adiós buen invierno

A winter Eden...

...lifts existence on a plane of snow

One level higher than the earth below,

One level nearer heaven overhead

- Robert Frost

Request for reassignment

It has been one year to the day, give-or-take, since I sent the email reprinted below to my school district's superintendent after a "long dark night of the soul," asking to be released from my job as an elementary school principal, a job that I did not seek or apply to, but rather was quite unceremoniously drafted into. I nevertheless worked hard at the job of school principal (as hard as I've truthfully ever worked at anything) for seven school years, each one filled with its own special sort of arduous labor, and replete with seemingly unending rancor and contention.

Being granted a reprieve from this work was followed by an immediate and confirming sense of relief which has not abated in nearly a year.  Unequivocally, I was never meant to be a school leader.  I am a teacher by training and teaching children remains the principle domain of my heart.  On one of my last days in office, I wrote these words to the faculty and staff of the school I struggled to shepherd adequately for years,"[W]e all know, I was really only ever the interim principal [here], holding a spot between [the principal I succeeded] and the next "guy" while trying not to break the place in the meantime.  I'm glad we've come to a point where I can step away, confident in knowing that I really did work super hard everyday to do my best by [this school] while you needed me to, to return to a role that's far less contentious and much more in line with what I feel I've actually been called to do with my life: teach."

Looking back today, on the first anniversary of this thoroughly consequential, life-changing decision, having now spent the better part of a full year back in the classroom contentedly teaching fifth grade as I did for so many years before entering the principal's office, and despite the nearly 40% reduction in salary I incurred, I nonetheless still feel only an abiding sense of well-being in my soul about all these things, which confirms to me that stepping down as principal shall forever be charted among the best decisions of my life.

I have nothing to say

I have nothing to say

and I am saying it

and that is poetry
as I need it.

 -- John Cage 

Mid-summertime and the livin' is easy

Left my shoes under my desk on the last day of the school year, just found them there yesterday, and hadn't missed them for even a minute.

Thus far, with some three weeks to go, summer has been just what I needed it to be: the opposite of work, filled with good rides with good friends, time spent together as a family, visits each week from faraway friends and family passing through town, and ample quantities of cheap hot grilled food and cheaper cold Tecates consumed in good company, and a bit of new ink for good measure.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light

As spring turns to summer, my father, dead now for a full year, continues to occupy my thoughts almost daily.

Not because I am sad that he is gone, though I am.
Not because I am unmoored without him, though I might be.
He is with me, in the center of my mind, because I cannot seek his wise counsel, his particularly prescient insights, in the midst of these trying times.

Our culture stands on the sharp precipice of history.  We have been here before, surely, though perhaps never before like this.  Yet my father, regardless of circumstance, always seemed to know what was going on.  Would that he could tell me of such things now.

The many trials of M. Vandeman

I dredged up one of my old signature files from the 1990s recently, while searching through archived alt.mountain-bike Usenet threads. Always liked this one, felt it was worth preservation:

Looking around this old online group, I was fascinated to find Mike Vandeman still posting daily vitriol to the forum about the dangers and destructiveness of mountain biking. After all these years, alt.mountain-bike looks to have become his solitary domain, a forgotten corner of the Internet that he's somehow become entrapped within, a kind of cartoon criminal imprisoned within the Phantom Zone, which has become nothing more than his very own bleak solitary repository of hate going on for page after page, amounting to literally hundreds of posts bearing his now-infamous name and a simple note: 0 views.

Overwinter

Fall was nice.  Winter was great.  Spring has been amazing.

Life is good. #BLE