WELCOME, PROFESSOR NEMO

"Snow Storm", acrylic, by John K. Harrell

While the media tries to stir up fears about the fierce storm that approaches from the west, I’m holding out my hand in welcome. It would be easy to surrender to the fears that will be working hard to scare us in the next few days, but it might be just as easy to say to this storm, “Come in. Please be comfortable and teach me what you can.” It might be possible to see it as an opportunity, a first-rate chance to learn inspiring lessons. The new storm named Nemo could bring nothing less than a high-level learning experience, sort of like a graduate college class in level-headedness and the uplifting aspects of winter. I’ve been looking forward to finding stimulating courses to take in my retirement, and Nemo might make the perfect professor, a teacher who can take me to advanced levels of attentiveness and insight. Why not welcome a situation that can show me new ways to stay observant and enthusiastic? Why not gladly greet an instructor who can set out high standards for living in a princely way? Why not hang out flags of welcome? Sure, a person might be anxious about possible problems – power outages, the furnace stopping, frozen pipes -- but a person might also be grateful to be given the chance to choose new ways to use his new snowshoes, new ways to watch a world turn white, new ways to stay passionate in a stormy world.   

Geri, egg-and-broccoli, and Middlemarch

      Delycia and I drove up to Newton, MA, yesterday to see our good friend Geri. It was a fun ride, as usual, even on the crowded interstates at rush hour. Delycia drove up and we talked and I sometimes read on my iPad, and then I drove home in the frozen darkness on fairly free-of-traffic streets.

      Up early this morning as usual, writing and then riding the trainer bike at 5:00 a.m., then an egg-and-broccoli sandwich with bone-suckin’ mustard sauce and sweet-tasting coffee. We continued our ritual of reading five minutes in Middlemarcheach morning, at the point in the story where Dorothea is starting, perhaps, to use her wings and discover who she really is.

     School was as serene and satisfying as ever, on this day that leaves only about 70 left in my teaching career. The career will come to an end, but the satisfactions and accomplishments and recollections won’t.

MIGHTY WORKINGS

"Ice Machine", watercolor, by Kay Smith

“Hear ye not the hum of mighty workings?”

     -- from a poem by John Keats, “Addressed to Haydon”

         This line from Keats came to me this morning as I listened to the hum of the furnace in the basement, and it brought to mind all the “mighty workings”, all the humming and whirring and bustling and pulsating that’s constantly occurring across the world as I carry on with my life. There are, of course, the miraculous machineries of my own body – my heart that’s held a steady rhythm for around 26,000 days now, my lungs that lift and fall like the most steadfast of engines, my cells that refresh and restore themselves second by second – but that’s just the start of the list of works of this workshop we call our world. While I’m sitting in silence, sipping coffee and typing, trees by the billions are restructuring themselves, rolling oceans are functioning with perfection, prairies in the west are performing with precision, and the sky above our house is rotating its winds and  spinning its stars with efficiency and precision. “Mighty workings” indeed – and in the midst of these sits a 71-year-old guy whose gears and mechanisms are still making miracles, still supervising his constantly prosperous life.