Friday, October 8, 2010

Show Me

It has come to my recent attention that I use the words beautiful and brilliant a lot.
This, along with my recent considerations of the prevalence of "love" in my dialect leads me to a personal challenge... omitting them.
The theory of love languages proposes multiple ways of communicating affection ; quality time, service, verbal, physical and gifts.
In short - if love is an emotion - how is it expressed?How much there must be beyond three spoken words.
So it is my current challenge to use other languages to express emotions. Beauty, brilliance, and love.
Perhaps I could tell you about golden sunlight, wind whipping 4th graders' hair and journal papers, warm stoney cliffs with rippling rain water pools. Perhaps I could tell you of cruising across crisp leaves peppering the Appalachian Trail, the turbulence of waves across a man-made lake as 10 year olds in blaze orange PFDs soaked in this ever present autumn light canoe through what could be the next cover of LLBean's fall catalog.
After spaghetti and garlic bread Sophia and I giggled until we cried over birthday cake and nothing at all.
Two years ago I was on top of Springer Mountain in Georgia October 7. Today is a good day for mountain tops.
It dawned on me today this life at Mountain Campus, through full of unique challenges is the most personally serene fall I've had in years. No homeless sleeping in cars or finding mattresses in alleys, no rainy north Georgia days to walk through giardia, no commutes after choffee dates and before scrounging for dinner.
Nope. Things are pretty simple around here. Wake up, eat, keep to the day's schedule while serving / protecting/ teaching students and other instructors, sleep, repeat.
At morning meeting today Izzie gave her class a quote "Life is a grand adventure, or not at all". Students interpreted this as unless you're on a grand adventure you're not really living.
But I've been wondering.... whether it feels like it or not.... we're always living. So maybe the true point is to LIVE a grand adventure; in southern terminuses, homelessness, unemployment, homecomings, restlessness, quiet breathing, pumpkin parties and pumpkin ales. All of it jumbled into the epic pages of simply complex adventures.
Maybe the "not at all" part isn't possible.
Yeah. I'm calling that bluff.
How could life not be a grand adventure?

1 comment:

Linda Lee said...

Hello My Friend...

Happy to read your words of October 8th. I see and feel the LOVE.

Great pictures! Hugs to you and Geronimo.

Love,
Linda Lee