Weekly Wide-Awake: Sweet, Soft, Plenty Rhythm

[The Stage is on Fire] is a page-turner in which, much like life, there are no easy answers and yet each step of the journey yields insight and hope. This work of heart must not be missed!

Melanie Faith

Creative Writing Teacher, Essayist & Poet.

Katie Steedly’s first-person piece [The Unspeakable Gift] is a riveting retelling of her participation in a National Institutes of Health study that aided her quest to come to grips with her life of living with a rare genetic disorder. Her writing is superb.

The Society of Professional Journalists

In recognition of receiving the Dateline Award for the Washingtonian Magazine essay, The Unspeakable Gift.

I thank you … It is the authenticity of your “class notes”; and it is the delicacy and skill with which you present the nuances of classroom life and the actuality of your students’ and fellow teachers’ lives.

Maxine Greene

Philosopher and Education Scholar

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Weekly Wide-Awake: Sweet, Soft, Plenty Rhythm

Jazz music is to be played sweet, soft, plenty rhythm.
Jelly Roll Morton

Summer is nature’s jazz. Improvisational and surprising. Blooming and joyous. Bounteous and overflowing. Hot days and long nights. Sweet like front porch tea. Its rhythm is perfect time — fast enough to move, slow enough to linger.

Soul lives in nature’s jazz. Let me explain. Our souls crave nature’s jazz. Jazz as warmth. Jazz as rest. Jazz as joy. Jazz as creativity. Jazz as edge. Jazz as depth. Jazz as connection. Jazz as hope. Jazz as faith.

Nature’s jazz has a song. We know the song. It loves on melody and lyrics, caressing them gently as it saunters toward unpredictability. We are never the same people after hearing nature’s jazz. That’s what I know for sure. Like a ripe peach eaten at the sweetest moment, you never forget. Summer after summer. Sweet, soft, and plenty rhythm.

What I Keep Learning

Notes on the Below

All my life, I’ve lived above the ground,/ car wheels over paved roads, roots breaking through/ concrete, /and still I’ve not understood the reel of this life’s purpose. — Ada Limon

I grew up above ground and in love with the underground. Like a geologist or archeologist, I have always loved the underground. The below. Below desire. Below story. Below identity. Below truth. At 8, I wanted to be a geologist. At 10, I wanted to be a writer. At 16, I wanted to be a teacher. At 30, I wanted to be a researcher. At 40, I wanted to be a storyteller. At 50, I wanted to be a seeker. Today, I see the connection between it all.

Nine Verses of the Same Song

The ear finely attuned/ to the extravagant music/ of yellow pears ripening in the scrolled light/ of orchards as if the world/ were perfect/ hears the cicada burst its shell — Wendell Berry

This time of year has particular music: hot days, short nights, bees, lawnmowers, crickets, frogs, children, stars, thunderstorms, and rivers.

The Summer of Soul

Resistance here doesn’t mean revolution. It doesn’t mean storming the barricades. Resistance means using art for the things that it does best, which is to create human portraits and communicate ideas and forge a climate where people of different races or classes are known to you because they make themselves known. In the simplest terms, art humanizes. It opens the circuit of empathy. And once that process happens, it’s that much harder to think of people as part of a policy or a statistic. Art reverses the alienation that can creep into society. — Quest-love

I want to think about the connection between art and freedom, between empathy and freedom, between love and freedom. I don’t feel free in my country right now. I don’t feel free from gun violence. I don’t feel free to make choices about my healthcare. I don’t feel free to have my voice heard at the ballot box. I don’t feel free to live in a healthy environment. I don’t feel free to worship, or not worship, a God of my choosing. I know that if some are not free, all are not free.