73tigerlillies

Keep Moving

2023-02-27

Teaching
Today was a grouchy, growls, pain-filled, anxiety-fueled day. I was not my better self. My mom texted to ask how I was and I responded with “I don’t even know. I’m just a stress ball with a migraine in a classroom full of teenagers.”

My desk on an average day.

Students are sensitive to the highs and lows around them. Sometimes they react with kindness and sometimes the teenagerness rises like a wave. Today was the latter; I can’t be too upset by that reaction. Two steps to the side can get you in the weeds pretty easily. I just hope I didn’t make anyone else’s day too much worse. Being a teenager is hard enough.

With the frustration I’ve been experiencing, the difficulty of the day to day is easing in this new space. But I keep reaching for the passion I haven’t had for the last five years. I’m trying. I have good days. I want to do right for myself, for my students. I want them to improve their communication and critical thinking skills….

Lately though, lately, I’ve been considering what else they need to embrace. So many students have an appearance of clinging to ignorance or the party line—whose party line is the question.

I know they have things I’m they are passionate about.

I know they have things they care about.

I know they have things they know about.

How do I get them passionate about reading or writing? How do I help them study all sides of the topics they care about and then communicate what they’ve learned? How do I tap into what they already know and expand it?

These are the things that haunt the back of my mind, that make me feel out of touch.
```
God—Creator, Sacrifice, & Guide—
Help us in these current storms…
Grant us grace that we may share it with others; 
Grant us the wisdom to bring the right supplies, 
So we may help those with less than what we have. 
Please be our shelter from the wild winds. 
Amen.
```
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Be true…

2023-02-26

Real Self BS

I’m one for making plans, but I do my best work in between those plans. If I focus on my bright ideas, I trip and fall and fall and fall and fail.

In 2007 I revealed to myself that I can do just about anything if I keep putting one foot in font of another. That how I finished the Portland Marathon in nine-and-a-half hours which is a long time especially for someone in poor physical health. I finished though—2500 people didn’t, but I did. So did fourteen other people behind me. We pushed ourselves beyond any expectation or known limit just to be able to say we finished.

It’s one of the things I hold close to my heart when things seem bleak.

Lydia lived with me in the fourplex my friends dubbed the pit…Beau only knew the house and fell too soon. The Terrors had a couple of rough weeks adjusting to the row house, but they are solidly settled.

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Eastern Oregon Gothic (additions 22)

2022-05-12

Lists

Health and wealth are on the decline while meanness is on the rise, showing the zombie in some people instead of the soul.

Drive on smaller highways and byways, see all the empty buildings calling out to be captured in your camera…careful you don’t get lost in the holes looking out…

It snows it April now, but doesn’t stick in the bowls & valleys that dot the landscape.

It rains on the east side the way it used to on the west side, but the ocean still beats at the shores…

Yetis have been welcomed by their Sasquatch kin in the woods high in the hills and mountains…other cryptids have been spotted on small-town streets late at night, from the corners of eyes.

Teenagers have stopped sneaking out at night; instead they surf the digital waves, becoming pixilated which makes life tougher when they can’t connect back to the analog reality.

Books have started moving in the library and the computers look like they’ve been taking hits—a war of words and information that’s bleeding into the day.

Poetry is on the rise. Teenagers who dig deep into words without sound around them to stop the magic from coming in…

All the colors are bleeding and the desert is drinking them in, changing the landscape something fierce: will the Courts know where they are when they come back?

Music is a language again. All on its own.

Celilo Falls is still there, under all that water…

Waiting for the fish & the spear-fishers to return.

Someday the concrete will be gone…

And the water will be free.

The Columbia calls to people in Boardman…they don’t always go to the home they came from.

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A Sonnet

2021-01-06

Poems
My seniors are reading sonnets and trying their hand at writing one. They’ve had a couple of good discussions. I don’t think they realize that we will be reading sonnets for a couple of weeks. We will be digging into the rhythm and flow, into the meter, into the structure as we jump around the centuries. For now, we are dipping our toes in.

My effort shows how long it’s been since I’ve written a sonnet. I’m asking them to put themselves out there, so I shall do the same.
```
The world is topsy-turvy;
The monsters all got out.
They took to television with their worry
And led everyone in a huge group shout.
Don’t look under beds;
Don’t look inside closets.
These monsters got elected
By pretending to be hobbits.
The monsters wear suits of gray.
The monsters wear suits of white.
They are the old folks who say
This is wrong. And this is right. 
After all, the scariest ones
Have human daughters and sons.
```
Title ideas are welcome…
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Keep Moving

Be true…

Eastern Oregon Gothic (additions 22)

A Sonnet