Snowed Under

I got an email from a friend the other day asking where I went, since I haven't posted anything here in over a week. The answer is that we went on a staff retreat over the weekend. Going away for the weekend requires a week of preparation to catch up before going and then a week of catching up when you get back because you didn't get caught up enough before, in spite of your efforts. At least, for me it does. If I don't do four or five hours of work on Saturday, I pay for the omission the whole week. So now I'm paying. It's not just the work itself, which can be done here and there in five minute increments - it's the chance to get my thoughts together and feel thoroughly prepared. I need that and this week I just didn't get it. Hope to be back soon!

The Birds

It's Bird Day again.

Weather

I've become a weather junkie. I'm always checking out Weather.com, the National Hurricane Center, and, most lately, Yahoo Weather. I particularly like Yahoo Weather, because you can personalize it. I have it set up to show me the weather in cities around the world. This is going to be even more fun when North American winter really sets in and I can feel smug about how much warmer I am than any of my friends and family members who live there.

Another great thing about Yahoo Weather is that I get a list of articles having to do with weather. (Some of them don't have much to do with weather really - if there's been a storm of protest in some scandal, the storm reference sends the article into my list.) There is always flooding somewhere - and the poor suffer disproportionately from this, as from everything else. In countries around the world, people with no homeowner's insurance and no FEMA are drying out their few possessions that survived one flood or another and mourning those who were washed away.

It was on Yahoo Weather that I found this article, too. It seems that some people in Ohio have been without power for five days and have taken to the streets to protest. (People do that here, too, but it takes them a lot longer than five days to reach that point. Sometimes after five months or so they might go out and burn a few tires and block the roads.) I sympathize with these people, honestly I do. The article notes that some of them are on oxygen and depend on the elevators in their building working. It's not easy to be without power, as I know better than many!

Weather obsesses us because there's not much we can do about it. People can forecast it, with varying degrees of accuracy, but we can't make it go away. And it affects what we want to do, irritatingly enough. On my Yahoo Weather page I notice a link to Fisherman's Weather, which I imagined was for fleets of fishermen going out to earn their living, but which turns out to be for recreational fishermen and to have more to do with whether the fish are biting than with the calmness of the ocean. There's also a Honeymoon Planner, because as the site says, "Your dream destination wedding or honeymoon can quickly turn into a nightmare if you're not prepared for the weather."

It all reminds me that we are very much at the mercy of things beyond our control, even though we like to convince ourselves that we can plan our future and run our own lives. The Bible is clear on this, in the book of James, saying: "Now listen, you who say, 'Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money.' Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. Instead, you ought to say, 'If it is the Lord's will, we will live and do this or that'"(James 4:13-15). In this country Christians always add "if God wills" whenever they use the word "tomorrow." For years I've resisted doing it because it seems so formulaic. "If God wills" is just part of the word "tomorrow" in the whole mumbled phrase, "See-you-tomorrow-if-God-wills." Sometimes it strikes me as a bit fatalistic and a way of avoiding responsibility for one's own actions. But lately, in the midst of yet another round of crisis for this sad little country where I live, I find myself adding the phrase to my speech, not in a formulaic way but remembering every time I say it that our life is a vapor, a mist, not lasting, subject to any number of unexpected disasters and yet also full of countless joys. We had a pastor once who remarked after a huge snowstorm that shut down activity and canceled church that God likes to do that every once in a while to remind us who's in charge.

Am I saying God sent the storms that caused so much damage and loss of life? I am struggling with that question. I believe God could have prevented them hitting this country, already in the throes of so many problems. Why didn't He? I don't know why He allows suffering in this world, though I have read many books on the subject and have my answers all formulated in a philosophical sense - but those pat answers fall apart sometimes in the face of misery and grief. It's easier for me to explain away problems caused by human beings - God allows for our free will, etc. etc. - than the so-called "Acts of God." (And yes, there's the whole global warming factor, with human activity affecting severity of weather, but let's face it - there were catastrophic events well before the internal combustion engine and people have always wrestled with these questions.)

This isn't the time for agonizing over philosophical and theological questions, though, it's a time for neighbors helping each other and outsiders coming with aid and comfort. It's a time for me to look at unfathomable, overwhelming need, and say, "I can't do much, but I can clean out my closet and pass on clothes, I can play with some displaced orphans, I can donate money, I can keep life normal for the children of others who are out helping more directly, I can pray."

I didn't intend to become so impassioned in this post. It was just going to be a lighthearted note on the features of Yahoo Weather. But life is overshadowed now with grief. "In the midst of life we are in death," says the Book of Common Prayer. That's always the case, but in times like these we are more aware of the fact. And as Lewis reminds me in his "Learning in Wartime" (which I blogged about here), it's a good thing for us to be aware of mortality.

Incidentally, I smiled when I noticed at BibleGateway.com, where I'd gone to look up the verses from James, that today's verse of the day is “Be glad, O people of Zion, rejoice in the LORD your God, for he has given you the autumn rains in righteousness. He sends you abundant showers, both autumn and spring rains, as before.”- Joel 2:23

Poetry Friday - To Night

To Night
by Joseph Blanco White (1775 – 1841)

Mysterious Night! when our first parent knew
Thee from report divine, and heard thy name,
Did he not tremble for this lovely frame,
This glorious canopy of light and blue?
Yet 'neath a curtain of translucent dew,
Bathed in the rays of the great setting flame,
Hesperus with the host of heaven came,
And lo! Creation widened in man's view.
Who could have thought such darkness lay concealed
Within thy beams, O Sun! or who could find,
Whilst fly and leaf and insect stood revealed,
That to such countless orbs thou mad'st us blind!
Why do we then shun death with anxious strife?
If Light can thus deceive, wherefore not Life?


This poem was on the Classic Poetry Aloud podcast during the summer. A professor I had in college said that all poetry is about death, because most of it is about beauty, and you can't write about beauty without knowing that it's all temporary. This poem is explicitly about death, and urges us not to fear it, since it will bring us a wider view - a realization of all that life hides from us.

Here's today's Poetry Friday roundup.

Has the Large Hadron Collider destroyed the World Yet?

Well, has it? Find out here.

(You can find out what this thing is here, if, like me, you never heard of it until today. Thanks Tricia.)

More on Haiti

I'm shocked to see that Haiti doesn't even make the Google News front page, but here's some more on what is going on and what you can do to help.

I wrote about Gonaives the other day and here's more on what's happening there. But many other parts of Haiti have been severely hit as well. You can see descriptions and photos here, here, here, and here.

There are some ways you can help here and here. Many, many other organizations are in dire need of funds right now, so just Google "Haiti Hurricane Relief" and give to the group of your choice. As Tara puts it on her blog,

Many were swept away in the water and lost loved ones and homes and possessions. State Farm Insurance is not cutting checks in two weeks, two months or ever. These losses are huge. They will have long-lasting effects on these areas.

The gardens are gone. The animals are gone. The houses are gone. Everything these people had (and in most cases, that wasn't a whole lot) is gone. And nobody seems to know how many people have been lost - every single article has a different number. Lord, have mercy on dear little Haiti.

Monday

I can understand why people worship the sun. That feeling you get when it appears in the sky after days of gloom is certainly a spiritual one. Ecstasy, just about.

We had a professional development day scheduled for today but our speaker couldn't come - his flight was canceled. (We shouldn't schedule any special events for storm season. Or election season. Or kidnapping season. Or riot season. Or, really, ever. As Homer Simpson would say, "So you tried, and you failed. The lesson here is: don't try.") We're going to meet anyway and I'm sure we'll get some things done.

Here's to a sunny week!

Gonaïves, Haïti

Cathedral in Gonaïves after Hurricane Hanna, Photo from Yahoo News

Here's what happened in Gonaïves, Haïti during Tropical Storm Jeanne in 2004.

Here's what happened there during Hurricanes Gustav and Hanna in 2008. (One pastor said this year's destruction was "ten times worse.")

And here's some about Hurricane Ike. And more about Ike's effects in Gonaives and elsewhere.

Early Morning Reading Update

I'm up early - I can't remember what woke me, but when I went to check on the kids (as I do almost every time I wake up in the night - is that neurotic?) I found that the leak in my son's ceiling had spilled over the strategically placed washtub. I put a towel under the washtub and found another washtub and strategically placed that one too - and by then I was wide, wide awake. It's raining and raining, and has been for hours, apparently, judging by the amount in the previously mentioned washtub.

So anyway, it's been a while since I posted a reading update.

Book #43 was Mistaken Identity: Two Families, One Survivor, Unwavering Hope, by the Van Ryn and Cerak families. Remember this story from the news? There was a huge accident involving students from Taylor University, and the one survivor was misidentified - the wrong family sat by her bedside for five weeks before they figured out what was going on. Very interesting book, terribly sad, but also full of hope.

Book #44 was Your Child's Strengths:Discover Them, Develop Them, Use Them, by Jenifer Fox. Fox believes that the prevailing educational system is based on weakness, not strength, and that we need to be encouraging kids to find their areas of strength. She makes a good case and I have used some of her material with my students already. I found that this book influenced the way I think about students. And I loved the item from the workbook where she suggests talking to kids about how they would handle it if the power were off at their house (among many other discussion items). Power off? Would they even notice?

Book #45 was Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, by Kiran Desai. I picked this book up because I loved Desai's later book The Inheritance of Loss. This one wasn't as good - same breezy style, similar eccentric characters, but not nearly as poignant and believable. Still, I guess it shows that Desai is getting better!

Book #46 was C. S. Lewis' book Miracles, which I read because my friend Janet posted this amazing quote from it. Lewis doesn't disappoint. Reading him always makes me feel as though I've been doing brain calisthenics. I loved this book. Janet writes way more coherently about it, in the post I already linked and a couple of others.

Books #47 and #48 were Nobody's Princess and Nobody's Prize, by Esther Friesner. These books are terrific fun. They are about Helen of Troy as a young girl, before she was Helen of Troy. In most retellings of the Iliad she comes across as completely insipid. Not in these books! She has as much adventure as it's possible to fit into a book, and she's a thoroughly memorable character, surrounded by other thoroughly memorable characters, many of whom happen to be folk you've read about in myths all your life. It's delightful to see Friesner's take on many of these.

The internet connection has gone in and out while I have been writing this post, and the power has gone off, and a child has arrived in my bed, and through it all the rain has pounded steadily on.

Learning in Wartime

Someone at a staff meeting referred last week to C. S. Lewis' sermon Learning in Wartime. I had read it before; back in 2001, after September 11th, a lot of people were reading and discussing it. (Here's an article published in Christianity Today at the time.)

Lewis gave this sermon to undergraduates during the second World War. How, they wondered, could they justify being at university and studying when such cataclysmic events were going on? Particularly, how could they study the seemingly impractical things they were working on? (This is something I think about a lot. I mean, what good am I in an emergency? I can just hear it now: "Ah, someone with a literature degree! Two literature degrees, you say! Just what we need right now in the middle of this crisis, in this country with a 50% literacy rate! Hurry over here, there's a text to be explicated! What a relief to have an expert on hand!")

The relevance of this Lewis sermon now was that we as a staff are overwhelmed with what is going on around us in this country, with the death and destruction and suffering. Of course, it's useful to keep people's children safe and occupied while they are out there making things better. Of course, it's useful to educate children. But sometimes it seems that the things we're teaching are perhaps not the best use of our time - why aren't we out there doing something useful? What good are equations and metaphors and chemical formulae now?

If you've ever felt that way, I highly recommend that you read this piece. (You can find it in PDF format here.) (Edit - Wow, I've worked and worked on posting the right link and I can't seem to get it - just do what I did and Google "C. S. Lewis Learning in Wartime PDF" and you should find it. It's at ncgv.net.)

Here's an excerpt:

Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice. Human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something
infinitely more important than itself. If men had postponed
the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure
the search would never have begun. We are mistaken when
we compare war with "normal life". Life has never been
normal. Even those periods which we think most tranquil,
like the nineteenth century, turn out, on closer inspection, to
be full of cries, alarms, difficulties, emergencies. Plausible
reasons have never been lacking for putting off all merely
cultural activities until some imminent danger has been averted or some crying injustice put right. But humanity long
ago chose to neglect those plausible reasons. They wanted
knowledge and beauty now, and would not wait for the
suitable moment that never came. Periclean Athens leaves
us not only the Parthenon but, significantly, the Funeral
Oration. The insects have chosen a different line: they have
sought first the material welfare and security of the hive,
and presumably they have their reward. Men are
different. They propound mathematical theorems in
beleaguered cities, conduct metaphysical arguments in
condemned cells, make jokes on scaffolds, discuss the last
new poem while advancing to the walls of Quebec, and
comb their hair at Thermopylae. This is not panache; it is
our nature.

Literature is part of what it means to be human - yes, even in a country where so many can't read it. It helps us understand one another, appreciate one another, and maybe be less likely to kill one another. It may not be of immediate practical value, but humanity wants knowledge and beauty now. The suitable moment will never come.

The Week that Was

I am thanking God it's Friday. (And here's today's Poetry Friday roundup, by the way). This week was a rough one, for several reasons.

One reason is that I'm a weenie, and I hate gloomy weather. I am spoiled here - we usually have perfect weather (if somewhat warm for some people's tastes). None of this gentle sweep of the seasons stuff - we have blue skies and lovely warm temperatures all year round, and we love it! Or at least, I do. This week was windy, dark, and rainy - oh my goodness, rainy. It rained almost all the time.

The second reason is linked to the first - this bad weather caused horrible damage in this country - not to my house, but to the houses of thousands of others. It killed people, displaced people, ruined people's lives. It was a week of grief, and that grief continues.

The third reason is that I was sick all week, and I lost my voice. A voice is rather important for a teacher. I realized once again that my voice is my main tool of the trade. I use it all day long, to explain and encourage and cajole and instruct and correct and, well, teach. I try not to raise it too often, but I take roll, read aloud, ask and answer questions, maintain order in the hallways, give directions, conference with kids, pray (it's a Christian school, don't call the ACLU). I was constantly reminded every day this week how important my voice is to the work I do. I would force it all morning with my middle schoolers and then be basically mute by the afternoon and give my high schoolers something to do that wouldn't require me to talk.

Today the sky was blue and gorgeous again, and the sun was out. That cheered me up immensely. And I was starting to feel physically normal again, too. One of my lessons today went so well that I wanted to jump up and down. I wished I had been being observed by an administrator. It was that good. One of those moments when you say, yes, I'm fabulous, this is why I'm a teacher!

At the same time, though, I can't stop thinking about the citizens of this country who have lost everything this week. I met some this afternoon, kids who were asleep in their orphanage when the waters started to rise. They escaped with their lives and their pyjamas and nothing else.

And that was my week. I'm hoping and praying for an uneventful weekend with clear skies.

Theme Day - Sister Cities

Today's Theme Day for the Daily Photo blogs is Sister Cities. Here you can see the thumbnails of participants' photos.

Poetry Friday - Sick

I have a rotten cold, but of course I worked sick. The thought of getting ready for a sub is so very daunting that I usually do. I know, I know, I'm encouraging the spread of the virus, which I probably picked up in the classroom in the first place.

Here's an Emily Dickinson poem that's new to me and it's just about impossible to shorten it.


Surgeons must be very careful
by Emily Dickinson

Surgeons must be very careful
When they take the knife!
Underneath their fine incisions
Stirs the Culprit—Life!


So, I'm thankful to be alive after a weird and windy week, and I guess coughing and snorting and struggling to breathe is a blessing since it proves I'm still alive. And now I'm going to go to bed.

Here's this week's Poetry Friday roundup.

Stormy Weather Book Club

So we're home again today, and it's raining and raining and raining. A bedroom ceiling is leaking (I removed a nearly full five-gallon bucket from under the drippy spot this morning), and there's water all over the kitchen floor because the (solar) fridge is completely thawing. (Funny, the way you need sun to make solar things work.) The whole world has a drowned feeling about it.

I know that in homes all over this country, people are putting buckets under drips. Someone who came over to see me today said that at his house they have to stand up because if you lie down you're going to be under a spot where the rain's coming in. He has sent his kids to different places to be dry.

I'm feeling a bit gloomy. You probably don't get Seasonal Affective Disorder after two days without sun, but I'm a tropical person and I can't stand all this gray. Especially when I keep thinking about all the people who are wet and miserable and the ones who have had mudslides on their houses and the ones who are just out in the cold because they lost their roof. None of these are cheerful thoughts.

This morning my son asked to have a book club. By this he meant that he and his sister would choose books and we would all get in Mommy and Daddy's bed and read to each other. So that's what we did. My daughter chose a chapter book she thought her brother would like and he picked a stack of picture books and we read. It made us all feel better.

Here's what we read:



Mr. Popper's Penguins, by Richard and Florence Atwater. I don't think I've ever read this before. It's funny and improbable and just what the doctor ordered.



Mr. Shaw's Shipshape Shoe Shop, by Eve Titus. Surely this wonderful book isn't out of print? I can't find it on Amazon at all, even used. This really is a great one - a surefire cheerer upper. It's about someone for whom everything works out - all the different passions of his life come together to create a perfect life. Unrealistic? Perhaps. But wonderful. And full of great alliteration, as my 11-year-old pointed out while we read it. (Edit: I found it when I searched by the author's name. You can get a copy for 51 cents here.)

Patrick: Patron Saint of Ireland, by Tomie de Paola. My children love this book. Patrick is taken as a slave and he rises above it and becomes a great servant of God.

The Story of Abraham, adapted by Maxine Nodel. Another great story about promises that really do end up coming true.

Tar Beach, by Faith Ringgold. All you need is an imagination and you can fly away and overcome your troubles. (Oh, and great illustrations help.)



Hope we go back to school tomorrow.

Carnival

Our internet connection is still up! Hooray! I think I'll go look at this week's Education Carnival.

Oh wait, that's last week's. I'm a little behind the times.

Weather Happens

One of the hazards of tropical living is the occasional tropical storm. No school today, as we hunker down.

And Still More about Breaking Dawn

Here is another review of the book by Lisa. She feels a little more strongly than I do about the - shall we say - mature themes in this book. I thought it was acceptable in the context, though I did feel that this was yet another example of a series that started out appropriate for middle schoolers and got less so as it continued. I don't want to mislead you if you're buying this for your young teenager, so go read what she has to say.

Poetry Friday - Abstraction

One of the things I enjoyed in the Twilight Series is the various kinds of mind-reading. (Here's a really interesting article that suggests the mind-reading the werewolf pack does is a metaphor for life as a tribal person.) I think Meyer does a wonderful job writing conversations where one or several of the participants are not actually speaking. These conversations are often very funny.

Most of the time we don't get to know what is going on in other people's minds. We know what they tell us or what we observe - so our knowledge is always partial.

My friend Tara loves Sara Groves and got me listening to her music, too. Over time Tara has posted the lyrics to most of the songs on Groves' latest album, Tell Me What You Know.



I don't think she has posted these lyrics, and reading Breaking Dawn, in the weird way in which my mind works, made me think of this song. In the liner notes Groves quotes from A Soldier of the Great War, by Mark Helprin:

We're too weak to feel the full import of such a loss...It would take more than anyone can give to understand the life of one other person...you cannot know anything but the smallest part of the love, regret, excitement and melancholy of one [life]. And Two? And Three? At two you have entered the realm of abstraction.

Abstraction

The girl looks out from the window of the airplane
20,000 feet up in the sky
She picks a rooftop in the middle of the town
And wonders what is happening inside

The TV in the kitchen flashes faces
The woman slowly pushes in the chairs
Her neighbor's son is fighting in the army
She's concentrating to remember where

Who can know the pain, the joy, the regret, the satisfaction
Who can know the love of one life, one heart, one soul
At two you're at abstraction

The man is waiting for the bus into the city
He grabs a drink and slowly reads the Times
His heart is captured by a story of a child
Around the world but always on his mind

A million this a million that
Vast sums of individuals
A million here a million there
Made up of a million souls


It's true, isn't it? We feel things so deeply, think thoughts that completely absorb our attention, live lives that seem incredibly important to us. Yet it's hard for us to enter into others' experience. Especially, as the song says, when we're talking of millions of souls. That's one of the reasons I like to read, because it gives me an opportunity to see things from other points of view, and opens my mind, often, to completely new ways of looking at life. At that point, I can get beyond the abstraction.

The Poetry Friday roundup is here today.

Precious Object

When we were discussing Writing Territories this week, I talked about things that we love as possible subjects for writing. Everyone, of course, has a different list. Here's one of my precious objects.



I got this puzzle probably when I was six years old (I'm going by the house I remember living in at the time). It has traveled with me to many different homes since then. I used to have my parents time me to see how long it took to put every piece in, and now my daughter does the same thing. Each time I've had a baby I've put the puzzle away until toddler years were safely past, since I didn't want any of these countries disappearing down a throat.

One country is missing - can you see? It's Tunisia, and I've always wanted to visit there, since its absence makes it seem especially attractive to me. My kids were looking for this piece a few months ago and I told them not to bother, because it was lost many years ago and in a country far, far away from here (not a different galaxy, but it might as well be).

Of course, this is a historical curiosity too, since several of these countries no longer exist with the names written here. Rhodesia, Malagasy Republic, Zaire, for example. Due in large part to this puzzle, my African geography (at least, using 1973-era names) is far better than my US geography. I didn't go to elementary school in the States, except for two years, and I didn't have a puzzle with the states on it!

I wonder which of the toys my children have now will get carried from country to country as this one has?

Day Three

Things at school are settling down a bit, becoming slightly less chaotic each day. Kids are still trickling in, but almost everyone whose name is on my list has made an appearance now. I've been giving out lockers, setting up procedures, getting things truly underway.

Today I picked up an extra class, one I've never taught before, so that will be an interesting challenge. It's good because I was feeling guilty about how light and easy my schedule was this year. I always have to be suffering, you know, and feeling guilty. It's an MK thing. If everything is going too well my character will not be sufficiently built. Now I feel my credibility as an overworked teacher has returned and I can gripe with a clear(er) conscience (not completely clear - I'll find something to feel guilty about - like the griping).

It is extremely, excessively, mind-bendingly warm. Right now it is 90 degrees, feels like 104 (actually, it feels more like 114, but Yahoo says 104). Today there was some kind of glitch with the generator - apparently involving maintenance, and switching to the old generator briefly - and we were without power between about one and two. Right after lunch, right at the steamiest part of the day. Nobody in my class fell asleep, but everyone looked miserable. The worst part was hearing the generator winding up to start and then having it not start - that happened three times at least. Finally it started back up and the AC in the classroom could be restarted. Whew. (And, my obligatory disclaimer: we are one of the few schools in this country that even has AC, we are spoiled rotten, yada yada yada.)