Like the woman who taught me to play the flute while she underwent chemo, who let me pay for lessons in folded towels and swept porches. I visited her yesterday, for the first time since serving my mission, and she talked to me about losing her husband--a powerful influence in my life!--and considering the possibility of dating again, now that it's been more than a year and a half. So strange, that this situation could come into being.
And there living is--the unexpected mixing in with the plan, the backup plan, the revised backup plan, and the completely new plan that came from facing the changes.
It hit me, the grief and the wonder that mix up so flawlessly to make living vital. We swing back and forth in the joy and the sorrow and all that's in between. Somehow, that is the beauty--the living, learning, feeling, thinking, and experiencing that makes up the days and years we're here.
There I was yesterday, saying goodbye to the scholars I've taught this year, their faces bright before me. The one whom had started with the most difficulty hugged me the tightest, with a fierceness that surprised me, and it stung my eyes that he had cared, after all. I took a picture of my empty little classroom and choked back the tears. I looked at the small, silent classroom and felt in myself that things will never be the same again. Those children have made me more than I was. And never again will it be the first year, with all the delightful bumbling about I did.
Just like I'll never be a college freshman again, with late nights and the learning of a new kind of friendship, without the walls that come from living in separate homes. I shared all the messy parts of myself without even meaning to, and found people who still loved me. And I passed classes and failed English and fell in love for the first time of consequence. I took so many years to truly say goodbye, inside myself, and not just in words.
And that season ended, and more rose up, overlapping in a wonderful tapestry of learning which I now wear, adding colors and people and places without end. The season of the second year, of hoping for something better, of becoming more than I imagined I could be.
Every day I become more. Occasionally I wonder at the fluidity in me, at how much my perspectives have changed and will continue to change. I think of the things I've held on to all this time. The truths, as well as the inclaritites waiting to break free when I am ready to see what is real. The people, and the places that I carry inside me, ugly and flawed and free.
And then I think of the life I built inside my head; the way I thought these years would stretch. Oh, it was a nice fantasy, it really was. But this is real. This stretches me. This is better.
This is much, much better.
Good Timber
- by Douglas Malloch
For sun and sky and air and light,
But stood out in the open plain
And always got its share of rain,
Never became a forest king
But lived and died a scrubby thing.
The man who never had to toil
To gain and farm his patch of soil,
Who never had to win his share
Of sun and sky and light and air,
Never became a manly man
But lived and died as he began.
Good timber does not grow with ease:
The stronger wind, the stronger trees;
The further sky, the greater length;
The more the storm, the more the strength.
By sun and cold, by rain and snow,
In trees and men good timbers grow.
Where thickest lies the forest growth,
We find the patriarchs of both.
And they hold counsel with the stars
Whose broken branches show the scars
Of many winds and much of strife.
This is the common law of life.
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