Phlox & Zinnia

March 29th, 2020

A practice that I have kept very inconsistently but doggedly is reading Common Prayer compiled by Shane Claiborne, Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, and Enuma Okoro. There’s a beautiful book but also an app and an online version for ease of access. It is simple enough that I don’t give up after missing it for a few days but deep enough that it prompts me to further reflection.

Daily the authors share a quote from a foundational Christian thinker. Today’s is from Pierre Teillhard de Chardin, a “twentieth-century Jesuit philosopher.” He prayed this prayer:

Since once again, Lord, I have neither bread nor wine nor altar, I will raise myself beyond these symbols, up to the pure majesty of the real itself; I, your priest, will make the whole earth my altar and on it will offer you all the labors and suffering of the world.

Many of the things in our lives have shifted radically over the past few weeks, but one of them that I never anticipated missing was not gathering in a space of worship. I was there last Sunday to run the soundboard as we recorded the sermon to put online (Creston’s not a very techy community—haven’t quite figured out the live stream). As Linnea got up to preach, I got a little choked up thinking about all the people that I hadn’t seen in two weeks. Someone had tacked directory pages onto the seats so when you entered the sanctuary, all you saw were white sheets of paper tacked to the ugliest lime green chairs displaying the faces of the regular attendees and their regular seats; an act that both eased and sharpened my ache of missing community.

In the past week, I’ve introduced the software FlipGrid to the women’s bible study group (and exchanged more than a few emails trying to get it up and running) and set up a Zoom meeting for my fall house church group. We’re trying to connect through the only way most of us can now—virtually.

Like de Chardin, we do not have bread or wine or an altar, but we can make altars in our homes and in our spaces on the internet. I am striving to use this extra time gifted to me in this quarantine to continue to explore how to listen to God and how to serve him best while I am still house-bound. Here are a couple things that I have done to introduce prayerful attentiveness and general positivity into my days:

• Common Prayer and the Biola University’s Lent Project: I’ve been even worse at keeping up with this, but it has a piece of music, a poem, a piece of art, a scripture, and a devotional for each day. A rich resource.
• Zooniverse: a crowd-sourcing science platform. Great to make your TV bingeing time feel semi-productive for someone other than you.
• FlipGrid: an asynchronous way of leaving messages for other people. I’ve been using it to connect with other English educators (sidenote: you can watch my video here—scroll down a bit) but I’m certain you could set one up for your family/classroom/whatever.
• Morgan Harper Nichols: Instagrammer who shares words of encouragement on abstract art. Honestly, I usually scroll past her stuff, but it’s a nice shot of positivity when I do take the time to read.
• Daily Examen: I introduced this to my housemates for my house devotions Thursday. We walked through the steps and used a zine to capture our thoughts with art and words. It was a practice that made me think more deeply about my emotions that day and what I wanted to lift to God.
• Accountability Log: Last October, Elizabeth and I created a shared Google Doc where we reflect on our spiritual practices. It was supposed to keep us accountable (and it does sometimes), but for me it’s a really great place to reflect in writing about what God is teaching me or what I’m mulling over.

Let me know where you have been cultivating positivity or an altar in your own life. Happy Sunday, friends.
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March 24th, 2020

I got on Twitter, and now I’m mad.

If you’ve talked to me in the last couple days, I’ve been pretty blase about this whole ordeal. I am in an extremely privileged position: I have some duties that I can do remotely so I am paid yet my workload has effectively been cut by 75%, I live in a house that communicates well and loves each other and is okay with me wanting to hang out with them a lot, my family is in constant communication and is hanging in there, my house has enough food, and I have more than enough entertainment to keep me sustained. This quarantine has kind of been a dream come true for me.

I’m learning how to hold my position in this quarantine with the fact that there are people around me that are fearing for their lives because of this disease. There are people who have lost their jobs and don’t know where else to turn. There are people depending on the government to freeze rent or they may get evicted. There are Asian Americans experiencing extreme racism due to this disease beginning in China, and this racism is coming from the top of the country—Trump—all the way down to Instagram live commenters on author Kelly Yang’s free online writing class for teenagers. There are students who are going to fall further behind because they don’t have the structure of school to support them and their families.

So now I’m mad, and I’m not sure where to put it. Into further educating myself as an anti-racist educator? Into reading the professional development books that crowd my bookshelf? Into resting and taking a break over the burn out that has been slowly creeping into my life? Into deciding if I want to stay at my current school? Into this blog post?

Realistically, there’s not much I can do to prevent the spread of this virus beyond what my housemates, my family, my friends, and I are doing. We are staying at home, only getting groceries when absolutely necessary, and trying to keep ourselves healthy and whole. Does that give me the excuse to sit on my couch and watch Mamma Mia 2: Here We Go Again? Read more books of poetry? Take a nap? Is it enough to know and acknowledge the pain, or should I as a privileged person take it on myself?

I’m putting some of my money where my mouth is, but I’m not sure what else to do. Guess I’m going to continue to learn and take care of myself the best I can.

March 22nd, 2020
No. I will not apologize for not writing. I created in other ways, like collaging and editing a vlog together.

With all this time on my hands, I've been reading a lot of poetry. Two Saturdays ago, I went to downtown GR on a whim to register to vote. It was too late for me to register online, and the free bussing and sunshine lured me right out of my house. After registering and voting, I made my way to the main branch of the library and skimmed across the poetry shelves, looking for covers I recognized from Goodreads or names I knew from Twitter. I picked up 3 books, Natasha Trethewey, Ada Limon, and Danez Smith, and have been reading them alongside my usual fare of YA books.

Trethewey wrote a lot about grief, and two of her earlier poems really got me. "Early Evening, Frankfort, Kentucky" paints a picture of Trethewey's parents and ends with her mother lying "down among clover / and sweet grass, right here, right now— / dead center of her life." It knocked the wind out of me, and then I thought, "I could write a poem like that. Calculate the center of Mom's life."

Whenever I connect on a personal level to a poem, my first thought is to mimic it. But I'm trying something different today (because writing poetry is dang hard): I'm going to muse about a poem that struck me—"Killing Methods" by Ada Limón.

The poem felt disjointed to me the first time I read it; perhaps it did to you as well. Limón pivots from a metaphor about stories to grief to people outside of grief to her killing a truth. As someone whose profession is to propel people to love stories, this poem is making me question how we do that. Limón seems to argue that we draw stories from our own lives and wrestle them into an agreeable form. We take the wildness and stab it out of our stories, only leaving the beauty. But I'm not sure that is everything. At the end of the poem, the speaker is killing out of desperation, out of a plea to be believed and understood. Writing and storytelling and the narratives we tell ourselves about it can seem so calculating, but in reality writers write to understand themselves and understand the world around them.

During this moment, I've been avoiding writing, despite Penny Kittle and Kelley Gallagher whispering in my ear, "Write every day. Write every day." I feel the pressure to pluck the perfect story, to arrange its limbs clearly, and to script the genus clearly under it. I want to make sense of this historical time and to document, to show what it's like to be living through this. But I'm not sure "how to hold this truth," so I've been letting them fly away. But when I'm back to regular teaching, when the children are driving me up the wall, or when I'm in year 2 of remote teaching, I will want to be reminded of how these days slipped through my hands, at how I couldn't touch anyone, how I finally understood the pain of dry skin and of the world being out to get you at any moment, and how keenly I felt the absence of things like my church community, a regular structure, and a general assumption of safety. These stories seem boring and over-abundant, but perhaps I'm just afraid of what their confinement on a page will show about me.

In other news, the entirety of Ada Limón's The Carrying is as thought-provoking and beautiful as this poem. Find some way to read it, please. Here are a few of my favorites that have found some homes online:

• Dead Stars (I'm obsessed with this poem; see collages below)
• Notes on the Below
• Ancestors

March 18th, 2020
5 Acts of Tenderness: (inspired by this prompt from Twitter)

1. Today I sat down at the dining room table. A benefit of living with five other people in a house that used to be a duplex is that you can still avoid other people when you need to and find them when you need to connect. Linnea took one look at me and said, “How are you doing with Shira leaving and Annika flying out?” I paused and said, “Actually, not that great.” I verbally processed with her, leading me to realize that today was not going to be an average day of productivity.
2. A student emailed me for a password the other day. Since I’m teaching an elective class for middle school and a specials class for elementary, there aren’t a lot of students clamoring for my attention (which makes me feel less-than, especially when all the educators I follow on Twitter are like “I miss my students so much! They keep sending me videos!”). But I replied, gave some best wishes, and she wrote back “Thank you Ms. Johnson and I hope you are doing well and staying safe. See you soon.”
3. I’m being cautious because of the pandemic. On my way to pick Anni up to bring her to the airport so she can fly home, I briefly considered the idea of keeping the 6 feet between us since she’s been at Calvin and encountering different germs. But when she held open the door to her apartment, there was no way that I was not going to give her a hug.
4. I’ve taken it upon myself to plan “fun-tivities” since I’m the only one in my house that is on semi-vacation due to the quarantine. For the first one, I decided to teach the adults in my house the origami I’ve been teaching middle schoolers. It went interestingly to say the least; however, they were very gracious with my “just fold it!” instructions and hand-waving on how perfect it is supposed to look.
5. Linnea played Psalm 126 on the piano yesterday, and it reminded me of how beautiful worship music can be.

Please read this blog post—"It’s Okay to be Afraid". It’s lovely.


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March 17th, 2020

I made a daily schedule for myself to keep myself accountable during the craziness of the world. It’s a little lenient, as in a lot of free time where I get to read and watch movies and whatever, but one section of it is “Academic work.” Two hours in the morning that I commit to working—planning lessons, updating my resume, deciding if I want to teach at River City again next year.

Yesterday, I went into school because I had to rearrange my classroom for cleaning. I also wanted to connect with my coworkers and get some work done. I hunkered down in my transformed room (desks piled to the left, chairs in rows like I was about to put on a show on the whiteboard) and worked for hours on my lesson plans. As I left at 2:30pm with lessons printed and in my mailbox, I thought “Awesome, I don’t have to do any work tomorrow.”

This morning, I planned on watching the Metropolitan Opera’s video of Carman, streaming for free until 3/17 at 3:30pm. I hunkered down, grabbed some popcorn, and watched the first five minutes before I googled “Carman summary.” Then, as you do, I hopped from summary to Facebook to Twitter, where the first thing I saw was Penny Kittle.

Penny Kittle is my teaching hero. I adore the work she does. So when I clicked on the video of Kelly Gallagher and her talking about teaching and learning and saw that it was 31 minutes long, I thought, “I trust Kittle. I guess this’ll be my academic work for today.”

Gallagher and Kittle talked about books and writing, but they began by acknowledging that teachers need a community during this time. They had both just shared some lesson plans for online learning for their classroom, and Kittle was surprised at teachers not just saying, “Thanks for your thinking” but also “Thanks for reaching out.” So they decided to talk for a bit each day about their pedagogical thinking and how it intersects with the coronavirus pandemic today. If you know Kittle and Gallagher’s work, it was very on-brand: talking about their own writing and reading and how to get students passionate about their own work.

At the end of the video, Gallagher closes with “Thank you all for hanging with us today. We look forward to building a community of thinking and a community that’s going to help us through these troubling times.”

And me, the washed-up English teacher who has been teaching art, who is so excited to not be teaching for 3 or more weeks? I started to cry.

I’m worried about my students, yes. I’m worried that they won’t be able to learn like they were at school. But I’m also concerned that these students aren’t getting the kind of English education that Gallagher and Kittle are providing. When they talk about students writing in notebooks and student choice, and then I turn around to hear my coworkers discussing testing our students for the skills they know and creating lessons around that, I want to scream. I wish I could convince my school system that these short stories focused on skill-building isn’t the way to teach students to take in information and love reading. I wish I had the courage to walk into that English classroom and put the focus back on language rather than testing.

But perhaps these kinds of videos and this kind of community will start that courage. Right now, it’s making me want to write and document. So here I am, welcoming you into my space. Make yourself at home.

As seems to be the theme with everything this year, this past week has taken me off guard completely.

On March 5th, I left robotics club early and drove home, walking in the rain to get to a local church. They run a community supper every Tuesday and Thursday, and this Thursday my church was supporting it. I greeted my fellow church members and hopped straight in, serving chocolate milk and shepherd's pie. When I ate my own dinner an hour or so later, I glimpsed a Festival of Faith and Writing email subject header before I swiped the notification away. Some bell went off in my head, and I opened the email.

Our aspiration… host… unfortunate news… postponed… April 7th, 2021… COVID-19.

When Linnea joined me, I was bursting.

"Did you see they are postponing the Festival? Because of the coronavirus?"

She furrowed her brow. "Are you serious? That seems a little excessive." I nodded. She leaned back in her chair. "I was really looking forward to it."