Yeats

Not long ago, one of my daughter’s friends remarked that everyone desires the warm feeling of home. And yet, why is it so darned hard to keep the home in balance? The stuff of literature is family, never wholly at ease, always shifting and turning, brimming with hunger and unmet desire…. the stuff of life: this material I write about; this very matter I live.

This winter, even a mouse came to die beneath my wood stove, spreading out its little furry body, relinquishing fear of us in its desire to expire on the hearth. The snow is all gone but the hard ugly leavings of dirtied lumps. Vermont in March should be heavy winter, sun bright over fresh snow, and we should be skiing in t-shirts, sunburning. The wind has been blowing every night, bringing neither spring nor storm. It’s off, all of it, this winter that never was.

Long after dinner tonight, the girls and I sat at the table, talking, myself knitting, pulling together through language. They tell me, this happened today, and we did that, while I’m thinking of those sunny faces of coltsfoot, the deep yellow blossoms that push up through the rockiest and poorest of soils. When will they return? I rely on language and story, yes, to bind us together, and my other old stand-by – resilience – thinking…

Surely some revelation is at hand…

– Yeats

March, Vermont

Today I visited a high school that reminded me of the high school I attended, and I remembered just how badly I wanted to dismantle that building, brick by brick. I wanted windows. I wanted to lie beneath leafy trees. I wanted to hike up behind the athletic fields and wander into woods I hadn’t explored.

So at 18 when I enrolled in a tiny Vermont college at the end of a paved road, where an old farmhouse housed the administrative offices and classrooms were in a former hay barn, I knew I was in the right place. The first night I slept there, I fell asleep staring through the window at the crystalline stars.

I’ve tried many paths with my own daughters, from private school to homeschooling to public school, and perhaps the one thing I learned is not follow what your own adult peer group is doing – that initial impulses are sometimes dead-on – and that if you’re feeling penned in, look for the egress, or at least a window sash to open.

Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.

William Butler Yeats

February garden, Vermont

Stony Soil Vermont

Vermont Writing

Koyaanisqatsi: Unbalanced Life

Another Brick in the Wall….