Teaching is really hard work.

And if I was a Sculptor

Today I initiated two beautiful plants into my classroom: one Zebra plant and one hanging Ivy. Zebra is not very happy to be transported through so many climates. His leaves are saggy and one of the veins has a crease--which is not good for the whole photosynthesis party. Ivy is quite happy to be in a classroom and she's twining her arms around my bookshelves.

I talk to my plants. Because they won't let me have animals.

My mom said I'm living backwards: I'm doing the old-cat-woman-who-lives-alone-and-talks-to-plants in my twenties. Maybe when I'm eighty I'll wear halters and bikinis and dance around on tables with my fists in the air.

Wait. I did that at nineteen.

Hm.

I live in a spiral and not in a line.
But my students like me--just. Fine.

So far I've gotten everyone to laugh through the Missouri Compromise and the Compromise of 1850 and the general period leading up to the Civil War. Which I count as a great accomplishment.

I have not, however, been able to infuse the older students with the same passion I feel for the WWII era. Maybe because nothing's blowing up yet. Tomorrow I'll stage a debate and make them all pretend they're either Truman, Stalin, or Churchill. Or was it Truman Lenin and Churchill?

John Lennon?

:)


I may have found the solution to the problem: figure out who the heck I'm supposed to be teaching about. And drink more coffee.

Last night I sat around in bed with my toes poking out from under the covers and listening to Anna Karenina on tape. It was bliss.

It's raining still and the snow melts
into my shoes in the morning,
and God keeps splattering his Tears across
the window-panes.
I like it when He laughs so hard,
He Cries.

Like Blood, like Honey (song title: Holly Brook).

Welcome back, to myself I say: as I glance around
the shadowed Cave, and build a new
shelf, shrugged against the wall. The rain cries,
down the melting snow outside
and I knew: I know,
.......I know I'm back again.

Seldom seem to understand me when I mumble
incoherently;
Seldom seem to want to see the
thoughts
..........that
.............spill
.............so list-less-ly
from the open palms that grasp at: nothing--Cling--

..............(to what's Right. In. Front.
..............of your eyes.)

'Welcome back,' the walls coo, 'My Friend,' while I slink
about the frozen Stone.
I know the temporary rain
will slow--but for now
it's a Memory (begging) to stay.

(c) M.K.P.
"Miss Kellie Parkinson"


"Just before she hangs her head to cry, I sing to her--a lullaby. Everything's gonna be alright. Rock-a-bye."

Literature is a beautiful word.

Sometimes magic comes in sunshine and sometimes it comes in ice crystals.

Today it came in a Stick-Shift-Samauri. That's a Jeep, my friends, and that means I CAN stick shift it sweetly through the snow.

I feel like I am unintentionally hissing.

I also made spaghetti, made my bed, made 10th graders smile and made 12th graders groan.

A full day I say. I'm going to my parents' home tomorrow and for the weekend and my heart feels warm with anticipation.

It's nothing abnormal ... but particularly now ... 

in the still of the twilight that

curls round my chest;

with the lift of the lash

and heart's hum in my breast,

My sigh's the conclusion

that wears the sky thin

and the snowflakes (like starlight),

Breathe--Zak: 

and Miss--him.

Blanketed.

A very, very long: exhale.

Two days into running my own classroom. I've traversed across the Holocaust, abolitionism, defined "precipice" and held a full conversation with a four year old. My throat is dry and my lids are heavy but my heart is full.

I wish the schoolday didn't end at noon.

When the students rise and chuck their chairs atop their wobbly desks, their pounding feet march their snow boots and their earmuffs out into the snow and I'm left, staring at my gradebook and wondering why I have to give grades when their intelligence is so apparent. 

And then a late paper comes in and I remember: Be Strong! Zero, my dear, but good effort. I enter the angry circle into the computer and frown. Why can't they all just get a hundred? :)

Morning comes again and my alarm is screaming--SIX SIX, SIIIIIIXXXXXXXX, SIX AM, SLEEPY and I groan, I moan myself out of bed and onto the cold--the frozen--floor and into my dress pants, my curled hair, my mascara, my collar. Be teacher, I command the dark circles under my eyes.

Another night of restless sleep: because I care, I CARE, if they listen or if they stare or if they twiddle their pencils or if they flip through eager pages, drinking or rejecting my words. My lessons.

Suddenly it doesn't matter if I can write it well, if the cursive looks pretty on the board, or if the sentence is eloquently stated: "Dot thine eyes and cross thy tees, my students."

Nah.

I want to know I can be heard. To be heard, to be understood: do you know what it is to care for young minds?

How could I ever be a mother if as a simple teacher the condition, if the education, if the future of these near-STRANGERS not only means so much but drives me so much into a passionate fury. You are too young not to enjoy learning, that you may love and BREATHE it every day,

the rest of your days,

my students. My friends, compatriots, Watchers, Listeners, hearts, smiles:

my children for the hour. 

And at the conclusion of a too-short-too-long-day, I sigh my way up the hill, textbooks and laptop and heart in tow: to an empty house shrouded in snow and I tilt my chin to the sky--"WHY, clouds? Why pour your white on me each night that I must dig my way out in the dawn?"

So lonely, these walls, especially when the days are filled with such sound. I come home, not to a home, but to a Cave and not to a Heart but to a phone. 

I am torn between pure joy and lonely sorrow. I long to be embraced. I shook a hand today and silently willed that she might hold on a little longer. But the Strange fingers were released in customary tone and the imprint left shadows in my skin.

I miss, I miss: Belonging in the arms, in the heart, in the Soul of--a Home.

In the Beginning

I wake with a force in my chest—breath—and my name echoing in the wake of an ethereal Being. I have no memory preceding this moment. An element holds soft pressure against my back—grass. There is no other presence but everything is presence. I am aware of potential outside my core—limbs. My heat breathes with the grass. These limbs—my hands—push my body above the earth but I do not leave the earth. Dust swirls from between the blades to embrace my toes. I have no knowledge but knowledge of presence. And there is no other presence… but everything is presence. I am fully being of greater Being: I am reminded by the breath in my chest. Learning invades my vision without warning and Being whispers the same echo of my name—Adam. And in learning I know—I am Adam: being of Being. My skin sheds the dust.

Being possesses a quality of … weight. A pressure that does not touch my skin but dwells in my presence. I do not have a name for this quality but it inspires an image of sky—the color of sky in the deep of the sea when it rocks. I present to Being my quality of question and Being is Silent. I am to wait; the knowledge waits and will come to pass in the fullness of time. These words I obtain from Being and keep them to recollect at a later moment.

Sometimes the Hardest thing and the Right thing are the same.

When I came back to school last semester, it was in the wake of the decision to live contrary to the year previous. I was greeted with the pessimistic responses of a lot of dear friends, of acquaintances, of strangers I'd never known but who'd watched me tear apart my world.

According to them, I wasn't "fun anymore." Or brushed aside because "it wouldn't last."

And then I was supported by the love of my closest friends, of a circle of women who supported me, of best friends who picked me back up when I slipped and helped me keep moving forward, who kept me pressing on, and who encouraged me by simply pointing to the sky.

It is because of them I am here today. Because a few hands held mine, a few arms encircled my tired frame, and a few hearts reached out to me in love and lifted me in prayer. And the doubters were proved wrong.

And I continue to grow. Continue to put one foot in front of the other, trudging on with my chin to the sky, watching and Waiting in hope for the Promise of His Name.


It gets harder every day.

I have a splinter in my thumb this evening, from shifting firewood, and I want to do everything but pull it out, cause I know it'll hurt, when the skin slides against the wood and slips against the exposed veins, causing blood to trickle its tear down my finger in protest.

Part of me thinks that if I just leave it in there, my body will naturally push it out. And it probably will. Once my mom leaned on a cactus and years later, her body pushed the spikes out of her back. I could leave it and hope.

Or I could grab the tweezers, use the tools I've been given, and pull it out. And stop fidgeting with cleaning the kitchen counter, with making my bed, with sorting the laundry.

Tonight, I still lonely. But I am white
snow, glittering across the frozen ground as I shift
beneath the gaze of the Moon and Wait--wait
for morning, wondering whether I will melt
in the Sun or grow with another fall
of flakes from the velvet sky.