unmoored.

It’s not that I’ve grown tired of teaching.

I’ve been teaching for 17 years. I still enjoy it—where I am, what I do.

But something shifted.

Trauma arrived in rupture. It scattered what I had taken for granted like pages caught in the wind. What I thought was a coherent story, with a beginning, middle, and end, unraveled. Hissing and snapping, the pages lifted, skittered, and were gone. In the silence that followed, I no longer recognized myself.

I drifted as well.

The pain of the break was sharp, but the greater wound was disorientation.

The dark sea stretched. The night sky mirrored it, the two dissolving into each other. I was suspended in the center between flecks of white. I strained for some sign of a soft horizon, some sense of direction, but was left with only a suffocating vacuum of potential.

So I stopped. Still and silent, I let the noise fade into the steady breath of black-and-white static. The world had lost its signal. The present settled like snow to reveal the world’s anatomy. Of what was Real, not merely real to me.

Familiarity had lulled me to sleep. Normalcy became reality. I needed to reclaim the shape of myself outside of habit, outside of role, outside of what was familiar. Outside of posing.

I wasn’t at peace. I was simply preserved in a suburban diorama.

Safe.

Thoreau once wrote that the real frontier exists wherever a person faces a fact, that there is wilderness not only in the world, but between the self and the truth it resists.

Somewhere in the sterile lines of the curriculum, the canon turned its eyes toward me. What had once felt distant and idealized became personal. There were facts I had not fronted. Wounds I had not named. Assumptions mistaken for truth.

Admitting delusion is a lethal wound. I’d need to resurrect.

But where?

Montana.

Idaho.

Madeira.

Pennsylvania.

Wherever I happen to be, but always in the context of nature.

Society molds. So does Nature. But Nature does not flatter. It does not congratulate. It does not lie.

It is quiet. And its silence is inquiry.

I may leave the classroom. But I will enter another.

The wind speaks in the grammar of erosion, and I am learning to let go.