3.2 miles today 

I had this beyond brilliant English Professor at the University of Pittsburgh. She was life-changing. Life-changing because she actually taught my mind to enter into three thousand new spaces that I would never have been able to reach on my own. It's hard to explain just what my mind does when analyzing literature, but I go into a deep hole of words and wonders and nuances, and you twist and turn and tilt and literally find the life inside every word and how it relates to every other words and you morph and you melt and the words drip until you come out on the other side-with new life and a completely new meaning. 

I remember when I first look at Langston Hughes poem: The Negro Speaks of Rivers. I have never been to such a deep place inside words before. And I came out on the other side with an essay that sometimes when I read..I actually cannot tell you where I went..or how. Some mentors are just like that. They create this magic that you quite literally never saw possible until you begin to play with this magic yourself. Anyways...I digress. She is and always will be one of my heroes. And I think she knows the profound impact she had on my life. And as I continue to have my own third graders play and melt and morph with words through poetry and fiction..I always think about this lived experience. And how I am so much better of a person and a teacher..because of the experience she gave to me. 

Good ideas, as I have learned and continue to learn, never happen overnight. And it is just like an analytical essay in that you tilt on word or look through another and all of a sudden you have a new vision with a new meaning inside a completely different light of possibilities. It's exhausting. But you have to admit that the arrival of something completely different with each new thought is just..

Well there simply isn't anything else that actually replaces it.