A Snowy Semester?

I’m snowed in at my apartment tonight, and I haven’t talked to anyone all day long. (I've been very productive!) Outside, it’s cold and icy enough that to walk the two blocks downhill to the grocery store wouldn’t be a fantastic idea (but it is there, so if the snow keeps up, I won’t starve—I’ll slide). I’m starting to go stir-crazy—but not insane.

The snow reminds me to include an addendum to the “I wish I lived closer to the land” post awhile back: What I really meant was, “I wish I lived closer to the land, providing I’d have four-wheel drive, a climbing rope, and other sticky-situation accommodations.” ☺

So since my meeting this evening was cancelled, I thought I’d post an update on what will be tumbling around in my head throughout this semester…

The Open Door: I don’t really know what I would do without the people of this community. Really don’t. Their friendships and philosophies on life rock my world. This paragraph is really just a shout-out to an amazing group of people who can drag me out of artistic isolation to watch Sunday football.

Teaching: I’m teaching in odd, nontraditional settings again: yoga on Sunday, a writing workshop on Tuesday, odd things on Saturdays. This coming Sunday, I’m introducing a new intention into my yoga class—opening up to creativity. We’re marketing it toward artists, specifically writers, and I’m excited to see what comes. During the week, writing workshops with public school teachers continues to unlock recesses of creativity inside me that I never knew I had! Basically, my job is to create a space for them to write and be creative… and I love it. I hope they do, too.

School: I’m taking three classes:
~Nonfiction & Poetry Hybrid Workshop (focusing on experimenting with genre)
~Global Literature (focusing on India and Latin America)
~A Traveler’s India (focusing on literature written about India)

Reading: These classes produce a long booklist, focusing on India—obviously. This is more preferable than last spring’s focus: genocide. It seems that every spring semester I accumulate a reading list as long as my arm, and I’ve already tackled three of the twenty-two required books for this semester. This does not include any research I will be doing for my manuscript.

Manuscript: Above and beyond all of that, I need to be working on my manuscript—which continues to revolve around the intersection of yoga and the Christian faith. What these 200 pages will look like changes every day. By the end of the semester, I need to have a really good grasp of what they’ll contain—they need to be done by the end of the summer, roughly.

Narrative Candy: Favorite television shows this semester—Battlestar Galactica, The Office, LOST, and Grey’s Anatomy. Recently, I realized that my tv receives the Sci-fi channel (surprise!), so add to that bad random B-grade science fiction.

Shuffling through iTunes obsessively: Ingrid Michaelson, Julieta Venegas, Emmylou Harris, Chicane, Once, Michael Franti, Matisyahu, India.Arie, Iron & Wine, Yo La Tengo, and my two staples—Over the Rhine and Loreena McKennitt.