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."

“For someone who does [podcasting] because you kinda wanna expand—you wanna leave the universe in people’s heads a little bigger than where you find them. And then to actually meet them and they say, ‘I’m bigger. I listened to this thing and I’m bigger. And thank you.’ That’s the nicest thing, the nicest thank-you there is.” — Robert Krulwich

In the past week, I’ve listened to two podcasts as they process through some turbulent changes: Robert Krulwich, one of the co-hosts of Radiolab, is retiring from the show, and The Nod is morphing into a TV series. Perhaps it's a little strange that I care about these changes as these two shows are not in my top tier of podcasts. They are ones whose feeds I scroll through when This American Life is airing reruns and Heavyweight’s season has ended and Reply All is stuck in the purgatory of researching stories. Nevertheless, I wanted to be a part of their reminiscences and bittersweet celebrations.

Towards the end of “The Bobbys,” where Radiolab recognizes Robert’s contributions to the show (and public radio) through an award that Robert created himself—The Bobbys—Robert says the line I quoted above. In the car by myself, I muttered, "Yes, exactly" and glanced at the timestamp so I could find it again when I wasn't hurtling down Fulton Avenue. I knew at that moment that Krulwich had put into words an idea my subconscious had already accepted.

Last weekend, we at Nizhoni had our house retreat. I was able to leave all my grading at home as we drove an hour to a tiny cottage five minutes from Lake Michigan. The house is tucked behind other expensive summer homes so all you can see through its large walls of windows are hills covered in snow, trees and occasionally speckled with does. It has a spiral staircase that leads to a loft that gets absurdly hot and light switches that never turn on the light you assume they will turn on. It was magical.

The goal of the retreat was to intentionally spend time getting to know each other. We spent every second together for two days and dished out all our feelings about families, friends, and what level of cleanliness we need. One of the activities we did to stimulate this sharing was to take our house Jenga set and write questions on them for each other. One of mine was “What do you want your legacy to be?” Even then, I wasn’t exactly sure what my answer would be.

Like Krulwich, I want the people who interact with me to be bigger—to have more wonder, to explore more, to know more. But most importantly, I want them to be bigger in their hearts.

I recycled the legacy question for a brainstorming worksheet to help my students write a personal essay. During class, one of them who didn’t really want to fill it out shot at me, “Well, why don’t you answer these questions?” I obliged, rattling off answers. When I got to my answer about my legacy, I said, “I want to be remembered as caring.”

She laughed derisively and said, “You aren’t doing that now.”

As much as I tried to grin that one off, her comment stung.

Legacies, by definition, are written by the people who come afterward. Krulwich hopes that his work on Radiolab made people think more, but it's only his audience members who can confirm for him that yes, that one episode about parasites was a slow gateway into a love of podcasts. I can hope all I want that I will leave a legacy of strong relationships and selfless actions, but the jury is still out.

And maybe this is all too much to consider for a 23-year-old who is not on the verge of death (as far as she knows). And maybe this is all too negative a piece for someone who knows that kind of legacy is possible. I’ve seen it throughout the past year; I saw it in the bathroom when I looked and found her face in the mirror. I blinked and then smiled as my features became my own again. “I guess she’s still there,” I thought and then turned off the light.

I’ve been thinking about this, and partially because no one uses Facebook anymore and partially because I’m beyond caring, I’m not protecting the links to this blog anymore.

When I started this blog about a year and a half ago, I didn’t really know if I would stick with it or keep up with it. I didn’t know what it would turn into and where it would go. I didn’t know if people actually wanted to read my thoughts, so I did the gradual release method: wrote for myself for about a month, opened the link to close friends and family, and slowly added people to the list as they mention hearing about my blog.

And the safety of a protected list is nice. I often don’t edit these pieces as I edit my the post calvin essays—the last one probably taking me about 4 to 5 hours from start to finish. I was able to be fully myself and say whatever I wanted. I guess now I’m confident enough to do it without a safety net.

Will I actually promote this blog more? Probably not. Will I write more on it? Also probably not. But this year I am trying to write more as I find it helps me work through my feelings. We’ll see what 2020 brings.

(If you’re new here, here are some posts that capture what this blog is about: The Start, Who Tells Your Story, Living in the Hyphen, Hallmarked Homecomings)


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I asked Abby, the post calvin content curator, for feedback on my posts. As I’ve mentioned before, I feel a little unworthy to be on such a high-caliber blog such as the post calvin and I don’t do my best writing under imposter syndrome. She mentioned that I’ve written a lot about teaching and that I should make a rule to not write about teaching until, say, April.

A part of me immediately balked at this idea. Me, a first-year teacher at a difficult school, not write about teaching for four months? What else am I supposed to write about? It’s what consumes most of my waking hours; if I’m not at school, I’m either lesson planning, thinking about my day and how to do better, at church, hanging out with friends, eating, reading, or sleeping. That list pretty much sums up my life.

“My life is teaching, my house, my church, and reading,” I glibly remarked to most of my parent’s friends at our annual New Year’s Day open house. I got kind of sick of explaining my job and having to be like, “No, it sucks and it’s really hard and I am kind of dreading it but it’s fine!” so I defaulted back to my joke-y line that reminds me of something Mom said in September 2018: “First-year teaching isn’t a job; it’s a lifestyle.”

That statement or advice has become unhealthy to me, I think.

(and even a piece of me right now is saying, “No it isn’t. Teaching takes a lot of time, and you are investing a lot and that’s good. Don’t try to weasel your way out of doing a good job just because you are tired. That’s really what this is.”)

I spend so much of my time thinking about teaching that it is becoming who I am. It’s taken me four months of conversations that have danced around this topic for me to finally let my guard down enough to even engage with that idea: that perhaps I am more than my job.

I’ve been so focused on being a good teacher that it has come at the cost of me being a whole person. Sure, being a part of a church and a PN house has mostly counterbalanced it, but I’m afraid if I keep hurdling down this route I will become the person who only talks about her job because she does nothing outside of that.

Here’s what I’m going to try: when I feel anxious and want to avoid my work, rather than browsing the Internet and find random memes or essays about pop culture, I’m going to turn back to things that I know fulfill me—reading, writing, prayer, and meditation. I will give myself evenings off. I will be a full person so I have the energy to love my students, even when they so clearly do not love me back.

But first, I have some lesson planning to do. Thanks for letting me process with you all.


Recommendations:

• The Good Place Season 1. Don’t say that I didn’t warn you that it is addictive. It’s on Netflix.
• The Way You Make Me Feel — a sweet YA contemporary summer novel that was light and yet had substance. I enjoyed it a lot more than most of the books I’ve been reading.
• Mad Max: Fury Road and Into the Spider-Verse are movies that I revisited due to the decade ending. Surprise! They are as amazing as they were when I first watched them.
• Little Women. I’m totally sold on everything Greta Gerwig produces now.