories inform each other’s stories.  May the release of each story release the shame of its secret-keeping.  May the telling of each tale offer new insight and determination to the hearer.  May the weaving of our stories together give each of us more power to enrich and enliven the telling of the stories around us.

May we walk in Beauty!

Color and Light

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Yesterday, when I was talking to a student about the really effective way she used quotations by Nietzsche and the Beatles in her Credo paper, she grinned and called herself a Quote Hoarder.  I am one of those, too.  I have to make sure that I don’t just hoard them, but that I spend time reflecting on them as well.  When I take time to contemplate thoughtful phrases, they have a way of popping back into my consciousness at the right moment.

I have been thinking about color and light in the last few days, pondering what I read in Michael Schneider’s Beginner’s Guide to Constructing the Universe about the different ways that color works when it appears as light or as pigment.  The quote that keeps coming back to me as I think about color and light is another of Nietzsche’s: “Color is the pain of light.”   The pure white light is fractured and splintered and we get color, and color blesses the world with such beauty.

I know people who are like the light in this way.  The ways in which they have been fractured and splintered and wounded become colors that reach out and heal and call to others around them.  Perhaps when we are broken open and pulled beyond the scope of what we think we can bear, then new inner capacities appear like colors at the edges of our vision.

Gratitude List:
1. The earnest good will of young people who want to make the world a better place.  I know I have said it before, but perhaps not recently: The future of the world will be in really good hands if the teenagers I know are any indication.  It makes me want to be even more conscientious about doing my part to make it a better place for them to inherit.
2. Color.  I think I need to take art classes this summer.  I want to learn more about color.
3. Gearing up for the season.  Circumstances have nudged us back into a doing a CSA again this year, though in a somewhat limited fashion.  We’re feeling energized and excited.
4. Hidden capacities that appear when they are needed.
5. Spring is coming.

May we walk in Beauty!

Fractured Light and Hope of a New Heart

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Last year, I posted this picture I took at the Lancaster Science Factory.  This past weekend I was reading about the colors of light.  Somehow I can’t quite figure out the primaries here–they look the same as physical pigments  to me, or like the secondaries of light: turquoise, magenta, and yellow.  My tech kids at school would be able to explain it to me, I bet.  I am taking a personal day next month to accompany my first-grader’s class on a field trip to the same place.  I will make sure my group hangs out in the light room for a while.

I wrote the following poem/piece last year when we were learning that my friend Kyla’s heart and lung issues were due to Emery Dreifuss Muscular Dystrophy.  Just last week, she was approved by the Duke University Hospital Transplant Team to go on their heart transplant list. Now a new kind of waiting commences.

“There is much I would write this morning, so much I need to learn about myself today,
if only I could write it out.  There is a prayer of sorts, waiting to find its way into the world,
to cast its golden threads through the air.

There is a poem waiting too, about a mother and a daughter,
about the house of the heart, about how I want to join
with a village of women to encircle that house, to sing,
to gather river water, to cook beans and rice, to comb their hair, to sit in silence,
to hold their feet in our hands, to anoint them with precious oils.
Perhaps this is that poem.”

Gratitude List:
1. Health: One boy is up and bright-eyed.  Both of them stayed home yesterday, but there is no way that this is going to let himself miss March Math Madness.  Last year he helped bring his Kindergarten class the trophy for their age group, and he is determined to do the same for first grade this year.  I, too, was not doing well yesterday.  I was sure I was getting an ear infection yesterday, but the shooting pains and the hot ear are back to normal today.
2. Flexibility.  Schedules.  Spines.  Attitudes.
3. Whoever that is singing out in the neighbor’s walnut tree.  Sun must be rising.
4. Easter Break is coming, and I have a couple built-in snow days to enjoy, but now in spring-time weather.
5. Last night’s dream.  I think it was a game.  There were bins and racks of fabrics and old clothes and costume jewelry and things, and we were told to make something interesting.  I was having so much fun tearing an old linen sheet into strips to crochet into a scarf when my alarm woke me.  I had my eye on some blue-green yarn, and now I am afraid someone else got it.  Sigh.

May we walk in Beauty!

Marking the Seasons

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orange moon hangs low
caught in the oak tree’s branches
morning comes slowly

Gratitude List:
1. Campus Chorale concert last evening, and the way the boys let themselves get totally absorbed in the music.
2. More senior presentations tonight. I love my role in this rite of passage.
3. Marking the seasons.  This is the first week of spring, and also Holy Week in the Christian calendar.  Lots of pieces to contemplate.
4. Morning snuggles.
5. Owls.

May we walk in Beauty!

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Hello, Speedwell!  Happy Spring to you, too!
Speedwell, tiny bright eye of spring.  Blue of sky, shot through with strands of deep blue threads of Mary’s robe.
Yesterday I saw a patch of dead nettle, such a bright purple against the dry golden grasses and the mud of the field.
And the shaggy forsythia is pushing out yellow blossoms.

May spring come to your spirit,
first the moment of exquisite balance,
when your night and your day have equal play within you.
Then the riot of song in the mornings,
calling you out and outward,
warmth returning to your bones
and sunlight on your hair,
rain that soaks the ground around you,
nourishing your roots.

Look around:
What is ready to hatch?
What is coming to birth in your spirit?
How will the season nurture this new thing
within you?

Gratitude List:
1. Balance
2. Rebirth
3. Transformation
4. Intention
5. Joy

May we walk in Beauty!

Sleepy Saturday

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Good morning, Sunshine!

Gratitude List:
1. Purple and Gold.  ‘Tis the season of gold and purple: aconite and myrtle, daffodil and crocus, forsythia and windflower.
2. Sleeping in.
3. Bluebirds.  Just beneath the high and insistent shrill of the Dawn Chorus, the bluebirds and mumbling and muttering.  They always seem to be saying, “It’s okay, Little One.  Everything is going to be okay.”
4. That baby green bursting out everywhere.
5. Curiosity.  Particularly the curiosity of children.

May we walk in Beauty!  So much Love!

Glorious List

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Gratitude List:
(Sometimes I accidentally type Gratitude Lost.  This morning, before I had engaged my brain, I started typing Glorious List.  Perhaps I should have let that stand.)
1. Beginning the process of blessing and launching these young people into the world in their evenings of Senior Presentations.  It’s a high expectation we place upon them, to call them World-Changers.  They are each, in their own ways, prepared to make the world a better place with the gifts and skills and compassion that they have been nurturing in their time at our school.  I am so proud of them.  Monday will be my last evening of blessing the last half of my crew.
2. A single crow rowing her way across an overcast sky.
3. The ducks are wandering all over the school these days, searching for nesting sites.  They quack outside my window.  I actually like when the natural world distracts us from the scholarly task at hand.  It’s a reminder that this work is only part of what they are to learn.  I should run out to the shop before I go to school and see if I can find that old plywood nesting box from the chicken coop to put outside my window.
4. Kyla has been approved for a heart transplant.  Now begins a new kind of waiting, but meanwhile, knowing that there is a team ready to work with her, a great weight is lifted. The cycles of life and death are so intimately woven together.
5. Rooms and fields where we all can find a home.  I don’t know how to say it less cryptically at this moment, but it is a profoundly important part of my gratitude list today.

May we walk in Beauty!