handwritten on March 5, 2020
Thursday was a beautiful day for many reasons. I think, as always, I realized the importance of having healing conversations with those I tutor and my flute students. We talked, we laughed, we discussed worries and transformations. And in the evening until 8:14 I was feeling pretty good until I noticed the driver of the van who takes our students back to the church talking pretty frantically underneath a blanket of helicopters flying across the sky outside.
When it was time to clean up, the students were all ordered to stay inside and the words "shooting" and "close by" were all too close to home. And I looked at a mom who had to be about my age with four children and a small baby,...
handwritten on March 4, 2020
3 miles: It doesn't matter when your dedicated "pick me up" day is, but it must be there. Every indiviual need a dedicated day of rest, something different than the norm, something relaxing, something that requires you to put your feet up and curl under a blanket and read a book for once that does not pertain to your career. Something that allows your mind to drift without feeling down or guilty or full of melancholy because you are indeed taking a break. So when you come to that fork in the road on the day where your break is designated wondering if you should take one...remind yourself that
1. Sometimes too much of one thing is never good
2. Laziness is not birthed from merely one day of...
handwritten on March 3, 2020
Through the creation of TEDx, I have quite literally learned that if every child gathered around a colorful carpet with cookies or brownies and created something that was their very own message to the world (and we did this consistently), as tiny humans, we would see a lot more healed hearts and steady souls.
There is so much rush and so little time for talking. I actually just recently came upon a TED Talk I found particularly important about the teaching career as a whole. And what the speaker mentioned was the fact that the magic of teaching is in storytelling. And ironically, storytelling is the exact thing we constantly tell our students they "cannot do" because we are moving from one...
handwritten on March 2, 2020
3 miles:
This fine Monday was certainly more dismal than usual. In fact, I could tell when the students came in that their faces were weary, they were tired and something just seemed a bit off. As my hunches usually tell me, I shortly received a note from one of my stuents about losing his/her cat and then seconds later one of my students reported the death of her fish. This student had also just lost someone close to her a few weeks back and she looked at me and said, "Mrs. Amoscato. All around this has been a pretty rough month. I feel like everyday I lose something else."
And so in the midst of reading a Dr. Seuss book about "pets," we just stopped to tell all of our pet stories near...
handwritten on March 1, 2020
I think this past week was entitled Time Away from Words. I took a little word vacation as well as a reflection vacation, and I have to say- it was quite refreshing. I think sometimes we just need a little vacation away from words. I found myself reflecting less, listening more and just trying to quiet my brain when I realized I was simply too exhausted for words to be written on paper.
It was a beautiful week as always filled with laughter and friends and family dinner, a viewing, a critical heart surgery. This week was almost a small snapshot of every possible mystery and tragedy and worry and joy and fear and community-type feeling one can experience in this game we call life. A...
