The year contained in this journal has been like last of a long struggle. I have finally reached surface from the dark, chill of abyssal depths. I am still adjusting to the light and air, but things are coming into focus. I have a new job that allows me to be an effective educator which reduces my stress and lets me be more positive and balanced in my creative moments. I am, as usual and forever, battling my negative moods, but I have relieved at least one source of distraction. As I start a new journal I feel it will be filled with less with stress, and more with wonder and possibilities.
From an observation of my work as a teacher of dreamtime children.
Her voice followed
the butterflies of her hands
dancing up the curve of her
experience
and away into the future
“That’s what my teacher called it.”
The distant butterflies transformed
bright leaves drifting back
loosely settling
in her lap.
My life has been experiencing some glitches and internal rewiring due to some very positive changes. I am now one month into my new position as a coop preschool teacher of the paperwork free variety. I document by photos and conversations, and I am in charge of the program, but not the administration. All I have to do is develop relationships with children and parents and provide a safe stimulating environment that responds to their needs as individuals and encourages social interactions. I am very good at these things. Parents who put their children in this program are aware of our policy of child centered, play oriented learning so I don’t have to sell them on my philosophy and style. And best of all I do not have to do social service work and spend half of my time writing down what happens every day. We just do things. Mostly I inspire, observe, set limits and provide caring and conversations.
Now that I have transitioned into my new schedule and dealt with all of the feelings that come with the change of community. I did not move, but I left some friends and comrades in arms at my Head Start job and some families that I had grown close to. Whenever I make these transitions I go through a period in which my priorities fly up in the air, and I am not very good at juggling. I tend to be a one task at a time person. So writing remained up in the air for a while. Now I am feeling the rhythm and have started to catch all of my flying priorities. I even wrote a poem though I am not sure why it has such a strangely fatalistic tone. I am feeling very positive about most of my life even though things get a little overwhelming at times. But hey when a poem comes in from wherever they come from, I just write whatever comes through.
Another chance to move
about in this small space,
Sweep a corner clear,
Chalk an outline of where
I will fall
With small
Adjustments that amount
to millions of still frames,
most of which I will
forget,
keeping only the ones that
mean the least,
flat, transparent images
unable to hold feeling,
as if they belong to someone else,
who is like me,
but seen from a distance,
flickered movements strobed
onto my mind screen,
an eyeball, a razor, a black-bearded man in a
tutu endlessly repeated,
infinitely varied,
until all possibilities are
exhausted.
We will carry
the bag of red and yellow cherries
up the hill from the ferry
with the watermelon
and the beer.
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