Walking through the halls of the secondary high school, people are smiling, jovial, friendly. It is the final day of classes and the relief of the school year’s end has brought joy to the hearts of everyone in the building.
The sense of community is strong in these last days, as we are all (students, staff) eagerly anticipating the same thing … the end of the school year. It is the shared anticipation of change, of rest, of other communities.
Final days can be especially joyous, especially when they precede something new.
The school years turns into summer.
The school years turn into graduation, jobs, travel.
The work year turns into summer vacation.
The dark seasons turn into light.
When it comes to school’s year end, it is the students who struggle, who hate this institution, whose gifts are best utilized outside of our places of learning. These institutes where the unnatural practises of sitting inside, under fluorescent lighting, with only people born the same year all day, every day, is the model, but also that successful learning is often different from loving to learn.
These are the ones I smile a knowing smile with, both of us aware that not only is summer coming, but so is freedom. Freedom to be who God made them to be, free to explore, free to create, free to move … free to breathe … free to heal.
Just As The Calendar Began to Say Summer
Mary Oliver
I went out of the schoolhouse fast
and through the gardens and to the woods,
and spent all summer forgetting what I’d been taught —
two times two, and diligence, and so forth,
how to be modest and useful, and how to succeed and so forth,
machines and oil and plastic and money and so forth.
By fall I had healed somewhat, but was summoned back
to the chalky rooms and the desks, to sit and remember
the way the river kept rolling its pebbles,
the way the wild wrens sang though they hadn’t a penny in the bank,
the way the flowers were dressed in nothing but light.
itsawonderfilledlife 