Unoccupied Space (94)

I find comfort in routine and consistency even if I also love spontaneity and following the winds of intuition. As I finish my teaching assignments before the summer break, I’m finding myself wanting to fill up the blank spaces and places in my days that for the past 9 months have been filled with vibrant interactions with groups of students in whom I delight and have grown to love.

There’s a rather large hole and, as I said, I think I’m tempted to fill it up rather than take time to feel what the space is like when not occupied.

Wow. Yeah. There is something deep in those words that just called out to me as they found their way into my awareness.

Take time to feel what the space is like when not occupied.

Yeah.

Even though I’ve been wanting to fill the hole - the previously occupied but now unoccupied space - with stuff, with the next thing, with plans for summer and the fall semester, with activity, I am encouraging myself to just let it be for awhile.

To let it be and honor what I - what we as a community of learners and practitioners - just experienced.

Perhaps stating it as an intention is important:

I take time to feel what the space is like when not occupied.

I like that. It resonates and it also flushes out its opposite.

I don’t have words for any of this incredible teaching and learning journey, really. I’m still reading Finals and journals and finding myself awestruck and thankful and humbled. Over and over and over.

With each Final that I click on, with each student’s name, I pause and let it soak in that this is the last piece of their writing that I will experience and respond to for awhile, if ever again.

I treasure what I get to learn from them and what I have learned on the short but transformational journey we have been on together.

“Wow” is the word that keeps finding its way up from my heart and out my mouth.

Wow.

I am in awe.

Over these past 9 months, I rode my bike along the Boise River on my way to class and each day I would always find a spot to coast, close my eyes, stretch out my arms and hands, open my heart, and feel the air and the sensation of gliding along effortlessly. Immense gratitude filled my whole being as I thought about the long days and nights and years when we weren’t sure what part of vocational life I would be able to engage in with any sort of consistency.

The beauty has come from the ashes.

The beauty is coming from the ashes.

The beauty has come from what is no longer there, from the space that the fire created.

A clearing.

Space to be.

Space to be together.

Wow.

Peace