As she grows away from me, may these life lines grow with her, keep her safe…
I title this blog with a quote from David Whyte’s poem, My Daughter Asleep… and I shall end with the complete poem.
Yesterday our daughter, Izze, graduated 8th grade and officially became a high school student. This is a right of passage for kids and adults alike. Who would have thought that it would have gone so fast? But go fast it did, and another milestone has been passed.
Izze heads for her seat in the High School Auditorium.
Foto by Jorma Kaukonen
We certainly got to know a great group of kids and parents over these last two years. After four years of home schooling, there was lots of adjustment for us all to make… and it was all good!
Izze spots us in the stands!
Foto by Jorma Kaukonen
Penny Purdy, Izze’s music teacher, read the names and Mr. Roach, the Vice Principal handed out the diplomas.
Two years well spent!
Foto by Jorma Kaukonen
We’re sure proud of this kid… but she did the work (with an occasional nudge from Mom).
Diploma in hand, she heads for her seat
Foto by Jorma Kaukonen
Nessa and a bunch of the other parents were committed to ‘chaperone’ the dance and after party so I hung around too. What else was I going to do?
Foto bombed in the cafeteria
Selfie by Vanessa Kaukonen
There were, and still are, so many feelings and emotions running around my brain I almost don’t know where to begin, but it is plain that life is evolving for my children as it did for me and that is how it must be!
This... is the dang deal!
Foto by Jorma Kaukonen
And so, another chapter has closed and a new one is waiting to be followed. I am going to post David Whyte’s beautiful poem yet one more time… and while our daughter, Izze, is a long way from sleeping on my shoulder as an infant, I suspect I will always feel this way.
My Daughter Asleep
Carrying a child,
I carry a bundle of sleeping
future appearances.
I carry my daughter
adrift on my shoulder,
dreaming her slender dreams
and I carry her beneath the window,
watching her moon lit palm open and close
like a tiny folded map,
each line a path that leads where I can’t go,
so that I read her palm not knowing what I read
and
walk with her in moon light on the landing,
not knowing with whom I walk,
making invisible prayers to go on with her where
I can’t go,
conversing with so many unknowns that must know her more
intimately than I do.
And so to these unspoken shadows and this broad night
I make a quiet request to the great parental darkness
to hold her when I cannot, to comfort her when I am gone,
to help her learn to love the unknown for itself,
to take it gladly like a lantern for the way before her,
to help her see where ordinary light will not help her,
where happiness has fled, where faith will not reach.
My prayer tonight for the great and hidden symmetries of life
to reward this faith I have and twin her passages of loneliness with friendship,
her exiles with home coming, her first awkward steps with promised onward leaps.
May she find in all this, day or night, the beautiful centrality of pure opposites,
may she discover before she grows old, not to choose so easily between past and present,
may she find in one or the other her gifts acknowledged.
And so as I helped to name her, I help to name these powers,
I bring to life what is needed, I invoke the help she’ll want
following those moonlit lines into a future uncradled by me but parented by all I call.
As she grows away from me, may these life lines grow with her, keep her safe,
so
with my open palm whose lines have run before her to make a safer way,
I hold her smooth cheek and bless her this night into all these other unknown
nights to come.
-David Whyte
…and all these other unknown nights to come!
