Sending all of the love to you (#solTuesday)

When someone in your community is hurting, you hold them up. It’s what community does.

Here’s a little snapshot into our classroom yesterday as we came together to hold up a treasured colleague who was receiving her first radiation treatment…

(Background information: Every student and teacher had previously decorated a small wooden heart with words and pictures of love. These hearts were strung together and assembled to hang in columns from ribbon. Our colleague, who has taught kindergarten for over 40 years, hasn’t been at school for a month, and we are all deeply feeling her absence.)

---

Dear Annie,

At 10:30 this morning, all first and second graders were gathered around our smartboard, loving on the picture of you all snuggled up at home and surrounded by our charged wooden hearts. Exclamations of “It’s Annie!” were popping from one sweet voice to the next (“I see my heart!” was the next common exclamation… of course…). 

We all closed our eyes and took a few deep breaths. We pictured you in our minds. We held our hands at our bellies and imagined the feeling that you get when you know that you’re loved. We captured that weighty and powerful feeling, nestled it in our hands, and rolled it around a few times to really explore it from all sides. We then brought that ball of love up to our hearts, where we nurtured and grew it, layer by layer. We matched the pulsing of our heartbeats to the pulsing of this love, and then we brought it all up to our throats. We envisioned this love as clearly as we could, we cradled it in our hands, we prepared our breath to launch it, we loaded up with every sweet smile we could muster, we counted 1…2…3…, and…

*POOF!*

With arms outstretched, we sent all of our love to you. 

We love you, Annie.

---