Summer Beckons

The sun is shining in the Pacific Northwest. We are regularly enjoying three to five consecutive days with blue skies, gentle breezes, trees in full leaf, and blooms celebrating nature’s pallet.

While nature is in full, feverish pitch, summer beckons and so does the temptation to ease away from the urgent press of students’ academic and social needs. There are many persuasive and historic reason for this annual downshift, yet this year the contrast between the lure of nature and the needs of students gnaws on my mind. As I plan the clean up and closing of my classrooms, I feel the tug of nature’s blossoming, birthing and bursting forth. I notice how disconnected school can feel from the primordial rhythms of life, and how desperately I want to reconnect them. It makes me wonder what will it look like when I do…

Perhaps summer would include weekly gatherings for me and my students in places that inspire – everywhere from local libraries to trail heads. Those eight weeks would be filled with our book clubs held in dappled sunlight beneath arching branches; movie-maker projects capturing action at the skate park, and dreams spoken out loud over glasses of lemonade. Nightly blogs would be written and read with star-gazing breaks built in. Shared morning cocoa and coffee would ease the complexity of making some sense of the news and its implications. Similes, metaphors and fodder for our pens would surface in pools, streams, lakes and water parks. I have to wonder, could summer look more like this if the rest of the school year did too?

Maybe, just maybe, giving in to temptation is the right thing to do.

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Mom, it’s just a cone….

I have the dubious privilege of teaching my oldest son to drive these days. Thrills and skills characterize our car time. He’s really doing an amazing job, and he stays calm amidst my occasional bout of nerves.
Yesterday as we were practicing backup maneuvers in a local parking lot, the slice for today’s blog emerged. I’d “borrowed” 8 cones from my husbands soccer supplies and we set our course with them in the empty parking lot. As my son made a cut to early, my voice skittered out and approached a wail, “g-g-go wider! Yikes!” His unflappable response, “Mom, it’s just a cone…”
We repeated this exchange twice more, and on our fourth round, he gave me The Look. Now, how a 15- year-old managed his father’s very own, “Will you chill” expression, I have no idea. And it worked.
I had to pause my litany of all the reasons and possible repercussions that led me to frantically worry about the cones being squashed. This pause reminded me that celebrations are more important than avoiding minor mistakes in all areas of life: I need to celebrate more and worry less…easier said than done, yet that’s my goal as I walk into our learning space today.

Holy terror Batman!

My oldest son starts driver’s ed today.  Enough said?

Missing It…

A phantom thought raced by me today…. In the middle of intentionally living life to the fullest, I wonder if I’m somehow missing it? Just because it’s cliché doesn’t make it less true.
Is the struggle I’ve constantly faced to remain connected to my writing a symptom of missing what’s important in a bigger way. The feeling that I never have enough time to reflect, let alone watch the grass grow or smell the roses, may be telling me that I’m missing “it” … The very marrow in the bones of a thinking woman’s psyche, contemplation, is missing or maybe it’s more accurate to say, draining away. The tap may be the very challenges that used to assure me I was making the most of every moment…the frenetic pace of those challenges feels like they’re filling up every quiet place inside me; and I miss the quiet, thoughtful moments of me. Me and nature, me and mine, me and God, me and it – whatever it may be…

A place verses a space…

There are myriad places I’ve chosen to write over the years. I have places I record the writing, places I do the writing, yet I continue to struggle when it comes to making space for my writing.  My writing life is rather like an overfull lottery bin eternally spinning round – full of numbered nuggets waiting to be pulled out, but there’s no one pulling anything out.  I know, I know, I’m the writer – I’m supposed to pull them out and grow them from nuggets into actual pieces of writing.  So here I go…I have a new place and renewed intent to open space in my life for living on paper…also known as writing.

There really couldn’t be a worse time – I’m in a new job, going to school for an additional certificate, running mom’s taxi and homework help, trying nurture my marriage and keep my balance amidst it all.  But I have a friend and colleague who said, “…start sooner than that – don’t wait.”  Add that encouragement to the muse gnawing at my brainstem because I’ve starved her for too long, and a dash of every author’s advise – write; write all the time write some more….and a blog is born.