Buds.

One of the people I've started reading this spring is Karen Walrond, who quit her sixteen-year law career six months ago so that she could pursue her real passions, which are photography and writing and parenting.  Every Thursday, she puts a "Love Thursday" post on her blog, and today's recounts a conversation with her young daughter, who not long ago spontaneously declared that she would miss her mom--someday, when she herself had to move away.  

I'm always happy to say that I miss my parents all the time.  They are some of the mighty finest people in my life--not just as parents but also as people, plain and simple.  Most of what I've learned about how to be decent, accepting, responsible, and respectful--not to mention what I've learned about how "tolerance" can be, in some important ways, an awful, limiting concept that allows people to dismiss others' ways of life without making an effort to value or even understand them and their feelings and then allows those same people to think that they're being upstanding and thoughtful in their relationships with others--I learned through watching and interacting with and being taught by them.  Which is why, as soon as I'm done resting a little after the conclusion of my semester's major administrative service duty sometime tomorrow, I'm out of here, on the road, headed toward my favorite people.

Skies of petal.

Today, no visible sun for another day of work, at the end of which a hot bath was the only contender for my attention.

Attending.

Today I consider attention and focus: how I find them, how I lose them.  How it has gotten more difficult, in the past year, to sit still and stay with one thing for a length of time.  How I have to choose my field of vision with deliberation or else lose the day altogether.  Lose the day, and the life seems to rush in after, willing to be lost, willing to be spent unwisely.  I work on retraining myself.  I start with my books.  Or, rather, start with the flowers and the leaves, with the plushness of the dogwood flowers and the unspooling of leaf fringe all over town.  Start with the perfect, unbreakably cool sounds of a blue late-spring evening, all colors merging under a waxing moon.  Wait until home to keep reading the new book.

Pivot point.

Now our flowers are giving way to leaves: one microseason pushes another out.

Springings.

With classes over, work is just beginning--but so, surprisingly enough, is a kind of serenely energized, supremely dynamic sense of what is coming next, what I am helping to bring into being: a way of being that is better and stronger, a recommitment to my best principles, away from which fatigue has let me slip of late.  Not an hour passes when I am not teaching something to someone, and I would not have that any other way: my best ambitions have always been pedagogical, and my best pedagogies have always far exceeded the four walls in which I find myself, year in and year out.  This weekend, tasks that I thought would wring out the last bits of my energy instead gave it back to me in spades, then carried me back here to start sowing them all around me in a simpler way than I'd have imagined possible.  

The best advice my greatest teacher ever gave me was Keep it simple.  There is, I realize now, almost nothing simpler than what I've come back home believing.  And there is almost nothing more richly multidimensional, astonishingly complex and challenging.  What my teacher taught is that the simple is, in many ways, the hardest thing of all--because it requires boring back to first principles, to rock-solid centralities, to that which is so crucial that it cannot be ignored.  What he taught me is that the truly simple is never simplistic--never easy, never fixed, never stable--but is always alive, always informing and informed.

Somehow, over the course of my Saturday (whose doings I can't really detail, other than to say that they involved fourteen hours in a windowless conference room in a distant hotel, the sound of departing and arriving airplanes regularly rumbling in from beyond our building), the back of my mind developed an idea that has already changed and anchored my place in this place--which suggests to me that my role here has been shifting and developing subtly for quite some time here, and that I had reached a point where I was ready for one last piece of material to arrive and catalyze this new solution I've become.