Three years ago, we'd be moving some of our stuff into seminary housing. I thought I would live there two years, and then came news of the old housing, where my apartment was located, would be torn down. In some ways, that turned out to be for the best.
Had seminary housing not been going away, I might not have started thinking about finding a face to face teaching job. I was trying to figure out a way to afford housing within driving distance. Then I began to think about the other possibilities: Wesley offers a wide range of modalities. We have a house in North Carolina--it made sense to go back to distance learning.
Still, I am glad to have had a chance to live on campus, to explore D.C. again. In some ways, I didn't do as much as I intended--no live theatre, no poetry readings. But in some ways, I did more. It would be a different experience these days, that's certain.
Of course, we never cross the same river twice, do we? The D.C. I explored from 2022-2023 did not much resemble the D.C. of my youth. Sure, there were familiar buildings, like the Smithsonian museums and the monuments. But the surrounding city was almost unrecognizable to me. And the suburbs were completely incomprehensible, not that I went there much, outside of my sister's house.
I've been revisiting the past in other ways. For the past several nights, I've been re-reading A Passionate Sisterhood before bed. It's about the women who were in the circle of the Lake District Romantic poets, like Southey and Wordsworth and Coleridge. It's delightful, even though it's not my usual bedtime reading.
It reminds me of the first time that I read the book, back in 2000 when it was first published, and I was teaching survey classes at the University of Miami. I was still trying to figure out my way to a full-time job.
The book also reminds me of graduate school, when I first discovered the journals of Dorothy Wordsworth. I was taking a class in prose and the novel of the Romantic period. I took it fall semester of 1988, and I was charmed by D. Wordsworth's journals. Of course, I still am.
Tomorrow I need to be here in Asheville for the last day of CPE, so I've created an experiential unit for my students, so that they can have a taste of what went into the creating of that journal. Hopefully they will walk for 20 minutes and write about what they see, and then they will sit in one spot for 20 minutes and write about what they see. On Friday or Monday, we'll see if we can transform that work into poetry.
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