INVISIBLE LIVELINESS

There isn’t much physical movement in my English classes -- mostly shifting in seats and maybe moving books and pages around -- but there’s a great amount of invisible mental movement. I often find myself imagining the inner movements of my students’ minds as they study the lines of a poem or a passage from a short story. I sometimes envision small earthquakes among their thoughts as they search some puzzling words, or perhaps, as they listen to their classmates’ words about The Tempest, their minds are shifting more like the silent motions of breezes on still days on the sea. It’s the unseen actions during class that I’m interested in -- the secret beginnings of new ideas inside the students that set all kinds of movements going and give small, new directions to their lives. We mostly sit in my class, but there’s constant, unseen busyness and liveliness among all of us as our thoughts shift and transform and find new ways to shape us.