Sunday Walk at Dusk

I walk back from the asphalt of the school playground

where I picked up a piece of wood

in the shape of a tree thought

blown from above in the wind

of  two nights ago.

I walk along the sidewalk home thinking

someone might mistake this branch for a gun

in the headlight glare.

so I carry it loosely swinging by two fingers

pointing the delicate web of lichen into the headlight

to reflect pale green above the gray silver bark.

maybe they see me and think

about the darkness that I am not.

maybe they only see me vaguely with no comprehension

simply a blank silhouette against the dark shadow trees

and the sky holding the last of the day’s blue around the edges of

oncoming clouds.

Maybe they see me and think.

 

 

 

I don’t do enough walking at night. It is strange how it makes me feel younger, a little adventurous, but not in danger.  My mind opens up in different ways when I walk in the dark. I become much less a visual creature and stretch out more with my thoughts, trusting my feet to fall right.

Before my walk I was feeling a bit harassed by thoughts of things I wanted to get done before my weekend comes to a close. Now I feel calmly ready to get what I can done. And I will let tomorrow take care of itself.

Summer Teaching and a Great Book

Summer Teaching

I have started full time at my summer job of keeping my little friends busy and safe. All I have to do is pay attention and go with their flow, and all is well. No paper work just being there for children and providing what they need. They have decided that Dr. Suess is great and have me reading the story of the pale green pants with no one inside them every day. We also have a great box project going, where each has their own special box and I provide materials for them to decorate it. There is one that has his moments, but I am definitely reaching him already after just one week so I feel pretty solid. So many calm moments of children just being and doing what is natural to them — learning about their world. Why do teachers think we have to interfere so much in children’s lives? Curriculum, I don’t need no stinking curriculum. I just need to pay attention and have a few ideas and some interesting materials. The children do the rest.

Short and Vague Review: 2666 by Roberto Bolano

I just finished a facinating novel by Roberto Bolano translated from Spanish, called “2666.” It is about so much that I could not tell you what it is about. It is written in the form of 5 novelas with vague connections to each other, some stronger than others. In the end I got the feeling that somewhere out in the future it all makes more sense, or maybe not. It is not very important. Like any good novel, for me, it was living a life in another skin, or experiencing the world from a slightly shifted dimension. I come back a little changed with a fuller understanding of life as a human being. Also I feel a little disoriented, like I only got some of what he was saying and maybe some of what he said by accident. I think the really good writers are not able to know all the levels contained in their work. There are shadows and reflections that are cast that they are not able to see. There are so many combinations of characters and symbols that interact with the reader that they cannot know what chimeras will hatch. I always come out of novels like this as if I have gone to a foreign country and my mind has not yet assimilated all of the strangeness and time of a different land. That is how I know it was a well written piece. It shifts my perspective and I see more of the human experience. The scope of what I have read has to linger because I am unable to process the whole experience on a conscious level. I am sure that bits of this novel will resurface in poems and dreams for a long while to come.

The Lost World of Fiction

I have not been able to find that mystical space where I find stories. It is lost in the fog of long hours of work and no silence, of dreams interrupted by my alarm at 6:00 in the morning. It is hidden by days busy with small chores and many very important jobs and lists of actions undone for lack of time. I need to tell myself some stories and write them down, even if they do not translate well into other peoples ideas of readable fiction. First it has to be for me and then I can fit it into a form that others can use.  I have to find the space in time that allows me to create worlds in my head that I can put characters in and watch them move and interact. I will listen to their tales and passions and watch their faces and think thoughts that are theirs and mine. It’s only a little bit crazy, but it keeps me sane to use my mind in this way.

I’ve Been Thinking About Recovery and Discovery

I have been reading May Sarton’s journal called Recovery which is initially about recovering from the loss of her life partner due to onset of senelity and finally recovery from a radical mastectomy.  I have not had to face any such life altering events in the last few years, and yet her ideas on finding meaning in the middle of life when you are lost helped put some perspective on my life. I have been feeling lost the last few years and actually most of my life.

In the journal, she tells of all the people who come to visit during the year, about all of the connections she has made in her life, and the people that reach out to her in letters. She writes about the difficulties of balancing the need to have space to create with the need to have connections with the world. My life is crowded with the world of work that I find overwhelming and family which has many positive aspects, but leaves me with just little slivers of time to be, to contemplate, to wonder, to study, to read, to absorb ideas and make sense of of them. This is what being a writer is all about. It is what makes me feel whole, and it is what I get to do the least of.

It does not help that I have been battling little illnesses all winter. I have had to use my low reserves of energy just to get through long dark days. But now I feel the light coming back. I am getting out in the world and moving and ideas are growing.

On Thursday I took some time to go to a recycled hardware store, something I used to do all the time for inspiration. I found some large bolts and nuts that I brought back to my class just to see how the children would use them. Just this process opened up other possibilities. How can we use the old muddy clay left over from last year. The bolts are heavy and cold and hard. What other materials with different properties can I find with which the children can experience different properties. Can we use clay to paint with? What about sand or coffee grounds? All of this is more valid than any of the other work on pre-academics and fine motor skills. I want to open their minds to the world and with preschoolers the world comes through what they feel and experience concretely. Maybe we will build stick houses and cover them with the muddy clay and coffee grounds. Maybe carving ice with colored salt water and eye droppers. What will inspire the connections in their brains to open up to the world and ask questions? Because questions are essence of true learning, questions that lead to more questions and further experiments. There is no need to make the answers hard and fill in blanks. The world should be full of wondering and open ends. They will have a life time to build frameworks of facts around the airy space of wonder. Let them discover the questions first and design their own structures to organize what they find.

A Failed Experiment: A New Plan

I started out this week intent on focusing on the light and got lost in a dense gray fog of fatigue and indifference ending in a black funk. I have no idea how things happen this way. This all ended with my lovely Mary telling me I had to make a plan for what I was going to do with my life because this isn’t working for anyone. She is, as usual, right, but making long range plans is not one of things I have never been good at. I tend to just take life as it comes, and living out a scripted plan makes me feel like I am on the gray road to the end without surprises or bright spontaneus  flowers of inspiration that bloom by accident on a less planned route. But then I have been thinking that maybe by not planning I have looked at all the possible roads and have spontaneusly moved myself down smaller and smaller roads until I have run up against this dead end. Maybe if I look at a larger map, I can plan a route with the option of taking unplanned turns.

I need to pull back my perspective so I can see the options available to me. For five years I have been working with people myopically focussed on what they can objectively quantify. I know that this is not the only approach to education or life. I have experienced places and people who are not confined to the clinical academic roads that trap life into boxes of jargon and numbers. I need to find a community based on ever opening vistas of human experience and creativity. I need to make a plan that opens out into broad roadless fields and rugged wilderness of unknown adventures. Maybe my plan will be to construct an offroad vehicle that will take me to places I haven’t been before. I have little bits of my mind that I can spare from my work and class focussed brain,  busily nibbling away, gathering bits and pieces, with mouselike energy constructing a plan for such a vehicle. I see the progress in my dreams and my attitude. Today I am full of hope even though I still have to face the almost overwhelming wall of small thinking each day. I have the power of creativity, synthesis, poetry, and the magic language of dreams working tirelessly to make a me sized hole in that wall. I will see the light of a new life of my own making.

What can I do now? That is the question at this point. I can write each day, which I didn’t last week. Writing frames my world in possibilities and allows me to exorcise my dark demons of despair. I need to put ideas into words every day that will at least save a little bit of my sanity until I can devote more time to my escape plan. It keeps the door open just a crack so the light can leak in. It is really impossible to get any quality work done in the dark.