No Sealey Challenge for Me--But a Different Daily Poetry Challenge?

For one brief moment yesterday morning, I thought about doing the Sealey Challenge:  reading 1 volume of poetry each day in August.  I've only done it once in the past, so yesterday morning, I went back and read the blog posts that I wrote in 2020; this post talks about the overall experience, and this one talks about photos I used when making my Facebook posts.  Some people have posted their daily experiences on Instagram, but I'm not on Instagram.  Did I post on Twitter in 2020?  I was on Twitter, so probably.

I even went so far as to gather all the single volumes of poetry that I have on my bookshelves here at the house (I have even more in boxes and a few volumes at my office on campus).  But by afternoon, I decided not to do it.

I was able to do it in 2020 because my work life was so different.  I was in an office every day for 8-ish hours a day, but I had long patches of time during the day when I didn't have tasks to do.  At that point, we thought it was likely that the campus would close at some point in the next year, so my main work job was to keep it going, in a hospice kind of way, keeping everyone comfortable, but not starting new initiatives.

It was 2020, early-ish in the Covid time, no vaccines, and trying to stay distanced.  So I had fewer people coming to my office to complain or to strategize or to fight off boredom by gossiping or rage baiting.  In short, I had a lot of free time, even though I had to spend it in an office.

During those no-task times in 2020, I was able to read a book straight through.  My work life is about to get a lot more complicated, with commuting and going to class and one set of online classes coming to an end and another set beginning.

But yesterday's thinking about the Sealey Challenge did remind me that I want to start reading more poetry again.  I want to carry a volume of poetry with me throughout my teaching day.  I want to model the behavior of reading in the moments of down time that come with every class.

And that has made me think of something else--maybe I want to project a poem onto the board at the start of each class--a different type of daily poetry challenge!  Maybe I want poems each day that encourage students.  Hmmm.  Let me think about this. 

The Hinge Festival of Lammas

 Early August is a hinge point in the calendar. In some ways, it's not as obvious a hinge as the autumnal equinox or the summer solstice; in fact, it's the time directly between those two hinges--we're as far away from the start of summer as we are from the start of autumn. But in some ways, it's just as significant a point of seasonal shift.

If we lived in medieval England, we would be celebrating the festival of Lammas, a festival that celebrates first harvests with loaves of bread standing in for that first harvest.  There might be processions to bakeries, to bless them and to bless the bakers.  

It would be a festival that celebrates abundance, the abundance that comes later in a cooler climate.  Of course, we here in Appalachia are celebrating that abundance too; the summer vegetables are still going strong with beautiful tomatoes at the farmer's market.  Yet across the region, apple orchards are opening today.

We may have slogged through summer long enough that we may feel that nothing will ever change--it will be hot and humid forever. The light hasn't changed significantly, the way it will in a month or two. But we are losing more daylight each day as we hurtle towards a different season. Students aren't in school yet, but the time draws closer. Most of us aren't agricultural people anymore, but if we were, we'd be seeing crops in their final ripening. Harvest would be coming soon.

Now is a good time to take an accounting. Have we been planning some summer festivities that we haven't gotten to do yet? Now is the time. Do we need to adjust our trajectories for the rest of the year? Let us make some plans.