Back into September light

September shadows return tomorrow.

March lettuce, started in the fall

The grackles, my favorite bird, are back, strutting around like they own the place, giving me the yellow eye, tossing over sticks and leaves and clam shells, eating pretty much anything that moves.

A lone crocus flower opened up for business, ready for any late winter bee foolish enough to wander out on this chilly, windy day.

Crocus!

I found the lettuce pushing up on the cold frame window. I may leave the frames open now, answering the prayers of the rabbits readying their nests for bunnies.

A March garden dinner sounds like peasant fare--kale, Egyptian walking onion, rosemary, various lettuces from the garden, bread and potatoes from Acme.

The first peas are tucked in the earth now, a week early, despite the nor'easter threatening to hit in two days. I have plenty more to plant.

As you get older, you realize you have far more seeds than you do time. 

On mending a fence

Near Higbee Beach

The earth breaks.
The rains come. The mud heals. The sun returns.
Then the earth breaks again.

For a few dozen cycles of the billions life has been around, you get to share the dance with others, ignorant of where the music comes from, but audible if you listen.

The fence post a few years ago.

The nor'easter blew over a stockade fence post I dug into the earth a quarter century ago. I got out my tool bucket,

A couple of my tools are from my grandfather. He was born in the 19th century, an ocean away. He ran away from home, ended up on the front for two weeks out of three for a several years "fighting" for the same folks who starved his people not so long ago. He lost all his teeth (a toothache bought you an extraction and a day off the front) and got shot in the back of the neck ("I'll be damned if I got shot in the front, I was always running.")

I do not use his tools because of his stories--I use them because they still work. But the stories make the tools feel warmer in my hands.

As I was digging out the dirt from around the post, an earthworm wiggled halfway out of its hole, looking a bit concerned that the earth had disappeared. (I do not communicate well with worms, but it was wiggling a bit, and seemed stressed). After a few minutes it scooted back into its hole.

Cabbagehead jelly seen on an evening paddle

Many have danced before you, mostly not human. We've only been dancing on this earth a short while--but it's no more earned than the air you just breathed in.

I forget this most days.
Today is as good a day as any to remind myself.

And maybe a better day than most--thinking of a few of my lambs today,

Spring, another year older

 Yes, it's a couple of years old, but I liked it then, and I still do.
Seemed like the right day for this.

I met the Bishop on the road
And much said he and I.
'Those breasts are flat and fallen now,
Those veins must soon be dry;
Live in a heavenly mansion,
Not in some foul sty.'

'Fair and foul are near of kin,
And fair needs foul,' I cried.
'My friends are gone, but that's a truth
Nor grave nor bed denied,
Learned in bodily lowliness
And in the heart's pride.

Yeats' Crazy Jane makes sense  in March. This is a hard time of year for mainstream churches. Words fall flat when the earth erupts again.

Today is the kind of day you count the old men in the neighborhood after a long winter. Still missing one, but he may be recovering from St. Patrick's Day. I will wander by his stoop again in a bit.

The cherry blossom buds are tumescent, ready to spew their sperm on our streets, our cars, our heads. Life is, again, for the living.

The big old moon reared up on its hind legs this evening. The clams are in trouble. I could feel the moon pull me along with the sea water. It seems unfair, raking clams when the moon sneaks up so close. The moonlight will dance on their siphons just past midnight tonight, and maybe a clam or two will share in the dance. They need not fear my rake tomorrow.

The crocuses have tossed off any sense of decorum, popping up pretty much anywhere they please.

The sun has returned, and with it, life. The old men left shuffle past and mutter hello, in shoes impossibly thick and black. They know, they know, what we all pretend to ignore.

Grace comes, again, unearned. None of us leave this life intact. Drink the wine, the sun, the pollen, the life.

I have spent too many of last week's hours indoors--I'm tossing this out there and taking a walk....

A story about basil

Last August, various bees sniffed among our basil flowers, seeking nectar.

Pollen grains stuck to their fuzzy bodies, which they carried to nearby plants and half the chromosomes of one plant joined with those of another. Not sure if the bees or the basil felt anything special, but these acts of communion give me joy.

The fertilized flowers dropped their show-offy petals, their opulence no longer needed once the union was complete, and the flowers got down to the business of making seeds.

Come fall, after the first hard frost, I stripped the dried flowers from their stalks.

In idle moments, I'd unwrap the seeds from the dried flowers, tiny hard black secrets holding next spring's promise.

I gently blow the chaff away from the seeds, and put them away in a small brown bag, tucked in the pantry, hundreds of living organisms, dormant, waiting for the sunlight.

Back in March, when the sun was just starting to win its battle with the dark, I sprinkled a few seeds on a tray of peat moss. Tiny green leaves erupted.

A week or so ago, we put our seedling in the ground, and they've been busy using the sun's energy to grab carbon dioxide from the air, to make more leaves.

Last night we ate the first of this year's batch, as we will, grace willing, until the next hard frost come November.

I am getting older, as we all are, but not the basil, living a lifetime between frosts.

And if there's a point to the story, to our story, we can find it in the basil.

We just have to look.

No point trying to grasp the intricacies of photosynthesis if you cannot see the flowers.

Spring silliness

As I type this, a tiny gnat is trying to break through my monitor.

"Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution."

Theodosius Dobzhansky

I should be crafting a descent with modification (misnamed "evolution") exam.

Descent with modification is the heart of biology. Without it, a world with red-lipped batfish, roly-polies, and humans makes no sense, no matter how clever God pretends to be.

Without it, nothing in biology makes sense. Nothing.

Seems sacrilegious to test it using vocabulary and a few standard examples any student paying attention can just fly through half aware of our universe.

 ***

 
I walked tonight, crushing thousands of insects and worms, breathing in microbes, watching squirrels and starlings and dogs and robins and humans go about their business.

A cherry tree late for the party dropped a few last petals on my head.

Mosquitoes paraded around my tiny pond, blissfully unaware that soon it will be filled with young fish born in a tank in Room B362, trapped by glass they learned to avoid, soon to be munching on the young wrigglers laid today.

Sunlight bathes us now, and everything that buzzes or tweeps or flaps or gurgles has forgotten that darkness was ever possible. At least I have.

And if I can forget, despite centuries of words telling me of death and of destruction and of entropy, well, what hope does the fledgling robin I saw bouncing around the Green yesterday have of grasping how serious this all must be.

Seriousness is a human conceit.

It's May. I going to listen to the fledglings for now, as long as now lasts, as long as the sun continues to bathe us with grace.

Red-lipped batfish--really, how serious can we be if red-lipped batfish exist?

The red-lipped batfish photo from PBS here.

Proust in the classroom

I love cherry blossoms, and we live a stone's throw away from Branch Brook Park. At dusk I got my nose dusted yellow from sniffing hundreds, maybe thousands, of flowers.

Photo by Cathy Elliott-Shaw

As I sniffed one tree's flowers, then the next, hundreds of people were taking photos in the ethereal light, the sun sitting snug just below the horizon, a bulging moon high up in the east.

We are (mostly) visual creatures. We analyze light, look for patterns, capture it digitally so we can show others what we think we saw. We have art shows comparing our various abilities to capture light, to hold the world in a frame. We can discern a good photograph from a mediocre one, talk about contrast and angles and resolution.

Me and my nose live in a different world, a world of sinuous curves instead of angles, smudges instead of contrast, a world where time and distances dissolve into layers of fog swirling into each other. The cameras capture the sensuous, pleasing the cortex, blending thought and analysis and the beauty of order; my nose triggers the sensual, flaring up the olfactory lobe, part of our more primitive brain, visceral, without language.

The art of observing, the crucial first step of science, requires all of our senses. Schooling focuses on the visual. For all the talk of various learning styles, our standardized tests focus on what can be seen, what can be analyzed, what can be fairly assessed.

Photo by Colin Archer

I encourage my lambs to use their noses in class--we sniff basil, gingko ("vomit" fruit), dirt, sea water, elodea--and by the end of the year, I see students routinely using their noses when examining something new in class.

This is not something they are ever likely to face on a standardized exam in public schools. Not everything worth learning is easily assessed. When we reduce our classes to laboratories of the easily assessable, we reduce the natural world. When we reduce the natural world, we reduce science.

Alas, odors can be a problem-ever smell a rotten starfish?

First Branch Brook photo NJ photo courtesy of Cathy Elliott-Shaw via nj.gov; 
Second photo  by Colin Archer/Agency New Jersey via NJ Monthly. 

If you live within driving distance, it's worth the hike--
more flowering Japanese cherry trees than anywhere in the States--take that, D.C.! 

Mud and blood

First full day of spring today. I've used up well over half allotted to me in this lifetime.

Got some serious planting done yesterday. Every year I am surprised at how muddy mud can be, then surprised again as I wash my hands in the sink, the dirt tracking into the drain, dark and sinuous, like blood from a deep wound.

The difference? There's a lot more life in a handful of decent dirt than in my veins.

I don't recommend that every child see her own blood washed down the drain, but I do recommend a life where that remains a possibility.

Photo by Leslie.

Now that's a lot of mud.

Spring!

I met the Bishop on the road
And much said he and I.
'Those breasts are flat and fallen now,
Those veins must soon be dry;
Live in a heavenly mansion,
Not in some foul sty.'

'Fair and foul are near of kin,
And fair needs foul,' I cried.
'My friends are gone, but that's a truth
Nor grave nor bed denied,
Learned in bodily lowliness
And in the heart's pride.

Yeats' Crazy Jane makes sense mid-March. This is a hard time of year for mainstream churches. Words fall flat when the earth erupts again.

Today is the kind of day you count the old men in the neighborhood after a long winter. Still missing one, but he may be recovering from St. Patrick's Day. I will wander by his stoop again in a bit.

The cherry blossom buds are tumescent, ready to spew their sperm on our streets, our cars, our heads. Life is, again, for the living.

The big old moon reared up on its hind legs this evening. The clams are in trouble. I could feel the moon pull me along with the sea water. It seems unfair, raking clams when the moon sneaks up so close. The moonlight will dance on their siphons just past midnight tonight, and maybe a clam or two will share in the dance. They need not fear my rake tomorrow.

The crocuses have tossed off any sense of decorum, popping up pretty much anywhere they please.

The sun has returned, and with it, life. The old men left shuffle past and mutter hello, in shoes impossibly thick and black. They know, they know, what we all pretend to ignore.

Grace comes, again, unearned. None of us leave this life intact. Drink the wine, the sun, the pollen, the life.

"The human toll here looks to be much worse than the economic toll and we can be grateful for that," said CNBC anchor Larry Kudlow. 

How many of us don't have a freaking clue? Is that the global economy my kids are supposed to worship?

Time to plant again

A few days ago I plucked a few more morsels off the Brussels sprouts. I'll get a few more yet before they bolt, shedding seeds for next year, as they have, as they will.

Tonight I mixed water and peat, getting ready to plant again, as I have, as I will, so long as I can. Tomorrow I sow the pepper seeds, in two weeks the tomato seeds.

And so it starts again.

***

I pray that my students remember this much--that they were able to grow food in class, with little more than tiny seeds, light, and water, that they are part of this miracle of life, that ultimately the things that matter are ours through grace.

Not through government, or cash, or the gametes of a couple of wealthy Americans who happened to get together.

A child learns that she is part of something bigger than mere human culture becomes someone to be reckoned with. 

No matter what happens on Wall Street today, or in Trenton today, or in D.C., water will start to seep into the seeds I sow, and awaken an embryo every bit as alive as I am, and it will ache to reach the sun.

Everything we eat comes from the ground, and everything we eat will return to the ground, as will each of us.

***

This week I got to meet a couple of folks with a whole lot more human power than I'll ever have, or ever want, folks who rule over abstract concepts using abstract ideas, tossing around abstract half-truths that they either believe (bad) or not (worse).

Planting last fall's seeds into the ground with my hands, a very human act, reminds me of my place. We are all all bound, literally, to the earth. Holding a handful of good soil does me good.

Plants above grown in Room B362, by my students.

The end of winter

Our crocuses bloomed today. A tiny horseshoe crab, smaller than my thumbnail, crawled out of the Delaware Bay. The day lilies are rising again, like Phoenixes from the snow's ashes.

All of this is more real than the nonsense that passes for discourse in the education world. I can still close my classroom door (though I rarely do) and tackle whatever problems we care to tackle that day.

Why is my plant wilting? Hey, sow bug babies! I think my slug drowned.
How come the starfish hasn't moved in three days? Are those mosquitoes?
Look! Peas!

We got kids from Somalia, from Sierra Leone, from Poland, from China, from Ghana. Not third generation, not second. We're talking off the airplane (Newark Liberty International Airport) and into the brink. I taught a child who spoke only Bengali.

And we thrive.

We thrive despite the mandates, the tests, the current climate that forgets the roots of the word public, "pertaining to the people." Our town supported the last budget, despite the struggles of family after family after family.


Families that come from desperate situations know education matters. Families that come from desperate situations value teachers who care about their children. They put their trust in our hands, in our classrooms.

So while the elite press on about this magnet school, that philosophy, the myriad ways to use (and abuse) technology, scouring the US News and World Report for college rankings (and the NJ Monthly for state rankings), most of the rest of us go about our business, getting children ready for loving, happy, and (yes) productive lives.

But never just productive.

I work for Bloomfield, and its families, and for its children. I do not work for Arne Duncan, I do not work for Governor Christie. I give my all every day, because I want my lambs to be happy, in the Jeffersonian sense, and I want them prepared to pursue whatever dreams they hope to pursue.

I wiled away a good chunk of the afternoon on a jetty poking into the bay. I stared at barnacles for a bit, mourned all the oysters scraped off the rocks by this year's ice. The water was exceptionally clear, revealing thousands of comb jellies, floating in with the tides, then floating out again.

My happiest moments are spent on the edges of the sea. 

I stumbled upon the horseshoe crab, not much different than its ancestors that wandered these same shores when dinosaurs still roared. It may be still alive, it may be in the belly of a gull now. Tomorrow I will share its story with my students, because for them, these stories still matter.

And then I will test them on meiosis and synapses and centromeres and chromatids, to get them ready for the state exam in May. Those who finish early will be allowed to study their terrariums, their aquariums, to see how their critters did over the weekend.

 And the day will not be completely wasted, the last Sunday of February, as the light returns, and all things, all things, again become possible.

All photos taken today.

 First one crocuses, then the tiny (and live) horseshoe crab, then the points of a dead horseshoe crab, 

then barnacles hanging out waiting for the next tide, 

and finally, light as seen through the compound eyes of a horseshoe crab.

Berries

She wrote, simply, "hi mike."

I assumed I was the Michael she meant, but it does not matter, berries are for all of us, so I am using the photo. The hand belongs to Jessica Pierce, the berries to whichever mouth gets them first.

***

Along my walk to school are several cherry trees--the cherries are ripe now. I get to school with a tongue stained purple.

I found two blueberry bushes three blocks away yesterday. The mulberry trees are about to give up ripe fruit in the next week or two. It's a great time to be a mammal (or a bird).

The cherries are small and dark, full of bitter tannins countering their ridiculous cherriness.

When I eat a cherry, I believe in God. Not the wordy omega John God--I keep Him in my pocket in late autumn. I mean the atavistic, prehistoric sun god, the Ra, the one who sets off week-long dancing and unpardonable ecstasy. The mysterious one. The unknowable one. The one found in a June-warmed cherry.

Most of the year, I can talk myself into anything. In June, I simply cannot talk. No need. Life is bursting around us.

***

When I was still young, I feared dying in spring or summer, feared missing what was to come, dying in the midst of plenty.

Now I fear dying in winter. I do not wish to die, few of us do, but when I do, I want to be surrounded by possibility, by sunlight, by berries.

I want to be the bee found nestled in the flower at dusk, her last day spent exhausted and resting on clover petal, a life well spent. I do not want to die in the hive. Even a 5 star accredited hive full of well-intentioned bees trained to transition me to the next life.

I am not transitioning anywhere. In June I am here, and no other "here's" exist. In June William Blake makes sense. W.B. Yeats makes sense. Even death makes sense.

***

The school year is winding down. And what have we learned?

I live in a good town. I teach in the same town. I am paid through taxes given up by my neighbors. I work hard, and so do they.

The least I can do is teach their children the ecstasy of June berries, pursuing the happiness of sweet stained lips instead of the demands of a petulant man-child dictating education policy several hundred miles away.

The least I can do is show them our local lichen and hawks and bees, instead of just words in books written by strangers who know nothing about the pair of mallard ducks who slumber on the Bloomfield Green.

The least I can do is show children why I still get excited when the sun rises over our town, our gardens, our homes, and why so many of us choose to stay here. The sun worth knowing is not the one in the textbooks, the one of fusion and distance and solar storms.

The sun worth knowing is the one that keeps us alive, the one that we can feel on our faces, the one that pulls the bay over my clams, the one that blesses the cherries with sugar.

If you want to teach science, start with joy. If you cannot tie joy to wild berries, go play on Wall Street or Pennsylvania Avenue. Real education starts on Bloomfield Avenue.

June

I want to crawl face down in the fields

and graze on the wild strawberries, my clothes

stained pink, even for seven years

if I must, if they exist. I want to lie out

on my back under the thousand stars and think

my way up among them, through them,

and a little distance past them, and attain

a moment of absolute ignorance,

if I can, if human mentality lets us.

Galway Kinnell, from The Seekonk Woods

I have never regretted any moment outside. As in under the sky.
Not one single moment.

I've been cozy, chilled, hot, wet, dry, stung, caressed by the breeze, and almost drowned in the sea. I've feasted on wild berries, feared wild beasts. I've watched ants for hours, and the moon forever.

I've seen life take life, and I've taken lives. I've heard the last yelps. I've eaten critters that squirmed in my hands. I watched a lightning bug flicker in desperation as a spider wrapped her silk around and around and around.

Tonight the honeysuckle blossoms steal words from my cortex, and I welcome the thieves.

June lasts forever when it comes, and is impossible to remember when it's gone. No words are needed in June. None. Life is as abundant as the light. I cannot help myself--I worship the sun now, so tangible on my skin, so obviously the giver, as it settles in the north for a spell.

Tonight somewhere in my town a child is doing homework on an early June dusk. Probably safer that way. Can't have children shirk responsibilities. Keep them indoors. They must stay focused!

Say you're a biology teacher, and, say, you know a lot more biology lies outside the textbook than in it. You're older now, with many more Junes past than any yet to be (graciously) received. What does a 15 year old child need to know? What do any of us need to know?

Ambition is well-rewarded in our culture. Delayed gratification is a virtue. If you want to be rich or powerful, chances are pretty good you won't die in the same town that welcomed your birth.

There's also a good chance you won't know where the local wild mulberries lie ripe for the picking, or where clams can be raked.

In June, my motives are clear--teach the children to see the world under their noses. The world offers riches beyond a wealthy family's dreams, but you need to go outside.

Kids know this until we teach them to forget. Most classes fit well in a classroom--a good biology class tends to ooze outwards.

If anyone asks, say "Limulus polyphemus"

We're taking a bunch of kids to Sandy Hook.

We will be looking for horseshoe crabs, pipefish, eels, and anything else we can legally catch and release. (Clams, alas, are out--even with a license, raking for clams is illegal in condemned areas.)

Many of my kids have never seen a horseshoe crab. Many of those that have, fear them.

Every day from now until the trip I will remind the children that if anyone asks, we are going to study Limulus polyphemus. I work under great conditions, under a wonderful supervisor, but why start trouble?

OK, what do you say if someone asks why we're going to Sandy Hook?

Limulus polyphemus!

What do you say if someone asks you what we're studying?

Limulus polyphemus!

What do you say if someone asks you how nuclear fission works?

Limulus polyphemus!

Spew out a scientific word and folks go running.

***

Part of teaching is getting observed. I don't mind it so much, and prefer frequent, unannounced visits to formally planned lessons since it gives the administration a better idea of what happens in my class, which (ideally) gives me better feedback. I love gold stars as much as anyone, maybe more (I had a lot of concussions growing up), but I learn most from the occasional disasters. A second pair of eyes helps me dissect them better.


Folks without a scientific background, however, often preface their remarks by saying science is too hard, so they didn't really get the lesson. I don't hear anything else said--I am completely deflated. If I cannot teach an administrator a concept I'm expected to teach to children who still believed in the tooth fairy a few moons ago, what's the point?

(And yes, I get another gold star for my collection....)

***

So here's the point--we live in a wonderfully complex , ultimately inexplicable,universe. (OK, that was too much of a mouthful--go stare at an ant colony for a few minutes and get back to me). This fantastic universe appears to be governed by teasingly simple laws.

If I ever hope to get a child interested in grasping these laws, a child who just rubbed a amgazine advertisement for Stetson cologne on his chest while leering at another child who (it seems) forgot to put something on over her stockings, I need to get them outside themselves by getting them outside.

If the Park Ranger asks if we have a permit, I'll just mutter Limulus polyphemus....

The horseshoe crab photo is from NOAA, via Wikimedia (public domain, eh?)

Apropos nothing....

Yes, I know I'm going to Hell in a purple basket
'Least I'll be in another world while you're pissing on my casket...

Leslie likes this, and now I do, too. I woke up with it in my head.

Take all your fears, pretend they're all true
Take all your plans, pretend they fell through
But that's what it's like...
That's what it's like for most people in this world.

Not sure if it's Casablanca's Johnny Cash voice, his bubblegum pop riffs, or the Oirish (and universal) themes of death and redemption (sort of), but it captures the madness of light and love.

Look up!

Lyrids tonight.


Be there or be square.....er, or parallelogram.

(OK, here's how you do it. Get a blanket and a comfy lounge chair. Wait until dark. Go outside. Keep looking up. The Lyrids are, occasionally, spectacular. )

Hey, we're going through remnants of the tail of a comet at this moment....
If you spent any time outside today, you might have some comet dust in your hair.

Crocus sirens

Ecclesiastes 11.1

We must cast our bread
Upon the waters, as the
Ancient preacher said,

Trusting that it may
Amply be restored to us
After many a day.

That old metaphor,
Drawn from rice farming on the
River’s flooded shore,

Helps us to believe
That it’s no great sin to give,
Hoping to receive.

Therefore I shall throw
Broken bread, this sullen day,
Out across the snow,

Betting crust and crumb
That birds will gather, and that
One more spring will come.

Richard Wilbur, New Yorker, this week

The crocuses are blooming. Every year I cannot believe it will happen. Then it does.

Every year they have something to teach me, late winter, when the burst of life reminds me I will die, something worth remembering.

I lifted up an errant patio stone, looking for pill bugs ("roly polies") for biology class. Under it, a miracle.


Several crocuses had risen from the earth, as they do, but the leaves remained yellow--no sense spending a whole lot of energy on chloroplasts if no light is around. That they rose at all, hidden from the sun, weighted down by a stone, rivals anything we have done.

On top of the yellow stalks?

Flowers--riotously purple petals exploding from the ground, hidden by the rock, calling to bees like silent Sirens, hope against hope, burning energy from last summer's sun.

I can talk of auxins and gibberellins, reduce my crocuses to a mechanized world, and sniff the sniff of the cognoscenti.

Or I can sit and marvel at that which we cannot understand--fecundity's wasteful exuberance celebrated as the sun returns. A starling squallacked at me today; I could not grasp the words, but I felt the sound. The sun has returned, and it's OK to be drunk again. Drunk with light, with life.

I will die. So will you. The starling told me so.

I started planting tonight. It's the closest I feel like to God, closer than anything I ever felt in medicine. And, of course, it's ridiculous--I plant seeds, and they grow, but they will grow whether I intervene or not.

And the world will go on as well.

So what do we teach in biology? The gibberish of gibberellins? Do we speak of death?
At 15 years old, we all live forever. At 50, a moment's forever is all we got.

I forget this in January. Today I remembered it.

Not much else to say....

September light...

Location: W074 11, N40 48

Daylight March 12: 11 hours, 47 minutes
Daylight September 30: 11 hours, 48 minutes.

St. Francis and the Sow


The bud
stands for all things,
even for those things that don't flower,
for everything flowers from within, of self-blessing;

though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on the brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;

as Saint Francis
put his hand on the creased forehead
of the sow, and told her in words and in touch
blessings of the earth on the sow,

and the sow
began remembering all down her thick length,
from the earthen snout all the way
through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail,

down through the great broken heart
to the blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering
from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and blowing beneath them
the long, perfect loveliness of sow.

Galway Kinnell

Almost September light again. Close enough.

Mucking season. Life everywhere, everywhere. Spring breezes warm up tidal flats and fields of mud, and souls rise up again where clay meets breath.

Not generic souls. Not metaphorical souls. Nefesh--living souls, some human, most not. The sun's energy feeds us again as we repay our debts in our lust and ecstasy, as we chase what even words cannot betray.

I am a teacher, a civil servant in a public institution. I cannot, of course, start spinning in a maniacal dance during class, spewing on about souls and life and mystery. We have more serious things to attend to--NCLB, NAEP, HSPA's and SRA's.

I can do this, though. I can ask a student to watch a tree. And I have. I call it The Perennial Project. (The word "project" covers a lot of ground in edumacation circles.)

Some of the children have become attached to their trees. It's been a rough winter, and the trees have been acting pretty dead. A few students are worried that their trees will remain dead.

Now the buds are forming--thickening, succulent, ready to burst. Last year's sap rises again, from the ground towards the sky, botanical resurrection.

If you pay too much attention, you may become useless, intoxicated by life, staring with an idiot smile at a bud about to burst. Life's addictive that way.

Beats staring at a Smart Board.

I do not have formal permission for Galway Kinnell's poem, but I do have a story.

Way back in the late 70's, a few of us studying in Ann Arbor got together and formed the High Spark of Low-Heeled Boys,
and "sponsored" a poetry reading by Galway. Despite a decent crowd, we came up a bit short,
but Mr. Kinnell was gracious throughout--I probably still owe him money.
Go buy a book or two. You will not be disappointed.

The daylight hours provided by the U.S. Naval Observatory.