"your flowers will grow without you"

I work on Sundays. I know that strict biblical constructionists will censure me for this, and I suppose that's a thing I'm willing to accept. The problem of keeping Sundays holy is one of pragmatism: I cannot possibly get all my work done in five days, and I cannot maintain my sanity (nor any sort of efficiency) if I work on Saturday.

So I've worked most of this day, most of it at a coffee cafe, and a bit more of it at a soup cafe, and then the rest of it slouching on my newly made bed. And I'm not done. Not even close. But I'm calling it good for tonight.

I just got off the phone with Chelsea Meyers, the woman who took over my position at Whitko. Before I turned in my keys this July, I left her a note with as much information as I could about technology and professional hierarchy and newspapery troubleshooting. Why reinvent the proverbial wheel, right? I told her to email if ever she had questions. And she has. Several times. Questions on computer programs, questions on classroom motivation and management. Today, for the first time, she called me to clarify a few things.

 I think I was able to help her on the critical issue of photo resizing in InDesign, though I'm certain that she would have eventually figured it out on her own. She told me about the ten or so students who are still involved in the newspaper, some of whom I expected, though some of the diligent journalists of last year have opted not to continue with the paper. I cannot help but feel a twinge of guilt and pain at this. I cannot help but blame myself some. But things continue. Chelsea is exhausted, as all first year teachers are, but she's working out kinks. She is, most importantly, still publishing the paper. I had so worried -- selfishly -- that all my work would be for naught, and less selfishly, that the students' work would be so. 

It was a nice conversation. Pleasant.

And as I mopped our wood floors with Murphy's Oil, I listened to The Lovely Sparrows on my ipod, and I heard the following lyrics from their album Pulling Up Floors, Pouring on (New) Paint:

"Please don't take this the wrong way --

You're just a ghost with a body...

And your flowers will grow without you,

Your flowers will grow without you."

And it's true, you know? Such a sweet delusion it is, that we're irreplaceable. Paradoxically, we are very much and not at all. 

I love Frederick Buechner's words:

Humanity is like a giant spiderweb. If you touch it anywhere, you set the whole thing trembling. As we move around this world as we act with kindness, perhaps, or with indifference, or with hostility, toward the people we meet, we too are setting the great spider web a-tremble. The life that I touch for good or ill will touch another life, and that in turn another, until who knows where the trembling stops or in what far place and time my touch will be felt. Our lives are linked. No man is an island.

I vacillate between understanding my life as a fable of community and one of the solitary nomad, and perhaps my life as all others is neither and both. Dichotomies always break somewhere. Yet, if I were to choose, I do begin to feel that I'm more of the latter than the former. Though my arms and my thoughts yearn to be held, though I long to pour out of myself as an intellect and as a woman, does not each one enter and exit the world and walk around in it alone?

The lyrics of the song in some way accused me of self-importance and absolved me of some measure of guilt. I left Whitko because of a choice, not a moral imperative. Don't ascribe to me some sort of disinterested benevolence. But, to consciously mix metaphors, though I have and do set webs a-tremble, I also know that flowers bloom without my presence. They did in Japan. They did in Huntington. They do in South Whitley. And I know that in the end, we each of us must walk our own winding paths with whatever measure of grace we can muster - my students as well as me.