Standing at the Trailhead of Winter

There are moments when I wonder why I continue teaching and think it would be good for my soul to go a different direction. Then I think I'm too old to start over. There's no way I could start anew and make the same kind of living I am currently enjoying. So I just sigh and continue the direction I've been going for the last twenty-five plus years. Then, out of nowhere, a message is sent telling me I'm doing exactly what I should be doing. This morning, as Ado and I were enjoying our early morning walk in a neighborhood I love strolling through because of the mid-century style homes, the tall, old trees, and the quiet, a car pulled up alongside. A voice called out my name, and I turned to see a former student. A student who had struggled due to responsibilities outside of school: work, divorce, kids. But he always managed to complete the work. He always offered his ideas and treated his peers with the utmost respect. He wore his desire for an education on his sleeve...

From my daily journal: Tuesday, May 2, 2017: I am in the writing center. I sit and listen as a student confides in me about a tough decision she had to make this week: telling the man she’s been in a relationship with for some time to leave. He doesn’t support me, she says. He’s always telling me I can’t do this (return to college), she says. I’m 50 and this is the third time I’ve tried to get a degree, she says. I will do this. I will finish, she tells me. As I watch this beautiful woman’s face go from sad to determined to resigned to happy. I tell her about all the women I have met over the years whose boyfriends or husbands were unhappy with them going to college, learning, finding out how smart they truly are. And I think back to just yesterday when I arrived at work, feeling so fortunate for being able to extricate myself from a toxic relationship. Thinking about all the women out there who cannot because they don't have a support network. Or they...

Though my sabbatical doesn't officially begin until August, I've already been jotting down notes when an idea occurs to me, and writing poems and short essays--very rough first drafts of both--to not lose the germ when it strikes. For the first time in my life, I'm taking the desire to be a writer seriously. I'm being protective of my writing time. I write. This is the most recent poem. It came about after an intense, overpowering need to sketch what was swirling in my head. That sketch has been right in front of me on my desk for weeks, helping me get to this: I dreamed of you during the night, again, the fourth night in a row,   and you were walking, again, as if you’d never not walked. I remember awakening in the darkness, smiling at the notion of you showing me where you are now, your legs working fine, no MS keeping you prisoner on the burgundy leather love seat, where you sat through your days then through your nights, as if roots had somehow spr...

For over a month now I've been ignoring the call of my yoga mat. At least when I'm not attending the eight week long yoga 102 class I signed up for. I go to the classes, but at home, the mat has stayed rolled up nice and neat in its carrier. I heard it whispering to me to unroll it, to take some time to move away from that which seems determined to seep into my my soul and keep me from finding and practicing what is positive, loving, good. I just feel frozen. I've never felt unable to act, to trudge forward though my feet seemed encased in mud, like I have over the last month. I find myself standing in the kitchen, staring at the stove but not really seeing it. Or in the bedroom, staring at the bed but not moving to lie down. The other day I realized I had driven through an intersection with a four-way stop, but I couldn't recall if I had actually stopped then proceeded through. I remember passing a few houses just before the intersection, but several seconds from those...

All of yesterday and all morning today, snow fell. Big, soft flakes much of the time. Every now and then, the wind would gust, pushing the snow sideways. But now the sun is shining. The snow is melting. I imagine by tomorrow evening all of the snow will be gone. The transience of this weather event is a reminder: keep looking ahead, for what seems insurmountable now will reveal itself as just a small inconvenience in the bigger scheme of things. Or as my mom always used to put it: this, too, shall pass. I'm trying to keep this in mind given the tension my entire being is feeling right now. I know holding onto the anger is unhealthy. I know I need to use the tension and the anger to walk a more creative path. Only I find this so difficult when my husband is in the same space, which is much of the time since he is and has been unemployed for the last year. I find myself intentionally leaving the room when he enters. I stay at work longer than I need to simply to not have to be here...