monday's mulling: national poetry month

It's mid-April and I just remembered that it's National Poetry Month. 

Back in my teaching days, April was nearing the end of the school year and the students' minds were looking forward to their carefree summer rather than classroom instruction. To keep our 8th graders focused on curriculum, my co-Language Arts partner and I put together a poetry unit that focused on the next phase of their academic journey - high school. Poetry is a great way to promote creative thinking. It's subjective, unique to that person, and it gives students the opportunity to think outside the box. It's beneficial to reluctant readers and writers as the shorter form of writing may be more accessible to them. Poetry also allows students to see language in a new way. So many of their poems were about the uncertainty of going to high school. They were the "big kids" of middle school and in September they were starting their school year as the newbies in a new school of 2600 students.

The solar eclipse was one week ago today and if I were still teaching, it would be a safe bet that there would be a poetry unit on this celestial event. I came across this poem while reading about the eclipse in other states. Coincidentally, as in the poem, the eclipse in Ohio started about noon, too. 

🌙 

🌙 🌙 🌙 🌙 🌙 🌙 🌙 🌙 🌙 🌙 🌙 🌙 🌙 🌙 🌙

Seeing the Eclipse in Maine

BY ROBERT BLY (1997)

It started about noon.  On top of Mount Batte,   

We were all exclaiming.  Someone had a cardboard   

And a pin, and we all cried out when the sun   

Appeared in tiny form on the notebook cover.   

It was hard to believe.  The high school teacher   

We’d met called it a pinhole camera,   

People in the Renaissance loved to do that.   

And when the moon had passed partly through   

We saw on a rock underneath a fir tree,   

Dozens of crescents—made the same way—   

Thousands!  Even our straw hats produced   

A few as we moved them over the bare granite.   

We shared chocolate, and one man from Maine   

Told a joke.  Suns were everywhere—at our feet.

confetti!

Winter is over. The spring party has begun and Mother Nature's confetti lines the curbs and settles into the cracks, providing specks of color along the roads and sidewalks. Confetti! It's an Italian word meaning "small sweet" and it is a small sweet celebration to see the petals float off the trees, adding a bit of color to the grass and pavement, acting as a prelude to the coming blossoms.

the duality of doors

When you first think about it, doors may not carry much weight. They are upright slabs of some material that slow your progress in and out of buildings. But when you stop and think about the symbolism of your doors, what they mean, and what they mean to others, your door suddenly becomes so much more mysterious. 

Duality is the idea of contrast - there are two somethings that are in opposition with the other. Light and dark, left and right, up and down. Doors are a physical manifestation of the symbol of duality: they can be open or closed, an invitation or a barrier, locked and unlocked.

It is abandoning the old and embracing the new; an open door signifies welcome and invites discovery and investigation. The closed door is full of potential, for anything might lie beyond, as yet unknown and unseen. Yet the closed door may also be limiting, preventing us ever gaining access to its hidden contents. 

When one door is closed, don't you know, another is open. ~ Bob Marley

the friday feed: eclipse themed food

Solar glasses, playlists, beautiful weather...all we need now is a little food and drink to celebrate the eclipse.

The Boston Stoker, a local coffee shop advertised a Moon Pie latte and Eclipse iced tea. The latte was made with toasted marshmallow syrup, cupcake syrup, chocolate sauce, and topped with whipped cream and moon pie crumbles. Woah...a little too much  sugar for first thing in the morning and too much caffeine for an evening dessert. I opted for the Eclipse tea, black tea with toasted marshmallow syrup, black berry syrup, topped with whipped cream. I asked for half syrup and the flavor was out of this world!

Dorothy Lane Market is always stellar when it comes to food and celebrations and had a fun eclipse centered food exhibit. The Oberon Eclipse beer gives a nod to another planetary moon. Oberon is the outermost moon for the planet Uranus. A couple of cheeses, New Moon Goat Cheese and Midnight Moon, brighten taste buds with their heavenly taste. And flowers! Eclipse Moon carnations with their otherworldly light and dark shades of purple bring an aura of a powerful connection to the broader universal energy around us.

wapakoneta, ohio

A little more moon madness...

One of Ohio's favorite sons is astronaut Neil Armstrong.

A few years ago, T and I headed to Findlay for the day for a family visit and for the amount of times we've traveled I-75, we had not noticed this sign. A quick Google search showed that "First on the Moon" was added to the exit sign in 2019 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of hometown hero Neil Armstrong's walk on the moon (July 21, 1969). 

“That’s one small step for man; one giant leap for mankind." 

wednesday words, wonderings, and wanderings

Q: When was the last time you were in awe of something? Or maybe experienced wonder?

A: For me it was April 8, 2024. 

The date of the highly anticipated solar eclipse and Dayton, Ohio, was in the path of totality. It had been cloudy all weekend. Shortly after midnight, on Monday the skies opened up and it  poured. What a disappointment to have cloud cover for this highly anticipated evert. At 7:00 a.m., the clouds departed and a gentle sunrise greeted the day. No red sky in the morning. Would the weather gods smile upon the region with clear or fairly clear skies? People flocked to the Miami Valley and soon crowds all around Dayton (and nationwide) would gaze skyward to watch the moon crawl its way across the sun. Some traveled hundreds of miles, others merely stepped outside for the event. 

During the eclipse, I was weeding the front garden and would periodically stop, put my eclipse glasses on, and watch the moon slowly cover the sun. T had been on a phone call and the when he walked over to inspect my weeding, I said, "Put your glasses on! The moon has made its way halfway across the sun." He did and he was amazed. He went back into the house and returned with a glass of Scotch for him and a bourbon for me. I told him it looked like an eclipse in a cup.

As the sun's light briefly dimmed, the birds' songs became quieter and quieter, our light-sensored house lights came on, a chill fell through the air, and twilight filled the sky 360°. When the last tiny corner of sunlight disappeared, cheers from the neighbors erupted, I could hear the excited "You can't see the sun, you can't see the sun!" Then to top it off Jupiter and Venus emerged briefly in the afternoon sky. There are not enough words to adequately describe what I saw and felt.

Artificial intelligence and high technology may be the story of the decade, but Mother Nature reminded us that she can stop us in our tracks with a show of her own.

Life is full of awe and grace and truth, mystery and wonder. I live in that atmosphere. ~ Dion DiMucci

A little P.S....this is the first time that I can remember in our current times that people just CAME TOGETHER. Such a minor, blip in our modern contentious society but it gives me hope.

globes

In the age of Google Earth, watches that triangulate and cars with built-in GPS, there’s something about a globe - a spherical representation of the world in miniature - that somehow endures. When did you last see a globe in an office, or a living room? American schools have seen a decline,too. 

I've always loved globes and physical maps. There was something about spinning a globe and putting my finger on it to see where I would land. Would it be in an ocean, on a place I knew or a place that was unfamiliar? A globe is something that connects us to the planet that we live on. It fueled my wanderlust in grade school and continues to do so to this day.

A globe also serves as a history lesson. Countries change their names and an old globe serves as a reminder to countries that underwent a change of name. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics changed its name to Russia in 1991.I had a friend who was born in Tanganyika which, in 1964, became the United Republic of Tanzania. 

Even though globes are not as popular as they were, the human desire to “find our place in the cosmos” has helped globes survive their original purpose - navigation - and the internet. 

"When we contemplate the whole globe as one great dewdrop, striped and dotted with continents and islands, flying through space with other stars all singing and shining together as one, the whole universe appears as an infinite storm of beauty."

~John Muir