LIG Fest

I am exhausted to have been, but elated to have gone, to the Life is Good Festival today.









Here's to life!

Coming Home

I'm back from training! Last year I was living out of my sleeping bag, back and forth to the Marriott with no clue, and this year I was running back and forth from a lodge in the woods, taking every chance just to walk around barefoot late at night and look up at the stars.

Luckily this year we were in NC, and so I was "at home" so to speak with the surroundings. Black Mountain's beautiful and reminds me of my uncle's on the marina enough to calm me and make me feel big, deep things from time to time. It made me think that there is never again a time in a person's life quite like the time when they are 5, 6, and 7, when one's faculties are essentially there but the social implications of living a life are not.

I remember being at J's and kicking around the gravel, sitting on the docks, surrounded by the pines and the water. Whenever I get back there, I listen to the masts clinking in the wind and all that water sloshing around, and everything inside of me just settles. This place was a little like that place. There's a peace in knowing I'll find my space again throughout life, but I'm disturbed that it's so rooted in geography and dislocation. Shouldn't that place be in my mind, set in my soul?

We got out to the Blue Hills today, which was a nice homecoming. The air back in New England is perfect right now, sunny and clean and getting cooler. I'm praying for a gorgeous foliage season despite the lack of summer rain, and I'm looking forward to the hikes ahead under a rainbow canopy of leaves.

I guess when you work with schools, this time of year really does feel like a new beginning. I am so excited for the work this year, and if anything, training helped me re-energize and refocus on what I want to devote my work to in the coming months. As long as my coordination efforts go smoothly, the innovation that is supposed to be coming from my department will be paramount in a way it couldn't be last year, the year of three jobs in one. I want parent involvement to really take off, and I want to look back and think about how this is where I want to be in my career come May 2011.

It is not about me in the least though. My feelings get concerned with this idea that I should be doing something more, but time must help mold us all. Maybe one day I will look back at this "place" and feel the vibe was I generating in these moments, and I'll be in yet another home, another stage, another opportunity.