Listening

There is a campfire off in the distance, its faint stream of smoke sliding from its mountainous ridge skyward, across a long, bright swathe of glorious, almost fluorescent blue before melding with a solitary cloud threatening the briefest spurts of rain. The two grays intermingle, the cloud and the vertical slit in the sky, it being impossible to tell if they’ve joined into one, if the impending moisture hovering thousands of feet overhead has fully absorbed the campfire’s message, or if the two now sit and speak.

Does smoke talk with the clouds? Or do the two exist ignorant of one another’s existence? They possibly turn their backs on one another, keeping alive a family grudge of Shakespearean proportions. I sit back and watch the last wisps disappear, and I lean forward to listen, carefully, and forever, for an answer.

Wake up, America

After reading this, it reminds me how much I wish we would go after alcohol companies like we went after the tobacco companies.

Why is it the drunk driver never dies?

To 2007 and 2008

Top 10 lessons I’ve learned this year:

1) If I let them, my students teach me more than I’ll ever teach them.

2) I’m happiest talking about big concepts, as opposed to people or rules.

3) The 80-20 rule is so very, very true. We should teach this to every student and child, then trust them enough to choose their own 20.

4) If you care more than others think prudent, you’ll be asked “Why the heck do you do that?” quite often.

5) Sometimes you’ve got to call a spade a spade, even if it’s not politically correct but morally and ethically right. Even if it's a fight you'll lose, or appear the fool.

6) I’m still not sure exactly how to teach English.

7) No matter how much you want something, if you don’t have your health, it’s impossible. Here’s to more physical education in schools.

8) Schools are doomed to fail if we want exceptional students, but fail to hold each of them to incredibly high yet fair standards.

9) I've learned more from listening than talking.

10) I'm happiest when I'm loving wildly. The wildest is, indeed, the most alive.

11) Give people more than they expect, and they’ll appreciate the extra effort (well, most people, anyway).

Thanks to all my teachers out there. (And if I've interacted with you at all, you've taught me something.)

Antithesis

I've always been warmed somehow by snow, as though something eternal is being liberally sprinkled upon and shared with our world. I fully realize the contradiction, however, of penning the words "warm" and "eternal" to describe snow, an object decidedly neither warm nor eternal.

But it is warm in my eyes, for a multitude of reasons. Clear driveway, a sidewalk, or even a reasonable-sized patio, and you'll rapidly understand how frozen white crystals can set rivulets of sweat rolling over you brow and down your back.

When you're done, lean on your shovel, take in the cleared land, and enjoy the eminating warmth that comes from the combination of physical work and physical labor completed to one's satisfaction. Who can deny that serenity, deny that you've never leaned upon a shovel, the handle under your elbow, or maybe between your clasped hands before you, and let out a sigh of ease, maybe even smiled as you did so, as one cool flake after another lands on your cheeks, only to melt and satisfy at once?

These are the obvious, though.

Warmer yet comes a mile or four into a snowshoe, breaking fresh powder with each step. Maybe the day is dull and heavy with leaden gray ladeled liberally over the landscape. Maybe, though, the gray has been erased by the yellow heat pouring across the seat of white reflecting back not the rays en masse, but instead in innumerable pinpoints of jewel-like reflections.

Regardless of which is the case, a shining sun or a heavy and thick sky, you stop. At first, there is silence. Not a hint of noise. You imagine you can hear the slowed, smooth, heavy breathing of some black bear curled upon itself in its underground vault, but no matter how hard you strain, no matter how intensely you plead with your heart to stop and your breath to cease so neither no longer interferes with your attempts to truly here, there is nothing.

At first.

But then it comes, the first of many. A click on your shoulder, followed by a second and then a third. The where you are, from where these clicks precisely originate, is irrelevant. It's about the what, not the where. And these sounds, the steady, delicate beat of the miraculous against your body and all the world's body continues. You sit in the snow, rustling and shifting, grinding your behind into the snow, creating a curve for your back, an elevated incline for your legs, a support for your neck and head.

Hurry, you think, although there is no need. The music will continue as if awaiting your ear.

Seated, you close your eyes - in fact, if you look skyward you have no choice as the sky falls not only upon you piece by delicate piece, but also into your eyes - and allow the slow, steady, beautiful music of the world to meet with you, and within you, as if the sky has been shattered into billions of tiny stars, all falling around you, upon you, and in your solitude as if all of time, every war and battle and vow exchanged and passioned bodies intertwined were meant to allow you to be here, now, in this moment at this very place. For this is life, simplified and in heartfelt contact with all that is real and forever. This is no moment of dust in the wind, but instead miraculous music.

Cold? No. In fact, on this day it's warmer than any sun or the so-called kind hearts of most any company I've ever kept.

Cold? Think again.

A day of reflection, observation, and cautionary tales at the MFA

Horrible stuff here, but I get it, even if no one else will.


Like a lengthy cloth that warms one at night, both holding the cold at bay and embracing the body’s warmth despite the impending darkness, yet does this and more despite the fact it is but a single thread woven with itself and intertwined upon itself time and time again, so also is there a thread in the paintings I am drawn to today. Amidst the onslaught of glory and expression and beauty, of the myriad of choices offered me, I find myself before Monet’s “Rouen Cathedral Façade an Tour d’Albane (Morning Affect)”, painted in 1894.

What brings me here?

Maybe it’s the front of the cathedral, lost in the purple-and-gray hue of dawn, both warm and cold in its shadowy, glowing glory. It stands solid, cold and still, immoveable amidst a world built of and upon change and progression and adaptation. It is solid, yes, but the images themselves appear shimmering, the outlines of solid granite and stone anything but precise. But are they not as we are? Are we, in the end, any more solid than a dream, a wish, or a candle’s final wisp of smoke that twists into the air and disappears for all eternity?

So, despite its solidity we know, its unsure and unsteady edges, the light that is dark moment and enlightening the next, reminds us that it too will change. When, we cannot know for sure, but change is that which we can rely upon.

Only in the cathedral’s forefront is there a hint of the future unseen, in the deep nooks and recesses Monet left uncharacteristically gray, does he pose the possibility of something sinister or unwelcome awaiting us as well as the dawn’s impending illuminating rays. Or maybe there is nothing there at all. And after all, what else is there in our own moments to come, recesses of darkness and the unknown? Surely nothing as solid as stone, but instead as ethereal as a fear or a dream or vacuum. Time is but the world we anticipate, but never the world in which we live.
The darkness of Monet is sunlight to other artists, and even from this faux attempt at a drab world, a sinister view, albeit cloudy and opaque, Monet strays.

Our attention is drawn from the front of the cathedral to a tower behind it, as nearly formless as the front, but instead of topping off on the canvas, this parapet stretches above the figure in the forefront but also even off the canvas, its angles and lines giving no hint of an end.

Then more contrast. This pillar is bathed in the breathtaking swath of pink and orange of the sun’s first emergence, sending out its dawning rays, the colors all the more striking when placed in direct contrast to – behind yet above – the darkness of night that lingers in certain corners and back ways in the first object. It is in the immediacy of both illumination and shadow that one is forced to consider the darkness and light that fill our lives; in fact, when one is not ceding to the other, light retreating at night or gray retreating at dawn, only then do we appreciate what it is to be alive, and in the quest to bring more light, to overcome what darkness we can, why we rise each morning. Only then, with this realization, does this art live more in my heart and mind than my eye.

Monet has today reminded me that all changes. That which is dark can be light, that which is glorious can kill. There is no single one, but instead all is, indeed, one. We are, after all, made up more of our pasts than ourselves.

I later find myself moving from the wall of Monets and Van Goghs to another room, this room filled not with impressions and abstractness but instead realism and solidity. But that which I find myself before is no more comforting: Francesco del Cairo’s “Heridias with the Head of Saint John the Baptist”, from 1625-30.

There is nothing subtle nor hinted at in this image before me. Heridias sits alone – or nearly so – in a darkened room, her pale-white face in a sea of black staring skyward in an ecstasy beyond a smile or even a grin. This is ecstasy that gives birth to a moan, a groan from the depths of a soul.
A fitting place for the origin of this ecstasy, as near her lap is the decapitated head of St. John the Baptist. Her left hand hovers inches above the forehead, her left hand grasping the holy man’s tongue in her hands, silencing one who needs no silencing.

We gasp at the darkness of the painting, and of Heridias’ act. We assume we are so different from her.

Are we? In degrees only. Not in totality.

Do we enjoy silencing a critic, achieving victory over a foe? Do we silently mourn the loss of a soldier while rejoicing the death of a Taliban leader? We shudder at the image of Daniel Pearl’s decapitation, but pass over without so much as a shrug the news of an errant bomb leveling a home, obliterating the mother and nursing child in the process.

Are we different, so very different, from Heridias?

Again, I am drawn to contrast, not that between me and the horror on the canvas, but instead a contrast much more stark. In the end, maybe Monet is right, we’re all subtle shades from the same palette, and none of us save the few – Hitler or Mother Theresa among them – have the right to blacks or whites. The rest of us, we’re nothing more than a palette of pinks and grays, a mixture depending in the time, the way the dawn’s first rays strike us or not, and that which we hold in our lap.

A bit of James Dean (but with a cause)

They read water bottles. They stare skyward. They doodle in the top corner of their page, as if the hand movement itself – despite the lack of progress across the page – and the placing ink upon white page will fool me into thinking they’re actually putting words, their thoughts and meaning to the page. They do anything but write.
Then I remember, more clearly than the blue sky we no longer see in Gorham, what I wanted in my high school years. I didn’t necessarily want freedom, the ability to do what I wanted, when I wanted, and how. But neither did I want constraints, telling me what to do, when and how.
I wanted rebellion. The ability to spread one’s wings comes only when there’s air to spread them within, something to flap those newly formed wings against, feeling the pressure beneath them. For one cannot fly without flapping against. Flapping in a vacuum is futility. Without that rebellion, needed for the sake of rebelling and absolutely nothing else. There would have been no growth, no finding who I am – or was, as I hope I’m not the same person now I was then – had I not heeded that instinct within to fight. The rebellion was not always to get what I wanted; it was, however, always, each and every time, me learning to be me. And me learning.
When I look at students who fight and kick and scream at each of my suggestions, I realize they would fight and kick and scream if I suggested nothing in particular, much like today. They want to fight, rebel, to force their slowly molting and growing wings against whatever force exerts itself against them. Without air, there is no flight. Without opposition, no self realization.
It’s a difficult process, growing up, a process far too many view as a story with an end rather than for the process it is, like breathing; when the process ends, so do you. So when students chat and giggle, laugh and play, put their heads down either individually or collectively, or even rebel in a less mature way by whining and complaining and kicking, I smile inside, even if outside I seem a bit perturbed. I know what they’re doing, spreading their wings, and seeing how far and in what direction all their squawking and flapping will take them.
So when I say don’t whine, I don’t really mean it. I hope that in the process of your complaining, you learn how to rebel, that you eventually move from baseless and incompetent whining to fact-based and result-laden argument, dissent and discussion. And that’s the key. Rebel for the rest of your life. Never sit still; never accept the status quo, because it can always be better. What we take as acceptable should be death, and not a single other thing; after all, even if we fight with vitamins and doctors and promises of anti-aging medicines, we’ll die. Death, yes, but what else, what single other thing, is as real or guaranteed?
I laugh at teachers who kick and scream when their students kick and scream. Do we as educators truly, from the bottom of our hearts, want a silent mass of teens that follow our every instruction? Do we dread their naïve or insubordinate questions so much because we don’t approve of their doubting us, or because more often than not their questions are dead on? Were we ever a teen who stared at the aging teacher before us and wondered if they remembered, at all, what it was to be a student who wanted only to find themselves, and in order to do that they had to absorb all that was around them, all the while kicking and screaming when they were pushed from the nest to see if they’d learned their lesson well enough.
So here’s to discontent, to questions, and to rebellion. Here’s a raised glass of hot chocolate in my Nanowrimo mug to those of you who fight back today, and through the course of that opposition learn how to do so a little better for the next fight. The first few flaps of wings are the most difficult, in their awkwardness, in effectiveness and immaturity. The first flight is always the least direct, least impressive, and least effective. But with enough flights, enough fights, enough testing of those wings, you begin to find your way and then the world is your own, taking you to wherever it is you hope to go. But only if you’ve learned the joy of flight. So fight on.

Hmmmm. . .

Think I’ll use this in my novel, after I polish it a bit.

“Hello,” the old man sighed, his eyes heavy with joy, as though he had carried a pleasure much too long.
“There was a time when the world understood,” he went on, speaking in the manner of one who knows the imperfection of words, and their ultimate failure regardless of the care with which they have been selected and ordered. He spoke slowly, smoothly, in the measured, pleasing cadence of someone who knew, and who held within in his
hands all the time that had ever existed.
“But we no longer think, so we no longer understand. How can a world of brief thoughts, of superficial dalliances and outward depth but inner frivolity, ever know? We’ve lost the strength to be weak, the patience to search, and the willingness to admit our errors. Without any of these, we cannot move forward from our failures.”
His cape rustled as a breeze slipped through the woods, a wind that seemed to work with the man to expose the drawstring purse about his waist. Hands of tenderness found only on artists and lovers deftly untied the string, holding the purse to his cracked leather belt without opening it.
I wanted to tell the man I understood. There was no room for disagreement, never mind argument. How could one argue that our world had depth, when movie stars and tellers of lustful or deathly tales were held on high, while our philosophers and teachers were ridiculed and shunned?
I wanted to tell the man I understood. How many among us sit amongst the stars, looking for answers to truth, nature and love, knowing that even when eternity ends, the old man would still need to shed millions of his collected moments to grant us more time to seek an answer that did not – and would not ever – exist. But the rare few understood it was the pursuit that lifted us. I wanted to smile, but could not. I wanted to speak, but did not. So I sat and waited, both with patience and paternity for my own life and all it held in its future.