Teaching joy – Page 6 – Science teacher

December 14, 2019January 8, 2022

November dusk

It’s mid-November and the shadows are long–the sun slips over the horizon less than 10 hours a day now here in these parts.

It’s near dark when I walk home, crossing our town green, as I do several hundred times a year.

There’s mystery in the shadows. Our ancestors saw spirits, and so will you if you lurk outside during dusk. The animals are aware of you, and so, I suspect, are the trees.

As winter looms, I watch the light change under my feet. (I look down a bit more now that I am getting older–the roots of the sycamore are determined to get me.)

But here is where words fail–when you walk at dusk over the fallen leaves, when it’s not quite light enough to see colors yet not so dark you cannot sense the colors, the edges of each leaf appear to glow as long as you keep moving.

No doubt there is some neuro-evolutionary advantage to this, some physiological explanation, some modern means of dispelling any reference to magic.

But there it is.

February 24, 2019January 8, 2022

February light

Crocuses poking up through the frozen earth

February is still here, hanging on as it does, but the light has changed.

February comes from a word meaning “the purging”, and was long the last month for the Romans, occasionally followed by Mercedonius, a month (of sorts) tucked into the calendar to get the calendar back in sync with the seasons.

While we mark our time in chunks set by people who lived a long time ago, people who knew nothing of this side of the Atlantic Ocean, the ancient souls in our ancient brains know the light has changed.

So does the life around us.

The geese are back, the crocus spear through the frozen earth, and the squash from last summer are getting soft.

Last summer’s fruit, this spring’s seeds.

I keep planting, I keep brewing, I keep playing my guitar badly, and I keep getting older. Something has to give.

And it will, but that’s all right. My molecules are vibrating as I breathe, and they will keep vibrating when I die, in one form or another.

(That’s not a metaphor, it’s how the universe works.)

My uke, not my guitar–I’m even worse on the uke.

I just came back from visiting my almost 3 month old grand-daughter. She laughs because that’s what humans do. And eventually I need to get out of her way. And I will.

In the meantime I will continue to sow, to harvest, to cull, to peel, to cut, to cook, to eat.

February 14, 2019January 8, 2022

Vibrating through life

Delaware Bay vibrating under a June sunset.

If the story is true, and it’s as true as we can know at the level where particles can still be called particles, everything is vibrating.

Everything.

I walk to school on a February dawn, where the grays around me look beautiful against the impossibly white snow under my boots. My steps trace the steps I made yesterday–not many people trod through the Green in the mid-February snow.

I have been walking for almost six decades now, past the age my mother walked, and close to the age of my Dad’s last stable steps. Remembering this makes each step matter.

So my vibrating feet are walking on vibrating water molecules held in a beautiful crystal lattice reflecting light from the sun and no one truly knows why any of this is happening.

But we’re pretty sure it is happening, and we’re pretty sure it will keep happening for a long, long time after any of us reading these words are long gone, whether we’re conscious or not. I’m most conscious when I am least aware of anything but now, step after step after step after step, the snow and ice yielding slightly with a slight crunch, more felt than heard, and I leave another footprint and then another.

February light, before the snow came (photo by Leslie)

We live by our stories, our stories make us who we are, and too few of our modern stories extend beyond the tiny bubble of culture we find ourselves immersed in, drowning in words with little meaning.

Meanwhile the particles keep moving–vibrating, swirling, more nothingness than matter–for reasons no one can fathom.

So ask me if I believe in God or miracles or Heaven or Hell, and I cannot help myself, I laugh, not derisively but in joy, thinking of my particles, inside and out, vibrating like music, forever vibrating, for no reason at all.

And if particles vibrate for no reason at all, well, then this collection of particles hardly needs a reason to do the same.

So I do.