Today settled in unlike any I've had in some time. Free for the day from teaching, I walked my son to school. My extrapolation of this small event is absurd: it is a brief walk down the creek side multi-path, but I can't swat away the metaphor of it. The intimate connection I want in his everyday life, as he grows into it, until the time I head off, alone. I don't know how to call out this fervent hope and put it back in the wind. Keeping to the business of living the moments between us as they come is more thorns than berries, more about reaching them, and less about plucking them.
I remind myself now and then of the Irish poetess' panicked fish, caught in a jar in a gentle but active rill. Exhausted from struggling to get free, it relents, and the current gently lifts it out. I wonder if this is how faith might return to me someday, only after I have done trying to wrest it into submission.
In failing that lesson today, I walked down to the school in the afternoon. It is very hot, and I have mowed, raked, and powered through other work in the heat. He is grumpy about geography, he says twice, and is not inclined to more talk. Soon he is walking behind me. I have forgotten to give him the time that any person wants to leave the day's work behind and simply be. The reflection I see in my jar is an angry and useless man.
A migraine of dehydration and glare I earned for this has since passed. The hot spell appears to be giving way to a cool front. We're about to play a game together. I'd ask which of us is thrashing more in growth, but it's obvious, embarrassing. By the way I dash my brains against the vessel, fathering but in due proportion, you might guess I like to fuck with my own self. I don't, but I can see where you'd get that idea.
I remind myself now and then of the Irish poetess' panicked fish, caught in a jar in a gentle but active rill. Exhausted from struggling to get free, it relents, and the current gently lifts it out. I wonder if this is how faith might return to me someday, only after I have done trying to wrest it into submission.
In failing that lesson today, I walked down to the school in the afternoon. It is very hot, and I have mowed, raked, and powered through other work in the heat. He is grumpy about geography, he says twice, and is not inclined to more talk. Soon he is walking behind me. I have forgotten to give him the time that any person wants to leave the day's work behind and simply be. The reflection I see in my jar is an angry and useless man.
A migraine of dehydration and glare I earned for this has since passed. The hot spell appears to be giving way to a cool front. We're about to play a game together. I'd ask which of us is thrashing more in growth, but it's obvious, embarrassing. By the way I dash my brains against the vessel, fathering but in due proportion, you might guess I like to fuck with my own self. I don't, but I can see where you'd get that idea.
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