Leaving March

This morning I woke from a dream in which I was teaching a writing class. I had just finished telling my students the story about the magic box. Next, I told them, I need to tell you a story about something else. I began by trying to create an anagram: Learning Is Fundamentally--fundamentally what, I ask them, and remember you're trying to spell the word "life." Someone raises her hand: evil? she says, perfectly serious. The whole class considers that for a moment before we all conclude that no, "evil" isn't the correct word for this lesson. Try this, I tell them: responsibility. That makes us all "lifers." And that, I tell them, brings me to another story. I relate the conversation I had with a friend a few nights before, a friend who seemed angry with me over her perception that I might use her problems as a basis for writing of my own. She was...prophylactically angry, I suppose, as she was on the offensive long before I would have had time to hang up the phone and pick up my pen. This was not the first time she and I had had that conversation. So, I tell my students, that is another thing you have to think about when you think about your writing, what you're going to be responsible to...

That is the point in the dream at which I woke up, and I thought about it most of the morning, rather sorry to have ended class at all. Even though I don't teach very often I know its big secret: you always learn more from your students than you can ever hope to impart to them. So to that room full of my ghost students from last night: thank you. Please come back to class again soon; there is so much more I have to learn from you all.

But this--and I am very lucky here, I know--is how March walks out beside me like a lion, only this one has nothing at all to do with the weather. There is a lion pictured on the Strength card of every tarot deck I own. Its meaning is not, Beware A Late Snowstorm, but Lust For Your Own Creativity. That weather blowing through my own world this morning is welcome like, well, welcome like the rain.