In the pastures

Image from a recent workshop day. A really fun day. I have such intense and fun days these days. A little too much of the fun stuff. To quote Bilbo: I'm starting to feel like way too little butter on too much bread. 
And today I was a Substitute teacher. The sixthgraders had locked out one of the other substitutes and made her cry. Apparently I'm not as much of a rookie anymore, because I always carry my keys with me to avoid these very situations. This job is good for me, but it also makes me even more cynical, and it's not like I needed more of that stuff.

I always long for ~my~ folk high school nowadays, when I'm not there, and especially when i have a hard time as a substitute. 
This folk high school is where I'm doing my teaching practice. It's for women and transgender people only, and there's so much softness. Rooms that smell good and vibrate with engaged conversations. It was pot luck lunch yesterday, soups, breads, homemade spreads. And one class had picked rose hips and boiled them for days into a dark red, vanilla-scented soup. I am emailed dissertations that teachers think would interest me. The women in the Swedish for immigrants-course nervously go on stage and read poems they wrote about their homelands. People are crying. I get book recommendations. People are there because they want to. Nobody is forcing them. I'm like a little in love and in a newly saved kind of state, it will probably calm down soon. But right now I'm just so happy and emotional to have found this place where everyone is so vulnerable but at the same time steady and firm.