A year ago, I started serious discussions with my children about safety and keeping their hands clean as I watched the news. I’d heard about Covid-19 from friends and family living abroad. I wondered, warily, if this was going to pass over us. My seniors were anticipating prom, but they had also started asking questions during class- what will happen, and how long will this last?
How long will this last?
As a teacher, I still mourn that abbreviated year. I miss those students and the time together that we lost- in my mind, I can still see where they sat and what projects they were working on. I miss my happy classroom community, the sunlight streaming in my east-facing windows, and the busy noise of my students at work. We were printmaking, and the art room bubbled with joyful, controlled chaos. The air smelled of springtime and speedball ink.
I feel like I’ve been mentally broken apart and reassembled over this past, lost, year. Crushing stress and uncertainty, and learning to live in a state of not-looking-forward, because two weeks out is too far to plan (if there was any doubt about that, last week’s winter storm underscores that fact). Learning how to abide in these times where the road ahead is obscured - well, I hope that it’s grown my character at least. The biggest struggle, and sometimes triumph, has been reclaiming joy. I have to force myself to remember what teaching is really like, and I have had to re-calibrate my expectations of what joy means this year. Some days, it means surviving. And that has to be enough.
Now March is at the door again, and the Texas sun kisses the earth, and my frostbitten plants struggle to reassert green stems. “Between the melting and the freezing/ the soul’s sap quivers.” My garden was still blooming, until the snow and ice last week. Fresh blossoms interrupted, an ironic metaphor.
What is a year, anyway? Immutable time: relative it quickens, and this year (or more) will collapse neatly once it is past- but what is gone is in reality irretrievable; I strain to really understand that time cannot expand and contract the way it does in my mind. Can I stretch out these blessed, quiet moments, and insert more productivity into my daydreams?
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
It is good, Lord, to be here. At least, that is what I strive to say- that is what all these unfinished landscapes aspire toward: the beauty of the present moment, the peace of the birds and wild flowers in the Sermon on the Mount. What a beautiful disaster this is, this blessed, Acceptable Time.
Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
