What a roll of the dice! Well, here’s a fun poem…not my usual fare…
Your ego is a feckless maelstrom
billowing with doom
a virtual vacuous vacuum
threatening to consume
all who wander near your path
for all infinity
your Luciferian hubris-wrath
the end of you and me.
She heard the same voice
before she ever arrived,
reading and reading
her big sister’s voice,
kindergarten booklover,
reading and reading
see how she listens
and looks toward the pages
—a reader is born.
My granddaughters: Scout, age six, reading Bible stories to Micah, age three months
The field at the end of my street
where cotton used to grow
where morning glories of purple and pink
bloomed in tangled profusion
where the autumn sun
burnished the treetops
where myriad insects would chorus
all summer long
is cleared
is being bulldozed
for houses
I will never again see the cotton
stretching out like snow
or the morning glories
rioting in the grass
the trees will be obscured
if they are allowed to remain
and the great insect choir
of quivering magic-sounds
is forever silenced
I cannot imagine how the field
is feeling
but I
am forlorn
Cotton from my lost field
Heard on the news this week: Broken heart syndrome is a real thing.
It happens after significant stressors. Too much adrenaline. The heart is weakened. It hurts.
There’s a scientific name for it: takotsubo cardiomyopathy. It derives from the Japanese word for “octopus trap,” after the shape of the left ventricle of the heart in this condition.
It is temporary. The broken heart can heal in a short time, maybe days or weeks.
It can sometimes lead to complications. Rarely death, though.
It seems to affect mostly women 50 and older.
But I wonder.
I wonder, as I regularly step in for teachers who are out.
I wonder, as I absorb laments and frustration and anger about the depth of student struggles.
I wonder, as I listen to students reading poems about tasting the salt of their tears.
I wonder, when I wake up so tired on workdays, when I have so little left to give when I get home.
And I am usually one to see the glass half full, to find the awe in each day, like…
the blue heron standing a glassy pond on the drive to work
the whorls of white smoke floating up from the chimney of a little house in the countryside, struck by the rising sun and transformed into clouds of peach-colored light
the newest photo of my three-month-old granddaughter who’s beginning to smile more and more
hearing my boy play old hymns on the baby grand piano at church with such a multitude of notes and joyful liveliness that surely, surely the angels dance
the one little bird (a cardinal?) singing for all it is worth, from the treetops
-these things strengthen my heart.
And keep it, I think, from breaking.
It is a long season, this pandemic, with its deep layers of residue.
On this day of celebrating love and hearts…I wish you healing peace for the pieces.
The quieter you become, the more you are able to hear. —Rumi
Morning
I rise far too early, don’t I.
Yet it is an act of love
this aloneness in the
dark, being able to empty
my spirit of noise, slipping into silent
meditation before the dewy
dawn catches in the cobwebby
grass, to wordweave away my hours.
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Late Afternoon
The last shaft of sunlight
pales on my pine floor
like a lingering goodbye
from beyond the window
where nothing is stirring
no breeze in winter-bare trees
no birds to be seen nor heard
in this earthtone moment
of prolonged silence
and stillness
time alone moves
it only ebbs
whether in seconds
or epochs
even in this moment
I can feel moss
growing by millimeters
on ancient rocks
caressed by golden fingers
of fading sunlight
I can almost hear
a song of gratitude
and I can’t tell
if it’s being sung by
the moss
the rocks
or the sun
only by something
which knows
time never flows
and that
soon, soon
it will be night
followed again
by morning light
Smiling face in moss. blondinrikard. CC BY 2.0
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with thanks to Ruth at SOS-Sharing Our Stories: Magic in a Blog for the inspiration with the Rumi quote and to C.S. Lewis, who wrote of rising “barbarously early” in the morning: “I love the empty, silent, dewy, cobwebby hours” (Letters to an American Lady).
Discouraging week
somewhat less than magical
suddenly transformed
by the appearance
of a tiny green dragon
and its paper tree
enchantment handmade
and proudly given by a
sweet student, to me
Created by a fourth-grader, the fantastic little beast lives on my bookcase now
My son challenged me to make something with this roll of my metaphor dice: loss, elusive, junkyard.
This is what I have, so far…
Junkyard Loss is Not Elusive
It is said that imagination
is the junkyard of the brain
where used things lie in limbo
until they are destroyed
taken back by the grass
or called into service again
which is to say
no experience is wasted
only catalogued and stored
in the deep recesses of memory
until the need for it
should arise
in solving a problem
in creating a new thing
in connecting patterns
in different ways of seeing
relating
expressing
understanding
which is to say
that beloved childhood doll
with the cracked face
or the scent of
your father’s shaving cream
or that dog, that dog
that chewed up your best shoes
but slept every night by your side
long ago, so long ago
comes bounding back
for a specific purpose
for there is unseen order
in a junkyard
where used things lie in limbo
until they are called into service again
or destroyed
or taken back
by the grass.
I will call it
as I see it
from the ever-shifting sands
at the shoreline
looking out
over the vast and raging sea
called School
nowadays
so much debris
in those rolling waves
flotsam and jetsam
of curriculum
of standards
a wreckage of data
certainly broken systems
and even “learning decay”
-phew-
how’s that
for positivity
it is not
that I don’t have faith
I do
I believe in kids
I believe in teachers
I believe in overcoming
I also believe
everyone doesn’t believe
and I know
as I hear the crashing waves
and the gnashing teeth
that the current
will drown us all
if we pull
apart
if only
if only
I could build a sturdy ship
I’d name it
Collaborative Spirit
and
if I could just get everyone
on board
we’d sail
over
and through
and beyond
what we can even
imagine
together
it’s just that
one person
can’t build a ship
(or relation-ship)
alone
no
building the
Collaborative Spirit
takes all hands
on deck
that’s how I call it
that’s how I see it
from the ever-shifting sands
at the shoreline
looking out
over the vast and raging sea
called School
nowadays
Wooden ship on the Rupsa River (Bangladesh). joiseyshowaa. CC BY-SA 2.0
It is not what I expected in a meeting at the end of another long workday.
A series of self-care surveys.
Not so much the physical, psychological, and emotional ones.
The spiritual one…
There’s my word – awe!
‘Other’, for me: Write about all these things.
Which I do.
And my spirit sings.
In my planner for February is this quote:
Relationships are the fabric of our lives. They should be treasured every day, but sometimes we get caught up in the stresses of life and forget to express gratitude to those we love most. How can you show more appreciation and kindness this month?
This notion of relationships as fabric captivates me. Fabric is made of woven or knitted fiber. Some fabrics are delicate. Some are strong. Fabric can tear. I remember a skirt I bought as a teenager when I started making some steady money of my own. High-waisted, flared, houndstooth, almost ankle length. Tons of fabric. It hung in rippling folds, fabulous in its 1980s way. I adored it. I was wearing the skirt, and hadn’t had it long, on the day I knelt in the floor to pick something up and inadvertently stepped on it with my high heel, which tore right through the fabric when I stood up…rrriiiiiip.
A six-inch tear in the lovely houndstooth, to my horror. I might have cried (I cannot recall) but I wasn’t ready to pitch the glorious skirt.
I brought it to my mother.
She was a seamstress who worked for a major department store. She tailored men’s suits, fitted bridal gowns (“these girls want the dresses completely remade”), and took in sewing at home. Many a night she spread fabric across the kitchen table, pinned patterns, marked and cut the cloth with sharp scissors, a rhythmic snip-snip-snip. She made several stuffed animals, like mice and precious long-eared bunnies with a wardrobe of changeable clothes. Her work was stellar; everyone said so…
“Mom, can you fix this?”
I handed her my voluminous, mutilated skirt.
She considered the rip, held it closed with her fingers, puffed on the cigarette clamped in her lips.
“I can try.”
She fixed it. Not like I’d imagined. The stitching was bulky and obvious. “I had to go over it more than once,” she explained. It looked as big as a train track to me. Like the garish stitching on the Frankenstein monster’s brow.
I loved that skirt. I’d paid too much money for it to just throw it away. Maybe I was expecting magic…
I wore it anyway, hoping the long folds in the natural draping of all that fabric would hide the ugly scar. Most people never noticed, but I knew it was there.
Relationships are the fabric of our lives.
Fabric can tear. It can be mended, but it won’t be exactly as it was before the ripping.
So it is with relationships. We wear the scars in hidden places. How much could be avoided by careful attention and mindfulness in the first place…especially if we value a relationship…
Sometimes we get caught up in the stresses of life and forget to express gratitude to those we love most. Show more appreciation and kindness…
This goes a long way in preventing the ripping, the unraveling.
In every relationship, great or small.
The thing about relationships:
they never really end. They are
with us, always within us, inextricable as the
silkworm’s thread to silk fabric,
forming the infinite intricacies of our
days, our stories, our lives.
Photo: A Symbiotic Relationship. Fouquier ॐ. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
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with thanks to the Slice of Life community at Two Writing Teachers
and the relationships forged by sharing our stories
lit bits and pieces 