Weekly Wide-Awake: Gentle On My Mind

[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: Gentle On My Mind

It’s not clinging to the rocks and ivy
Planted on their columns now that bind me
Or something that somebody said
Because they thought we fit together walking
It’s just knowing that the world will not be cursing
Or forgiving when I walk along some railroad track and find
That you’re moving on the backroads
By the rivers of my memory
And for hours you’re just gentle on my mind
From Glenn Campbell’s “Gentle On My Mind.”

On April 23, 2021, I ran my 8th Kentucky Derby mini-marathon – my 14th half marathon, overall. This race is a touchstone for me. This year’s route was different due to pandemic-related concerns. It wound over the Ohio River into Southern Indiana — the part of the area in which I grew up — which it had never done before. As we traversed the Ohio River Greenway by the Falls Of The Ohio, a path I knew well, I thought of Glenn Campbell’s “Gentle On My Mind.” That song played during mile 17 of the marathon I finished many moons ago, and it came to mind as I ran down the Ohio River. The mini (as it is known locally) is how I take annual stock of my overall health. It is how I gauge how far I am living from my center. It is my annual celebration of home.

Growing up, I would not have predicted that I would become a runner. It would be even less likely that I would call running a gift. I started running at the age of 30 when I ran my first, and only to date, marathon. I am not sure how I started to like running. In “How To Start Liking Running,” Farah Miller, of the New York Times, shares her thoughts on how even the most reluctant person can learn to love running using pace-centered training and individually-tailored motivational strategies (which do include embracing dirty laundry) to get out the door and run.

I have learned a great deal since the time I first put on my running shoes in 2003. I have started and finished roughly 30 races. I have signed up for, and never finished, the Thousand Mile Club several times. (I have learned from that, too.) I have learned music inspires me. (Florence and the Machine’s “The Dog Days Are Over” and Pharrell Williams’ “Happy” being two of my favorites.) I have learned I enjoy podcasts of all types. A recent running-focused one, “Get Out Of Your Own Way” — A Conversation With Anthony Famiglietti on C Tolle Run, is particularly insightful.