On the Other Side

Graduation has come and gone and now the true thinking begins. I believe I’ll sit all the way down for a spell.

Ah, yes!

What’s on your shelf?

My favorite business book is The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People – but I’m lovin’ The 8th Habit right about now.

High-Wire Acts

More than once while doing the final analysis for this PAR project I have encountered others working along the path of ending the oppression who, while doing perhaps the most difficult and necessary work (transforming the oppressors into allies) apologize for so doing. In fact, for oppression to end, at least two things must happen. 1) The oppressed must resist. For what Douglass cautioned in 1857 is still as undeniably true today.

Power concedes nothing without a demand.

And, 2) The oppressor will have to be transformed. What precedes either of these actions or possibilities is nothing if not preparation, consecration and communion. Yet, for any of these to happen, members of each group must awaken. Just how does one awaken a sleepwalker perched on a high and live wire? This is the position in which we find ourselves not only environmentally, but economically in this interdependent global village hurtling through time and space. For starters, we must connect and ground ourselves in a shared reality. Last one to define it is IT!

Savouring Summer

inside, a succulent peach
outside, indescribable heat
across the miles a father remembers
his own childhood, four plaits
no barber for at least three years

Peaches

Taking Learning to the Edge

At the annual Teaching For A Change conference, this year held in Flagstaff, AZ, highlights include Sharon Bowman who did today’s keynote on collaborative learning, Evangeline Parsons-Yazzi who shared stories of growing up Navajo at lunch, and Lee Mun Wah’s afternoon workshop on diversity leadership development for educators. You may remember his name from The Color of Fear, a classic film in and beyond diversity circles. I was inspired to remember the importance and responsibility of story and audience in each of these settings and yet found it easier to do 22 minutes on the treadmill after a full day than to do 10 minutes free writing – the practice of freedom I profess and will present on later in the conference. It’s funny how many bricks and boulders we can throw in our own paths. Funny? Or sad. Some of the things pulling at my attention are questions concerning the ethics of assisted living; what some might consider the moral ambiguity of the ending in Will Smith’s Seven Pounds; the anniversary of our mother’s death; and the pathetic disinterest of certain political figures regarding education in Nevada. Ten minutes didn’t stretch too far, this time.

Showing Up

The joke was on me. Perhaps it was the curtain of supplements stretched before me. Perhaps it was the skillet of sky expected in the next few days after a glorious, unmerited reprieve from the approach of Phoenix summer. Whatever the reason, I had not been prepared for such revelation. We are given a body at birth. This first shock was delivered well past my 30th birthday when my younger sister, laughing herself to tears over yet another all but hilarious circumstance in our lives, blurted out that the bodies we now inhabited were in fact ours, despite the fact that they had been placed in the precarious hands of our parents and there, more or less, rested until we took on a mind to wrest our bodies from them. Apparently, this process is retarded in many among our species, due in no small measure to the obsession with youth and focus on reaching drinking and driving age. And, retarded because liberty to do with it what we will is not synonymous with taking responsibility for its care.

That we are given a body and later, if we’re paying attention, salvation, is but the beginning of the revelation. In between drawing our first breath in this form and exhaling our last, a few untidy things happen; family, [mis]education, intercourse – partnered or public, and aging. This latter however, only occurs if we can beguile the body into playing along for just long enough for us or it to lose interest in the game.

And there’s the rub. We mistake the events of our existence for the facts of our lives. Mistake the existence of the body for its permanence and mistake the regard of others, current or historic, for a serviceable perspective on the entire enterprise. We get so caught up in, focused on and simultaneously conditioned to the experiences of the body that the actual and far more glorious and intriguingly benign reality of life is all but ignored. Mind you, this is not to say that a few gnomes and trolls among us do not escape the conditioning and breathe the truth in our direction as long as they are able despite our indifference or abject hostility. It is merely to suggest that, for the most part, few of us are paying close enough attention. And herein is how I come to what has become, by now, my default position, showing up.

As often as I can I show up; in the body, a room, a conversation, a class, the moment, on a page. I show up with the thinly veiled expectation that if I continue to do so, simply or not so simply, something will happen and I may know it. I may just be present enough to enter and transcend the vehicle of the body and its moment to marshal their several gifts, wield their otherwise unwieldy tools to our advantage. If I continue making this effort, one day I might arrive in the present to experience now in its fullness, as some transparent thing united with the greater I Am That I Am, not focused but aligned with that force that gave us breath and being, hope and despair sufficient to make us chafe against the daily clay with which we find ourselves.
************ The Current Shock:
Said all that in order not to say: Our father survived his first night of assisted living. I can only imagine the effort required to put on a good face about the indignity that passes for this emblem of having made it to the middle class.

Join the Winning Team!

It’s simple really. Who you are makes a difference every day. On your birthday this year and happily ever after, decide to make a global difference by joining One Day’s Wages.

Loose Threads

“I don’t have a tissue so you’ll have to stop crying,” I say to the stranger in front of me as I place my hand on her shoulder. She smiles. Turns to wipe another tear from her cheek, glances shyly up at me and back through the glass where we wait for the bus carrying our loved ones to leave the station.
“Will it be a long time till you see one another again?” I ask.
“Yes”, she came for my husband’s funeral.”
“She’s the last one to leave”, I suggest more than question.
“Yes”.
“Well, don’t try to think ‘what’s next’. It’ll come and find you. Leave it to the Lord”.
She chuckles, spilling fresh tears: “You read my mind”.
I want to say, that’s Jesus, but think silence a better tonic. We’d both watched the other see off someone beloved. She’d lost two grown children in the 48 years she’d shared with her husband.
My husband and I’d only been married six months. Both, for the second time.
“I never had the guts to have children”, I say, “I couldn’t bear the thought of putting them in someone else’s care for kindergarten or college, let alone allow them to drive in this mad world. Do you think it’s obvious? Why else would the driver feel the need to reassure me: I’ll take good care of him he’d said. He’s a grown man…” I natter on and trail off.
“God chose you for this special assignment” I continue when I can remember the thread of her current life that I’d been trying to cauterize if tying off were out of the question. “It’s a tough one. But He’ll see you through. Lost my Mom last year, June 22nd, and yesterday in church, we sang the song I sang for her as she lay dying. It was the first time I didn’t cry…”

Once the bus had reversed, we made our way around the wet floor cones and outside.
“Would you like a hug? I ask.”
“Yes. Yes, I would,” she answers.
I hold onto her longer than she holds onto me hoping to convey that it is all right to need at such and any time.

Pigeon Pride?

How Much Can You Say?

He stood on the island separating traffic at the corner light, gut hanging over sun-bleached red sweat pants. As he stood in profile, I could tell his hair was matted in back, and when he turned, it looked like he’d used a fork to create the Liberty-like crown of an Afro in the front. I’d been deciding where to stop for breakfast on the way home from the bus station when he came into view. He was panhandling traffic moving in the opposite direction. In his left hand, he held two white plastic bags, neither entirely full.

One car slowed to a stop behind me. A couple inside. A man at the wheel. A short woman is barely visible in the passenger seat. I’d have enough time, and they enough notice, if I took the intersection at a crawl when the light changed in our favor.

I wanted to tell him to find some place to volunteer. When I first moved here, I’d volunteered at the hospital and got lunch each day I came in. Now, they wouldn’t give him clothes or a place to shower, and being accepted as a volunteer with a Master’s Degree and a place to sleep sure gave me more than one advantage over this brother, but everyone has something to give and passing the time positively can save more than your life. It might even give him hope, something to look forward to.

Though the light felt longer than usual, and who knows, it might well have been given that it’s Memorial Day, I hadn’t settled on anything to say, encouraging or otherwise, by the time the light went green. I fished out the $2 I’d planned on using for breakfast and held it out as I slowed to a crawl coming abreast of him. He nearly stepped off the island as he reached for it. The people behind me didn’t honk. Didn’t climb into my trunk. Our fingers brushed as the dollars changed hands. I could have held the bills out and away to avoid contact but in these times and throughout history, a single touch can heal. I said no bless you. He stuttered his thanks. In the rear view mirror, I saw him step off toward the south and imagined him stepping into his rightful place as a son of the King. Such is my prayer.

Three pigeons stroll along the crosswalk. Two jaywalk. One flies.
A long-eared, white-haired rabbit hops hurriedly around the corner away from the scene of the crime.
A boy and his rock amble down the road, shirtless, minutes to seven on a holiday Monday.

When I get inside, I nuke a packet of Fresh and Easy’s Apple and Cinnamon oatmeal, grate some fresh nutmeg over it after adding a teaspoon of Challenge butter and couple tablespoons of F&E Peach-Cranberry Granola before testing the 6-month old whipped cream and answer the phone. There are 128 fluid ounces in a US gallon. My sister calls to confirm before filling the rented carpet cleaner. And so this day begins.

Is It Impossible to Follow One’s Own Advice?

“You surprised me”, I say, leaving the room, shaking still from the encounter that left one dead, one grasping for even a toehold on sanity. “I don’t mean to blame you for making me kill you. It’s not your fault.” Some days teaching is equally extraordinary in either direction. Just like the tail end of that conversation I was having with a spider with whom I’d been peacefully co-existing since our introduction, around midnight, some time last week. Is it still peaceful co-existence if you pretend the other isn’t there?
When our paths had crossed on one of my regularly scheduled trips to the bathroom a week earlier, I’d resisted the instinct to defend myself. I’d simply (or not so simply, given that I was for all intents and purposes, sleepwalking) raised my hand to heaven and vigorously affirmed that “all God’s creatures disport themselves harmoniously throughout the realm.” And it was so, or at least had been so long as I was blissfully unaware of Spidey’s presence. I’d only considered calling the bug guy because the carcass of some other much smaller insect was waiting by the front door the week prior. Under other circumstances, I love spiders. In fact, ever since Charlotte’s Web was published I’ve had a soft spot in my heart for all but Brown Bettys and Tarantulas. And earlier than that, if I’m not mistaken, I’d vowed never to injure another spider after having chased a Daddy Long Legs at sleep-away camp until one leg was left between my fingers. Although the chase had been somewhat engaging, what inspired the vow in me was dropping the severed leg to see it still moving on the asphalt. That had gotten my attention. That had reminded me of a similar incident summers’ earlier when, as a toothless seven-year-old, I’d chased a chameleon across the veranda in Jamaica and captured its tail. Like that incident, this one had made me realize what I’d been chasing had in fact been like me, alive and, until its encounter with me, in tact.
When I’ve just returned home after difficult dialogues with students and less than exhilarating exam results, it’s not the time to see how far my commitment to being an ally to all forms of life extends.
In the surreal conversation with a current student whose older brother, a former student, had called to inform me that the younger brother would no longer be attending class because of a knife wound and the stabbing death of his best friend, I suggest he pour all of his thoughts and feelings onto paper. I say this because I believe it relieves the bottleneck of emotions that can muddle one’s thoughts and actions. I say this because, for years, it is precisely what I have done, though it is no longer what I do. Even this is a lie. Rarely have I tried to record the feelings of a moment. I have only tried to distract myself with words from the feelings themselves. Ashamed now, I have practiced writing-as-sedative if you will. I have used what I professed to love illegitimately. And now, what do I have left? Only words, the very thing I accuse others of being full of, words, nothing more.
Despite this creeping awareness, and its suffocating implications, I tried to record some of the exchange in my official field notes before leaving the office but there are and were too many feelings colliding in the approaching darkness, I was cold, and I knew it would not be enough. I knew there was no closer to any truth I could get, no matter how many words I permitted to spill in lieu of tears.
Even now, I shake my head, not in denial of the facts, nor in disbelief of what sounded like a matter-of-fact tone in his voice, but because nothing and everything has prepared me for such a time as this. This most certainly is a job for Alpha AND Omega. Kids, don’t try teaching at home.

Twitter Widget

Connecting the dots in cyberspace is at once easier and tougher than you think. I learned about Twitter from Oprah on Friday and here I am on Saturday, wading in. This is a link to my page there. I don’t imagine I’ll be more consistently present there than here but it could happen…

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