I’ve been thinking about popping in here for weeks and everything else has been instead so pressing. I try to fly through as many professional to-do items as possible during work hours so I can devote evenings and weekends to my men; and many evenings find me composing lesson plans and grading assignments for a group of promising high school students who have never written a proper essay. In this setting, blogging seems less and less primary.

Work demands so much of my creative and analytic mind, as well, that I find myself almost completely empty in attempting to fill yet another page and space for any other pursuit. I enjoy it, and feel incredibly fulfilled and challenged, but am not like Christ to multiply so easily my meager store of bread and fishes.

Even so, everything remains at a quiet hum, just the sort of lull when you must begin to expect a coming storm. At least this time we know much of what that storm will entail: a wrinkled, wet baby girl with no sense of time or expansive space.

In the spaces between, I pop for thirty seconds into considering that old question of “the good life,” as my students and I approach the ancient Greeks. There is a sort of virtue and personal development entailed in becoming so much more disciplined with my time and attention, and I am glad of it; yet continue to find myself the same faulty person in new and unspectacular ways. My habit of criticism is extremely useful attached to public policy, not as much used defensively to justify myself or unexamined prejudices.

Such is life—bits of treasure in an old and forgotten stretch of dirt, which one Man buried himself and gave all to ransom.