This weekend I’m grading a fat stack of textual analysis essays, and one thing that several students have noted in their accompanying reflective letter is how working on the project forced them to slow down and notice details in the story they were analyzing. Although my employer pays me to teach writing, I’m glad some of my students are also learning the importance of slow noticing.

It’s Thursday afternoon, so once again I’m at the library working on the Work-In-Progress. Last week, I mentioned being stuck on a chapter I stopped working on in July. Today, I made progress by going back to my previous chapters, mapping the format I used to weave together nature observations, autobiographical details, and Buddhist teaching. Given that template, I started braiding the themes of this current chapter.

On this morning’s drippy dogwalk, I saw a yellow leaf dangling from a strand of spider silk. What is it like, little leaf, to be caught in time, bandied by wind and rain, and frustrated in your attempts to fall?

Canvas is down due to today’s AWS outage, so instead of spending my office hour grading the papers students submitted last week, I’m copying students’ email addresses from my Workday rosters so I can directly send them a link to today’s notes, which I store on my Google Drive. I have been using an LMS for so long, I almost don’t remember how to teach a class without one. 

Yesterday, instead of taking the T into Boston for the massive No Kings protest there, I drove to the town common in Natick to rally with friends in a Massachusetts suburb equidistant from our respective homes. Back in March, I wrote about the usual complaints against organized protests: One criticism of marches is they don’t (directly) effect lasting social change.

For the past few weeks, I’ve gone to the library on Thursday afternoons, intent on working on the book-length collection of nonfiction essays I’ve been working on intermittently for the past decade or so. At home, there are many distractions: pets to tend, chores to do. At home, the bed beckons: maybe I should take an afternoon nap. At the library, distractions are fewer.

After days of rain, this morning the streets and sidewalks were glinting with a thin sheen of moisture, and I saw one tree emitting a cloud of steam as its trunk dried in the low-slanting October light. While writing my morning journal pages on our screened porch, I heard a loud squawking that sounded similar to a flicker’s call, but slower and lower-pitched, followed by blue jay cries.

This afternoon the rain that started on Sunday finally stopped, so now we’re drying out from our autumn nor’easter. The leaves underfoot, the Halloween decorations in our yard, and a neighbor’s dahlias are all sodden and dripping, but tomorrow promises to be sunny. As usual, the mantra for October rainstorms applies: at least it wasn’t snow.

Whenever I see mushrooms pop up after a rainstorm, I wonder how long this particular mycelial mat has laid dormant, quietly living underground until conditions are just right to send up fruiting bodies. Mushrooms and other fungi don’t appear out of nowhere: they patiently lie in wait, then emerge in the fullness of time. One of today’s rainy-day tasks is to make a sign for Saturday’s…

Today has been gray and threatening, with an imminent nor’easter waiting in ambush. On this morning’s walk, Swifty shied at a flapping flag, one hanging on the same porch where months ago we’d seen a woman emerge from her car then climb the steps to her door carrying a bunch of helium balloons. Swifty was spooked by those, too: it was a sunny day, and light glinted off one of the balloons, which was a large mylar numeral for some child’s birthday, and appropriately shiny.

Halloween is a big deal in our neighborhood, with lots of friendly competition to see whose house is the spookiest. Last year, the house with an enormous pirate ship in the front yard won Halloween, in my opinion. This year, I'm voting for the house with banjo-playing skeletons on the porch and a slam-dunking skeleton in the driveway.

This morning on our walk, the dog and I saw a chevron of geese fly honking overhead, and she looked up to track their flight across the brisk blue sky as if she’d never seen migrating geese before. This is the sentence that unspooled in my mind as I remembered those geese while tracking my pen across my morning journal pages.

Take it from someone who knows. If you want to avoid heart-attacks caused by your Halloween-obsessed husband, be sure to check the backseat before you get into the car.

Yesterday A (not her real initial) and I went to a conversation between former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick and historian David Blight, moderated by Harvard professor Imani Perry. The event, part of this weekend’s WIT Literary Festival, was titled “My Voice, My Pen, My Vote,” and it strove to place our current political moment in a historical context–what led us to this point–and a larger social movement–where do we go from here?

Yesterday was torrentially rainy. I wore a bright yellow poncho to walk the dog, and we largely had the streets and sidewalks to ourselves. Today has been sunny and humid, with mushrooms sprouting out of the sodden soil. This morning when I put my shoes on to walk the dog, they were still wet from yesterday’s downpours.

It’s a wet, dreary day, and I have a serious case of the Wednesday Wearies. I have papers to grade and not an ounce of motivation, as if every cell in my body is screaming “Put off ‘til tomorrow whatever you planned to do today.” Last night when I asked my ELL learner how she was, she said tired, then laughed.

This time last year, I blogged an almost identical photo of the burning bush in our front yard. Back then, I described something I called leapfrogging, where I’d prepare my Framingham State classes while holding office hours at Babson, then I’d prep my Babson classes during my Framingham State office hours. Now that I’m no longer teaching at Framingham State, I have recovery days between my teaching days: days when I can take my time preparing classes, grading papers, and generally debriefing from my on-campus days. Teaching three classes still involves lots of hopping, but now I have lilypad days when I can take a breath between leaps.

Whenever I see a tree laden with fruit, I wonder whether such fecundity comes naturally and effortlessly, as easy as rolling off a proverbial log, or if it involves rushing and juggling, with the tree pulled into as many directions as its twigs.

Today at the year’s final Worcester Red Sox home game, I saw my first-ever spotted lanternfly. The bug zoomed out of the Polar Park outfield and landed on the concourse behind our seats on the Worcester Wall, where I photographed it resting at the base of a light stanchion. At rest, adult lanternflies are large but unremarkable–brown with black spots–but in flight they have large red spots on their wings.

After long days of photosynthesis and the constant barrage of chewing insects and infesting fungus, how much relief is there for a leaf to fall, spent, into the arms of Autumn? Is this relief a kind of re-leaf, a chance to recollect and reflect, a spot of renewal after being tired and re-tired?

Some people mark the start of Autumn when pumpkin spice lattes return to Starbucks. For me, the most telltale sign of the season is the return of All Things Pumpkin to Trader Joe’s.

Oh, laziness. How misunderstood you are. For years while I juggled five classes at two colleges, I fell into lazy procrastination, feeling shame when I couldn’t squeeze another ounce of productivity out of every last minute. Now that I’m teaching a more human workload, I realize I wasn’t lazy: I was just tired. Laziness and exhaustion are not the same. You shouldn’t be shamed for being exhausted, and maybe you shouldn’t be shamed for being lazy, either.

Every semester, there is at least one class session where students in the room next door are giving presentations, each ending with a round of applause. Whenever I’m lecturing and applause breaks out in the classroom next door, I stop, take a small bow, and say “Thank you very much.” It’s an old joke for me, but it’s new for my students…or at least it’s new the first time I do it.

September is the season when meadows sing with a chorus of crickets, waves of grass dotted with aster, goldenrod, and ironweed. All flesh is grass, the Bible says, and September is when the flesh of grass gleams golden ahead of the harvesting scythe. Live life to the fullest, the meadows whisper, like a grasshopper more than an ant, because the harvest of time will cut you down for sure.

The final sentence in yesterday’s post contains two adverbs: “loudly” and “emphatically.” Some writers and editors insist on using adverbs sparingly, which itself is an adverb. Adverbs, they say, clutter up a sentence unnecessarily, which is another adverb. Instead of luxuriating in florid prose, editors say you should eschew adverbs. But here’s the deal. I write by ear, not grammar. Sentences don’t build in my head like building blocks stacked one atop the next: Subject, Verb, Object.