Schooldays By The Ocean
We were with the waves yesterday afternoon. The Labour Day sun blazed down on a beach both packed and raucous. People shouted over children shrieking with delight and the dogs bumped and jostled one another in mid air as the spray tumbled down all around them. I’ll never be able to take such scenes for granted again. Too many days spent walking on solemnly silent stretches of sand have seen to that.
For one reason or another I hadn’t made it to dog beach since before our trip to France last month and it was starting to tell. The ocean holds the keys to the kingdom here in Southern California. Only the simplest of activities need be performed when one is beside it; too much of nothing is nothing except an impossibility. We stayed standing in the echoing water with time unmeasured. The tireless ocean moved backwards and forwards, washing away the self important strain of the past few weeks.
The beginning of September unfailingly signifies the beginning of school to my resolutely English family. We’ve never had the inclination to accustom ourselves to the Californian predilection for opening schools in mid August. Today, September 7th, saw the Manjushri School welcome in the new school year. Just like that, the streams of academe and learning flow freely once more. Patterns set last year are now as familiar and comfortable to my daughter as an old friend. For my part, I moved through the day with a deepening sense of joy as the peace and nourishing restfulness brought forth by deep and shared concentration breathed all around us.
An incorrigible romantic, half of myself wanders, dreaming and lost, somewhere in time past. I never could feel quite whole in all the years I spent teaching under the bright lights of the modern classroom. The scene has changed: I educate my daughter in the subjects I can, and curate her experience in the garnering of accomplishments where greater talents can be brought to bear. She will walk with the spirits of those who enjoyed gentler times where refinement and an exquisite sense of grace and place were qualities to be honed and cherished. We will keep the brutish miasma of modernity from the hearts and minds of our children for as long as it is in our power to do so, as if their lives depended upon our efforts. After all, in every sense that means anything at all, they do.
