The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.
-Thomas Merton
Today is the first day of spring. My favorite day of the year.
The Spring Equinox 2017 in the Northern Hemisphere is 6:28 AM on Monday, March 20
The moment the day is perfectly split half in the dark and half in light another second forward in time and the scale is tipped towards light. The days grow longer and longer until the longest day of the year the first day of summer but not yet. Spring is the time of year when life blooms from death, when light wins the battle against darkness and hope is expressed all around us.
Each day as we move into spring the days grow and grow.
my favorite thing about you is your smell
you smell like
earth
herbs
gardens
a little more
human than the rest of us
― Rupi Kaur
Today is my 44th day of student teaching. That means I only have 26 more school days at Leawood. It's wonderful how 44 days can change a person. I did not know the neighborhood Leawood gardens existed in Columbus and in 44 short school days I've fallen in love with another corner of this beautiful city!
The plants have begun their blooming, their slow and subtle yawn, waking from winter's nap. It always begins at the ground, the low places. Isn't that how all of the best things begin? Maybe that's why they call them grassroots. I notice the small bushes flashing stem tips of green while their big brothers remain bare and bark brown but as the days grow longer the green of the buds seem to climb the heights of all the plant life of Ohio. Until finally even the tallest of our trees upon the highest banks of this wonderfully flat state, paint their branch tips with that wonderful green.
My favorite color green, but not any green. I love the green of the leaf when the sun shines through. It can't be manufactured by Crayola's best scientists. It cannot be fully captured by Nikon's sharpest lens. No, it must be experienced in it's time and season. The right time of day among her sisters in the forest filling the skyward view with that amazing green. I can't wait for those days. But I must, and I like that.
Spring brings with it those chilly mornings and warm sunshine afternoons, the kind of mornings make your coffee mug summon a dancing genie. The kind of afternoons that make the soil feel extra soft as you reach your hand into the Earth's crust. It's these early days of spring that always give me that itch to quit it all and start landscaping again to push the wheelbarrow and dig the soil as I did at 24. It's these kinds of days that make me want to move back to that quiet small hometown and work those long 10 hour days at the lumberyard as I did at 16.
But teaching brings me a different kind of satisfaction from my work. It isn't shown on my body like the sweat, dirt, and muscle aches of those previous jobs. It is a sort of cultivation, not like planting a tree for a client, not like hauling shingles for the contractors, it is different, and it is very good. Watching the students develop from 2nd graders into 4th graders, it is like watching the green slowly paint the colorless forest.
But the cyclical flow of the school year will soon bring me satisfaction and fulfillment for all of my needs. Soon I will see the growth of the students as they learn during the winter and I will work the soil and see the growth of the harvest as they push towards the sun during the summer.
And a life lived with these seasonal cycles, makes all of those nights and weekends of studying and planning very very much worth the harvest of a satisfying life.
Joe Pug - I Do My Father's Drugs
-Thomas Merton
Today is the first day of spring. My favorite day of the year.
The Spring Equinox 2017 in the Northern Hemisphere is 6:28 AM on Monday, March 20
The moment the day is perfectly split half in the dark and half in light another second forward in time and the scale is tipped towards light. The days grow longer and longer until the longest day of the year the first day of summer but not yet. Spring is the time of year when life blooms from death, when light wins the battle against darkness and hope is expressed all around us.
Each day as we move into spring the days grow and grow.
my favorite thing about you is your smell
you smell like
earth
herbs
gardens
a little more
human than the rest of us
― Rupi Kaur
Today is my 44th day of student teaching. That means I only have 26 more school days at Leawood. It's wonderful how 44 days can change a person. I did not know the neighborhood Leawood gardens existed in Columbus and in 44 short school days I've fallen in love with another corner of this beautiful city!
The plants have begun their blooming, their slow and subtle yawn, waking from winter's nap. It always begins at the ground, the low places. Isn't that how all of the best things begin? Maybe that's why they call them grassroots. I notice the small bushes flashing stem tips of green while their big brothers remain bare and bark brown but as the days grow longer the green of the buds seem to climb the heights of all the plant life of Ohio. Until finally even the tallest of our trees upon the highest banks of this wonderfully flat state, paint their branch tips with that wonderful green.
My favorite color green, but not any green. I love the green of the leaf when the sun shines through. It can't be manufactured by Crayola's best scientists. It cannot be fully captured by Nikon's sharpest lens. No, it must be experienced in it's time and season. The right time of day among her sisters in the forest filling the skyward view with that amazing green. I can't wait for those days. But I must, and I like that.
Spring brings with it those chilly mornings and warm sunshine afternoons, the kind of mornings make your coffee mug summon a dancing genie. The kind of afternoons that make the soil feel extra soft as you reach your hand into the Earth's crust. It's these early days of spring that always give me that itch to quit it all and start landscaping again to push the wheelbarrow and dig the soil as I did at 24. It's these kinds of days that make me want to move back to that quiet small hometown and work those long 10 hour days at the lumberyard as I did at 16.
But teaching brings me a different kind of satisfaction from my work. It isn't shown on my body like the sweat, dirt, and muscle aches of those previous jobs. It is a sort of cultivation, not like planting a tree for a client, not like hauling shingles for the contractors, it is different, and it is very good. Watching the students develop from 2nd graders into 4th graders, it is like watching the green slowly paint the colorless forest.
But the cyclical flow of the school year will soon bring me satisfaction and fulfillment for all of my needs. Soon I will see the growth of the students as they learn during the winter and I will work the soil and see the growth of the harvest as they push towards the sun during the summer.
And a life lived with these seasonal cycles, makes all of those nights and weekends of studying and planning very very much worth the harvest of a satisfying life.
Joe Pug - I Do My Father's Drugs