The year will wrap up in 2 weeks. It's the time when a lot of thinking about failures, mistakes, what was missing, what was not, creeps up silently and just sits there with me. I think it has to do with saying goodbye to the children who leave us this year. After doing this enough times, I know that after that Moving On Ceremony things change (we change, but mostly they change) and they go on and move forward with such momentum (which is good and necessary, they are so new and forward is the only way). So there's a part of that surely, even though they are ready and they have to go, it's still emotional and a reminder of impermanence. Is there always a heaviness in this season? It is surely also compounded by so much work to do to wrap things up neatly and well, reports to write, paperwork for new schools, preparations for the Ceremony. So it's heavy. I notice on this written history of our school that I don't write in May or June very often. My personal observations get thin in my record keeping as well during this period. These seem to be parts of the year that are left mostly undocumented, maybe a response to needing more space to just be with things as they close.

So I'm here. Yair says it's always like this at the end of the year for me, full of doubt. Am I good enough to continue? Do I still love this work enough? Why does it feel so heavy? 

Summer beckons, time to make things, to rest and read and swim and be so much a student that the teaching hat takes a break. That seems over a mountain though at this moment. 

The dharma says that when the Buddha was visited by doubt (the last visitor before he became enlightened) he touched the ground and said  (maybe, something along the lines of) "the earth is my witness." I'll take that as advice to stay grounded these days, in the simplicity of the daily work with the children which doesn't really end until it does, in the presence they require which is not one of looking back or forward but of being right there in the moment with them, grounded in the knowing that these are cycles that come and go, that it's heavy now but that that will also change.