When I was twelve years old in the middle school choir, we sang a song called “The Storm is Passing Over.”

Have courage my soul, and let us journey on.

Though the night is dark, and I am far from home.

Thanks be to God, the morning light appears.

The storm is passing over,

The storm is passing over,

The storm is passing over,

Hallelujah!

I loved that song. I think it was something I needed at that point in my life. The storms around me were very real, and I was very alone. I didn’t have a God to turn to; although I tried, it felt like he always left me alone too, to figure everything out for myself. The idea, though, that the storms in my life could pass over, and there would be something brighter on the other side, gave me hope, and suggested to me the value of drawing on my own resilience to see the tough times through. Self-reliance became a big part of my life. I didn’t always know who I could trust, but I did know I could count on the courage of my own soul.

Over time, I found myself pulling from that courage frequently, as one naturally does with age. Again and again, I impressed myself with what I could handle, with how much I could bear as the challenges of life came and went. I learned that inner strength isn’t something that you need to find. It’s always there, in all people, waiting until it must be used. When there is no choice but to move forward – which, really, is the only choice we ever have – our strength shines through, and we realize we were always capable of withstanding what once felt impossible.

Ten years later, I found myself in New York City, alone again, missing my friends and the life I’d left behind, sitting at the feet of the Hamilton statue on the Columbia University campus. I was lonely and tired. The city was too noisy, too large, too much. I didn’t feel like I belonged there, and I didn’t want to belong there. Yet there I was, so there I had to be.

A song from a long time ago popped into my head.

Have courage my soul, and let us journey on.

Though the night is dark, and I am far from home.

I sat under the statue for a while, contemplating all that had brought me to that moment in time, and when the sun finally started to dip behind the tall buildings, I got up and walked back across the street to Teachers College, climbed the stairs to the fourth floor, and found the practice room of the community choir I had joined in an attempt to keep myself busy. The rhythms of a choir room were familiar to me. I signed in at the desk, took the red folder of music I was offered, and found a seat on the risers. As I waited for the class to begin, I opened the folder and flipped through the music, curious to see what pieces the teacher had selected. There were five or six pieces of sheet music in the folder. The last one caught my eye.

Courage, my soul, and let us journey on,

Though the night is dark, it won’t be very long.

Jesus walks the seas, and calms the angry waves,

And the storm is passing over, hallelujah!

It was a different arrangement of the same song. The one from ten years ago. The one from earlier that afternoon.

I felt a thread around my waist, suddenly, pulling me, connecting me back to the twelve-year-old girl standing in a Florida middle school, back to the tall ceilings of the choir room, back to a place and time and self that no longer were. And I realized, then, that maybe there was another thread around my waist, one I couldn’t see yet, that was pulling me in the other direction, into the future. Connecting me to the person I wasn’t, but one day would be.

Although I didn’t know it at the time, in that same moment, my husband was out there, finishing his master’s degree, beginning his PhD at Ohio State, in the same program I was about to enter myself. His life had run parallel to mine, just a few years ahead. One warm Halloween day when I was in high school, enjoying the twilight of my childhood, my husband had just entered his adulthood, and had been hit by a car while teaching in Detroit, nearly losing his life. He recovered, facing injuries no person should have to stand, drawing on his own strength and his family’s strength in the process. The storm was withstood because it was always going to be.

What my husband didn’t realize then was that, a decade later, on a warm Halloween day, he’d sit with his wife in a little white doctor’s office and witness his baby on an ultrasound for the first time. New life blooming on the same day his almost ended. He and his daughter, connected by a thread that stretched back into the past and, again, into a future none of us could see.

My 30^th birthday came a few weeks after the ultrasound. Pregnant and uncomfortable, I decided not to go very far to celebrate. We got in the car and drove a couple of hours up to Michigan, to Ann Arbor, where we saw the last of the Autumn leaves and stayed in a little room in a creaky old house. Breakfast was served in the dining room, and on Saturday morning, just before we left to drive back home to Columbus, we were seated at one end of a long table, an older couple at the other side.

They were quiet, and we were quiet. We didn’t talk much. I stared at my food, and they enjoyed their coffee, and when I apologetically handed the waiter back my untouched plate and told him I was pregnant and too nauseous to eat, the white-haired woman looked over and congratulated me.

We exchanged stories, a little bit. The man, greying hair still black at his temples, told us they used to live in Ann Arbor, a long time ago, and they met working at the university hospital. Doctors, I thought. Just like us. They told us that time moves quickly, and change comes and goes, and that everything turns out okay.

When we left the table and went back up to our room, my husband told me that we just had breakfast with ourselves from the future. Fast forward thirty years, and there we are.

“Time is circular,” he said.

And I saw the thread around my waist, stretching out far past where I could see it, into a tomorrow I couldn’t know, but connecting back, somehow, to the twelve-year-old girl in the choir room, to my mother, to her mother, to the infant growing inside of me, who, I think, was always going to be there.

Put a pinwheel on my grave

Please.

One with rainbow colors that glitter in the light.

Put a pinwheel on my grave and let it dance

In the fluffy spring breeze

And be covered with snow in the winter.

Let the leaves fall around it in the golden autumn

As time passes

Watery and dewy and thin.

Put a pinwheel on my grave so that when children

Pass by at dusk they smile and laugh

Maybe

Like blades of grass

And their twinkling parents say

Don’t touch that.

While secretly wishing to pick it up

Themselves

And feel its momentum turning in their hands.

Put a pinwheel on my grave and

Maybe add a lava lamp and some tie-dyed socks

And some neon glow sticks that shimmer

At night

After the sun falls behind the sky.

Because sometimes when I stop and breathe

And live

And the quiet presses down.

And I wonder what is the point of it all.

That’s when I think

Maybe.

Maybe the pinwheel is the point.

I’m hesitant to call myself a “poet” in the traditional sense, but since I do enjoy poetry, read poetry, and write poetry, I’m not really sure why. A person who does philosophy is a philosopher. A person who writes is a writer. So I suppose I fit the bill for “poet.” I try not to over-complicate things.

Two pieces of my work have revolved around this poetic interest. In 2022, I published my first-ever article in the Ohio Valley Philosophy of Education Society’s journal, following a presentation of that work at that year’s conference. The article, “Poetry in Pre-Service Teacher Education: A Bridge between Philosophy and Practice,” is my attempt to unify my worlds and my thoughts. I quite like this article! Reflecting back on it now, maybe there’s some space for me to keep thinking about this link between philosophy of education and poetry.

I’ve published a poem of my own, as well, in a little no-name online journal called “The Font,” a journal for language teachers. How I discovered this journal, I cannot remember. I also can’t remember how I came to submit a piece of writing to it. The poem, “Wedged Underneath a Heavy Desk,” is just a small little thing that I wrote on a whim, but I’m glad it has a place to live.

This is where my PhD dissertation lives.

Looking back on this work now a couple of years out, I’m struck by the fact that I’m still so proud of it. Of course, in retrospect there are certainly things I wish I had done differently, or that I would do differently now. Overall, however, this is a work that came fully from my mind and heart and experiences, and it says exactly what I needed to say.

It’s hard to maintain a positive perspective on a work like a dissertation, I think. Like any piece of writing, it’s necessarily a snapshot of a moment in time. And the more time passes, the further removed I am from it. It’s important to remember that a dissertation is a document intended to serve a very specific role: to earn someone a PhD. That’s what this work did for me, and because of that, I don’t think I could ever look back on it with anything less than fondness, even love.

Testing…testing…

I’ve never used WordPress before. It’s actually rather confusing!

I’m going to put some of my work here, so it has a place to live out in the world.