Sadly, 2012 appears to be both the pinnacle and the nadir of the story of The Civil Wars.
I will miss their divine harmonies. Indeed I will.
As for 2012, well...
I suppose it could have been worse.
Mojo remains unemployed amidst the Great Recession that has so many others searching desperately for work and hope. My heart hurts for her. I hope that the coming year finds her working, and content.
My children continue to grow and thrive; may that never cease.
My soul continues to seek for a reason to hope, and my heart for a hope within reason. My body continues to falter beneath me. Every night I go to my rest aching and rise still restless and sore in the dark pre-dawn.
I understand that this is the cost I am paying for the adventures of my youth, and while I would not give back those times I cannot but rue the hard days ahead.
To my friends - and if you are reading this you are my friend - I wish the hopes of happiness and the blessings of peace and the love of those you love.
I wish you joy, and the strong pull of good muscles and hard bone as you enjoy the blessings of your mind and body in the coming year.
To my country...well, I have little hope and less expectation. May you surprise me with a glimpse of a probity and righteousness that I fear you have lost to the broad road to Hell that is wealth and sloth.
May we all wake tomorrow to a bright morning and a fair day. May you and yours be gentle, and greet the day with a kiss and a caress from the one you love. May your hopes be luminous, and the road rise to meet you. May you be blithe, and bonny, and good, and gay. May all your hopes for the coming year be fulfilled, all your fears be unrealized, and your uttermost dream be fulfilled.
May you in your sleep tonight take flight and that journey bring you safe and whole into the dawn tomorrow.
New Year's Day
The rain this morning falls
on the last of the snow
and will wash it away. I can smell
the grass again, and the torn leaves
being eased down into the mud.
The few loves I’ve been allowed
to keep are still sleeping
on the West Coast. Here in Virginia
I walk across the fields with only
a few young cows for company.
Big-boned and shy,
they are like girls I remember
from junior high, who never
spoke, who kept their heads
lowered and their arms crossed against
their new breasts. Those girls
are nearly forty now. Like me,
they must sometimes stand
at a window late at night, looking out
on a silent backyard, at one
rusting lawn chair and the sheer walls
of other people’s houses.
They must lie down some afternoons
and cry hard for whoever used
to make them happiest,
and wonder how their lives
have carried them
this far without ever once
explaining anything. I don’t know
why I’m walking out here
with my coat darkening
and my boots sinking in, coming up
with a mild sucking sound
I like to hear. I don’t care
where those girls are now.
Whatever they’ve made of it
they can have. Today I want
to resolve nothing.
I only want to walk
a little longer in the cold
blessing of the rain,
and lift my face to it.
~ Kim Addonizio
Showing posts with label ends and endings. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ends and endings. Show all posts
Monday, December 31, 2012
Saturday, December 22, 2012
Sol Invictus
Well, we're still here.
Another solar year has passed its longest night. We now enter the Dark Ages, the short, cold, wet days of winter that slog painfully towards the light of Spring. The winter is upon us, but the world hasn't ended.
This will probably come as a disappointment to some of the more woo-woo fringe here in Portland as well as those goofs at the National Geographic channel who made those ridiculous half-hour "specials". One hopes that, fueled by that sort of weapons-grade stupidity, very few of the rest of us took the opportunity of impending doom to take out large short-term high-interest loans on the ground that the impending doom would obviate the need to pay the money back.
Or, gee, anything else really foolish, either. Wonder what that could have been..?
Oh.
Yeah.
That.
But now we've dodged that slingstone the hard work begins.
That same hard work we do every day; get up, get dressed. Make food. Care for those who are too young or old to fully care for themselves. Work. Rest. Make love. Make war, or just make something. A chair, perhaps, or a painting, or a poem. Pet a cat, sing a song, filet a fish. Grow a crop or just grow older one day at a time.
Get on with living, in other words, the same way that people have done ever since there were people and will continue to do until the first flicker of the expanding corona announces the nova that really will mean the end is here.
And when all's said, that's the really difficult part, isn't it? Death and destruction and the End of the World are easy. It's living life, or at least living a decent sort of a life; being a good friend, a good lover, a good father or mother or son or daughter, that is hard. That's damn deadly difficult. Fairly amazing that so many of us manage it. I know that I'm going to need some more of this damn cold medicine if it's going to work for me tomorrow, and some more sleep. So I'm for bed, and hope you won't be reading this until the sun is up today.
G 'night.
But, hey, while we're still here - how about those sneaky Mayans with their stealth apocalypse?
Honestly. What a pack of jokers.
This will probably come as a disappointment to some of the more woo-woo fringe here in Portland as well as those goofs at the National Geographic channel who made those ridiculous half-hour "specials". One hopes that, fueled by that sort of weapons-grade stupidity, very few of the rest of us took the opportunity of impending doom to take out large short-term high-interest loans on the ground that the impending doom would obviate the need to pay the money back.
Or, gee, anything else really foolish, either. Wonder what that could have been..?
Oh.
Yeah.
That.
But now we've dodged that slingstone the hard work begins.
That same hard work we do every day; get up, get dressed. Make food. Care for those who are too young or old to fully care for themselves. Work. Rest. Make love. Make war, or just make something. A chair, perhaps, or a painting, or a poem. Pet a cat, sing a song, filet a fish. Grow a crop or just grow older one day at a time.
Get on with living, in other words, the same way that people have done ever since there were people and will continue to do until the first flicker of the expanding corona announces the nova that really will mean the end is here.
And when all's said, that's the really difficult part, isn't it? Death and destruction and the End of the World are easy. It's living life, or at least living a decent sort of a life; being a good friend, a good lover, a good father or mother or son or daughter, that is hard. That's damn deadly difficult. Fairly amazing that so many of us manage it. I know that I'm going to need some more of this damn cold medicine if it's going to work for me tomorrow, and some more sleep. So I'm for bed, and hope you won't be reading this until the sun is up today.
G 'night.
But, hey, while we're still here - how about those sneaky Mayans with their stealth apocalypse?
Friday, June 11, 2010
Posted
I've just finished posting the grades for my community college class. It is the last I will ever teach. While I enjoy teaching, and the students, I loathe the time-suck that it demands, and I hate the adjunct faculty system that allows the community colleges to avoid giving real jobs to the instructors that they currently pimp out for convenience store-clerk wages.
I had a great last class; lively, fun, and funny. Many of them did well, too, which I always enjoy. Some didn't, which is the nature of what I do. I once read a long-winded whinge from a community or junior college English instructor in which his snivel was that instructors like us were the
Word, dude, that's what teachers, instructors, and professors DO. Not everyone can master the Next Level, and if the Next Level - high school diploma, associate's, bachelor's, master's, or doctoral degees - is to mean anything it is going to be out of the grasp of an increasingly large number of people.
And so in that sense we're not "button men" but sensei, the blind man with the staff that hits the younglings and makes them think, makes them quick and alert, makes them good - that is, surviving - swordsmen and -women...or teaches them that they will be hewers of wood and drawers of water all their lives because their intellectual swordfighting skills are a danger to themselves and others.
That's teaching and learning and has been since the first australopithecene taught his kids to throw rocks.
Now, mind you, I do think we're doing a lot of this teaching and learning thing the wrong way, but that's fodder for the next post.
But tonight I didn't want to natter on about education. I just wanted to come to a full stop, a night's caesura, and mentally sit on the ground and think over the students I have stood before over the past seven years.
I have loved some of you and hated some, too. You have frustrated and angered me, but you have also delighted me, and even enlightened me. I have grieved for some of you, lost souls you were in the howling midnight of a world you couldn't understand. And I have celebrated for the way some of you pushed yourselves high into the hills, above where you thought you could climb.
It was always a climb; sometimes a scenic one, sometimes a grind, always a challenge for you and for me. A climb worthy of us and our labor. But now I turn my back on the hills with no regret.
The light in the window tells me my family is home waiting up for me. I am longing for their silly laughter and their love, I am weary, and grateful for the gentle path down to the warmth, light, and love, knowing I will not walk these hills again.
I had a great last class; lively, fun, and funny. Many of them did well, too, which I always enjoy. Some didn't, which is the nature of what I do. I once read a long-winded whinge from a community or junior college English instructor in which his snivel was that instructors like us were the
"...academic button men. (We) roam the halls of academe like a modern Coriolanus bearing sword and grade book, “a thing of blood, whose every motion / Was timed with dying cries.”Um, yeah.
Word, dude, that's what teachers, instructors, and professors DO. Not everyone can master the Next Level, and if the Next Level - high school diploma, associate's, bachelor's, master's, or doctoral degees - is to mean anything it is going to be out of the grasp of an increasingly large number of people.
And so in that sense we're not "button men" but sensei, the blind man with the staff that hits the younglings and makes them think, makes them quick and alert, makes them good - that is, surviving - swordsmen and -women...or teaches them that they will be hewers of wood and drawers of water all their lives because their intellectual swordfighting skills are a danger to themselves and others.
That's teaching and learning and has been since the first australopithecene taught his kids to throw rocks.
Now, mind you, I do think we're doing a lot of this teaching and learning thing the wrong way, but that's fodder for the next post.
But tonight I didn't want to natter on about education. I just wanted to come to a full stop, a night's caesura, and mentally sit on the ground and think over the students I have stood before over the past seven years.
I have loved some of you and hated some, too. You have frustrated and angered me, but you have also delighted me, and even enlightened me. I have grieved for some of you, lost souls you were in the howling midnight of a world you couldn't understand. And I have celebrated for the way some of you pushed yourselves high into the hills, above where you thought you could climb.It was always a climb; sometimes a scenic one, sometimes a grind, always a challenge for you and for me. A climb worthy of us and our labor. But now I turn my back on the hills with no regret.
The light in the window tells me my family is home waiting up for me. I am longing for their silly laughter and their love, I am weary, and grateful for the gentle path down to the warmth, light, and love, knowing I will not walk these hills again.
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