Fragments From Floyd

This three-word bumper sticker is something that Lorianne and I concocted in our collective lament over the end of summer. While it's not as dismal and defeatist as it sounds, the phrase reflects the overwhelming pull of a teacher's attention, time and energy away from whatever or whoever they were during the freedom of summer. A return to the classroom--long before the actual first day of class--begins to hijack all that, channels all currents between narrow canyon walls and the flow of life moves relentlessly toward the next lecture, the next lab, the first test, and the long list of names and numbers that will be your responsibility soon for three months or more. And here on Goose Creek, this current away from blogging, photography and daydreaming started several weeks ago. Now we enter the rapids. Class starts in three weeks. I already hear the foaming cataract that is the rapidly approaching end of summer.

Between now and then, the fall garden needs planting and what harvest we have will come in. I'll spend a week at Hindman and come home overwhelmed with seeds of inspiration that are likely to fall on rocky ground during this hectic time. I have a presentation to give at the Floyd Library on the 18th. Our daughter and granddaughter will be with us for a week, and there's not room in a house for a blog if there is also a four year old and a dog. Know what I mean? So, I guess we've entered a new chapter in the lurching tale of this weblog.

Fragments will go on, in fits and starts. But you're likely to see a change in focus from personal perambulations to more biology-relevant and less general-blog-audience-relevant topics. And I have to admit, it has been exciting these past two weeks to re-enter the current events of biology in my daily browse, thinking how I might reach those latent riches of curiosity, excitement and passion that lie dormant in a typically inert and passive eighteen-year-old freshman non-major. It is quite a challenge, even though it seems it would be an easy task:

We live in such wonderful times when our tools can carry us to levels of knowledge we only dreamed about when I was eighteen. We live in such terrible times when our technology and its residual ills can alter entire systems--the weather, the oceans and bacterial resistance. How can a young person not be engaged in a living world where their knowledge or their ignorance of basic biology may tip the balance in the planet's future? Oops. Stepped up onto my soapbox there.

Anyway, teaching will end not everything, but it will alter many. I'll dance to a different drummer for a while. But then, after three and a half years of blogging, I've changed partners often enough to know, the dance will go on. In time, (I don't know if I'll be teaching one semester this year or two) I'll cycle back and find that when the rapids give way to wider, slower currents again, things here will not have changed all that much. And when some things end, that gives other exciting and challenging things an opportunity to begin. And here we go!