I look out my kitchen window. Mist settles itself among the bare trees. I check the hunting stand: empty. That's good. No strangers too close to my house, firing their guns. I know they're after that four-point buck who has wandered through here as the weather has changed, but I'm hoping he'll live to add many points to his rack. 

 Sun's up, uh huh, looks okay
The world survives into another day
And I'm thinking about eternity (Bruce Cockburn)

It's the end of the semester. I feel depleted. Panicked, almost. My words sit behind the wall of multiple obligations. Grading. Meeting with students. Reports to write. The gearing up for the upcoming several days, which will see me work with no days off until I get the papers in. 

First-world problems. I have a job. No bitching. 

But I miss waking up with the sense that I have something to say. 

For one thing, as I have written before, the CWFA has once again published an article claiming that environmentalism is a false religion--one that hates humanity and turns people away from God.

Such stupidity makes me crazy. But today, I can't muster the righteous rage to write a good rant. I just want to let it go. 

I have students to take care of. Final paper time is hard. Some of them are confronting issues in their lives that they've never written about. Some don't give a shit about anything, and I have to deal with all of them. 

It's a balance. Teaching writing. Writing. In some ways, I'm fortunate beyond measure that I'm teaching others to do the thing that I love. On the days when I watch a student's passion in full fire, I groove on that for hours. On other days, when I stare into eyes that tell me, "Please. Just make this hour be over now so I can get out of here and go hang out with my friends," I try not to let it drain me. 

I want to write. 

But I have to teach in a few hours. I know what we need to do today, and for the past 36 hours, I've been thinking about how I'm going to get them from "not knowing" to "knowing." 

Some days, teaching is a calling. 

Other days, it's a robo-call. 

I miss my writing. 

I return to the kitchen window. The rain is so fine that if you didn't peer into it, really see it, you'd think that it's just part of the greyness that stands between me and the woods. 

I wonder when I'll be awake enough to be able to see again. Because I know when that acuity of vision returns, so, too, will the writing.