Sunday

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When I was in college (which sometimes now seems strangely long ago), I used to decide I was going to write a blog entry, and just do it. I would begin (usually on a Sunday like today), and just go, not knowing where the winding trail of words would end up, only trusting.

I am sitting in my apartment with the AC off and all the windows open, because this morning my roommate found fleas (ugh), so we set off bug bombs this afternoon and now I am airing everything out. The sun is warm on the back of my neck, and I am happy.

School starts on Wednesday. I haven’t taken the time to be sentimental about it, but it occurs to me now that maybe I should. Writing about what I do all day doesn’t give those things their value, but doing so certainly helps me to understand them.

This will be my fourth year in front of a classroom, my fourth year in the working world, my fourth year as neither a student or a child. I have changed. I have changed so much that sometimes I wonder if I show physical signs of it. Do I walk more quickly now? Does my voice have a slightly lower register? Has the shape of my face stretched and sharpened?

But much more has stayed the same. Maybe it’s silly to say that and post it to the internet, which is a place renowned for its daily hysteria over change, but sitting in a quiet room reminds me that it’s true. There are vines which press themselves against my bedroom window, and they are just the same shade of green as the ones I used to play in and around in my backyard as a little girl. A warm room full of indistinct laughter and talk still sounds the way a full stomach feels, the same as it has for centuries. We all still walk around carrying little burdens of trepidation and confusion and annoyance and wornout cares, which would have looked perfectly familiar to the ancients. We still sing.

All of this hints to me that the truth of the matter is not so much that everything changes, but simply that I am growing up in God’s world, and everyday my eyes see more of it: the good, the warped, the beautiful. There will be moments I will meet which will be discouraging, and of course I may allow myself to be discouraged by them, but I must remember that there will be other moments coming, and then more and more. One day, the more will become most, I will meet my Lord in eternity, and my education, my child-growing-to-adult years, will be complete. I will be ready to begin the real business of living.

So that’s how I’m trying to begin this fourth year out in the beautiful old wounded world: worship and keep my head up, so that as I grow I won’t miss a thing.

Beauty Past Change

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On Sunday, I got back from an overseas trip that was the product of many very long-term dreams and plans. I find that I’m grateful for so much.

On a Friday a couple weeks earlier, Karen and I drove up to DC. We listened to old high-school era mix CDs of my sister’s, and got Chik-fil-A. She put her feet up on the dashboard, and then when it got dark and poured lashing rain for the last couple of hours, both of us got worried about my driving. It all felt very 2009, which was fitting, since that was the year we had sat in a booth in a Chik-fil-A back in Greensboro as teenagers and made a list called “Alice and Karen: London Extravaganza 2012!” Five years late is not that late. As we waited at our gate at Dulles the next morning, I thought that a lot of things were being fulfilled.

We stayed the first few days with my sister in Southall, which is in southwest London. They call it Little India. I always think that coming into Southall as a white American is double culture-shock, because you’ve got all the neat, well-worn British infrastructure, but it’s overwhelmingly, full-to-bursting South Asian.

On Monday night, while we watched a wonderfully ridiculous Bollywood movie, and ate wonderful chicken curry and paneer, one of Mary’s roommates covered our arms with henna, and for the rest of the week when we were out around Southall, we got surprised and approving looks from the locals. I bought a really great coat for £5.50 at the charity shop Mary helps run and stared longingly at the beautiful saris that I have no clue how or excuse to wear. And of course the whole family plus Karen ate at Mirch Masala our last night in the city. Mary ordered for the table: lamb on the bone, two kinds of chicken, naan, veg, more paneer, and pitchers of mango lassi. Then we walked back down the sunny crowded streets, full and happy.

Of course, we saw Central London too. The first day, I dragged Karen and George from Kensington Gardens, where we saw the wonderfully ridiculous Italianate memorial a grieving Victoria had built for her Albert, past various important landmarks, all the way down to the Thames, entirely on foot. We ended up at a pretty sliver of park called Victoria Tower Gardens, where we sat on a bench and watched the river go by. That was my favorite part of the day.

I like the quieter corners of cities best: Karen and I walked around Notting Hill another evening,  and when we went to Oxford for the day, best of all was walking through Christ Church Meadow. We sat by the stream there, watched people go leisurely punting past, and took polaroids.

Later in the week, when the whole family had gotten there we went to Hodgkins Certified Favorite London Places: the British Library, Hampstead Heath, and Apulia for an early birthday dinner for Dad. Mom had gotten us all to write poems for him, and after we had read those out and were full of Italian food and wine, we walked around the corner to see an emotional Royal Shakespeare Company production of The Tempest. I had seen The Mousetrap the night before with Karen, but I didn’t compare them. I just enjoyed them both.

 

Then on Saturday Karen left for Brussels and the continent, and my family strapped on our packs and took a train to Birmingham and then another one to Welshpool. Out the window of the train as we were crossing into Wales I saw a field crowded full of solar panels with dozens of sheep wandering between them. I knew that we were getting close.

Back in the eighth century, a Saxon king called Offa decided that he wanted to invade Wales. When this proved more difficult than predicted, he forced his slaves to build a very long earthen wall between his territory and the Welsh, so that they couldn’t invade him back with more success. So now there is a 150 mile walking path named after Offa’s Dyke which winds along the present-day border between England and Wales, back and forth across (and sometimes right on top of) the Dyke itself. Our plan was to do about seventy miles of it, heading south. (Except apparently what the British call walking is what we call hiking, but it’s probably for the best that we didn’t understand that beforehand.)

We got off the train at Welshpool, and it was raining. So we pulled our ponchos over ourselves and our packs and lurched into the town like hunchbacked swamp-beasts to find lunch in a shop. I got a Scotch egg (and others got other things, like sausage rolls,) and we set off down the canal. By the time we reached the actual entrance of the path (marked by the marvelous yellow acorn that we all learned to love so well), the sun was out, and we stripped off our ponchos and marched forth through various wonderfully rolling private pastures, confident in the Right of Way Act for walkers.

Then our precious guidebook announced that there were double arrow climbs ahead of us, and we realized that we had not quite counted on this level of exertion. It was the sort of hill that would almost certainly have had switchbacks in the US, but of course it was just someone’s farmland, and you don’t put switchbacks on that. So we toiled up it for a good hour or two, with a very important reprieve at what was marked as a “special bench.” (All benches henceforth became special.) But after that first painful climb was finally over, there were golden barley fields to cut straight through, which, when you were in the midst of them, went on and on, only stopping at the sky, and then there was a shadowy pine forest that our guidebook called “Grimms’ fairytale,” and a country estate with tall, tall trees, and tame pheasants dawdling past our feet. And then there were hot showers and an enormous dinner at our inn.

The days after the first one blend together more, (or, rather, I’m not going to subject you to a play-by-play,) but I consistently wrote in my journal about the beauty and my tiredness and my contentment. I said that none of these things could be overstated, and I wasn’t being hyperbolic. It was the most beautiful–you did not really have to climb for a view–the view was everywhere. I was the most tired and the most content. We played Spades in pubs at night while waiting for dinner, we picked and ate blackberries as we walked, we had cake at the top of a windy hill and read Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Psalms aloud to the livestock, we took advantage of the free tea and biscuits for walkers in country churches, we squelched in our boots when it rained, we ate bought sandwiches in the ruins of the castle where George Herbert was born, and we saw thousands upon thousands of sheep and marched along daily in their droppings. We even, inevitably, came across a couple of them in various states of decomposition, one with a monarch butterfly fluttering in and out of its ribs. My mom said there was a poem in that, and I agreed with her, but I couldn’t think what it would be.

I realized as we walked up and down and over the hills that I was capable of much more than I had thought, though I resented the fact that while you climbed, the best and farthest views were at your back. (I knew there was a life lesson in that as well, but I decided simply to learn it by osmosis, rather than by dwelling on it.)

We cut our walk short by a day to spend time in Hay-on-Wye, a little Welsh town with more bookstores per capita than anywhere in the world. We split up in the morning and then met back at a bench near the town square with our individually accumulated book piles, and in the afternoon took a cab to Llathony, which has a beautiful ruined Priory and only about three other buildings. Our driver gleefully played chicken with the other cars on the narrow Welsh roads, and drove so fast along the side of the mountain and through Gospel Pass, that I said seriously to myself, “Well, if this is the way I go, it’s so beautiful that I don’t think I’ll mind.”

That was a symptom of the way I felt the whole two weeks, though. Once I got past jet lag in London, and adjusted to the fact I was somewhere new, everything in me seemed to simplify and slow and fall into its own groove. The rain which had been terrifying on the initial drive up to DC became friendly as I squinted through wet eyelashes, looking for the next path marker. The sun brightened the things around me: the grass, the roofs, the crowds of sheep, the crowds of people, and I was able to appreciate the shades of difference it made. The practice of gratitude became easy and easier.

Common sense says the feeling will not last, but I’ve been home for a few days now, and it’s still hanging on. On the plane on the way back, I wrote a haiku about the clouds outside the window, unconsciously inspired, I think, by the legions of sheep I’d witnessed staring so stolidly at me earlier that week. So who’s to say that doesn’t mean something?

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

  Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

     With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

                            Praise him.

Measurements

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If I were to tell you briefly what I miss most about studenthood, I would tell you that I miss all the measurements. I miss the measurements because back when I had them, they could tell me how I was doing. The grades told me I was doing well, or I was doing alright, or sometimes they told me “Oh no!” The comments I received along with the grades gave me other measuring words: “Excellent analysis” “Adequate reading” “Very poor introduction.” But my favorite was the way that for a student everything, good, adequate, or poor, came to an end: years, semesters, classes, papers, projects. Everything reached a point where it was finished, polished and shiny, ready to become my ancient history. I used to love the moment when they passed out the test and you put your notes under the desk: whether I had studied for fifteen minutes (which was not enough) or three hours (which, frankly, was rare) there was nothing more I could do now. I knew what I knew, and not what I didn’t. I found it easy to be a philosopher when it was up to others to decide the value of my work.

But now it is hard. I have a great deal of freedom in my job, and I am grateful for this, but it means that much of the time I am my own judge, jury, and occasionally executioner. Each day I come in, and for lack of anyone else to constantly measure me, I become the fly on my own wall as I make curriculum decisions, pacing decisions, policy decisions, grading decisions, classroom management decisions. I sit and watch myself, with the good, adequate, and “oh no!” score cards waiting in my hand, as I make second to second decisions about what words and inflection to use with the student I’m speaking to. Oh, I want to do well. I want to do well so badly that I am hard on myself, because how else will I grow? I’m terrified I might end up complacent or even delusional about my own performance. So I come into school each day, saying, “Alright, do better, Alice,” without really knowing what I mean by that. Sometimes I wonder if the standards I ask myself to meet are possible, or even definable. But I never know, because that final test that would tell me never comes.

And if school is bad then summer is worse. It is formless and quiet. By choice I spend a lot of time by myself, left to my own devices. And there’s the rub. Alone, unshowered, on a July Tuesday morning, I sit on my bed, feeling a desperate pressure to accomplish something, without entirely understanding what I mean by that. I know that it is summer, and I am free. Free to do all the things I don’t normally make time for: cook and clean and read and write and walk and talk and put on make up and spend money. The list begins to grow and overwhelm me, the Mr. Knightley I have built out of extra shards of my own conscience says “Badly done!”, and I end up watching Netflix and indulging in a self-loathing which is nothing like rest.

I say all this not to sound dire, but because this is so often the gist of my inner monologue. I want to be told that I’m doing wonderfully, and by a more reliable source than myself, but I also want to be alone, and do things my own way.

So first I must laugh at myself, because that is usually a good way to begin (and beginnings are the best endings).

And second I must repent of more than a little self-aggrandizement. I must repent of the silly belief that even if I cannot be the savior of the world, I can still be the savior of myself. I must remind myself that goodness and growth and learning come not through human effort, but through God’s grace to us.

Last, I must find a new way through. I am not a good measurer of myself, so I must find something else to measure, some other structure to lean on, to tell me the value of the work I am doing. I must hold it up to the cross, I must ask it about joy, I must find if it leads me to worship.

Philosophers have measured mountains,

Fathom’d the depths of seas, of states, and kings,

Walk’d with a staff to heaven, and traced fountains

       But there are two vast, spacious things,

The which to measure it doth more behove:

Yet few there are that sound them; Sin and Love.

Old Loves and Magic

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The other night I finished re-reading the fourth Harry Potter book, and I realized my heart was racing. I felt warm and sad.

I’d forgotten how much I love children’s books, which is funny because I have shelves full of them. I read them when I was a kid, and continued to read them unashamedly through middle and high school. They weren’t the only things I read, but clear, sweet stories of adventure meant for audiences with the most wide-open minds were always my first love. I wrote my high school senior thesis on happy endings in children’s lit, and returned to my favorites during summers in college to be reminded and rejoice.

But I don’t read quite as much anymore (though I’m trying to make up the deficit this summer), and when I do I feel duty-bound to plow through grown-up books, to check them off my list, so that I will be improved.

For example, I’m about to force my way through the end of Brothers Karamozov, which was recommended to me over and over with great sincerity and enthusiasm by quite a few people whose opinions I respect. However, the novel has sat next to my bed for a very long time, containing three separate bookmarks which represent more than a year and half of teeth-gritted effort. This is not to say that I think that Dostoyevsky is too smart or difficult for me, or that it is not a wonderful novel, or even that I won’t enjoy it someday. I’m just saying that right about now, I am not loving it as it ought to be loved.

I must face facts I have forgotten: I do sometimes get that lifted, warm-and-sad feeling when I finish a book for adults, but I get it so much more often with kids’ books. When you write for children, there is no need to be obtuse, because children are not shy about the truth. It will not startle them coming round the corner as it does many adults. The best children’s books treat good like good, bad like evil, and mystery as if it is something wonderful to revel in. But I can’t really explain–stories have to be experienced.

Grown-up literary novels are written by people who expect, for better or for worse, to have what they have written discussed and pondered and considered, and perhaps, on a sunny day, enjoyed. But a good children’s novel is meant to be fallen into, to be put on like a garment,  because that’s what kids do with the things they love.

On my fridge is a little slip of paper in my fourth grade handwriting. It looks like this:

Council of Galadriel

A written explanation of the inner workings of this girl-power-on-the-grammar-school-playground circa 2001 version of Tolkien’s masterpieces would not be worth the space it would take up on the page. But suffice to say, when I look at this little list now, more than fifteen years later, I have two reactions, both of which make me smile.

First: Only one of the girls listed had even a small working knowledge of what the novels actually contained or who any of these characters really were (and she was not me), but we understood magic, that these names with all their solemn vowels could be portals to some greater world, and we wanted in to that place.

And second: That magic naturally fit and even characterized a childhood friendship which would become the foundation of something which has so far proved to be enduring. Of the three other girls on the list one just moved out of my apartment, one just moved in, and the third is moving back to Greensboro with her husband at long last later this month. And if you mention a good story to any of us grown women, we will glow. We loved magic then, and in a different, deeper ways, through years of practice, we love it now.

So shame on me for neglecting the stories which first taught me so much. Maybe next time someone acts surprised that I’ve never read whatever adult classic changed their life, I will write down the title, but then, if I am feeling brave, I will recommend right back at them one of the books which changed mine.

Maybe, in good time, I will become my grandma as I remember her, repeatedly confessing with only a very little bit of regret that as she got older she would merely re-read the her same favorite books over and over, because “they were just so good!” It is well for each of us to find stories in our own heart’s language.

Note: This entry from 2012 contains recommendations of some long-held children’s favorites, all of which I still stand by wholeheartedly, if you’re willing to stomach my sometimes stilted and flowery descriptions.

Summer Update

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This is going to be a little more of a vintage-Alice-blog-entry: more rambling and personal, probably not very philosophical. I guess summer brings out the nineteen-year-old in me.

I’ve been done with work for two weeks now. I’ve reorganized my bedroom, gotten a massage, accidentally made an obscene amount of corn pudding, had my oil changed, gone to a wedding, applied for a credit card, donated four bags of clothes to Goodwill, finished reading eight books (three of which I began at least a year ago, two of which were re-reads), and finished writing one (short) short story. Hello, June.

Other highlights so far have included more in-depth planning for trips to London this summer and next, getting to sit down and talk with various wonderful friends whom I almost never get to see, ordering stuff off Amazon Prime nearly every other day, and listening to heavy summer rains wash down my windows in fresh torrents.

Also, Karen moved out on Saturday. I will miss living with her and her habit of walking to my room and beginning enormous theological and cultural conversations with no preface whatsoever. Even though I have a lot more stuff than she did, it echoes here now.

The last summer I spent at my grandparents’ in Missouri was in 2014. They were not really doing very well at that point and shouldn’t have been left alone for long, but sometimes I got restless. Some nights, despite all the books I had to read and the movies I routinely rented from the Redbox at Walmart, I felt like bursting out of my skin. Everything around me seemed to be either stagnant or in decay, so I would take my grandpa’s pick-up to the Sonic in town, where I would buy a large cherry limeade. Then I would drive out into the countryside for an hour or two, down all the little highways with letters for names, and I would try to get lost out there, in the silence of the thick summer. I was never able to do it, though. No matter how far I rolled down the windows, and how the wind rushed through my hair, all my responsibilities and cares stayed in their neat little pile on my lap. I never managed not to know who and where and why I was.

Over time though, I find I mind that less. Responsibilities and cares tie me to people and purpose and community. You don’t always need to be lost to be found.

So, like I said, hello. I’m here and I’m grateful.

 

Peace

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School is done and so is our post-planning workweek. I don’t think I genuinely believed the last day of school had happened until about three or four days after it had. I am mind-weary. Teaching fills you up to overflowing, but it also makes you forget almost everything you ever learned. (This is ironic, but, happily, so are most things.)

The other day, going through papers at home, I came across something I wrote when I was seventeen. In it I had quoted a line from T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral: “Darkness declares the glory of light.”

I used to love that line when I was a teenager. I would quote it aloud and in my writing. I may even have transcribed it onto various whiteboards around school, because that’s the sort of kid I was: obsessed with words and more starry-eyed than was necessary. Reading it again startled me. Though I used to be so fixated on those words, somehow I hadn’t thought of them for years, and I was arrested by their truth. How had I forgotten? What superfluous worries had edged them out of my consciousness for so many years?

A couple nights later I took a short walk by myself. It was not really dark yet, only fading into gray, but there were fireflies coming out anyway. I thought of the line again: Darkness declares the glory of light. All sin and evil is just good that has been twisted and marred. Nothing bad is original material. So the existence of any wrong means that there once existed, and if you believe the promises of the God I serve, still exists, an opposite and more powerful right. So all darkness, in this or any world, inevitably, though unwillingly, testifies to the existence and the power of righteousness. We identify a shadow only by perceiving the light around its edges. That’s what Eliot meant.

As I continued to walk, alone in the June evening, a small voice asked politely if I still believed it to be true. The darkness you understood when you were in high school was tiny compared to the darkness you know of now, it said. Has the light really grown in proportion?

Hesitantly, I tested it. I summoned the creeping, long-fingered spectre of my anxious fear, which did not exist at all when I was a seventeen, or certainly not with the size and power it does now, and asked what particular light it declared. What was the opposite of fear? I resisted the immediate urge to shout “Boldness!” which can sometimes be foolishness, or even “Courage!” for which fear is actually a prerequisite. I wanted more than that. I stared into the deep trees leading down to the arboretum, lit by the shy lightning bugs, and realized: peace. The existence of fear declares the glory of peace.

Peace never seemed to me to be a very important virtue. It is, as some of my students would say, vague, and usually brings up visions of Miss America contestants expressing their hopes for the world at large, or automatic signatures on emails from hipster Christian college students. But maybe it is hard to express, because, like humility, it cannot be showy. You can impress others with your love and joy and kindness and courage and perseverance and patience, but peace is simply not an outward action. In fact, I think peace may be invisible. The only two people who will ever really truly know if you are at peace are you and the God who made you.

Peace is the state of being right with God. You can have all this world, but give me Jesus. To be at peace is to be able to unreservedly worship, to enter the state for which we were made.

So though teaching makes me forget and heavy shadows loom larger with each passing year, I am learning and learning still. I am learning that peace is the virtue for which I have long been thirsty without knowing it, and I am learning, like Lucy Pevensie does, that Aslan grows larger with each passing second. Not only has the light I can see grown in proportion to the darkness around me, but it will eventually obliterate that darkness and surpass it, far into eternity.

All things exist only in Thy light, and Thy glory is declared even in that which denies Thee; the darkness declares the glory of light.

The Impulse for Home

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What I have to say today will be something I know I’ve said before.

When I was in college I was obsessed with the idea of home. I wrote about it on here a lot: home, friendship, and the weather. In fact, my fixation became so obvious by the end that the poem my dad wrote for my twenty-second birthday was simply called “Homing.” “Our daughter’s always leaving to return– / Her warmest heart is longing after home– / For home she’s made, and for her home she’ll yearn,” ran the refrain.

And then I came home. I lived in my parents’ house for a year, and now I’m in my own place about a mile away. I’ve stopped thinking about home as much, and I’ve certainly stopped writing about. I’m here, right? I don’t need to miss it.

Except sometimes late at night, when I’m not sleeping (which I’m often not), I get homesick. I become keenly aware that I am not where I really long to be, that I live in a place that is shattered, alongside people who, like myself, are bruised and bent from birth. I am more aware of the reality of sin than I’ve ever been before, and sometimes on those nights, even safe in my own bed, I can hear it oozing through the floorboards and pounding in my veins, until I am nearly deaf with the sound. It makes me sick for the land I have yet to lay eyes on, the land where this is set right.

But though I haven’t laid eyes on that final country yet, I do know its taste. It comes to me, and to you, in flickering part-pictures. You find it in conversation with the people who are the gentlest, in the handwriting of someone you love, in some combination of colors, in a very full room or a very empty one, in five-part harmony, in a single voice which speaks a single word. You blink and it’s gone, but for a moment you were Home and now the air is full of its lingering wonder and tang. That’s no accident.

I am trying to be more conscious about bottling these moments to save, not because I think they will cure my late-night homesickness, but because I am greedy to have heavenly truth here on earth. I want what those visions will teach me.

Two weeks ago, while sitting in my second period class, I wrote this:

The sun is out, and this makes me feel as if I am standing up straighter. Like its beams are strings attached to my spine and my chin that tug up, up, up. I feel soft and melted on the inside, as if all those things that weighted me are dribbling away and soon I will float away like a balloon, swinging unsteadily, joyfully, from my ropes of light as more of my forgotten cares drip off my dangling toes.

So that is how I feel. I am grateful, and gratitude smells like rosemary.

That rosemary-sunshine-gratitude is what we’re made for. The rest is shadows.

Classroom

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I have been thinking about trying to write more. Not write on here, but push myself and write the things that are hard for me to write, like short stories. (It’s a little funny that short stories have become the most frightening form for me, considering that’s where I started as a teenager.) So I was thinking the other morning that I should write what I know. It is not the only writing advice, but it is tried and true and good for quelling fear. I looked out over my sophomores who were working on their journal entries with kind-of-sort-of-maybe diligence, and I thought, But how do you write fiction about that? Those kids are real and personal and ever mutable. They’re wonderfully, painfully individual. My everyday experience as a teacher is shaped by each one of them, and though my words can accomplish something, I am not fool enough to think they can capture all of who my students are in a single plot arc.

But there is one way to give you an in to the day-in and the day-out, I think, and that’s to tell you about my classroom.

My room number is 208, but I’m always getting confused and telling people it’s 210. It’s the room where I took Geometry and Precalculus when I was thirteen and fifteen, so it knows my tears and worries of old. It has green carpet and one green wall and two windows with curtains that, like so many other things, I inherited from a teacher before me. The walls are littered with maps and colorful student projects, and a lot of things in my room are broken. Notable items include a three-legged table, a chair separated from its seat, and a pencil sharpener with a crank that’s inconveniently missing its handle.

In fact, back in December when I injudiciously allowed my precious freshmen to decorate my room for Christmas and the whole scene turned into a magnificent catastrophe, I made a “Broken Things” list on the board, to which a few students joyously contributed.

The list was, perhaps, a bit hyperbolic, but there is no denying my students are very comfortable in my room. They tell me so themselves and sometimes I am frustrated. All of my current students are at least fifteen years old, which is quite old enough to understand that when they make a mess, someone, somewhere, must eventually clean up after them. And yet at the end of a long day as I pick up debris off the floor, I will remark bitterly to anyone in earshot (or very often no one at all) that my classroom is probably the world’s largest trashcan. (Though I do get a lot of nice free mechanical pencils.)

Other frustrations include the fact that space is at a premium and so aside from the previously mentioned broken items, my fairly small room houses two teacher desks, ten student tables, twenty student chairs, various and sundry cabinets, shelves, and storage towers, and whole lot of moving bodies and foot traffic.

So the familiar running patter of instructions in my classroom includes: Get out of my window, stop leaning back in your chair, get out from behind Ms. Gillespie’s desk, whoever that water bottle belongs to needs to put it away so I don’t see it again, don’t sit on that table it has three legs, yes I know my stool is shaky but it’s mine not yours, STOP leaning back in your chair, take your bag off your desk, no projectiles in my room no I don’t care what it is or why, get your hands off each other, put the scissors away, shut the door for me, put my table back where it goes, do you understand that every time you lean back in your chair like that I picture your skull crushed on the floor and your blood and brains splattered across my carpet?

Clearly I say a lot of words every day, and sometimes, like my teenagers, I complain just to hear the comfortable sound of my own voice, but the strange fact remains: most of those “broken things” have been in bad shape since around October, and I have yet to put in a help ticket to the trusty facilities team. And it’s not because I’ve forgotten.

I suppose the silly secret is that I’m a Romantic. I think of my classroom as a living thing, an organism, a place of life. I secretly like that it has wounds, that it shows signs of my students’ sometimes-misguided exuberance. I am grateful to find that the space where I breathe and sit and sigh and dream and talk and spin my energy out like thread for at least eight or nine hours every weekday actually feels lived in.  It reminds me that quite a few souls are constantly in and out of my door and that things happen there every day. I must continue to make sure those things are valuable.

Sunlight Palace

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I’m about to begin a little poetry unit with my sophomores, and I’m excited. As I’ve been planning, I’ve been reminded how important a good image is to a poem. Poetry all begins with taking your words and using them to build an image so clear and sharp that its corners could cut you open and make you bleed.

And this has got me feeling wistful. As I have sunk more deeply into this mid-twenties stage of life, I struggle to find things I can write about on this blog. I want to write the bright and the bold and the strong and the poetry, but the things in my present, though mostly oh-so-good, are often too fragile and complex to be splashed onto the page of some public forum. And the future, of course, is only a whisper.

So what is left to me is the past.

At the bottom of my parent’s backyard there is a fence that belongs to their backdoor neighbors. But before that fence was there, there was a great big tangle of trees, some of which were fallen. We played there in the summer, and the soft mulberries layering the ground stained our feet such a deep and lasting purple that I think the soles of mine remained patchy crimson well into my teen years. Beams of light played through sheer green leaves, and my sister named the place Sunlight Palace. When you are small, everything seems big.

Sunlight Palace had different rooms. There was a main living room, in front, with a long bough stretching across like a couch that everyone could sit on. There was a main bedroom, which was exclusively the province of “the big girls” (none of whom were me.) There was a “Martin Luther King Jr.” room, named by me because it had a bunch of branches that stood straight up, like they were standing for what was right, and there was a spacious kitchen which no-one was allowed into after the first week or two because it was suspected of harboring poison ivy. My own favorite spot was the trampoline, a horizontal branch about a foot off the ground which was pleasantly springy. Pooh would have called it a good thinking spot, and I was a child who did a lot of thinking.

We invited our friends over with the sole purpose of playing in Sunlight Palace all afternoon. It was sometimes a main party attraction. Its shifting light and shadow oversaw unending games of Orphan, and dozens of petty circular arguments, all easily and happily resolved by magnanimous promises that “next time you can be the baby.” We hiked for miles upon miles, back and forth at the bottom of my mother’s garden. We feasted on violets and mulberries, and chewed up mint leaves in lieu of brushing our teeth. We cunningly lived off the land, all in sight of our safe bedroom window and my dad washing dishes at the kitchen sink.

We stopped playing there eventually. You always do. But I still remember the pang I felt when, sometime around late elementary school, new neighbors moved in, cleared out the brush, and built a tall, flat fence. Everything looked shallow and short. The pain was near to what I felt a few years later when my mom unexpectedly put my favorite reading armchair out by the curb for the trash truck. I perhaps had not really known other people could actually touch these things, let alone cart them off to a distant city dump. I thought that I held them like treasures in the palm of my own hand. I am nearly twenty-five and it hurts a little even now to admit: perhaps Sunlight Palace was never really ours. Perhaps it was just borrowed for a while, when we had most want of it.

So even the past is not mine. I only held it for a while. Because this place is not home; I am not Home yet.

Blessed Are the Februarys

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I feel as if every year in February I write a blog entry about how little I like February.

This is because February is grey. It has a sandy feel that goes down your throat and into your stomach, and everyone seems tired and cynical and little bit empty in the eyes. I usually feel used up and far-from-home.

So since this February has arrived in all its disheartening splendor, I have been feeling small and small and smaller lately, and then this past weekend I read The Great Divorce. And I read where the Spirit tells the man with the lizard on his shoulder that “the gradual process is of no use at all.”  I stopped and I sat very still. This is at least the fourth time I’ve read the book, this scene has always been my favorite, and I think I may even have already underlined those words before. But I guess I haven’t actually been paying attention.

For a very long time, I’ve fed myself the narrative that since life is long and winding, and we change so slow, it’s okay to come to Jesus the long way. It’s okay if I don’t do the best thing, the right thing, today, or if I only do it halfway. I’ll begin being faithful eventually, when I’m older and better, when I’m tough and mature enough to handle it. I’ll join the ranks of the saints once I’m fit for sainthood.

But He must have all of me now no matter how flimsy and sullen that “all of me” is. The plan is not for me to inch towards Him as I have the strength and inclination. I’ve got to throw myself onto the pyre to be made new. And beyond that blaze lie the unknown regions of sheer grace.

Blessed are the poor in spirit,

Blessed are the ones who sing off-key,

Blessed are the ones who’ve lost their appetites,

Blessed are the ones who forget their turn signal,

Blessed are the ones with illegible handwriting,

Blessed are the uncomfortable, the fragile, the speechless, the lowly,

Blessed are the ones who are often flat-out wrong,

For theirs is the kingdom of heaven, and the “Bleeding Charity” that flows at its heart is theirs for the taking.