In the Oven

A cloud cover of remote silver scales, heavy with the impending heat of the day; already there's a dusky shadow in the air. A couple of fat raindrops struck my face as I rode my bike here, but that's all we'll get, I think. It will be another day in the sky's oven. It is not so much that I mind the heat, as that I mind seeing Oregon gasping this way. East Texas is supposed to be like this, not the Willamette Valley.

Dress rehearsal for clinic last night. Next week I'll have my first-ever paying clients. Last year at this time I was still working, or rather not working, in my cubicle in Beaverton. That seems a very very long time ago. Although it also seems like I just started massage school -- that I can't possibly be in my last quarter.

My last class, besides Clinic, is "Survey of Modalities" ("modalities" being the odd and highfalutin, though standard, name for different kinds of massage; I guess "Survey of Sorts" struck someone as falling short of the high dignity of our calling.) It has no prerequisites, so there are some beginning students in it, people who aren't used to whipping the sheets on and off a table and matter-of-factly shedding clothes, and who are still stumbling over "coracoid process," confusing it with "coronoid process," or even coming up with the enchanting "congoloid process," which really ought to be the name of something. I'm so used to feeling like a raw beginner in this that to feel like an old hand is somehow unpleasant -- distancing. I have loved this so deeply, being a student again. A student is what I am, always have been, always will be; I love learning new things. I'm so grateful to have had this chance to be what I am again, for a lovely luminous year.