Quaker Pagan Reflections

It is truly amazing how little I can remember the feeling of this exhaustion when I am not teaching... that I can't anticipate how little of me there is at the end of a day or week in the classroom. I keep thinking I'll be able to do things: visit a friend, write a blog post, read a serious book... and I keep being surprised when, as happened again this past weekend, Saturday rolls around and I just fall down. Sorry. This isn't meant to be a teaching blog. But teaching is looming so large in my poor little psyche these days that there's little room for anything else. But however firm the wall between church and state within my little classroom, religion follows me wherever I go, and my experiences as a teacher and as a soul are definitely affecting one another. For one thing, there are the conversations with S. I'm mentoring a Fulbright exchange teacher from India, as I mentioned earlier. It's a terrific experience overall--though where he comes up with his

We're still alive and well, Peter and I... but that part of our lives we like to call our "annual trans-Arctic submarine voyage"--teaching school in two different public school systems--has begun. All summer long, we got used to daylight, exercise, friends, and time to think, play, and work around the house. I got a satisfying amount of writing done, and Peter finished building the walk-in closet in the attic and almost finished insulating it. But now it's September, and we're diving for the sea floor. We'll be down here, under the ice, far from our summer lives of friends and free time, until we emerge again in June. I exaggerate slightly. I'm going to go to Meeting for Worship today, and I'll be attending our local RPG group just as religiously as meeting. (Amusingly, it's the second place I find my spiritual community--several of my very favorite longtime Pagan community members attend week after week, and recently, a number of our Quaker