Summer Dreaming and Passion

Passion.  Such a strong word.  A gusty word.  No mild-mannered emotion, passion bursts all out enthusiasm, untethered live out love, and vibrant multi-colored energy.  Passion is not a word to be tossed about lightly.

I've been spending some meditative moments gazing at my dream board.  Propped there behind my computer, its geography invites reflection.  Making it, I thumbed through pages of magazines to find each of those seven letters - P A S S I O N - all roughly the same size, all blue but for one orange.  I cut and glued each, stretched the full width of my board and swept across the swirled glitter paint sky.

 

P  A  S  S  I  O  N

 

So why?  A dream board reinforces your dreams, hopes, desires - daring them all to come true by virtue of your attention and daily notice of their very existence.  So why?  Why did I meticulously place those letters there?  How does passion fill my dreams and fly my skies?  Do I want to find it or feel it?  For what or for whom?  Did I glue those letters there because P A S S I O N is lacking in my life?  Did I have it once only to later lose it?

 

Intentional and attentional living requires sustained effort.  All hands on deck, oars in the water, rowing in the same direction effort.  We are what we think.  We are what we do.  What we dream. 

 

P A S S I O N is technicolor, we're-not-in-Kansas-anymore dreaming.  I live with passion when I live intentionally and attentionally. To whom and to what will I give my time, my energy, my attention?  What thoughts, what actions will earn my devotion?  Does one first begin a passion-filled relationship with and for others before fully understanding and actualizing the self?

 

Maybe passion is fleeting - a momentary gust of wind across our sky - flying our kites on a sunny summer afternoon.  Here today.  Gone tomorrow.  Yet may return the next day in a new form - an angry storm of passion perhaps - dark and deep and thunderous.

 

Maybe daring to dream out loud leads to our life's passions.  Plural.  What I feel passionate about on Monday may ebb  by Tuesday and Wednesday's passion stirs a whole new pot.

 

Sure.  I feel long-term passionate about my marriage, my children, my family, my teaching.  But maybe passion is also a flash of emotion, a lightning-bolted moment of fervor - unsustainable in day to day to day living.

 

Maybe passion is something to be on the look out for.  Keep watch.  Be at the ready.

 





Every New Beginning

"Every new beginning is some other beginning's end."  ~ Dan Wilson

Ending a school year is like finishing a marathon.  Having run a marathon, I can say running the last .2 of the 26.2 was the easiest.  The miles at the beginning of the end - miles 20 through 26 - were the hardest.  The same was true for me as I raced to the school year finish line.  As in my marathon,  the days and months at the beginning of the end of school - after spring vacation going forward - were my most challenging.   I was quite sure, at times, that I couldn't run one more mile.  But I did.  I finished.  And so did my students.  Together, we crossed that finish line -  a little tired and out of breath - but feeling accomplished.  Happy.  And already planning for the next marathon.

Just as it was an end for all of us, the next year's beginning appeared on the road just up ahead. Rising like a new hill to climb, we could see it, my students and I, so we paused a moment - neither here, nor there - looking back and looking forward.  Looking back, I wanted us to reflect on the year's learning as writers.  Looking forward, I wanted us to dream. 
 
Reflect:

Borrowing a thought from William Zinsser, I asked my students to write a reflective letter about writing well.  Some 5th grade thoughts on writing well:

I now know that grammar is important, but writing is from the heart.  ~MI

I learned that writing can be sloppy, that stories can be messy in your writer's notebook, that a writer's notebook is a place to feel free. ~DN

This year what helped me write well was when I got home I would think about what I wrote that day and what I would do the next day.  ~CJ

This year I learned that if the writer has feelings, the reader has feelings. ~ SJ

What helped me write well this year was bouncing ideas off somebody.  It helped me get some of the bad ideas out and then the good ideas started coming. ~LK

The thing that helped me as a writer this year is to take a break from a piece and then an idea will come. ~CB

What helped me write well this year?  The confidence and courage writers gave me. ~AB

Dream:

I believe in the power of positive thought.  We are what we think.  We become what we think.  I believe in self-actualization. Having been trained in Responsive Classroom, we begin every school year reflecting on our hopes and dreams.  This was the first year I ended the school year dreaming and hoping.

 "What a man can be, he must be. This need we may call self-actualization...It refers to the desire for self-fulfillment, namely, to the tendency for him to become actualized in what he is potentially. This tendency might be phrased as the desire to become more and more what one is, to become everything that one is capable of becoming." ~Abraham Maslow

I credit my colleague, Becky, with the idea for creating dream boards.  She came to me in late February with a flyer for a dream board workshop.  I contacted the presenter.  Didn't hear back until months later and by that time, the end of the year was on the horizon and I knew I could do this with my students on our own.

My Own Dream Board

We spent three gloriously messy days surrounded by paint, glue, and magazine clippings.  Pom poms, ric rac, ribbon, glitter, stickers, burlap, and buttons gave texture and depth to our dreams. Teachers dream boarded alongside students.  Academic goal words like: ASK, CONFIDENCE, MAKE MISTAKES, ORGANIZE and STRESS LESS appeared on the boards around me.  Stuck in  puddles of glue right alongside were interest words like SPORTS, ROCKS, NATURE, and HORSES.  My students continued to write using an almost Found Poetry technique and remembered to feel with words like LOVE, PASSION, HEART, FAMILY, and DREAM peppering the paint.

We ended our year by dreaming about future beginnings.

Maybe endings aren't like periods at the end of a sentence.  Maybe they're like commas.  A pause, not a stop.  Maybe an ending is more like moment of reflective thought as we stand there on our life's path - looking back, looking forward - and walking ahead into another dream's beginning.

What makes hope so hard to hold on to?

Hope's a slippery thing to hold onto.  Reach up to wipe one of life's tears from your eye, and hope fumbles from your hand, bounces on the floor, and rolls under the couch.  Hidden there among the dust bunnies and a few runaway M&Ms, you'll need to look for it, sometimes stretching as far as your hand can reach before you're able to wrap your fingers around it again.

What makes hope so hard to hang onto?


Criticism pops hope's balloon - sometimes startling so - and we are unprepared for its aftermath. How shaky we feel minutes, hours, and even days later.  Once firm ground doesn't feel quite so solid.  Confidence wavers. Doubt rises.  And hope's drifted away.

Criticism destructs.  Hope constructs.  And it's hard to rebuild sometimes.  We stack each block of advice we've ever heard about overcoming criticism, but the ego's still a little shaky.  Consider the source.  Learn and move on.  Surround yourself with nourishing people.  We know all that, but criticism - even just implied criticism -  moves right into the ground floor of our consciousness, an unwelcome squatter crowding out all the good stuff we know to be true about ourselves.  No compliment ever seems to build us as high as criticism knocks us down. 

Disappointment.  Another hope-foe.  Disappointment in ourselves, in others, even in hope itself, disappointment wraps around us and smothers us.  If we are to remain hope-full, we have to believe in second chances.  We have to allow ourselves some do-overs.  We seek out new beginnings and fresh starts.  Disappointment can devastate, but it can also motivate.  A multi-feathered phoenix from the ashes, hope can rise again in a new day, new year, new job, or a new relationship.  We are hopers for happy endings.  All's well that ends well.  A place where everything old is renewed again.

Worry.  Large, small, and even nagging niggling little worries are hope's party crashers.  Often showing up late to the show and when we're at our most vulnerable, worry is the great what-if.  We what-if all night long, tossing and turning and churning up worst-case scenario after worst-case scenario.  Hope's never awake at 2 a.m., but worry's an insomniac and wants a little company.  Prayers and deep-breathing and faith and sometimes sheer tenacity can overcome worry.  Life's greatest waste of time, worry lives simultaneously in our past, present, and future.  In the morning, hope has to lift the shades, push back the curtains, and open a window to the light and fresh air of the here and now. 

Regret.  All the once upon a time beginnings we didn't quite see through to the end.  All our should haves but did nots.   The might have beens but were nots. Regret is a rusty wheel refusing to spin and move us forward.  A detailed list of failures, people we could have been, decisions we made and wish we hadn't, regret challenges hope by pointing its crooked old finger back to where we have been, while hope stubbornly looks ahead to where we want to go next.

Hope dares to be happy.  Hope is the better and born-again reincarnation of criticism, disappointment, worry, and regret.  Refusing to abandon us, hope waits like a forgotten five dollar bill in last year's coat, and we delight in its discovery and smile a bit at our unexpected good fortune. Hope helps us do the next day, whether we want to or not,  with a faint whisper of encouragement, "I know you can." 

Photo Source

Enough Said

I've been living the New Year for just shy of two weeks now.  New resolutions can be found in every print and social media source around.  I'm just not that into it.  I'm just not.  I'm naturally self-reflective every damn day and honestly, it gets even more exhausting at the starting line of a new year when everything I'm not but want to be is thrust into life's social spotlight for the world to see.

As an educator, I evaluate my performance day to day and sometimes even period to period.  I'm forever and always trying to do it - this entrusted teaching of children - better, faster, stronger, smarter.  The combination of my perfectionist personality and today's diverse and often expressed opinions about the state of learning in our country has me like a frustrated dog chasing its own tail.  I feel flustered, confused, and overall underachieving ... which bewilders and saddens me given how hard I work.

The buzz words are many.  Engagement.  Assessment.  Technology.  Common Core.  Testing.  Testing.  And more testing.  And on and on and on.  My students aren't reading enough ... or they're not reading slowly enough, or deeply enough, or reading text of sufficient complexity.  They're not writing enough or in the most important formats.  I'm not integrating technology to the level I should so my students are producers rather than consumers.  We don't have a blog - yet - and so our opportunities for authentic audience are few.

And on and on and on.

And that's just my professional self.

The me of me isn't thin enough, healthy enough, and my face wears too many wrinkles.  I need to do more.  I need to do less.  I need to do more with less.  I need to save more, plan more, and stay active.  By anyone's standards, I'm not organized enough, and many's the night the dinner dishes stay in the sink until morning.  My best conversations with my young adult sons are by text, so clearly I'm a face-to-face parenting failure.

I never feel I am enough.  In any aspect of my life.

So I say enough is enough. 

I want to pay more attention to how I feel rather than what I do - or don't do.  I'm done with multi-tasking, to-do lists, and trying to do more in less time.  I want to guide my life by my own internal compass, and quiet the incessant background chatter long enough to hear myself think.  Because I'm smart, strong, capable, sensitive, sincere, and hard-working.  I believe in me.

And I'm enough.

Barbara