Not forgetting the mountain

No time to blog tonight, so you just get a poem.

Witness

Sometimes the mountain
is hidden from me in veils
of cloud, sometimes
I am hidden from the mountain
in veils of inattention, apathy, fatigue,
when I forget or refuse to go
down to the shore or a few yards
up the road, on a clear day,
to reconfirm
that witnessing presence.
- Denise Levertov

Big project due tomorrow. It's done and it's not even midnight yet. I'm happy with it, proud even. I have figured out how to create podcasts and put them online for use by myself or other teachers. I have learned a lot about stage directions - most of them not Shakespeare's, so they are fluid - and performance, and another lesson integrates that. I have learned what scansion is and how Shakespeare used it to disrupt meter, like in that Richard III wooing scene. That's all in it. So is Chinswing.

Need to rest. I'm sicker than a dog. Eyelids hot, throat scratchy. I can't believe I'll be teaching again on Monday.

The Summer Day

I'm so moved by this poem, and am considering making it a first-day activity. Because, after all, what else is the first day of school about than deciding what to do with your wild and precious life?

First found in Teaching With Fire:

The Summer Day
Mary Oliver

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?