Solo

That cold has come again. The one from Prague that seems to have never really cleared up. I suspected it was here last week, but now I'm sure of it after having leaved over the sink for 10 minutes hacking away to remove whatever it is I can feel lurking in that pink fleshy void that link nose to throat. 

Whatever it is looks like lungs or brain. I'm sure it can't be good, but I have neither the time to take off work nor anything to keep a sample in until I can make it to the doctor aside from an old glass jam jar I washed out yesterday.

It hasn't stopped me entirely, this cold (if I can call it that). Although this is the time of year that I would start to burn out, and I am. Now the leisure of last minute planned activities will be replaced with more rigorous academic content. Play time, at least for us teachers, is over until after spring break in mid-April when at last we can pass comments over poorly brewed coffee in the staff lounge like

"the end is near!" and "we've almost done it, keep strong." 

I supposed part of me is excited for the change. With it comes centers meaning I'll get to take a step back and watch the kids blossom. We are here to make independent learners after all, right? It also means that winter months will soon fly by and those simple joys that came late to me last year will be soon upon us in 2013 - lest the world ends abruptly even before the new year.

I'm excited to see them plant seeds in our box if only to watch them peak outside the classroom door when they think I'm not paying attention in hopes of capturing any glimmer of movement beneath the soil. I'm excited for our "better" planned field trips to the Tech museum and, possibly, Academy of Sciences if Blythe can pull it off. We'll see. 

Soon. First we finish 2012, wrap up what lose ends we have going forward in the hopes we can blaze ahead lose ends free. Next Saturday I leave for New York to visit Jules, an impromptu trip I'm looking forward to very much. Any excuse to get out of Oakland and away for longer than an evening is much invited. 

I'm excited for snow. I'm excited for the time to read and write. I'm excited for good food. And, most importantly, I'm excited for the rest only a trip such as this can provide: no responsibilities, no demands, no schedule. Simply me and a brand new city.

Here's to the rest of this week....

When I grow up...

During Opening circle of class, I asked my students what they wanted to be when they grew up. After settling into our normal lopsided circle, I waited patiently for everyone to "think, think, think" about their answer before allowing each student to complete the sentence followed with a short explanation. 

Of course I expected the obvious: a princess, an astronaut, a race car driver. I smiled exuberantly with each response, coaxing a sentence more from each willing to produce it before moving on. After each had spoken, I stood and reached for the day's vocabulary before settling back into my spot on the rug when someone spoke up....

"But teacher, you never said what you wanted to be when you grow up."

In the moment I laughed and explained that I had already grown up and that I was a teacher. But looking back, maybe there was something to what was said. Something more than the pristine view of a six-year-old.

On the drive home I reflected on what I might have said. An astronomer, a volcanologist, a rescue diver...

Never a teacher.

Not that I should be ashamed to have become a teacher, I love what I do. I guess what hit me was more or less my inability to dream for the sake of dreaming. In some ways I haven't lost that talent totally, I don't think I would have come as far in running as I have if I didn't set some lofty goals. 

But those days of standing on the edge of consciousness while discovering a new planet, or fiddling with hot lava in some weird-o suit, or saving an entire crew from a capsized ship off the coast of Alaska are no more. I'm not sure if I could at that time realize those would never happen in this lifetime, but can I remember falling asleep to the idea of what I could do if given the chance. I was invincible! A beast among my wryly counterparts! 

A fearsome thing to behold behind my mane of tangled sun-bleached hair, face swept with the freckles of a thousand lazy summers spent in a tree. 

I was amazing.

So what happened? When did I lose enough faith in humanity to decide that it wasn't worth the hassle anymore, even if only for myself? 

Sitting in traffic, I wonder what I would have said if I had the chance to go back to that moment. 

Would I shout and stomp my feet and fight for the idea that we never grow up? Would I say a teacher, truly? Or would I say something more poignant? Something captivating? Something worthwhile? 

It seems I've forgotten what it means to live a life of any of those things for the time. But how I wish to practice anyhow.... 

Ray LaMontagne - For The Summer

And it begins

Tonight the rain comes.

A familiar voice once lost

to an endless rage.

And with it comes hope

for a renewed sense of self

having been displaced

among the wicked.

The cruel. The apathetic.

In exchange instead

an awakening.

A fierce knowledge of this earth

tethered by its grace.

Allow me then to

drink my fill of those waters

and be born again.

Have you ever asked yourself, what's the point? I supposed we all have in our own way, but at what place do we agree to walk away from all possible answers? 

At what place do we determine the true weight of what that is, the point of all of this? Our name, our job, where we live, what car we drive, where we graduated from.

Our worth. Our life.

I'm down to the last few pages of Egger's A Hologram for the King  and I've found myself asking that question from the moment I picked up the book and read it's sleeve. 

A man whose life is crumbling financially takes a career leap of faith and gets sent into an economic city on the rise in hopes to hit it big and pay off those debts inherited inevitably on the path to the best possible existence, including paying for his daughter's college tuition. Instead what he finds among chaos and uncertainty in the desert is that his life has, in many way, surmounted to nothing. And that his actions had not provided for him the judge of character he'd hoped to be remembered by. 

It isn't a happy story, anyone could gather that. But I was curious. My father had gone into Iraq as a civilian contractor for a year for the very same reason. His debt outweighed his gain and with myself in her last year of college and my sister just beginning, money had to be made.

I cannot begin to understand the trials my father underwent in those 12 months. As all things military and overseas, nothing is run by the books. Daily schedules are determined by how to avoid imminent death, something no one under those circumstances can avoid, including my father. 

Sure he returned with the money he'd been promised, but at what cost? 

I guess the book was in some way a chance to see through the looking glass he refused to let me know was there at all, and in a way I had anticipated it as it was: cloudy and painful. 

As children we can never truly know what goes through our parents mind, partly because they try and spare us those grueling details that wrack their very flesh at times, and partly because in many ways we can never full understand their intention, even when we become parents ourselves. 

So again begs the question, what's the point? Why bother?

Why fall in love with someone who has repeatedly told you they cannot give you what you want? Why mother children that very well may turn their backs to you, and if not, must endure watching you fall apart before them in some unholy way? Why try and save future generations that will be wiped out regardless of the vaccines we find or our ability to turn the rising oceans into something worthy of our insatiable thirst? Why write? Why run? 

Why try?

Maybe I've missed something along the way. Maybe the point is that there is no point, and that the beauty simply lies in existing: Breathing. Looking. Touching. Tasting. Smelling.

Listening. Always listening. 

Seeing the forest for the trees. 

Always giving the pedestrian the right of way. 

Taking a long drink after attempting to keep up with a 6-year-old on the monkey bars scorching hot from the noon sun. 

Lingering in the rain just to think you can in that moment feel your skin. 

Thinking, maybe, you still have a chance to be an astronaut. 

Telling someone you love them regardless of what the outcome will be. 

Knowing that in some way, your story is worth being told.

That what you do has some impact, forever. 

I want to find relief in knowing that I am not the only one who questions her place among us 7 billion. That maybe, within reason, I will be capable of accomplishing something that will out weight the notion that this is all for nothing. 

That we are more than fleeting bulbs of existence, flashing out with a subdued pop when our filaments have had their fill of this place.

I won't want to go until I first know someone read a book beneath my light that made them, if only for briefly, feel content. 

You see, because as much as I don't know what the point is, I also don't know if I've made a point either. 

Alone, I wonder if I, too, am an Alan. Finding that my meaning has become obscured and calls for an excavation. That mine is a meaning elusive like a steam of water hundreds of feet below the surface and that calls for a bucket to be dropped to its placid waves so that I may drink and remember. 

To taste it would mean to remember, and how I want nothing more than to remember. 

But standing at the edge of the opening, bucket in hand, the last of the day's light bounding over my shoulder in an act of defiance, I find that my rope won't reach. So instead the bucket's uneven bottom skims the water's lips, throwing it into far reaching ripples that carry for a moment before disappearing all together. 

Mrs Jynx - My Friend T3 (Remix Of Resynthesize)

And I, I feel so alive....

When I first started this journey, I never thought I would've reached this point: 200 miles.

But a couple of runs a week, turned into running every morning before work.

What took me 45 minutes to do then takes me 20 now. It isn't easier, I've become stronger, more in tune with my body than previously before.

I've started to train my mind to disregard the pain in my legs, the throbbing in my lower back, the cuts in between each toe threatening to open up and ruin yet another pair of socks. Two deep inhales in, two sharp breaths out. 

Hips square, land in the middle of the foot, rotate at the core, use your arms for momentum. Eyes forward. Listen to your heart.

Push. Push. Push.

I run for the release. I run for the thrill. I run for the challenge. I run for the peace. I run to stay fit. I run to feel alive.

I run because above all else, I am a runner.