who I am, with gusto

 

new paradigms

retirement first feels of absence,

the laying down of work,

a laying down of a self-definition

that requires self-worth to result from one's career,

the presence of other ways of doing, of other ways of being,

can take a bit of time to find and accept,

new paradigms need to be constructed,

the new school year is just starting,

and I am no longer part of it,

relationships, photos, no longer my charge,

when I began my journey as a teacher,

I wrote that the goal of a teacher is to make yourself dispensable,

that if you help the learner enough,

they will assume responsibility and supervise their own learning,

their education within their own control,

I am working to feel something like that now,

that the vital work of creating and maintaining a middle school

is well in control with the staff there, without me,

maybe now my charge is to let go

and trust in the next generations 

to continue the tradition of Friends School,

to help every student and staff 

come into the power that is their birthright,

I want to spend the time I have left

on whatever calls to me now,

whatever connections to support,

whatever order to assert:

whether in house, or yard, or garden, or internally,

as in the writing that still calls strongly to me,

to think the good thought,

to assert myself with actions and words,

like with this poem,

to use my now near eight decades

of experience, of thought, of love,

to make a difference for the good,

in this world I dearly love,

I can still live for the good,

for nature,

for myself,

for the future,

and for the past,

I can figure who I am with gusto. 

by Henry H. Walker

August 29, ‘26

guilty comfort

 schadenfreude

schadenfreude, 

a German word for taking delight 

in the misfortunes of others,

there's no English word

for this reality of connected thoughts

that speaks to a truth

into which it is easy to fall,

another example of the power of language

to make a reality that was only nebulous before,

those of us speaking English

could already secretly delight in the sufferings of others,

but only schadenfreude expresses

what is at the heart of such feelings,

I have the teams I love and support,

I also have the teams I do not like,

when one of those teams did well yesterday,

I missed the inner delight in their loss,

in their misfortune,

I miss the guilty comfort of my schadenfreude.

by Henry H. Walker

August 30, ‘26

written by. . . ?

 

who writes us?

I like who I am,

though it challenges me to have a psyche

only sort of in conscious control,

a psyche easily swayed by emotions:

the laugh and the tear,

confidence and despair,

each an easy step from the moment,

each but a nudge from the other,

the man in me always wants to tough it out,

to control, to act upon the world,

make myself responsible, indispensable, for any move forward,

the breaking through to new lands,

the assertion of will upon the world,

those places within which I feel myself important, and of worth,

other parts of me want to connect with

and to honor others, too,

those who share the world we both love,

those who see a larger picture,

one in which the move forward

should be of a collective wisdom,

my ego helpful, but not determinative,

this part of me seeks to expands who I am

to be also who you are,

our older granddaughter talked of characters in books

and of how the female characters, who are written by a woman,

are often fuller as people than many women characters written by a man,

true to who they are, and also true to who they can be,

if released into what is possible and right,

my mother wrote much of who I am,

I hope to choose and embrace both who she was

and also the lonely, loving gifts of who my father was,

of how he worked hard to do his best 

and to make family and world better,

I want to honor that drive to act, to build,

to forge a path upon the world

that leads to a better place,

I want to also connect with partners

who have a vision of what can be,

and the energy to work to make it so,

in the stories I hope to live, and to have lived,

I want to use both the drive to do,

and the gift to honor how collective any step forward must be

in a better world that works hard to balance individual and group,

the parochial and the universal,

within which all the pieces of one's self

can come to consensus and into resolution,

I hope enough of us can be full characters

so that we can find ourselves together

and step into new lands sure enough 

of the totality of who we are

to create an improved world

that honors the best within us.

by Henry H. Walker

March 18, ‘26

in the heart of a flower

 

death comes with life

one white puff of wild seed

softly glides down through the air

and finds itself in the grass of our yard,

intention meets up with the random,

most of the futures a flower dreams in its heart never come true,

the seed just cannot find the way forward

as rock or wrongness meets it on the way,

the random closes off the potential of the future self,

nuts find even more challenge

in the finding of he way forward

into continued life for their genes:

the chestnut, the walnut, enough of a meal

that their future is of morphing into the creatures that eat them,

acorns try other systems,

flooding the environment with great quantities of potential,

suffusing their selves with excessive tannin

so that they're still worth eating,

but not worth savoring,

their very unpalatability must allow more to survive,

I want to celebrate the transient 

beauty and hope of the floating seed,

but the tragedy of loss after loss

sings even more clearly to me,

like it did to Annie Dillard when she wrote 

of being slapped in the face

by the massive amount of death 

the life cycle requires.

by Henry H. Walker

August 28, ‘26

save us from auto-correct!

 beware slipping into the ruts

I like spellcheck,

for it signals me if it doesn't recognize

the rightness of the letters I've typed

to represent a real word,

though I have my idiosyncrasies,

which can challenge its suggestions,

I prefer "gray" to "grey",

and sometimes I want to stretch the language

and make a new word real,

"riskifying" for effect,

when spellcheck morphs into auto-correct,

I am annoyed with the attempted insertion

of what it "thinks" experience should tell me

of how opening letters most often lead into certain words,

of how opening words most often lead into certain phrases,

encouraging me to take the road already taken,

the tried is maybe true,

but the tried may also be trite, redundant,

beneath what I should attempt,

wheels of thought safely contained

in the ruts of what has come before,

we are even more challenged by A.I.,

for it can take huge amounts of input not from us

and fashion clarity by repeating what others thought on the page,

just mixing it all up with the semblance of something new,

how can we find ways forward

that are actually from our own inner unique creator

when it is so easy to give up agency

to the consensus of a program that isn't us?

no matter how fancy it's packaged,

it's still canned,

I fear the servant who can make us lose our edge

and allow the ruts to claim us

within the roads already taken.

by Henry H. Walker

August 27, ‘26

tragedy and redemption in a mountain valley

 

Little River, and the Logging

today we lost ourselves in a significant walk

in the valley that Little River drains,

though that apt physical description

does nothing to describe the heart-wrenching reality

of a magnificent river so full of itself and so beautiful

that we keep focusing on its grand reality

 as we haul our bodies along the trail by it,

the stream is full and often frothing white,

clear enough to exude a green transparency,

the forest all around softly rebuilds back toward old growth,

125 years ago the wealth in wood here

was too much to be resisted,

so the saws came, the magnificent giants roughly reduced to logs,

the land blighted with the desolation of that physical savagery,

the logs then transported and transformed into lumber,

within which the gifts of the great forest

would be reduced to meeting the desires of the people of the time,

to get the logs out of these high valleys,

man and animal did what they could,

a gargantuan physical effort that used gravity, animals,

and daredevil workers to bring trunks from ridge to valley,

often the logs were floated down high water to the mills in the lower country,

the gentle path upon which we walk

was carved out of the valley for the benefit of machine,

railroad lines snaked along the water courses

and allowed the wooden wealth to escape the mountains,

how many walnut rockers and cherry dining room tables

owe their lineage to the forests ravaged up and down this valley,

so calm and idyllic now as the woods recover?

about two billion board feet of lumber were torn from these woods,

I feel the hope for renewal

and also the tragedy of the cutting, and the waste,

the desecration that happened all up and down this great valley,

a few great trees salvaged from the saw

because of the stubborn will of one owner on Cove Mountain,

and then the angry will of the lumber magnate

who refused to buy the wood after his nemesis died.

by Henry H. Walker

August 24, ‘26