Messy

Summer for this teacher was wonderful. 
Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful. 

I found the magical things that refreshed me, and bound up the ways I had been unraveled in the spring.  And then, after all of the big and small things in that season, I found myself back at school. 

Life this week is everything I used to do in the spring, but it's fresh again.  Without fail this week is fresh bulletin boards and long meetings and pencils and copies and protocol.  And don't forget the crazy nightmares about losing control entirely.  (I hear you always have those, no matter how old you get.)  But in one said meeting today, our speaker said this.

'Teaching is messy.'

Breezy Trees, Summer Sky, and Jesus

There’s a certain amount of pressure for all of us, I think, to be endlessly productive, to create content around the clock, to say big things every day.....

Let’s resist that. It’s not how nature works. It’s not how seasons work. There’s planting and reaping and harvesting, and there’s the practice of letting a field lay fallow for a while, allowing it to prepare again to produce. For the first time in a long time, I’m practicing silence, laying fallow, trusting that the world will keep spinning quite happily without quite so many words from me.

I’m going to listen more than I speak, rest more than I produce, read more than I write, say“no, thank you” more than I say “yes, please, and quick, and more!”

I didn't write this.  Shauna Niequist did.   But I started there because until today, it's how I felt exactly.  

Switching

I'm done. 

With the D.C. trip.

With my long, winding habit of grading papers in the 13-14 school year. 

With doing things as I can in the moment, knowing I'll have to circle back later and actually do it well.

With crazy, cluttered thinking. 

Hiding Within The Vine

Sometimes when life is loud you move through it differently than you would in the deep silence of another season, one less full.  I like reading things from a bunch of people out there in the world who maintain a site called 'The Art of Simple', and of course it's because they're interested in simplicity.  Like me.  We live in a really complicated world, and the older I get, the more I see with real depth and clarity, that I like things simple.

Prosaic Mosaic

Spring is the time of year when I am humbled as a teacher.  Also just as a person, but it goes to teaching first.  I feel it keenly every year, and now I just expect it.  I am tired.   I am being simplistic.  I am streamlining things.  I am thinking about priorities, and not trying to control too much.  But there is still a lot to do.

There are a lot of things I could write right about now which would, what, somehow prove that I'm busy and really feeling it...?  But I don't want to.  Half of me says I chose teaching, so own it.  Another half says that you don't do this to people unless they're your people.  (And they've already been hearing from me this week.)   Meanwhile, I am doing my best. 

Every year though I discover again in this feeling of ratty humanity that God is artful in how He designed us.  We're wretched and vile and don't have very many manners and sometimes we're just tired.  A few weeks ago I heard the term 'human sandpaper' and it rang in my ears.  It has not left.  Even the students, when they hear a loud noise now, comment on it.   People have short fuses.  In this, I realized that it makes us still, thank you God, long for and hope for something beyond ourselves.  How relieving that it is not just about us.  

Short Speak

Today is....


The Head and the Heart and The Killers
grading
a conversation with  my mom
coffee
the smell of spring
classic awkward traffic in Stillwater, Minnesota
(why?...always?....never before have I seen so many angry decision makers on small quiet roads...)
deadlines
more deadlines
intentional smiling, the real kind, when your eyes crinkle

Furiously Loved in A Tangled, Redeemed Place

"Beauty. Redemption. Miracles. Wholeness. Healing. Renewal. Friendship. Conversation. Prayer. Worship. Work. Music. Art. Justice. Jubilee. Mercy. Love. Sex. Aging. All redeemed.

I want to see the light and I want to see the trees. I want to learn to see them both, moving quickly, stirring with the wind of the Spirit.  I think the Kingdom is more poetry to bear and live into throughout our life, than dictionary definitions to memorize or boundaries to place. Go for a drive, go for a walk, look up and fill your eyes with the Kingdom already come."


This comes from Sarah Bessey who is current inspiration in my life.  When I read Sarah Bessey, it feels like the things I think about (and wanted to say) magically floated through space and time and landed somewhere else far away.  I like Sarah Bessey's words because she is refreshing in the age of reason in which we currently find ourselves.  I become reminded to inhabit my life, to breathe the words I speak fully, and to let the Spirit of God inhabit my life too.