Rhythms

Monday morning with no obligations claims the gift it is. I got up old-man early anyway. Such is the power of habit, and circadian rhythms, and the imprint of intention. I do an online yoga with the laptop, a promise I made to her some years ago became a promise to myself, to play against type, to live forever young – or at least to spend 20 minutes trying. Adriene gets my sore-everywhere mornings. Dylan gets the hazy evenings, the eddy-space when getting up too early exacts its costs and the world becomes primal and liquid again – and prophets sing. 

These rhythms. The rush of summer teaching, evenings on Big Twin Lake, the day given to transition and Highway 2 windshield pilgrimage back to my “real” life back in Madison. The cool open-window mornings. The family walleye trip and my apprehension about my ability to hold it this way this time again. Watching sundown over picnic point with a brat and beer. These seem like small things, like random habit touched again and again, like ritual emerging from the haphazard soup. Like memory filtered and curated and served up the way I like it.

Like wandering in, shaking off the cold, and finding it all familiar. 

Seventy-nine RJ blog essays in, I find my imagination retracing its steps. Can I take you to Dorn creek again? To Six-mile creek? Will I stumble on inspiration somewhere? Should I go and look? Are you aware of the climate crisis? Should I tell you about it? It’s the most important thing.

Tubby little Scherzo was testy yesterday, Mendota’s winds were fickle and we reeled between extremes threatening to broach or luffing inadequacy without the lazy summer-dream bliss of setting the sails and mind-wandering off. We crossed east to west on a weather-helmed starboard tack that obscured an increasingly backing wind. We then spent the afternoon tacking back upwind and adjusting with exquisite attention. I get annoyed at the stupidest things. I make an obligation of playing with the wind, aware that my summer is beginning to close and feeling the urgency of opportunity. When time is free and the weather’s bluebird right, a faire wind is what you make it, being more forgiving than you know. And I wouldn’t be anywhere else.

I worked on Labor Day, driving into campus early. Such is the irony of a semester starting in September and sense that I am permanently behind, making uneasy peace with my procrastination. That’s the way it is, the way it’s always been. Always straining at the tiller with little to give until things calm a bit. 

Campus was crazy busy. This week was the move-in. This moment with the full complement of students, lingering parents, Madisonians out on a crazy beautiful Labor Day to enjoy one another’s company. No homework yet, no projects due, no exam to study for. I walked over to get a beer, assessed the queue, and walked back. The calm before the storm and Fat Tuesday vibes at the same time, or the brief, beautiful moment at the beginning as all of us know it. Before the work begins.

I wouldn’t be anywhere else. Carol and I have lived the academic calendar long enough to know that the year turns over, not in January, but in early September – and it’s familiar and right. New students, earnest, hang on my words at the little convocation event. Here with all the greenstick newnesses and networks of friends and families wishing, wanting, and hoping for it to be good for them.

It is the privilege of my life to hold their trust and their attention in this space. I teach and I shepherd my backwater of the academic enterprise. I lean in. Hope is a flash of recognition. Hope is an introspection. Hope is a spark of passion. I do inspiration or try for it. Inspiration can be a method for retention and, introvert that I am, I’ve learned to turn on the professor schtick when I need it. But I believe it. I believe in them. I do it with no apologies. 

September light is amber ember warm and the landscape glows as it only does now. Deep green summer is losing its grip from straining for months to turn as much sunlight energy into plant tissues as efficiently as it can. The deep green seeps out, separating into its primary colors, ethereal blue escaping to the rich distant sky and yellow pooling here, saturating the very light laying itself over the landscape. It’s only like this for a moment, when summer relents ever so little.

With the holiday winding down, I drive out to the hill prairie. The last thing, a visit to the holiest place I know. I have a habit of coming here on Easter morning. They burn this prairie reliably in spring and Easter is often awash in the embryonic paler green of emergence and plants soft and succulent. The counterpart to spring re-growth is not winter dormancy, it’s the slow release of life and striving, the pull of nutrients back to the rootstock, and the smell of dry grass and dark prairie flower seedheads having dropped their petals. The prairie is taller than I am. Umber trefoil big bluestem and spent prairie dock. The prairie glows with goldenrod (and its bees!), Coreopsis, ox-eye daisies and a dozen other yellow flowers I wish I knew.

It’s late now. We return to the soil, not so much as defeated soldiers as champions having given it our all in our time. Good and faithful servants all. Giving our last for faith in the seeds we leave and warming wind.

Even in a country that you know by heart

it’s hard to go the same way twice.


The life of the going changes.


The chances change and make a new way.


Any tree or stone or bird


can be the bud of a new direction. The

natural correction is to make intent

of accident. To get back before dark

is the art of going.

Poem: “Traveling at Home” by Wendell Berry, from Traveling at Home. Counterpoint Press, 2011.