Working with Wet Wood In the Wet Wood

 

I was out in the woods behind my house, and I came across a lot of branches and roots scattered about. Everything is so wet and broken after a week of rain and wind. As I was looking at the variety of shapes and sizes of branches and how they interacted with each other, a deer wandered across an open space and into the shadows of the trees its feet silent on the soft ground. Like a creature from a dream, it moved slowly and continuously disappearing as it went under the trees.

I gathered some branches and carried them back to a flat open space behind the garage in back of my house. I remember what Andy Goldsworthy said about the work keeping you warm when it is going well. I can’t say objectively how it went, but I did not notice the cold and wet while I arranged the branches. I worked for almost an hour and as it was getting dark snapped a few pictures of my progress. I will work some more tomorrow. The branches are light and brittle. I expected them to be more water logged. I am thinking I should call it “Brittle Wood Weaving.” It is far from finished and some other name might occur to me. It is pleasant work almost like meditation when I am absorbed in it. Taking the pictures in the half light was frustrating though and made me almost forget how natural the rest of the experience was. Process is experience and product is documentation of the experience. The experience was good. The rest is not important.

The Owl Came Calling

In the night and early morning hours, sometimes just before dawn, I have heard the owl’s gentle call as it hunts on silent wings. A few days ago we got to add a visual image to the audio. The owl perched on our awning for a couple of hours before dusk, letting us get very close. Every once in a while it would clack its beak at us if we got too close. Then as soon as the sun went behind the trees it carefully preened its feathers, running its short beak over the long tail feathers, lifting up its body feathers like a skirt to reveal the unexpected long legs covered in furlike white down, almost like fluffy tights. Its whole image like some old monkish woman in a shawl, patient and ancient. And suddenly it stretched out silent wings and glided away into the shadows over the neighbors roof.

I looked at some pictures and found out that it is a barred owl. At first we thought it a young great grey, which people had sighted in the neighborhood, that had wandered away from its parents, and which I thought I had been hearing. But I think it more likely I had heard this one.

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.

Bringing a Little Wonder Back to my Work

I have worked in programs that are supportive of the kind of child led learning that I believe in, but often administrators pay lip service to it while piling on prewritten curricula and norm based goals which in my opinion dilute the learning process into a gray soup of letters and numbers instead of a rich interactive environment in which the children and teachers collaborate on the curriculum as passions and interests and opportunities present themselves. It is more about a static norm based approach as opposed to a fluid child based approach. We have so little time for projects or even the kinds of conversations necessary for developing the ideas that children have. Parent involvement is also difficult since most parents work and many have infants and toddlers. My time is also an issue as I am expected to do the social service work for 19 families as well as the educational planning and running a classroom for the children in 40 hours a week.

As I write this it sounds so negative. At this point I am so burnt out and mentally exhausted by the paperwork and academics that I have to make a commitment to do at least a little each week to move toward creating more wonder and excitement and interaction in my class. I made some easy changes to the environment to attract children to little used areas (a mirror on the science table, and a magnet board in the library). This week I am starting a car project as I have mostly boys who are completely into cars. I already am feeling more positive and energetic toward all of my job. I am also working on a class project on the Reggio approach so this will give me some good examples of my own work to include.

Here is one a poem by Loris Malaguzzi one of the founders of the Reggio Emelia approach in Italy. There is alot in here about the way I like to teach.

The Hundred is There

The child
is made of one hundred.
The child has
a hundred languages
a hundred hands
a hundred thoughts
a hundred ways of thinking
of playing, of speaking.
A hundred always a hundred
ways of listening
of marveling of loving
a hundred joys
for singing and understanding
a hundred worlds
to discover
a hundred worlds
to invent
a hundred worlds
to dream.
The child has
a hundred languages
(and a hundred hundred hundred more)
but they steal ninety-nine.
The school and the culture
separate the head from the body.
They tell the child:
to think without hands
to do without head
to listen and not to speak
to understand without joy
to love and to marvel
only at Easter and at Christmas.
They tell the child:
to discover the world already there
and of the hundred
they steal ninety-nine.
They tell the child:
that work and play
reality and fantasy
science and imagination
sky and earth
reason and dream
are things
that do not belong together.
And thus they tell the child
that the hundred is not there.
The child says:
No way. The hundred is there.

Loris Malaguzzi
(translated by Lella Gandini)