Notice.

Eric Church recently gave the commencement speech at the University of North Carolina ...

Six strings. Six strings of life and willingness to keep them in tune. Six principles. Six pillars. When all six are in tune with each other, the chord your life makes is full and resonant and true. All six will drift. Not one or two. All six in their own time, in their own season. 

Your faith will go quiet when you need it loud. Your family will get complicated in a way only the people who love you most can complicate things.  You will go through hard seasons with your spouse. Your ambition will hollow out and your resilience will wear thin.  Your community will start to feel like an obligation and your world will try to sand down the edges of exactly who you are. 

This is not failure. This is not weakness. It's the inevitable universal experience of living in an imperfect world that doesn't stop to let us tune up. And the difference between a life that sounds like music and a life that sounds like noise is whether you stop and listen. Whether you're honest enough to hear which string has drifted out of tune and humble enough to make the adjustment instead of just turning up the volume and hoping nobody notices, because you will notice. The part of you that knows what the chord should sound like will always notice.  It will not let you go. Life won't be right until it is tuned. Trust what your heart hears and is telling you about your song.

Thank you, Hayden. 

Amused.

Turner inspired a discussion today ...

Thanks, Kelton.

Happy Birthday, Nicolaus Copernicus

Anonymous, Nicolaus Copernicus, The "Toruń Portrait", 1580

Nicolaus Copernicus was born this week in 1473 and his thoughts provided our Creative Writing class with some of the year's best discussion so far ...

To be intelligent is to be able to see the hidden connections between things.  To know that we know what we know, and to know that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge ... I am not so enamoured of my own opinions that I disregard what others may think of them.

Eli, The Insightful, said, "Mr. Firchau, he said this a long time ago and people still haven't figured it out." 

A conversation about the importance of putting your name on your paper was had based on the painting's attribution.

Copernicus and His World ...

Illumination.

A couple of years ago, a group of eager reading, writing, and thinking students at the school where I teach came to me with the request that they might use my classroom as a clubhouse once a week after school.  They were having a difficult time meeting after hours and thought that a regular meeting during the day could be the ticket.  

Thus was born The Eunoia Society, a self-created, self-managed, and self-named group of "crooked trees" that are some of the most energetic and inspiring people I've ever met.

Eunoia is currently in the process of creating a collaborative literary and illustrative "concept album" of short stories, like The Wall or Sgt. Pepper's they tell me.  I get updates and samples for critique at all hours of the day and night, all week long.

Last night came this hopeful message from a member ... 

Hope springs eternal in the human breast;

Man never Is, but always To be blest.

The soul, uneasy, and confin'd from home,

Rests and expatiates in a life to come.

Alexander Pope

Sustenance.

Sustenance from a seventh-grade student (who has decided to name his Chromebook "Charles Clickens") ...

From Stephen Leacock's "Merry Christmas"...

I was silent. Father Time had moved across the room and stood beside the fireplace, leaning on the mantelpiece. The little wreaths of smoke from the fading fire seemed to mingle with his shadowy outline.

"Well," he said presently, "what is it that is wrong with Christmas?"

"Why," I answered, "all the romance, the joy, the beauty of it has gone, crushed and killed by the greed of commerce and the horrors of war. I am not, as you thought I was, a hundred years old, but I can conjure up, as anybody can, a picture of Christmas in the good old days of a hundred years ago: the quaint old-fashioned houses, standing deep among the evergreens, with the light twinkling from the windows on the snow; the warmth and comfort within; the great fire roaring on the hearth; the merry guests grouped about its blaze and the little children with their eyes dancing in the Christmas fire- light, waiting for Father Christmas in his fine mummery of red and white and cotton wool to hand the presents from the yule-tide tree. I can see it," I added, "as if it were yesterday."

"It was but yesterday," said Father Time, and his voice seemed to soften with the memory of bygone years. "I remember it well."

"Ah," I continued, "that was Christmas indeed. Give me back such days as those, with the old good cheer, the old stage coaches and the gabled inns and the warm red wine, the snapdragon and the Christmas-tree, and I'll believe again in Christmas, yes, in Father Christmas himself."

 Thank you, Eli.  Merry Christmas!

Oft.

Doisneau, Enfant Papillion, 1945

“Many are the strange chances of the world," said Mithrandir, "and help oft shall come from the hands of the weak when the wise falter."

J.R.R. Tolkien, from The Silmarillion

Thanks, Noah.

Kids rule.

On.

At the end of each grading period , I ask my students to complete a grade card on my performance as their teacher.  This came from a sixth-grader ...

Thank you, Avery.

Strength.

I teach middle-school kids in a rural community, surrounded by farmland.  The horse people that come through my classes tend to be smaller in stature, quiet, eerily-observant bad-asses.  Year-in, year-out they carry themselves with the inner strength of a person three times their size.

The football players tend to be the opposite.

Thanks, Kurt.

Deep-Seeing.

THE HAUNTED HOUSE

I seem like one

Who treads alone

   Some banquet-hall deserted,

Whose lights are fled,

Whose garlands dead,

   And all but me departed.

           —Thomas Moore, “Oft in the Stilly Night (Scotch Air)”

See’st thou yon gray gleaming hall,

Where the deep elm-shadows fall?

Voices that have left the earth

     Long ago,

Still are murmuring round its hearth,

     Soft and low:

Ever there;—yet one alone

Hath the gift to hear their tone.

Guests come thither, and depart,

Free of step, and light of heart;

Children, with sweet visions blessed,

In the haunted chambers rest;

One alone unslumbering lies

When the night hath sealed all eyes,

One quick heart and watchful ear,

Listening for those whispers clear.

 

See’st thou where the woodbine-flowers

O’er yon low porch hang in showers?

Startling faces of the dead,

     Pale, yet sweet,

One lone woman’s entering tread

     There still meet!

Some with young, smooth foreheads fair,

Faintly shining through bright hair;

Some with reverend locks of snow—

All, all buried long ago!

All, from under deep sea-waves,

Or the flowers of foreign graves,

Or the old and bannered aisle,

Where their high tombs gleam the while;

Rising, wandering, floating by,

Suddenly and silently,

Through their earthly home and place,

But amidst another race.

 

Wherefore, unto one alone,

Are those sounds and visions known?

Wherefore hath that spell of power

     Dark and dread,

On her soul, a baleful dower,

     Thus been shed?

Oh! in those deep-seeing eyes,

No strange gift of mystery lies!

She is lone where once she moved,

Fair, and happy, and beloved!

Sunny smiles were glancing round her,

Tendrils of kind hearts had bound her;

Now those silver chords are broken,

Those bright looks have left no token;

Not one trace on all the earth,

Save her memory of their mirth.

She is lone and lingering now,

Dreams have gathered o’er her brow,

Midst gay songs and children’s play,

She is dwelling far away;

Seeing what none else may see—

Haunted still her place must be!

Felicia Dorothea Hemans

Thank you, Walter.

Store.

Take all summer,

your ember

from the sun,

its walking meditation.

Store it in small

vaults of light

to keep

the rest of us

when winter seals

around each day.

We’ll flicker

to the table.

We’ll gather

to your orange flame.

Leah Naomi Green

Thank you, Walter.

Changer.

 Execupundit on relationships ...

Here's a rule of life: you have to be there. You have to listen and laugh and argue and comfort the people around you in a multitude of exchanges where life's mystery means you may not know just which exchange was the most important.

I can recall off-hand conversations from long ago that seriously affected my life and even my world view.

You never know, but that raised eyebrow, that quiet reassurance, that brief pat on the back may be another person's life changer.

Don't hide away. Get out among 'em.

There is a student in our school, Clementine, who stops by my classroom every single morning for a brief chat before heading upstairs to her homeroom.  We aren't in any classes together, but in the past I've had her siblings, Ruby, Olive, and Violet (no joke).  Clementine makes my day with her smiles, her corny jokes, and the fact that she usually brings a friend in tow, a student that, most likely, I'd never have gotten the chance to meet.  Some of Clementine's friends have begun Clementine's routine on their own, so now I'm meeting drama club kids, skater kids, kids who cook, new kids who don't speak a word of English, kids whose siblings are classroom legacies, kids who teach me dances, handshakes, and suggest good books I should read.

This year, walking the hallways is quite a different experience.  Kids rule!

(Oh! I've been told by these kids that saying "Good morning" to students I don't know is creepy and they won't respond [this happens].  Instead, they've taught me to say, "'Sup" [it works].  We often discuss what I call "reading the room"; they call it "matching energy." We're both learning.)

Thanks to Clementine and Mr. Wade.

When.

WHY the DAY STEALS

The poet leans on some tree, or sea, or slope, or cloud of a certain hue for a moment during his life, if circumstance smoothes the road. He’s not welded to others’ confusion. His love, his grasp, his joy have their match in all places he’s never been, nor will ever go, in strangers he’ll never know. When they ply him with prizes-those that would bind-and praise him with voices raised, invoking the stars, he responds that he comes from the country next door, from the sky just now engulfed.

The poet gives life then runs to the plot’s dénouement.

At night, despite dimples in cheeks like a novice, he cuts short his goodbyes – polite passerby-to be there when the bread leaves the oven.

Rene Char

Thank you, Sonja.

Amused.

Kids rule.

Thank you, Avery.

Germinating.

Looking round that huge shadowy room with its black window bays, its recesses and alcoves, its dusty brown-red hangings and dark gigantic furniture, one could well understand the legends that had sprouted in its black corners, its germinating darknesses.

H.G. Wells, from The Red Room

Thank you, Ethan (a former student who thought this quote sounded like something we might discuss in class)

Vigilance.

Thanks, Noah.

Ways.

Adults follow paths. Children explore. Adults are content to walk the same way, hundreds of times, or thousands; perhaps it never occurs to adults to step off the paths, to creep beneath rhododendrons, to find the spaces between fences. I was a child, which meant that I knew a dozen different ways of getting out of our property and into the lane, ways that would not involve walking down our drive.

Neil Gaiman, from The Ocean at the End of the Lane

Thanks to my student, Phoebe, who sent me this quote.  She always finds ways and is really good at patiently reminding me that they're out there.

Big.

Ahhh, yes.  Today, the last day before Christmas Break, was one for the books.  I was told by one of my little lambs, "I just figured I'd go big or go home."

O, wonder!

How many goodly creatures are there here!

How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,

That has such people in't!

William Shakespeare

Showeth.

The SONG of AMERGIN

I am the Wind that blows over the sea,

I am the Wave of the Ocean;

I am the Murmur of the billows;

lam the Ox of the Seven Combats;

lam the Vulture upon the rock;

I am a Ray of the Sun;

I am the fairest of Plants;

I am a Wild Boar in valour;

I am a Salmon in the Water;

I am a Lake in the plain;

lam the Craft of the artificer;

I am a Word of Science;

I am the Spear-point that gives battle;

I am the god that creates in the head of man the fire of thought.

Who is it that enlightens the assembly upon the mountain, if not I?

Who telleth the ages of the moon, if not I?

Who showeth the place where the sun goes to rest, if not I?

by an unknown poet at an unknown time at an uncertain location

Thank you for your detective work, Remy.

Covers.

Kossan covers the classics ...

Ramones, "Teenage Lobotomy" ...



Queen, "We Will Rock You" ...



The Crowned Heads of Anti-Music, "Yellow Submarine" ...



I love it when cover versions are better that the originals.

Thank you, Claire.

Never.

Thank you, Sam.