The first week of classes is over and I feel like I barely made it through. Teaching is exhausting, y’all.

In one of my classes at Naropa we spent almost an entire class talking about the concept of wabi-sabi. The class is a course on contemporary performance practices, but I felt like I wanted to kick off the semester by offering an ancient view of aesthetics that can inform and challenge the Western view of what constitutes “beauty” and “perfection.” Essentially, wabi-sabi accepts and even celebrates the fact that nothing is permanent, nothing is perfect, nothing is complete. Ain’t that the truth.

Just before I went in to teach that class I got an email from my father, telling me that he was having the last two, tall pine trees in the backyard cut down today. He said: “One of them has died–undoubtedly, a result of the drought last summer–and the other one looks pretty bad, too. So, I’m getting rid of both. It will make mowing the yard (with my new riding mower) a lot easier, but I’ll miss the shade they provide during the summer’s heat.” I can’t imagine the backyard I grew up in without these trees. I didn’t even get to say goodbye. I asked him to take a picture before they cut them down. He said he’d try.

I remember as a kid being fascinated by the bark on those pine trees, because it was so different than the bark on the other trees. I also remember our labrador retriever, Bitsy, literally trying to climb one of them to get at a squirrel that was taunting her. She would trot way back and then make a running charge at the tree. I think she really believed that if she got going fast enough, she could just keep on running right up the tree as if it were still the earth. She got pretty high up there, too – higher than you might think. She didn’t catch the squirrel. I also spent what I consider an unreasonable amount of time raking pine needles from those trees. My father refused to mow over them because he claimed that they would poison the grass with their acidic juices or some shit. It felt more like an excuse to make my brother and I miserable for an entire day.

In addition to being the last day of the first week of the semester, today was also the last day of work for two of my colleagues in the Kerouac School, who were recently laid off: Lisa and Julie. Lisa has been working in her position for 12 years, and Julie for 5. Both of them brought so much joy, innovation, creativity, and chutzpah to their jobs and I know I’m not alone when I say that they will be sorely, sorely missed. We celebrated their accomplishments at Naropa and toasted to their future: they’ll both be fine, more than fine. They were ready to go and both look forward to having a bit more time to dedicate to their creative work. So it was sad, but not sad.

Tomorrow, we will all wake up and it will be September for the first time this year.

It will be weird to wake up in a new month. It will be weird to go home and not have the pine trees as part of the landscape anymore. It will be weird to go to Naropa and not have Lisa and Julie just next door. But nothing is permanent, nothing is perfect, nothing is complete.