warm weather and vulnerabilities

I love being barefoot.

I love the feeling of clean carpet or tile or concrete under my feet. love walking on cool grass or warm sand or slick mud.

thankfully Arizona gives us plenty of good being-barefoot weather, overall. I avoid socks at all costs unless I'm jogging or hiking in actual shoes.

being-barefoot weather is upon us for good now. spring! summer break mere 3 weeks hence!

it's exhilarating and intimidating, the idea of summer. I won't be teaching. what will I do? how will I choose between all the crafts and writing and projects and excursions and naps I want to fit in? 

maybe I can figure out a way to do it all. (there was a pretty cool podcast episode from Maisie Hill about that, just last month.)

we shall see.

first I need to survive the semester and all its grading, meetings, lesson plans, presentations, and commencement shenanigans. 

I will. we all will. all 97 of my students and I and my colleagues too. 

somehow.

April is national poetry month, isn't it? 

I'm not a poet-- not really. but sometimes my brain thinks very poetically.

I like to read poetry. 

even more I like to hear poetry read aloud. seeing it on a page isn't quite good enough usually.

this poem, "The Hill We Climb," from a whole fifteen months ago, is a good and grand tear-jerking hopeful poem to listen to. 

to read it silently-- well, it might still be good. or it might seem long and uneven, or as the post I linked to just there has it, too dense.

what are the best parts? it is hard to choose. and pasting them here won't do any justice to how they sound in Amanda Gorman's own voice.

listen and watch the whole thing first:

and now, here are the most moving sections for me-- these three from near the beginning, middle, and end:

We’ve learned that quiet isn’t always peace, and the norms and notions of what “just” is isn’t always justice.
And yet the dawn is ours before we knew it. Somehow we do it.
Somehow we weathered and witnessed a nation that isn’t broken, but simply unfinished.

and

So, while once we asked, how could we possibly prevail over catastrophe, now we assert, how could catastrophe possibly prevail over us? 

and the last few lines, singed with cliche just at the edges--

When day comes, we step out of the shade of flame and unafraid. The new dawn balloons as we free it.
For there is always light, if only we’re brave enough to see it.
If only we’re brave enough to be it.

maybe I ought to go looking for more of Ms. Gorman's poetry.

 

for the record, I've been reading various other non-poetry lately, including:

The Echo Wife, by Sarah Gailey  (not the winner of this year's Tournament of Books)

Poet Warrior, by Joy Harjo (recommended via yoga church friends)

Trigger Warning, short stories by Neil Gaiman

The Marvelous Clouds, by John Durham Peters

and 

A Primer for Forgetting, by Lewis Hyde (the same one who wrote Common as Air, which I managed to cite in my dissertation) 

 

here's to springtime and reading and being barefoot as much as possible.