Joan D'arc: Reflections on a Teacherly Life: All Blogged Up

A few friends have asked recently why I stopped blogging. Very few, actually, which is probably just a function of the fact that this extremely low self-monitor gal tends to attract guarded friends with firm boundaries. And others who seem patiently to appreciate me with only the broadest conditions. But it served as a convenient discouragement when the going got complicated.

What derailed me first was that I couldn't, or had chosen not to, write about others in any real depth. None of us lives in a social vacuum, but it didn't seem fair or wise to share the details of other folks' private lives, even if they had an inextricable impact on mine. I'd read a true, cautionary tale in the NY Times magazine of a young writer who was catapulted to legendary blog fame, and just as quickly thudded from grace because of her propensity for including the gory details of her relationships in her entries. I've included the link to the article. It's long, but interesting if you have some free time:

http://tinyurl.com/38p63u2

The compelling focus of my life at the time -- it should probably be the compelling focus of any life at any time -- was interpersonal, and included woes. What to do? I could sidestep the daughter struggling bravely with transition, the extended family wracked by relentless, near insoluble crises, the complicated friendship that had come, it seemed, to a declarative end. I could write about the wonders of Portland's pervasive green-consciousness instead -- which, by the way, was really deeply wonderful. But the elephant in the room had stolen my pen and scoffed at my travelogue. I went back to just living my normally complicated but slightly less examined life.

Another sort of related block had to do with my own life complications. I had started my blog as an ambitious and celebratory sabbatical agenda-setting, but things weren't quite unfolding the way I had planned. I know, and I'm usually the first to holler, that conflict and the unexpected make for better writing. But this muck just seemed mundane, and I was NOT going to allow my glorious sabbatical to be seen as the stuff of everyday frustration. My grad school classes were more than a little disappointing, either too academic and theoretical, or a rehashing of things that I, as a literacy coach, know well enough to teach myself. My days, which were often unscheduled until the evening, had tended to bog down with unengaging course work and a bit of (resultant?) undisciplined lethargy. Bike riding in all but park trails turned out to be a nightmare. The days I spent tutoring second language learners were fun and productive. But the two schools I was working in and hoped to learn from and be awed by were, respectively, vastly inferior to my own school, or too cool and trendily excellent to allow me to stray from my self-contained ESL room to walk amongst them. Seriously.

But, there were two bits of awareness dogging the corners of my avoidance all along. One is my Achilles heel habit of all-or-nothing perfectionism. If I couldn't write a superlative blog about a superlative sabbatical, it wasn't worth doing at all. As I once admonished someone who wouldn't talk at a gathering because everyone else was too boring, I'd become the most boring person in the room in my refusal to engage with close enough. The second tiny beam of light was that things had a way of becoming more interesting when I really attended to them. I have difficulty with mindfulness, with presence, and tend to live in my head. But when I get in the habit of writing I live a more wide-awake life, to borrow Lucy Calkins' phrase. I am on the look-out for material, for meaning, and it doesn't take perfection or melodrama to provide that. We can "see the world in a grain of sand," or in a pointless debate over difficult material with charming classmates, or in an autumn bike ride.

So I ride my bike on New York's park trails, which is imperfect but close enough. It's actually pretty breathtaking. Although I've known there's a promenade along the East River, about a block and a half from my home, for 24 years, I'd never considered biking on it until last month. You can take the trail just about all around Manhattan, but a staircase with a unwieldy bike chute has limited me so far to the few miles around my neighborhood. But no matter -- the river glimmers, the leaves put on a life-cycle show, folks walk their babies and bulldogs, or smooch on benches, I fly by and absorb it all. On a chilly day last week, the brisk wind whipped icily over the river, and the trees went up in flames. It reminded me that loss can cut deep -- my kids' transitions, my family's crises, my doomed friendship, the dream sabbatical, the election -- but it also may be, as the poet Rumi said, "clearing you out for some new delight." So I came home from my bike ride and scribbled down this haiku: