In one of Rumi's poems, I love these lines especially:
Reach your long hands out to another door, beyond where you go on the street, the street where everyone says, “How are you?” and no one says How aren’t you?
All day long, I’ve been pondering how I am not. I am not at Goddard College, finishing a long day of faculty meetings after, as goes my habit, a long night of fighting my travel-spun brain to calm itself enough to tip out of consciousness. I am not walking back to the dorm to get some snacks I bought, likely rice crackers and hummus, to bring to another dorm where most of us faculty convene to relax, joke around, and retell our old stories around wine and whatever crunchy tidbits Karen brought us from Japan. I’m not stepping outside in the cooler-than-here twilight there, watching the tall swaying firs and pines at the forest’s edge, and telling myself to pause enough to take in this beauty.
Instead I’m on my porch about 1,500 miles west and an hour earlier where my view holds bigger sky, smaller trees, and a whole lot of hummingbirds zip-lining without lines from Osage orange tree to feeder to mid-air acrobatics. It’s lovely to be home, far easier on my schedule, health, and sleep cycle, and the air is full of mild buzzing, perhaps the fading out some of cicadas and the gearing up of katydids right before the barred owls call that sounds like a baritone reverse rooster crow.
As some of you faithful readers know, I’m taking my first leave after measuring out my life by semesters much the way J. Alfred Prufrock (in T. S. Eliot’s poem about him) measured out his life in teaspoons. Luckily, semesters hold more than cutlery, and they certainly held me during 64 consecutive ones teaching at Goddard, K.U., and Haskell Indian Nations University. Spaciousness abounds, at least in theory and hopefully in practice soon, without the weight of all the time I would spend traveling, working, traveling, recovering, then undertaking the fabled and heavily-emailed ways of the semester.
At the same time, being human with a propensity for habit and connection, I miss my peeps at the college where residency beginnings are so sweetly imbued with hugging, catching up on each other’s lives, laughing at Katt’s great spins of life, or finishing each other’s sentences on occasion because we’ve been seemingly together forever in this program. I miss the beautiful campus (although I’ll be there in October for the Power of Words conference) in its summer fullness and all those cute Vermonters who think 82 degrees is hot out. I also miss the nearby pond, crazy cold and deep, where I swim with Lise or Lori, having learned the best way is to go in fast and paddle my arms and legs wild-fast to warm up enough to propel myself across and back. Somewhat discombobulated with all the shifts lately, I tell people I’m at twelves and thirteens, sort of like being at sixes and sevens, but more so.
I’m very happy to be home watching the western horizon orange itself dark while listening for what comes next. Who am I untethered to an academic schedule for six months? I have no idea, but I’m very happy to be on the cusp of reaching my long hand toward another door and stepping over the threshold.
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