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Journey into New Normal - Day 64

May 24, 2020

Today’s idea – We have one more week in the 2019-2020 academic year.  Tomorrow is a holiday, then three days of classes, a remote school field day and graduation. The field day is a long-standing tradition going back decades, a friendly competition between the two houses of Imps and Tigers.  We are all sorted, each as we arrive, everyone a life long member of their house. 

This time next week, graduation ceremony will be set up on the nest of lawn at the campus’s center – a small affair (one of the blessings right now of a small school) of seven graduates.  As we are in Iowa, masks are recommended but not required. 

So many of us have arrived at this present moment by living large.  To pull things in is a challenge, one that feels too granular and one that presents the most viable path forward. The day after graduation, we get organized for the summer, the shape of which is still a mystery to most of us.  Our new normal demands that we look at the small immediate matters before us and watch for the openings to do something bigger, like return home for the summer.

In a school year, summer has grown in tradition for being a restorative period.  If students cannot go home, there is little chance for the restoration that only family and home can bring. But something larger emerges.  Essentially, they have become environmental refugees, the ones we read and talked about as we discussed the social consequences of climate change. That was from the comfort of our American bourgeoisie lives. We expected them to wash up on our shores like boat people and be something with whom others must deal.  Now the refugees are at our doorsteps, and they are us – stranded imps and tigers.


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