How to Love a Wolf: Gratitude Files, January 4, 2020
How to Love a Wolf: Gratitude Files
I'm sitting in my kitchen in deserted Granville, Ohio. Food—it smells good—is on the stove and in the oven, cobbled from a fridge and pantry holding on for tomorrow. The students are gone. My friends and colleagues are gone. When I arrived "home" from Italy in the pre-Christmas build up last week, no, two weeks ago, this place was a haven, sunny, golden, and warm; a place to walk slowly to recover my jet-lagged energy, read, and pass the holiday hiking my backyard trails, discovering ponds and quarries previously undiscovered: feeling the sinking gratitude for my lifelong space juju.
A trip to Canada to see family and mark the holiday, albeit late, ensued. I'm now back, having flown on NYE and woken late on New Year's Day to a bad, annoying, now-lingering cold; its nuanced rhino-chaos reminding me of my humanness, the fragility of immunity, the reality of, well, sinuses collided with air travel. I've passed the time with work (thank you virtual co-workers), reading no less than four books at a time, finishing none and setting aside ideals of perfectionistic singularity, watching like-it-was-my-job the complete Season Two of "You" (okay now) and the three jaw-dropping episodes of "Don't Fuck with Cats" (ohhhhh...ohhh). Slowly, steadily, I got fed up with myself and the parts and piles in this giant house I'd left still packed (un-unpacked?); the piles of objects without a place and closets left untended. Blame a week + of salmonella poisoning upon move-in (yep), and being "shot out of a canon" into a semester that was both the canon and the gunpowder.
Now it's now, and I remember suddenly today how much stored gratitude is pushing at the cellar doors of my heart. There's a lot.
Tonight, I'm grateful for this beautiful woman, scholar, artist, thinker, guide, mentor, facilitator, mover, and questioner: Karen Bond. Dr. Bond had my back at every stage of my PhD journey, from interview and fellowship application to coursework (two very, veeeerrrry different years in my life), to the confusing exam years, to the still-more-confusing mostly self-directed writing years. I had the good fortune of teaching during those years, and hearing myself repeat Karen's teachings to me and my classmates (meaning: my students). As I heard myself incorporate her words into my own, I realized repeatedly how much there is to learn, how much I was learning, and how nuanced some learning truly is.
The semester in which I finished was, bar none, the weirdest season in my life; filled with stories I will tell (in dances and words) and those that will decay, ineffable, with my flesh. But I remember, as I comb through that season in this season of reckoning, Karen's steadfast belief that I would, could, and should finish. I trusted her and this was a trust well placed. The learning of my doctoral process will likely not stop while I draw breath; and my sense of pedagogical ethics is forever changed and improved with Karen's influence.
No social media post can capture the gratitude, but thank you, Kare.