Hot coffee; sunny morning. Students gave me cards on the last day of teaching fifth grade at Murwood yesterday. They each copied out their favorite poem of the ones they had done with me. Here's Kilian Goltra's:

"This is a letter to chapped deserts
dry as bone, cracked as elephant
skin, unforgiving as lightning.

This is a letter to mirror reflective lakes
peaceful as the rain, calm as a deer,
blue as sapphire.

This is a letter to emerald green trees,
giant, high, swaying, digging bear-brown
roots:

This is a letter to salty oceans
peaceful, sparkling, giving..."

A full teaching week--not much writing for me, except in here. Wonderful, sacred, fulfilling interactions with students though; soul to soul.

Yesterday in Wing It! practice, Enver and I danced so deeply together, I lost my fear of death for a moment. I realized death is merely in the mind--it's the mind that fears dying--but we are molecules, and the molecules go on dancing. Maybe better after the brain is no longer trying to boss everything around.

It could be that simple.

Sunday I went with a friend to see a weeks worth of the 365 days project that Suzan-Lori Parks is doing, at the Museum of the African Diaspora. Parks wrote a play a day for a whole year--of neccessity they are short, sometimes dreamlike sequences. Basically, it was like sitting through a week of someone's dreams. My favorite was the very first one; a man is digging a hole. A woman comes out of the hole. They start talking, and that's how all the trouble starts.

Afterwards my friend Rebecca told me an amazing story about a friend of hers who was traveling in Asia when the tsunami hit last year; she took a train there, and with her techno expertise was able to set up a PayPal account and get money wired privately in right away. Rebecca and her friends organized in the States and sent money, supplies, toiletries, toys for children who had been orphaned. The friend just made herself useful and was able to help rebuild. She flew under the radar, an undercover Buddha.

Then I taught a Writing Salon class and afterwards one of my students stayed late to read aloud her essay and tell me how she came to meet her husband; another sacred story. (I have an idea for a "sacred stories" project. The ones I'm often privileged to hear. They would make a great little book.)

I'm getting ready to go have lunch with Suzanne Cohen, who directed the staged reading of Saying Kaddish at the Mirror Stage Company in Seattle last year, and talk to her about the first draft of my next play, the one I wrote this past summer, and about Mirror Stage, which just received a nice grant, and is a great, thought-provoking forum for new plays and playwrights. She was able to do magic with my script.

My hair is standing on end as I type this--I better go wet it down and plaster it with product before I leave the house!