living – Feminism and Religion

After my year of teaching high school students, I found a kinship with them in their frustrations, longing, apathy, hopelessness, and hope. Fortunately, we studied together Jean Paul Sartre, whom I want to get to know more intimately, but we, the teens and myself, could take the spiritual answer to our questions about the meaning of life (is there one? What is it?): The meaning of life is to give it meaning.

I am not sure about their generation, but adolescence for me, in mine, was about discovering, not necessarily creating. Of course, now I think it is a little of both.

Sometimes I wonder if there is also a lesson. Being an academic, perhaps I love learning and teaching. I demonstrate my love as Jonathan Livingston Seagull does, by offering to others, perhaps a specific community of others, those who have chosen or must be in a state of learning (easily found in institutions of high school and college), the truths I have gathered (59). Of course ‘truth’ is a word that tastes a bit tannic, for it needs to be rolled around by the tongue a bit to be cleansed; perhaps to mitigate its toxic potential, we can never consume it undigested, but must gestate it and transform it within our warm bodies, just at the cliff, before we allow it to permeate our organs in a chemical structure that serves us.

Continue reading “Spiritual Ideas, Existential and Eastern, in Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Elisabeth Schilling”

Natalie Weaver edited The summer is getting late. School supplies are coming in, and it is time to try on the uniform pants in order to get them hemmed before the first day. I always feel a little funny at this time of year, almost queasy from my mixture of nostalgia for waning days at the pool and excitement for crisp plaids and fresh notebooks. I continually miss the scents of summer skin, chlorine and suntan lotion, even while I look forward to the autumnal fragrances of newly sharpened pencils, cinnamon sticks, and rubbery Halloween costumes. Time, at this transitional time, is always pregnant with the promises of both bounty and loss, so I am not surprised by my wistfulness as we turn to fall. I am, however, taken by its depth for me this year. For, this transition has been a little heavier than usual as I ask myself, “Where did it go?” and “What did I do?”

You see, I wanted to travel more with the kids, but I became sick, or rather, a sickness I already had presented itself unmistakably and irrevocably just as the summer was getting under way. So, I slept a lot, but it was not the sleep of rest and recovery; it was lost time. I felt bad about my crankiness and limitations, so I tried to make up the time by adding more play to the times of day when I felt good. The kids weren’t playing along though, and I just felt more exhausted. I was a broken record, as I kept asking what anyone wanted to do. And, I felt like I was failing when we couldn’t arrive at activities, or menus, or destinations. Continue reading “A Cornucopia Sometimes Curiously Stuffed With Nothing by Natalie Weaver”