Skin

To meditate, I go first to my meditation cave. That sounds pretty official, but actually, it's just the inside of my clothes closet. If I shut the door to my bedroom and then the door to my closet, I am double doors away from kids, cats, telephones, and computers. I sit on the floor, my back against the wall, shirts brushing against the top of my head. I breathe in the smell of freshly laundered cotton and leather shoes. The darkness hugs me.

At first, I find myself chomping on thoughts — the salty bits, the sweet morsels, the spicy spiraling thoughts that smell so tempting. I keep grabbing one without even realizing it. One minute I'll be sinking into meditation and the next moment I'll be saying to myself, "I can't believe he said that!" It's difficult to push those thoughts aside, leave them lying in the air. And below the thoughts are layers of feelings, boxes and bins of anger and sadness and frustration, the feelings that tend to sink below the happier thoughts that I live with daily. The little clothes closet quite fills up with thoughts and feelings, all swirling about in the darkness.

Some days, I am able to push the swirling aside and sink into stillness, allowing myself to separate from all the chaos and find a place where I can simply be. Some days the closet around me — the sneakers, the shelf of jeans, the hanging dress shirts — disappears. Sometimes I can move into a place where I can listen to a power greater than myself. Other days, the jangling thoughts are just too loud: I feel successful if I can just get them to quiet a little.

So I'd be lying it I said that I stepped out of the closet with profound spiritual insights, with nuggets of great wisdom. Mostly, I don't. And often I'm angry at myself for letting thoughts intrude. Always, it's a struggle to achieve anything that even approximates meditation. And yet, something is happening, something that keeps me at this practice.

I can feel it. Even though I'm sitting still the whole time, I am twisting and turning, rubbing against rock. My skin turns translucent and peels away. I am shedding.

First snow

We always get some snow before Halloween. Often the ground isn't frozen yet, so the snow doesn't stay very long, but it's enough to remind us that we need to get out the wool socks, the mittens, and the snow shovels. It means we need to hurry to bring in the firewood, put away the lawn chairs, and get the snow tires on the car.

Last night, the snow was just beginning as I drove home. I built a fire and settled down on the comfy couch for the evening, but my older kids decided to go out to get something they needed for their Halloween costumes. My brother and his wife are having a big Halloween party this weekend, and family members of all ages are dressing up.

Shaggy Hair, who had been taking a nap on the couch, decided to go with them. Still half-asleep, dressed in sneakers and a t-shirt, he opened the front door. A cold gust of wind blew snowflakes across his hair and face. White covered the lawn, the trees, even the road. I could hear him laughing as he stepped into the slushy snow.

"This fucking sucks," he yelled dramatically. He turned to add: "And at the same time, it's awesome."

Dipped in hot sauce

We eat french fries in class. Every day.

Because they take science courses with labs and recitations, most of my students have pretty tight schedules, with no time for lunch. And my schedule is the same way. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, I teach three 80-minute classes in a row, right in the middle of the day, often followed by a meeting. I cannot survive that long without food. Seriously, I would faint if I tried it. So early in the semester, I discussed the situation with my students. I realized that many of them were not eating lunch — and often they hadn't had breakfast either. No wonder they were ready to crash by the time they got to their late afternoon classes.

I told them I sometimes bring food or juice to class, and they were welcome to do the same, so long as they ate it quietly, and when they left, removed all evidence of food. Since I teach in a classroom that's in the same building as a dining hall, some of the students will rush down in between classes and bring food back up with them, usually a plate of food for themselves and something to share with the class.

So what food can be shared amongst twenty people, some of whom are vegetarians? The answer is simple. French fries. Every Tuesday and Thursday, for my 12:30 class, at least one student will appear with a steaming mound of french fries, along with hot sauce and ketchup, and we'll quietly pass the food around while we talk.

The result is that I've been trained like Pavlov's dog. When I walk into the classroom, I begin to salivate.

Meant to be broken

On Friday's picnic, FireAnt, BusyLifeAlsoWrites, and I hiked first along a trail with a nice path, even a handrail. But then we came to signs with ominous warnings: "Danger! Stay on the path!" Of course, we ignored the signs and climbed over the fence. Those signs have been there for years, but the waterfall has been there even longer. And who in their right mind is going to pay attention to words on a sign when they've got the sound of a waterfall in their ears? The paths that lead down to the creek at the bottom are still navigable, even if the state doesn't want us to use them. We looked around hopefully, to see if some cops would come to arrest us — what great blog fodder that would be! But sadly, no one showed up with handcuffs and we hiked down into the valley without any excitement.



That's FireAnt in the photo, blatantly breaking the rules.

Cold wind and spray

We meant to get naked. But the season for outdoor naked shots is pretty short in my part of the country, and we've already had snow. All three of us women were dressed in layers -- socks, underwear, jeans, shirts, fleece, winter coats. FireAnt even brought gloves. We'd hiked down to a waterfall, a secluded spot perfect for a naked photo shoot, but it wasn't modesty that kept our clothes on. It was the cold October wind.

Even fully dressed, we were already a bit cold when we started the picnic. FireAnt and I arrived first and carefully reserved a picnic table in the sun. Well, it turns out that reserving the table was a bit unnecessary since we were, actually, the only people in the whole picnic area. By the time BusyLifeAlsoWrites arrived, we welcomed the hot thermos of tea she'd brought, wrapping our hands around the cups as if they were minature fires.

I explained that we should be lying on the ground, that we'd be much warmer. We'd be in the boundary layer of the earth's atmosphere, I explained, a microclimate that is actually much warmer than where we were, sitting perched several feet above the ground on the picnic table. We needed to be down in the boundary layer, where mosses grow, and the wind speed is reduced.

FireAnt looked at me the way people always do when I start spouting off science stuff that I've learned from my students at Little Green College. That is, she ignored me as if I was crazy. "Isn't the ground wet?"

Besides, she had already spread a red and white cloth out on the picnic table. She'd brought a whole canvas bag of food, including the best potato salad I've ever tasted. Fireant made the potato salad with olive oil instead of mayonnaise, and lots of dill, with bits of cut-up onions and carrots and peppers, with black-eyed peas and fresh parsley, and I'm not even sure what else. All the ingredients soaked in the olive oil while it was still hot so the flavours blended together, coating each chunk of potato, which were still slightly warm as we began eating. She explained how she'd made it, but I was too busy shoveling it into my mouth and letting the soft bits of potato roll over my tongue to pay full attention, so now I'll just have to beg her to make it again next time we have a picnic.

After lunch, before hiking off to see the waterfall, I found a sunny spot and lay down on the ground to demonstrate how warm it was. FireAnt flopped down on the ground next to me, stretching out in the dead leaves, and then looked over in surprise. "Hey, you're right. It is WARMER."

Of course. My students are always right.



FireAnt, taking photos from the ground, where it was warmer.

Framed

First I heard loud scraping noises, along with muttered cursing. Low talking and laughter was followed by a series of thumps and banging sounds. I could make out a few of the words: "Take the door off" and "It's too long" and (of course!) "That's what she said." I thought briefly about getting out of a warm bed to investigate, but then dozed back off to sleep. Towards morning, I could hear the pounding of a hammer, as if elves had come to build a house in the next room.

Yes, all noises indicated that my kids were involved in another middle-of-the-night project. I've learned from experience not to get up and investigate. Because really, it's always too late anyhow. No sense losing any sleep.

Earlier in the week, I had asked the kids to take charge of getting rid of our old couch. Sadly, our furniture tends to be so beat up by the time we are done with it that we can't even donate it to a good cause. Even places like the Rescue Mission don't want it. I used to think that this had something to do with the fact that so much of our furniture comes from the Rescue Mission in the first place, but I've since changed my mind and blame the cats. No one wants secondhand furniture that's been clawed and peed on. I know, it's crazy, but that's the way it is.

I did, however, think that Boy in Black might know some college-aged people who would want an old couch. He was the one who kept saying, "Why get a new couch? This one is FINE."

It turns out he had a better idea. During the night, the kids decided to carry the couch up the stairs and put it in the boys' room, where it could serve as both bed and lounging area in the already ridiculously crowded room. But the long couch would simply not fit up the stairs, even after they removed the door from the bathroom at the top of the stairs and the door to the boys' bedroom.

Undaunted, Boy in Black flipped the couch upside down and cut it in half. Then they carried it up the stairs in pieces, and inside the room, he rebuilt the frame and hammered it back together. By the time I saw the couch the next morning, it had been re-assembled in the boys' room, where it just barely fit, shoved up against the futon that's already there. Boy in Black, stretched out on the couch, was just going to sleep. He grinned at me sleepily. "Hope you like it. Because you can't get it out of the room now without cutting it in half."



"Don't worry, Mom," said Shaggy Hair Boy, "I borrowed your camera and took a photo for your blog."

Friday fall foliage

Outside

The grass in the cemetery was still green, but the trees were beautifully yellow, orange, and red. As we walked, leaves crunched under sneakers, hiking boots, and one pair of pink flip-flops. In the shade, it was cold enough that I felt glad I'd worn my winter coat. "Let's find a patch of sun," I said to my students.

We'd begun class in a windowless room, in stiff plastic chairs under fluorescent lights. But we've been reading Linda Hogan's Dwellings, a book that talks about our spiritual connection to the natural world, and it just seemed wrong to have the conversation inside a box-like room. So soon after class started, we voted to move class outside. Little Green College is in Snowstorm City, an urban setting, but we're right next a cemetery filled with rolling hills, curving paths, and more than 80 species of trees. According to my students, it's the second largest cemetery on the eastern seaboard. Built just about 150 years ago, it was designed in the style of a rural cemetery, with huge old trees spreading branches over hills carved by glaciers.

We found a patch of lawn on the side of a hill, just below a line of tombstones, and sat down in the sun. Flippy Hair pulled out her sketchpad and began sketching a tombstone that was covered in vines. Beneath the hum of traffic from the nearby highway, we could hear squirrels and birds. "A black-capped chickadee, " Talkative Girl said, tilting her head to listen. "And a bunch of crows." Near the ground, the air was warm, and those of us wearing bulky winter coats rolled them up to use as cushions against the gravestones.

Earlier, my students had been talking about the calculus exam, scheduled for later in the day, and the chemistry test they had just gotten back. "It's overwhelming," one student said as she talked about how much work she had to do. But as we sat in the sunshine, talking about the book, listening to the leaves rustle as a squirrel ran through the canopy, I could feel the energy in the circle shifting, changing. Worries seeped into the not-yet-frozen ground. I could feel the bodies around me relaxing as they turned their faces towards the sun.

Blue

Well, yeah

"I can tell when you've got papers to grade," another blogger said to me the other day. "Your blog posts get really short — just a photo maybe or some paragraph of description."

Well, yeah, it's hard to write anything meaningful or lyrical when I've got a stack of papers to grade. The unmarked essays take up all kinds of space inside my brain, squashing any profound thoughts or witty insights.

I don't know why grading essays is so torturous. I like the topics I assign, and my students come up with cool, perceptive ideas. When the students are working on their papers, and we go around the room with each student talking about his or her topic, I always think to myself, "What great ideas." And then I tell my students, with complete sincerity, that I'm looking forward to reading the papers. The weird thing is that I do mean that.

And I do like reading the essays. I learn all kinds of stuff. If I could just sit by the fire, read the essays, and not write anything on them — well, I could be done in a couple of hours. And it would be a pretty enjoyable experience.

But it's the writing on the papers part that drives me crazy. I hate having to judge the paper to give it a grade and then try to explain to the student why the paper got that grade. It always seems like a lost cause. I mean, if the student understood what made an A essay an A essay, it's likely he wouldn't have written a C essay to begin with. And it seems rude to say to a student, "Yeah, this essay was adequate but you just had nothing insightful to say."

I hate reading a paragraph, figuring out what's not quite right, and then trying to say it tactfully to a student. Well, okay, I'm not even always that tactful. I have been known to circle a sentence and write in the margin, "This sentence says nothing." Or sometimes I'll underline a sentence and say, "Read this aloud. Does it make any sense to you?" I'm not sure how tactful it is to circle a whole paragraph and write, "You could improve this essay by cutting this paragraph out completely."

I like it when I get to an A paper. Those go fast. And the really bad essays are fun in their own way because I can quickly see what the problems are. I know what to say to the student. It's a bit like watching someone on a sinking life raft and knowing you can at least throw them a line. It's nice to feel needed.

But all the in-between essays take me forever. I want to explain to the student what she did right, which parts she should feel good about — but then separate that from the stuff that needs to be improved. I want to tell a student that his thesis was wonderful, but starting out the introduction with the words "In the modern world of today" makes me want to bang my head against the floor. I want to tell the student what needs to be improved, but also say something encouraging.

And so, I read the essay, write some comments, reread the essay, figure out the grade, read the essay again because I haven't yet said anything encouraging .... and then look back at my messy handwriting, the scrawling on the margins of the student paper, and feel like I didn't do a good enough job. And then, because I'm feeling discouraged, I get up, do some housework, have a snack, and check my email. Then I sit back down again. Only 59 more essays to go ....