mornings...

Have I written before about my new mornings?



This semester, I wake up with my kids every morning and feed them breakfast, coax them through putting their clothes on, check their homework, fix a ponytail, zip their coats and load them into the minivan.



Five minutes after I kiss Addison goodbye and 30 after I kiss Jaelyn goodbye at the doors of the school classrooms, I am standing in front of a class of tired freshman and sophomores making claims about the relationship between the mass media industries and cultural norms, and then I wade through meetings and papers and approval processes and petitions and policy adjustments and consensus designs for strategic planning.



This year I allowed myself to become further entrenched in the bueracratic machinery of educatioppression. I'm a senator in faculty senate and chair of my department. You see the underbelly and the alliances and the machinations more frequently and with more lucidity. You sense that suddenly you have more power than you really wanted to.



But in these new mornings, there's something profound and simple and centering about putting one leg in at a time, about stirring the pancake mix and pouring pancakes that meet the required specifications, and coaxing out a long laborious, but successful bed making process.

When I looked across the room at J & A trying to muster the awakeness to face the day, I grabbed my camera to try to capture the map of my own heart at this moment.



It is a bigger better world that I face in this moment than most of the other views I will experience in my lifetime. Having the object of your vision be so shot through with moments of your own life. So habituated into your every thought, that you almost feel as though you are looking at an embodiement of love or happiness or contentment...

hope your mornings are giving you glimpses of the same kinds of hope.