Let's Give This a Try

 1. Starting the day, sending off my Wordle to my niece and nephew. Not my best Wordle day, but full of appreciation to connect with Emiley and Austin! 2. Appreciating the early morning light on the bay walking with Jenn. 3. Receiving a photo of pear blossoms from Dad who currently has COVID.  4. Assembling a bag of books for Devin, my student teacher to start his own classroom library. 5. Walking in the green, green, green of the park. 6. Pruning the little sprigs of the Julia Phelps Ceanothus.  7. Experiencing gratitude for Leslie who is appreciating beautiful spacious spaces to live in.

  I greet my fifth graders as they come back from lunch. Grumbling…rumbling…many stories fly around about the morning in their math class with a substitute. I wonder how I will guide them through this moment of frustration. I first attempt, “Is it possible to let your feelings go and move on into this moment?” “No!” some of them responded unhappily. Stories begin again telling me about the injustices of the morning. I try again. I draw a picture of the brain and explain how we often tell ourselves stories…again and again…and again. Often, the stories we tell ourselves are the hard stories of our lives. I draw a series of repeating spirals inside the brain on the board. We continue repeating the stories in our minds even though the moment has already passed. I explain that we need to replace those stories with our joy…with our stories of strength, our power, our beauty. We need to imagine our quiet, safe place.  I encourage them to sit up straight in their chair. To first feel their str

  My mind is racing as I wake up… already feeling “late” for the day. The waterfall of “to dos” race through my mind and I am definitely not savoring the moment. I remember my “One Little Word”: sacred and take a breath. Breathing in, I whisper “slow” to myself. Breathing out, I settle and ground in my body. I reach for the baked new potato that I am cutting up for my lunch. I SLOWLY cut the potato…repeating sacred…slow…sacred…slow…resting in this moment. I slice it with focus. I slice it with appreciation. I am beginning to slow the waterfall of thoughts and remembering that life is one small sacred step after another. Slowing. Returning. Savoring. Remembering.

  “Neil Armstrong!” Ethan says. “I have a statue in my bedroom of Apollo 11,” he continues with excitement. He is the only student in my 5th grade class that knows the name of the first person to walk on the moon. We are beginning a study of the space race and reading a biography of Mae Jemison this week. I smile inside because this is a side of Ethan that I hadn’t seen before. He has been struggling with his independent reading for the last couple months after he finished a series that he loved. Today, it is an unexpected gift to find a little peek in the doorway of  Ethan’s passions and interests. It is not always easy, and I am especially happy to connect with Ethan. Up until now, I hadn’t found the key to truly getting to know him and  being the best teacher for him this year. He is now set up with a challenge to read as much as he can about space for March!  “What did you learn last night about space?” I ask as Ethan walks in the class the next morning. “Did you know that each par