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The world has gone green but the green is smaller-our pruning peach trees have lost so much fruit, so many arms, and the garden I intended has vanished beneath the weight of my good intentions. Only the spring onions survive, because they are determined, and push through the dirt on their own, without any help from me.
The year is closing as the world opens, and I stand in the doorways of my classrooms whenever my students are working without me, and watch. My students tell me what different soils can grow-loam soil, clay soil, sand. They know more than I do.
A few months ago the peach trees began to riot-sudden strange pink creatures that loaned my eyes their beauty. I watched the dry pale purple and yellow landscape slip away. The storms have arrived with a vengeance during our final week. The lightning is trying to tear the air apart and the air roars back. The stars are bright in the clear aftermath, and I must leave them.
I don't know what to say about the end.
I came here to learn about honesty, and joy, and time. I have. I have learned that joy is not enough. The same joy that used to make me so happy now paves my sadness, because it has been severed from its twin, passion. Joy without passion seems to cultivate stagnance, the way passion without joy cultivates a sort of consumed dissatisfaction. So many visitors have come back from this continent with tales of joy, as I will, but I will also tell of the absence, the nothingness.
One of my best students has borrowed about a hundred dollars from me, and disappeared. The one I thought I knew best. She knew what she was doing. I will never see my money again, and I will never see her. My best student, Matlakala, has roots everwhere, and grows, and looks out the window most classes at the center of her boredom, and I want to take her with me, but I can't. I believe in her movement, I believe she of any of them will find out about passion.
I used to be still at the center of all my movement, my vast busy Grinnell life. I think soon I will move at the center of my stillness, but right now I am just still.
There's nothing to say about the end.
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