Gratitude List:
1. Keeping up with the work. I’m starting out better this semester. Better focus. Better organization.
2. The color orange. Saffron. Tangerine. Burnt Umber.
3. Student poetry. Really. I don’t know that I was trying particularly hard to impart the craft of the poem this semester, but some of these poems in the unit project are really quite amazing.
4. Reflection and reflection
5. Re-membering
May we walk in Beauty!
This is something I wrote in 2015, when Joss was 5 years old:
Today when we had walked to the top of the hill, we stopped to examine that big patch of ice that formed when water pooled just above the eastern corner of the fields beside the little grassy airstrip at the top of the ridge. It formed a nice ice-puddle which Joss immediately dubbed his very own skating rink. I got to increase the step-count on my pedometer by walking around and around and around the puddle, holding on to his hand as he skidded and slipped over the icy surface. It was a classic Christopher Robin moment, a small boy happily involved in the imaginative possibilities of the moment.
At one point, he lay down on the ice, and said, “Oh! It’s beautiful! There’s writing here!”
The ice had crystallized in a hieroglyphic pattern across the surface.
“Can you read it?” I asked him.
“No. It’s in cursive.”
But there’s not a shred of doubt in your mind, Small One, that the writing is there to be read, if only one can crack that cursive code. I know the feeling. I had experienced it myself only moments before, watching a flock of Canada geese honking their way toward the River in front of a Michelangelo sunset sky, the shifting patterns of Vs undulating across the clouds. I had the same feeling as we were watching the robins moving through the fields, the dark brown of their backs seeming to make the very earth bubble and boil like a live thing. I get that feeling when I see bird tracks in the snow like cuneiform writing on the most transitory of tablets. And it’s the same feeling I get when I see a branch or twig that has been burrowed by small insects who leave behind their trails in the wood, like a complex system of writing just waiting for me to figure it out.
Perhaps it’s just that age-old human trick of trying to make sense and meaning out of the seemingly random patterns of a chaotic natural world. Or perhaps it’s an intrinsic awareness that we all have, that even if the random patterns about us do not make alphabetical sense, there’s an underlying order or patterning to everything around us, a purposefulness.
Maybe the point is not so much the attempt to decipher the coded purpose in the pattern, but to notice it and wonder at it where and when we see it, to lie down right there on the ice and say, “Oh, it’s beautiful! There’s writing here!”
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