Some Days

Some days, I just feel overwhelmingly present and ripe and fresh and new. Ironically, most of those days follow on the heels of restless nights, and I fear that the aliveness is really just a rawness that comes of not enough sleep and various stresses from daily life. Still, it's a feeling I generally welcome, if for no other reason than I feel more alive to the world around me.

It's also a time of thinking, sitting, dreaming, anticipating--waiting, charged and ready, for what's coming. My entire body feels like a sheet of water atop a full container that's ready to burst with the next bit of precipitation.

Today I'm working on some materials for a new course I'm teaching this fall; one of the nice things about being a faculty member is the autonomy and support to teach what you want to teach. Don't get me wrong--I enjoyed tremendous support from my former school with regard to what I did with my courses, but this feels so dramatically different.

I'm teaching a favorite group of poems, Coleridge and Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads, and I felt drawn to this portion of Wordsworth's, "Expostulation and Reply" :

The eye it cannot chuse but see,
We cannot bid the ear be still;
Our bodies feel, where'er they be,
Against, or with our will.

Nor less I deem that there are powers,
Which of themselves our minds impress,
That we can feed this mind of ours,
In a wise passiveness.

Think you, mid all this mighty sum
Of things for ever speaking,
That nothing of itself will come,
But we must still be seeking?

--Then ask not wherefore, here, alone,
Conversing as I may,
I sit upon this old grey stone,
And dream my time away.