Dear TCS Community,
In our community meeting last week, I asked us to name the other holidays that happen around this time of the year. We had some standard answers: Dewali, Chanukah, Winter Solstice, Christmas, Kwanzaa. Then we had some creative responses: Boxing Day, Valentine’s Day, even October (!). We realized that many holidays celebrated at this time of year are connected by a search for light, perhaps because of the shortening days and growing darkness at this season.
I talked about that search for light at our winter concert. With a new family of swans on a pond near our house that has provided us with hope for months, I read Mary Oliver’s poem, Swan:
Did you too see it, drifting, all night, on the river?
Did you see it in the morning, rising into the silvery air –
An armful of white blossoms,
A perfect commotion of silk and linen as it leaned
into the bondage of its wings; a snowbank, a bank of lillies,
Biting into the air with its black beak?
Did you hear it, fluting and whistling
A shrill dark music – like the rain pelting the trees – like a waterfall
Knifing down the black ledges?
And did you see it, finally, just under the clouds –
A white cross Streaming across the sky, its feet
Like black leaves, its wings Like the stretching light of the river:
And did you feel it, in your heart, how it pertained to everything?
And have you too finally figured out what beauty is for?
And have you changed your life?
© Mary Oliver. From The Paris Review # 124, Fall, 1992.
The challenge and darkness that we have been facing in our lives, at Touchstone and in the world, have come at us in unprecedented breadth and depth over the last year of so. At the same time, we have found hope and light in unexpected places at TCS:
- An uplifting winter concert–love hearing those rehearsals through my office wall
- Jane’s Curriculum Morning talk last week on early reading (and monkey bar learning)
- The workshop that Jane and Beckley did Monday night for 40 area nursery and day care staff members, about parent-teacher listening
- Polly’s class presentations on Americans who have taught us to stand up for others
- A TCS Measles Initiative fundraiser that simply will not stop–another whole piggy bank and a grandparent donation, now at $1,000–enough to inoculate two villages!
- As we prepare to go on winter break, I trust that we will all find light and hope in unpredictable places–not just in October, November, and December, but also in January, Valentine’s Day, and the rest of February, for starters.
Best,
Don Grace, Head of School