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.

Broken Things

Things that are currently broken, yet my life is still functioning well:

1. our toaster. until Katie Sams bought it for our family from a thrift store or a garage sale, we never had a toaster. which galls me, because i love toasting things. but the bottom has never latched shut, now the screw that holds the bottom on at all is falling off. but it still toasts stuff just fine.

2. my Buick. Broken in too many ways to catalogue. Ugly in even more. Runs fine, though. I should be driving it for a good 5 more years.

3. two coffee mugs i received for christmas. the good news is that i received five of them (travel mugs) and the other three are working well. The first two spilled coffee out of a decorative panel on the side. I had spilled coffee on three shirts / pants / suitcoats before i realized that it would be okay to just throw them away. it just felt too close to christmas.

4. the wrapping device on my mac cord. don't get me wrong, maclovers, i know i'm spouting heresy here, but the little flip up wrapping thing broke off. I have to wrap my cord randomly around the....(i'm suddenly profoundly aware of how unnamed sub-parts of cords are in my life)....thingy. And its always unravelling. But I still love my machine.

5. my lenten vow. at the last minute i abandoned my plan for lent for relational reasons...but I havne't been able to decide on the right thing to give up or take on since then. besides -- are you allowed to make a lenten vow once ash wednesday has come and gone?