Friday

It's Friday and it's still cold - in the 20s again. But the sun is showing her bright face in the big blue Colorado sky. My bike has a new rear tire and a new rider. Everyday I'm a little bit different. I hope for being more perceptive too, but that's a bigger challenge. It's a rough couple of weeks at school -- copied papers, student grievances -- and yet some things turn out better than expected. The pain of confronting a student who copied a paper turned into an acknowledgement of and even a thank-you for a lesson learned. Still, I am discouraged. The karma feels off. The fit isn't. It's not new, not out of the blue, not once in a lifetime. But this morning this misfit seems worse.
Nevertheless small things can have big payoffs -- shadows for example. When we think shadows the mind can go in two directions. The "out of the shadows" direction is scary and dark. But shadows have another aura too. In my funk this morning I noticed my shadow out ahead of me as I headed west. And there dancing in the sun were the straps of my back pack. Carefree and energetic. Light and gleeful, they hopped and bobbed in the morning light. It seemed almost two-dimensional, black and white. My movement through space creating wind added the third dimension. I thought about how that's a sort of opposite of how we define"wind" as air moving through space past us. And the joy of the dance made me smile.