A Letter to Teachers Newer Than I - For the new school year

            Before I begin, let me say, that this is merely a letter. It claims to be neither words of advice nor wisdom. I am no master on the topic of teaching. I do not know if I will be in the profession for decades to come. Assuredly, I will not, any time soon, be making the pages of Fred Jones’ next book on America’s most innovative educators. But I am a person who struggled, a lot – much more than I expected – with beginning the profession of teaching. I know that others struggle too, though doubtless some who read this, those for whom teaching comes more naturally and quickly, might find my questionable mental state in this blog post alarming and disconcerting. There is some truth telling that will take place here. Consider this, above all, a letter from a colleague – if you are a teacher. And perhaps a letter from a colleague even if you are not a teacher, because we have, most of us, been new and awkward and overwhelmed by a job or some other important life experience at some point. We are friends now, for the experiences we share. Consider it a letter that is meant to be in part a platform for my own soul to vent, and in other part, one of sympathy and understanding for what you might be going through. All that I really want to say, after all, to both of us, is that things will get better
             I’ll never forget the emotional trauma that used to sweep over me any time someone started in on how much easier teaching gets after a few years. I remember my credential school year when I’d smile bravely and shrug off those types of comments, hoping to maintain my façade of self-assurance, as though it didn’t matter to me if my life got easier in one year or in twenty years. I’d be okay either way, my shrug said,  because my undying passion for the  profession, my selfless adoration of children, and my profound vestment in the future of our society could carry me through anything unscathed. None of it was even bothering me now, I suggested. My deep physical and emotional exhaustion, my perpetual awkwardness, my chronic confusion over acronyms and school procedures and politics and even my colleagues’ names, my feelings of inadequacy in the classroom, my certainty that I was, in fact, making my students dumber, my inability to feel confident even in the one area – academics – that I always had (I was getting my Master’s at the time), the shock of being treated horribly the first few times by an angst-ridden adolescent. None of these – I suggested – were making me at all doubtful of my chosen profession, none of them were burning me out, or making me want to run away to a farm in the countryside and forget children ever existed, none of them were having anything but a positive effect on me because, after all, I was sacrificing myself to the Future of America and happily fulfilling my Societal Duty to my Fellow Man.

But my heart sank every time. Behind my carefully manicured façade, my entire being cringed at the unwitting good intentions of the people who talked to me about teaching. Because unfortunately for their good intentions, they did not know that others had already been where they were going…and had delivered different messages. My first encounter with the impossible numbers game of how-long-do-you-have-to-suck-it-up-before-this-actually-becomes-managable came from a professor I had during my student teaching. Her comment actually did lift my spirits at the time. “It gets better after the first year,” she told me knowingly. And I felt a gentle wave of relief wash over my soul adrift. A year wasn’t forever. I could doggy paddle for a year.

It wasn’t until several weeks later, when one of my master teacher’s got ahold of me that I recognized this numbers game for what it was – a well meant – and completely unrealistic – gesture passed from one person who felt sympathy to another who looked like a drowning cat “After THREE years of teaching,” my master teacher assured me, “you’ll feel like you have finally gotten into a rhythm and you’ll be fine.” Three years?! At that point I didn’t actually care how long three years even was, I only knew that it was three times longer than the original quoted estimate of my sentence.

If only my principal had never tried to help. Now, I absolutely adored the principal at my first school. He was kind and communicative and supportive. His philosophy of teaching aligned – for the most part – with my own. He was easy to talk to and easily accessible. He was beloved by students and teachers and parents. He was warm and funny and likable. And, in a meeting I had with him at the beginning of my first year, he was trying to be helpful. He smiled at me from across the table, “How’s it going?” he asked brightly.

“Great,” I grinned back, though it wasn’t.

“Are you feeling overwhelmed,” he asked?

“Nope,” I lied.

“Are you feeling supported?”

“Very much so,” I reported with relief, because that, at least, was true. What we all know as new teachers is that we (as new teachers) are never going to feel perfect or underwhelmed or put together. But we don’t need to overshare this information every time anyone gives us an opportunity because it’s not a great way to keep friends. And what we also know is that having a good team to work with, though it cannot save us, is such a huge blessing – we’ve heard the horror stories! – and can go a long way in convincing us to convince ourselves to stick it out.

My principal, as if he knew what I was actually feeling (he’d been a new teacher once, too, I suppose), said, “My wife’s a teacher too. She says that after FIVE years you really get a handle on the job and love what you’re doing.”

Five years. It was almost too much. Where had my original 365 days gone? In five years, I’d be ready for my third midlife crisis, or I’d be pregnant, or I’d be whatever’s left of a human being after five years at a job that she doesn’t “have a handle on.” Five years his half a decade. Half a Decade. This is what I wanted to yell at him from across the table. But his face was so earnest – he really was trying to be helpful. And I refused to be the teacher who starts crying in the principal’s office. I refused,  I refused, I refused. So I didn’t stop smiling. I tucked the corners of my mouth up behind my ears and pulled tight to keep them from sliding downward. To stop smiling would be to cry. To stop smiling would be to fail.

“That’s good to hear,” I finally risked opening my mouth a crack to say.

            This year, my fourth year of teaching, just a few days ago, in fact, I sat down with my fellow 9^th grade team member to talk curriculum. She came into teaching late in her career and she is wonderful and I think we’re going to get along great. We spent some time bonding over the struggles of being an introvert in the teaching profession. She told me it took her ten years to be comfortable as a teacher. I thought to myself that I must lack stamina because there is almost nothing in the world that would keep me at a job for nine years without feeling comfortable or competent. But she didn’t scare me. It seems the fourth year, for me, is the golden year. Not that I’m trying to jump the gun. I’m just starting my fourth year and I’m at a new school in a new state, so there’s no doubt that I’m still in way over my head. But I also just spent two weeks at professional development, and a new teacher orientation, and welcoming my new students and I didn’t panic once. Not once. Not even when I realized that summer break is really and truly over. Not even when I realized that I’m in Kansas for goodness sake. Not even when I filled a binder on the first day with names of people and resources that I will never ever remember even if I study them for an hour every night. Not even when I learned I had to turn in lesson plans to my department chair on a weekly basis, or that I have two formal observations this year as a teacher new to the school. And I’m taking this as a good sign. Because last year, and certainly two years ago, I would have been in the fetal position in bed with tears streaming down my face. (Don’t laugh – it happens.)

            I cannot tell you when you will finally get comfortable at teaching. When you will love it. When it will feel like you’re in the right place. When you don’t wake up before the rooster crows kicking yourself for doing it, groping for a cup of extra strength coffee, last night’s late night lesson plans still bouncing painfully around in your brain like a hangover. What I can tell you is that each year gets better. Significantly better. Better enough that, even if it’s not great, you are so grateful that it’s not last year that you can get through it. And enough of those betters will eventually get you to a place where you love your job and where, on some days at least, you feel good at it. Wait, did you think this was going to be a pep talk? I said I was in my fourth year of teaching, not that I’m the Dalai Lama! Teaching is hard. But you can do it. I know this because nobody goes into teaching with their shoes tied on right. Some of us have left on right and right on left. Some have laces criss-crossed. Others one shoe tied to the other. Some haven’t even mastered the art of Velcro yet. Nobody just walks right in on the first day with perfect pumps and the confidence to wear them. We are all a mess. But there are still thousands of amazing teachers roaming around the country, all of whom must have been new at one time. That’s how I know we’re going to make it. If we want to, we’re even going to be amazing.

            And another thing: don’t believe that you have to have a bottomless personal pocketbook to be able to do creative stuff in your classroom. I don’t know if any other new teachers are as alarmed as I was by all that talk of teacher’s paying for their own supplies, but I have to admit, when I first started teaching, it really bothered me to hear how much other teachers spent on their classrooms and students. I felt like I was already giving every last bit of my exhausted self to my profession, to the point where I was having diminishing returns. The one small reward I was afforded was the money I made to pay my rent and buy a beer on Friday night – a beer which I had never even needed before. So it outraged me to hear people say things like, “Oh, I just buy all the stuff I need for my class,” or, “They don’t pay for that. You just have to buy it yourself.” (Which, by the way, is, in my experience, generally untrue. I know some schools are hurting for resources and some schools are pretending to hurt for resources, but, though I know it happens from time to time, I’ve never been unable to acquire the supplies I needed for a class if I had a clear plan and justification for my supply needs and I asked [and was kind to] the right people.)

            This year, I have spent a couple hundred dollars of my own money on my own profession in the first two weeks of work. It’s from my budget – I’m not going bankrupt over it or anything. But the spending doesn’t seem like such a burden to me now, or like so much salt in a wound. I think the more teaching becomes a part of you, the more fulfilling it becomes, the easier and more natural it is to invest back into it – whether that investment involves spending actual money or, probably more significantly, investing more time getting to know your students, or more effort in creativity. Don’t think that being a teacher in this climate means having to spend your pocket money on your kids. It doesn’t and I’m proof. You should only be giving as much of yourself to the job as you feel good about giving – and I’m not just talking about money. Don’t worry that it’s not enough. The more you grow into your role, the more of yourself you’ll be able to give.

            Speaking of investment, here’s the only piece of advice I actually will give you, because I really think it’s true. Invest, first and foremost, in yourself. New teaching is just like any new relationship: you have to work really hard to not lose yourself in the collective “us.” And, as irony will have it, you will likely tend to lose yourself in your efforts to be a better teacher to your students, but will inevitably find that you are unable to be a better teacher – or a better person – when you’re not nurturing the things that make you uniquely you. You cannot spend the entire weekend lesson planning and grading. You will need to. You will be stressed and overworked on Friday afternoon and you will think that you absolutely must finish up your work over the weekend or else Monday will be hell. Here’s the dirty secret: no matter how long the weekend is, you will never finish your work. It doesn’t happen. In the history of teaching, it has never happened. But you will lose yourself. Because, despite your students’ best convictions, there is more to you than lesson planning and grading. There is the athlete and the friend and the reader and the adventurer and the gambler and the movie watcher and the beach goer and the wine taster and the dog walker. And those parts of you need you too. And those parts of you are also never done.

            I’ve come to the disheartening conclusion that to be the best teacher in the world, you must be the most interesting person in the world. That’s, basically, in a nutshell, what the job demands of you. I know with certainty that I am, in fact, not the most interesting person in the world. But I must at least be interesting enough. And there’s nothing that turns a person into a Big Dull Dud faster than grading papers all weekend, every weekend. Trust me. I’ve been there. I have a shirt from that trip. You cannot simultaneously be a Big Dull Dud and an Invested Teacher. You will wear yourself thin until there is nothing left of you to give. Invest in yourself. Papers will wait. Word documents too. Student emails. Even angry parents will wait. And while they wait, your brain will have some time for the creativity that it couldn’t get in during the crowded week. The creativity that will make you breathe easier and do better, both as a person and a teacher. Interestingly, this is the quote that came up on my phone’s daily quote widget just before I posted this blog entry: “It is not enough for the teacher to love the child. She must first love and understand the universe. She must prepare herself, and truly work at it.” (Maria Montessori).

With my sincerest sympathy and sincerest congratulations that you have chosen this profession,

Roya

ETSB (English Teacher Scraping By)                                                                                                                                      

Expatriate

It occurred to me, as I looked over the sad decline of my writing here on this blog over the past years, that my writing – my mindset, really, which would lead to my writing – needs a serious jumpstart. The frightening thing for me, as an expatriate of the writing world, is that it is not merely the writing that has waned, but also the perspective. A writer must look at the world through a storyteller’s lens, whether she is embellishing the truth or sticking to it, and the less one writes, the less one sees the world through that beautiful, exhilarating writer’s lens. And a writer without a lens? That is a sad and miserable misfortune.

            Emily Dickinson was the first poet I ever loved and when I began this blog, my greatest wish, perhaps, was to be that little stone that rambled in the road alone. There remains a part of me that yearns to be that stone – that, indeed, is that stone. That is not Dickinson’s only wisdom for me right now. There is also: “Tell all the truth, but tell it slant,” and “Hope is the thing with feathers- / That perches in the soul - / And sings the tune without the words - / And never stops – at all,” and, if I really want perspective, “I’m Nobody! Who are you?” Dickinson took my adolescent angst and helped turn it into an identity for me. And so, the name of this blog has always been an ode to her. But it seems to me, now, that for someone who is trying to reenter her homeland after a lonely spell away, only originality of voice will do – that if I am to be a writer in this world, Emily Dickinson must be a part of me, but cannot be all of me, cannot be my voice. Voice is a thing this blog needs most right now. So I am starting with a minor facelift: a new name, inspired by my own life, the same old hope of “fulfilling absolute decree.” This is a short story of how the Catalpa Tree is an ode to my own life and writing.

            It seems to me, sometimes, that I can recall my childhood in snapshot memories of perfect moments. Even those moments that should not have been perfect – could not have been perfect – were made perfect by the people who cared for me and the places we were together. There are perhaps no memories that I recall more vividly than those I spent in Southern Virginia on Pappy and Granny’s five acres off of Rural Route 2. If I were writing about those trees, in Southern Virginia, I would be writing about Sycamores and Maples and Cherries. But I wouldn’t be writing just about those trees – though trees are a worthy and weighty topic – if I were writing about Southern Virginia. Because for me, writing about those days and those people and that place is like trying to capture in a foreign language the taste of sweet tea on a sticky summer day; or the feeling of a firefly’s tiny legs on your palm and that inexpressible feeling in the pit of your stomach when he lights up on your hand that makes you believe in God and magic; or the purple that comes over a mountain at dawn that some people can’t see; or the thrill of car tires on a gravel driveway; or that feeling you get – both inexplicable sadness and overwhelming happiness – when you watch somebody you love across a room, unbeknownst to him. You see, it is thoroughly impossible for me to sum up Southern Virginia in three words – or to sum it up at all, in small or great detail. I have tried. Many times have I tried.

            Western Pennsylvania is to my mother what Southern Virginia is to me. And it is not far behind in my own memory’s list of perfect moments either. Should I grow old and gray and forgetful, I pray I will still remember picking blueberries in Great-Grandma’s yard, and all the tastes, smells, and sounds that accompanied blueberry picking with my cousins and sister. But the Catalpa Tree is from later in my life, well after the Spring of 1998 when my world ended for the first time, after I had begun – just begun – to grow up and learn that happiness is far more complex than it ought to be. It’s from a more realistic time, but perhaps a better time for that very reason. The Catalpa Tree grows outside of my Great Aunt Helen’s home. She is one of my favorite people on earth and I share her middle name – something which has always made me proud. No matter how long gone I am, going to Aunt Helen’s house (and Uncle Fred’s – another part of my growing up that ended something in me) always feels like going home, which is somewhat unusual since I have never spent expansive amounts of time there. Visiting Aunt Helen has given me an awareness of the charm and profound romance and rightness of quiet, beloved, wood-smelling, well-kept places and I hope that my home will someday welcome the people I love as warmly as hers does.

            My mother, I am sure, could write poetry –or a novel – on the Catalpa Tree alone. There is more to the Catalpa Tree story than even I know. But this particular snapshot memory is only a brief, vague remembrance. I didn’t know, at the time, that there was anything extraordinary about that beautiful tree out front – just that everything about Aunt Helen’s home was beautiful. Do you know those moments in your youth when you realize people that you have known and loved for ages actually have a life and identity outside of who they are to you? My mother has always had this gorgeous quality about her where she remembers something, or is tickled by something, and her laughter and her words take on this warm, joyful, secretive tone. In those moments, I always catch a glimpse of what she was like as a child, before my time, and also a secret glimpse of her beautiful soul. For whatever reason, the Catalpa Tree snapshot has always seemed so important to me because of my mother’s tone that day when she pointed to the tree and said, “That’s a Catalpa Tree,” as though she had a story to tell about it…as though it had a story to tell us. “Catalpa” – a lovely and intoxicating word. Mildly exotic, somehow also earthy and familiar. She had one in her own yard as a kid and they called it, she told me, a Cigar Tree because of its long brown late-Summer seed pods. Out of curiosity, I also learned that Catalpas are sometimes used in the making of guitars and are found both here at home and on the Caribbean coasts, so I was right about its exotic and familiarness.

            Aunty and the girls and Mom and we girls were there to visit Aunt Helen that time. Maybe it was just a malleable moment in my development. Perhaps I realized, then, that life didn’t need to be perfect to be perfect, that change did not mean you lost all the things you loved. Maybe it was a salve for the growing pains of knowing that people and places get old, and responsibility sucks, and paving your own road is a lot harder, and sometimes less gratifying than it looks. Whatever it was, that Catalpa Tree stuck in my mind as a symbol of both every good past moment I loved so dearly, and also as a threshold to embracing the creation of my future and the role I have in its unfolding. We decided to take some pictures under the Catalpa Tree. Family picture time, it seems, gets sadder the older I get, because it always feels like we are trying to capture a togetherness that none of us are sure will ever come again. But also, it was Summer on the east coast and I wore shorts and a tank top and my hair stood out like a frizzy mane from my scalp and I was road-tripping with some of my favorite people. Both nostalgia and a hearty enthusiasm for the moment had control of me. And there we were – snapshots on a camera – and in my mind. I still have the pictures. In them, I look young and awkward and adolescent. We all look thoroughly steeped in the Pennsylvania-summer humidity. We were not the same family we once were. Granny and Uncle Fred were gone. Sira and Miya had joined us. And yet there we are, all just the samely interconnected as we have always been – as we will always be. Though we come and go, we are indivisibly family, intertwined undebatably, in the picture, beneath that tree – a few of us representing the all of us.

            And that is reality. Which I think is my point, here. Because along with all the awful things we wish we never knew – about Santa, and death, and politics, and the like – there is something else that reality gives us that beautiful childhood illusion cannot – and that is a recognition of, appreciation for, all of the unflappable, immortal rights in our lives. The rightness of family and nature and stories and scuffed knees. The rightness of counting our blessings, of roots and of wings. It is, to me, reality, more than anything else, that tells me that there are universal truths – they have been and they are and they always will be. It tells me that goodness exists and cannot be suppressed for long – love and gratitude are ways of life and should be embraced. And so this snapshot in my mind, of the eight of us under the Catalpa Tree – so many of us missing – each of us missed – seems symbolic, somehow, in my mind, of the bittersweetness of adulthood – of experience (which may be all that adulthood is after all). I love it because, once things lost the glow of childhood, everything also took on more meaning. Stories became more powerful. Life, though more painful, also became more adventurous, which, after all, may essentially be what writing is to me: my heart and my head grappling with experience, wanting and not wanting to go back to childhood, trying to understand how the ancient ties that bind me and the every-day-new world ahead of me coexist, balance out, affect each other. It seems to me, sometimes, that if I just go back, sit under that Catalpa Tree, alone, for a good few hours, that some things would come to me that would not come on their own. I can see, almost, a faint dust of magic shimmering beneath those lush leaves. And maybe it would. Or maybe it would not. It’s difficult to say with those things. In adulthood magic is more ephemeral than it is in childhood.

            And so that’s how the snapshot with the Catalpa Tree is the story of me, and yet, still a story to me, because I’m not sure why it, out of all the snapshots in my mind, feels so profoundly old and new, then and now, familiar and enigmatic. Like a good story – to read or to write – I understand it in my soul, and yet know there is still much more to understand. So it is that tree, that seems a fitting place to end one era of writing – which has lasted my entire  life thus far, which is the beginning of my passion and my love for the field, which is rooted in a family and life so full of love and happiness that it often overwhelms me and a restlessness that continues to overcome me – and to begin a new era of writing – which begins in Kansas, of all places, and hopefully never ends, but instead feeds into another writing era for another person or another time, and whose direction I have not entirely decided upon yet, but that offers me the same adventure of familiarity and mystery that I cherish so dearly.

            Children have so many restrictions that adults do not remember about: where they are going and what they do when they get there and when – and how – they are to get home. And to an adventurous heart, one of the joys of growing up is to not have to tell anyone anything about all of that anymore and to be able to just go where the wind blows. My soul, for example, yearns constantly to climb mountains, and to sail in the winds, and to ford brooks and to lay on grassy hilltops and watch horses roam. It has always yearned for these things and perhaps the first thing that writing was for me was a way to adventure without being able to adventure. And so now, if my heart yearns, constantly, to climb a mountain, to seek adventure, so also does it yearn to write – and to read – about these things, a pastime for a rainy day, a responsibility day, an entire adventure to be had somewhere as simple as sitting beneath a Catalpa.

-R.E.A.

These envoys of beauty

It seemed as though it would be a stressful day. Without a doubt, I had some blues from saying goodbye to my sister and brother-in-law and sweet little bubble of a nephew. More blueness for nostalgia; some for worry over my parents’ happiness; some for the time-worn discovery I seem to have every time I get a couple days off of work: that though I am happy, I am not living my happiness to the fullest.

Then there was the house to clean and Thanksgiving dinner to plan – which I have never once done before in my life, and which I am already certain to fail at on some level in comparison to my amazing mother and my amazing sister who is following in her footsteps. I am not the domestic one of the family!

The holidays are upon us, people, and there hasn’t been a single one since I have passed into the precarious mental state known as adulthood, during which I have not mustered up some sort of breakdown or another in the privacy of my own privacy. Money or work or gift-giving or missing-people or a need-for-space or all-of-the-above giving way to a much-needed, thoroughly enjoyable sob fest that often involves some Kenny Chesney music and always ends in a headache.

So it not only seemed like it would be a stressful day, it also seemed perfectly reasonable that it would be a stressful day. People are always sad. This is something I’ve learned as a grown-up. Not sad in a disheartening, dysfunctional, depressed way. Just sad in an acknowledgement of all the good things that have ever been and won’t be again. Or maybe that’s just my family. At any rate, I am prone to it. And there is nothing like the holidays to make me realize:

1.      I am very, very, extraordinarily, breath-takingly blessed.
2.      I have been for a very long time.
3.      I miss the blessings that have passed. I mean, my heart actually hurts for them.
4.      I fear a future that lacks as many blessings as the ones I have now.
5.      It seems impossible to be blessed without recognizing that
         a.       things change (not always for the worse).
         b.      the world contains both blessings and lacks thereof.
         c.       one cannot relive the greatness of past blessings, but only
         d.      try to live with the remembrance of those blessings and become a more deserving person. And
         e.       I rarely live up to my blessings.

So yes, the holidays stress me out because I am too blessed to handle it. How’s that for lousy and unappreciative and nonsensical?

But the thing is that I wasn’t stressed today. Oh sure, there were tears. And Kenny Chesney music. And blessings. But as I sit here, now on in my own little living room, on my soft rug, looking at a clean house, listening to Jeremiah Took snore away on the wall, I am whole-heartedly not stressed. Overwhelmed by many things, yes. Uncertain, certainly. Clear-headed, no. Happy, yes. And unstressed.

There is a beautiful irony in the stressfulness that the holiday season seems to induce that I never recognized until today. Oh, the irony I’ve always been well aware of. But the beauty, I’ve been blind to. That we should spend too much money, and grow resentful over not knowing what to get people, and plow other shoppers down to get to sale items, and stay too busy to actually spend time together, these things I have always recognized as ironic in the worst illustration of human culture. But there is also a sweetness to our irony, to our lack of perspective, to our ability to royally spoil a beautiful time of year. Because, you see, it is the type of time when we are overwhelmed by our blessings. By our possibilities, and our moments to indulge, and our opportunities to share and love and be loved. Of course we muddle it up. Of course we miss some of the sparkle and wonder and grace. We are looking for it so hard. We are trying desperately to do it right. We are over-eager. We are like the child on the playground who wants so badly to help his little sister walk that he drags her to her knees. We are like the intern on an interview who slips and says the wrong company name. If only, we think to ourselves, if only we jump in early this year, head-first, balls out, embrace the season from its first nanosecond to its last. If only we do all the things at all the times and do them all right. If only we are as perfect as the season. If only we invest more than we did  last year. Then we will have finally lived it to the fullest. Then we will have finally deserved the bounty and the beauty and the blessing.

We are wrong of course. The best things in life, it seems, are simple. The purest and gentlest and least manipulated actions are the ones that – at least for me – bring the most peace and joy and revelation. It is through the very basics of family and nature that I truly feel the holiday spirit. But the ironic beauty is in the vision. In our motivation for pursuing the perfection. We lack the insight to simply, faithfully follow the star. We must jump and twist and buck and bound and bolt off course time and again, like puppies learning how to heel or kid goats chasing butterflies. And that is our gift. To be allowed this immaturity of spirit. To not have our blessings yanked impatiently away from us in our stupidity. To be showered with them again, to be loved and appreciated despite our repetitious naïveté. To be given the chance to try and fail and learn and take joy in the moments that we actually understand. To be allowed to never quite grasp the big picture, even when it is laid generously before our eyes. To be just ourselves.

Emerson wrote, “If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile.” What patience, it seems to me, must be required to handle our incessant ambivalence! But that, too, we are granted. Each year, the season arrives to remind us of all the very most important things in life. Each night, the stars take up the same mantle. To remind us that, take them or leave them, our blessings are ours. 

-R.E.A.

To live like you were living

            Considering that most access to really untamed nature is at least a solid hour drive from Sacramento, the outskirts of Davis can be a decent spot to imagine your life is less stubbornly citified than mine is. There are horses out there, and old barns, and open fields, and, if you ignore the obscene number of cyclists, you can almost imagine you’re really out in the country. There is also Putah Creek, which is where I often go because I’m not yet of the envious class of people who owns any of the rest. The Reserve, the property-less man’s access to the Creek, is nothing special, which is just the way I like it. The Creek – well, was there ever any body of water that wasn’t astronomically special? The Reserve is off of County Road 98A and if it didn’t have the Creek and the peace, I would still love it anyway, simply for being attached to a road not special enough to have ever really been named. Functionality - that’s what a numbered road is named for, and I have a high regard and reverence for those types of things that are too busy doing things to worry with poetry. Ironic, isn’t it, since poetry is my prayer and my profession and I am one of those people who worries almost exclusively about it?

            

There is almost always a restlessness and excitement and thankfulness in my soul when I’m on my way to Putah Creek. I go because I need space and solitude and God, and the drive to Davis, and the horses and fields along the way all lead to my anticipation, to the gentle, freeing release of my soul when my feet hit earth and my eyes first light on the mellow, golden glint of creek water.

            

But also on Route 98A, on the way to the Reserve – a delightful, barely-there turn-off into a gravel lot before the bridge (What bridge? I don’t know; perhaps it is sweetly nameless) - you must pass by the UC Davis Primate Lab. I can always see it, looming up to my right, with its strangely pleasant buildings and its high fences, an uncomfortable blend of interesting architecture and cold, scientific cruelty. And it always brings a lump to my throat, just before I see it. But, imminently I search for it every time, anyway. To face it. To not let myself get away with pretending it’s not there. Every time, I think of a quote I read and saved when I was younger and the cruelties of the world were much less stomachable than they have become: “Think, sometimes, of the suffering from which you spare yourself the sight.” Always, the monkeys in the lab remind me of this, a stark contrast to the still, graceful beauty I am seeking out at the Creek. And it is right that way, I suppose, to remember the sufferers in the midst of being grateful for your blessings. Painful and right and just.

            

How many million times a day would a heart break if it could face all the suffering in the world? And how long could a person survive it? (These are questions, by the way, that Sue Monk Kidd begins to answer in her book The Secret Life of Bees – one of the many great triumphs of that novel).

            

But the opposite question is also valid, and one I think about a great deal: How many million times a day would a heart break if it could fathom all the blessings in the world? And how long could a person survive it? “Dazzling and tremendous” (as Whitman said) “How quick the sun-rise would kill me, / If I could not now and always send sun-rise out of me.”

            

There is a lot of minutia in the day-to-day – something adulthood hands you on a steaming silver platter that you take before you realize that you’d rather just have had Mac ‘n’ Cheese. Meanwhile, suffering and blessings abound as though they were only trivial things amidst all the monstrous importance of the minutia. It’s strange, the way life can get flip-flopped that way. Or maybe just the perspective of those trying to cope with the great importance of existence. Like succumbing to the minutia is a flippant joke we are making to avoid facing the perpetual enigma of eternity. But me, I like the enigma (like, being, of course, far too bland a word). I revel, seek vitality in it. It is the makings of my religion, a necessary portion of my happiness, grounding and liberatingly terrifying at the same time. Like being cut loose from the ground and flying helter-skelter, powerless, tumbling through the air and then bouncing gently down on your own two feet and finding you are safe. Like tacking a tiny sailboat in a full wind, with sails taut, that moment just before you know if you’re going to capsize or if your body weight and the lines in your hands and the grace of the universe will keep you up. And not only up, but soaring through the water in an exultation that cannot be separated out as purely physical or purely emotional, but that is wholly both simultaneously.

            

And so it is the minutia of adulthood that wears me down, not the complexity. Exhaustion billows in on those days when I recall neither great sadness nor reeling joy, but just am, like a perpetual stapler of paper stacks, hearing the changeless thump of the stapler, looking up only when my staples run out and then only long enough to recharge my stapler and continue. Thump. Thump. Thump. There are always mild frustrations, of course, even as a perpetual stapler, bangings of your thumbs against the stapler head, papercuts. And always some laughter, a glimpse of humor on a page, a rogue bee that upsets the progress of the mundane. But these are only side effects of the real world – peepholes onto the shoulder of the Great Enigma that I cannot stop to investigate within the confines of my minutia. They could lead me out, but I don’t follow. Because I am an adult, eating from the proffered silver platter.

            

Minutia is not the small stuff; it is the extraneous stuff. I teach, for example, to improve lives; to provide respite, offer alternatives; to share ideas, and curiosity, and inspirations. Not, as it seems I spend half my time doing, to analyze state education standards; or give tests (or analyze scores); or grapple with misguided parents; or attend meetings that are either purposefully useless or that enable students to be weak and wretched and entitled. And yet, I do all of these things more frequently than I teach to my intentions, or sit by Putah Creek, or talk to my grandfather, or think about the primates at the lab, or the rape victims in Africa’s latest upheaval, or the cold, mindless bums on New York subways.

            

This is not the universe’s fault; it is my own. Yet I see so many people doing it. Why do we have this novel concept of “living like you were dying,” when we could just be living like we were living? I can’t speak for others, but I don’t desire minutia as a distraction. I want to be burned by the sun-rise and send it back out. I want to feel my heart in the grips of despair. I want to laugh joyfully and sob uncontrollably. I want those to be my daily, to be my exhaustion. Not a drained feeling of denial, of neon lights and air conditioning and forgotten computer passwords, but the well-earned, bedtime exhaustion of being active in the universe, of being constantly, thoroughly used up, of being tarnished and polished and hopefully tarnished again by the great stuff of life. Who has time for minutia in the midst of all this wonder...and horror? Will the growing pains of adulthood pass and leave me with an answer, or is this a question of a lifetime: How to indulge in the everything and leave the busywork behind? How?

-R.E.A.

Picking oranges with a bunch of people I don't know

When I was little, we used to go, some Sundays, with Granny and Pappy to little Andrew Chapel out at the end of some long country road in Virginia. Getting ready for church on those mornings was a spiritual event in and of itself. I knew – still know, Granny’s floral Sunday dresses by heart and I waited expectantly down the hall in the morning – in my own Sunday best and my “clicky” shoes – for the beloved scent of Pappy’s cologne and Gran’s perfume to waft out to me, letting me know it was almost time to go. I loved going to Andrew Chapel – loved the ice cream socials, and Mrs. Henderson – Gran and Pap’s neighbor sitting in the pew behind us – loved being Pappy’s “Granddaughters from California,” loved the stray cats always hanging around the door, and the gravel parking lot and the sweet, graceful peace of the cemetery out back. I loved with all my being – and still do, that small, white holy church and the ramp they built out front of it when Gran became wheelchair-bound. (Against all modern odds, they didn’t even need a law to tell them that was the right thing to do.) I loved Pastor Creech with his carroty-haired youthfulness – against whose preaching artistry I still compare all sermons I hear. And I loved – with an adoration that literally shaped who I am as a person, that feeling of being tiny, little me in that great sanctuary of warmth and love and community.

There is a special luxury afforded to children which is taken from us somewhere around high school, and I can’t be the only adult who mourns its loss. It is the luxury of being left alone, at times, usually in matters of seriousness and importance, even in the midst of roomfuls of other people. Children can sit, if their parents let them – and the best kind always do – in a room full of things-going-on, and merely be, with no expectation to add pleasant banter, or give good advice, or jump up to clear the dishes, or know the latest news from the White House. It is not rude for a child to sit in the midst of a conversation and merely watch. Listen if he pleases and daydream if he doesn’t. It is, in fact, considered good manners on some terms. That was the luxury I indulged in on Sunday’s at Andrew Chapel, as the grown-ups greeted and caught up and settled in, as the choir sang and the preacher preached. Amidst all those community worshipers, I felt equally small and (as the preaching suggested) imminently important. I was a part of them, of “it”, and yet, at the same time, I was alone.

It is this same paradox of alone togetherness that Jason and I stumbled upon in our adult worlds  just a couple weekends ago as we gazed into our campfire somewhere in Southern Oregon. Across the way, through the pitch darkness, another campfire glowed and we could see the hunched form of another camper leaning over his book beside the fire. We knew that he could see us, too, if he looked up and glanced around him, and we reveled, for a while, in the pleasant company he afforded. Separately, we had sought similar things: solitude, perhaps, beauty, peace, adventure, self-sufficiency, freedom, smallness. And we had ended up here, meditating by our respective campfires, beneath the same magnificent expanse of stars. We did not wish to become friends with one another because we were not seeking friendship, just then. But we were friends nevertheless in our solitary communion. I took comfort – looking across the way at him – in knowing that there is another out here like me. And I marveled in how connected I felt to him, though neither of us sought direct contact. We were gladly alone and yet, together at last.

Robert Frost wrote a poem about communal solitude. A poem that I read in college and which elevated Mr. Frost from his already honored position in my mind as creator of “The Road Less Traveled” and “Swinger of Birches” and “Mending Wall” to something more spiritual – an unmet kindred spirit. The poem is called “A Tuft of Flowers,” an unobtrusive title at best. To begin with, Frost weaves the word “whetstone” into the poem, a thrilling event that for me is delightful in both sound and spelling. But he proves (for the billionth time) his true artistry in imagery in the 12th stanza, with a simple set of lines that thrills me to the core each time my eyes see it chanted out on the page. In the poem, a man working in the fields contemplates his solitude and alienation from the man who mowed the field before him – and indeed from all other men – until a butterfly leads his eye to a tuft of flowers by the brook: “A leaping tongue of bloom the scythe had spared / Beside a reedy brook the scythe had bared…” The speaker finds that, though the man before him was not seeking to make his acquaintance, they are acquainted, and connected, nonetheless by their mutual love of the flowers, the grass, the wild. The second to last stanza speaks, I am convinced, not only to my soul, but also to other souls, around other campfires, beneath others stars: “And [I] dreaming, as it were, held brotherly speech / With one whose thought I had not hoped to reach.” *

In secondary education you hear, from the moment you step in the door of your first class in your credential year (no, before that, even, when you read the interview questions and personal statement prompts) about the importance of group interaction. Team building, communication strategies, cooperative learning are (currently) the signs of a globalized, contemporary classroom. And the “sage on the stage” should be dead and buried. There is no doubt that group work has a place in the classroom. And there is no doubt that some students learn better in an interactive, moving, pulsing, collaborative environment. But I can’t help but think, miserably, forlornly, sometimes, “What of us?” What of us small, unpopular, revelers in solitary togetherness? Where have our dearly beloved learning environments disappeared to?

There was a lecture hall at Cal State Long Beach, PH1, that I adored. When you entered the room through the door at the back, you stood at the top of the stadium stairs and looked down on the chairs and lecture stage. The side walls were old brick, not well-kept, fancy, austere brick, just plain, old brick that did its job steadily, reliably, trustworthily, day in and day out. There were lights, but the room was always mildly dim, maybe on account of the oft-used screen projector. It was cool and comfortable and anonymous. There you’d sit, watching some sampling of the intellectual world unfolded by the lecturer before you. There was no cold-calling, no “think, pair, sharing,” just you alone among all those other learners, soaking it all in, or wasting time, or writing a novel as the case may be. It was communal learning, but it was solitary, autonomous learning as well. And it was beautiful.

I once got a B in a class whose essays I scored high As on because the professor said I didn’t participate enough. (This class was not in PH1.) Despite what I found to be fascinating content, I felt no urge to contribute to the blather I heard sometimes in class discussions, nor to compete with the brilliant insights at other times. I was learning through solitary communion. Chewing  on my thoughts as I grazed on the thoughts of others (Cows, on a side note, are masterful creatures at solitary communion). The professor wished for me to learn in social communion. (Perhaps if I had given him the cow analogy he would have been more forgiving). It was a difference of opinion – of purpose – and I accepted the B as earned. But I’ve often thought about how marvelous that same class would have been if the talkers had been left to talk and the listeners to listen. The world needs all types, after all. Students are not, like children, granted internal reverie. There is a misconception among some that if we are quiet, we must also be thoughtless. These some are not the type who would feel solidarity with Mr. Frost’s farmer.

I go to church sometimes because I like to be among like-minded people. When I touch the wooden pews and look around at the communing worshipers – and smile at them as though we are not strangers, because, after all, we are not – and feel the music move through me from my toes to my beating heart, I feel more social than perhaps any other time in my life. Alonely contemplating the day’s message along with all those other contemplators, I feel the kinship that we share while still holding onto myself, just as I am, without social graces or expectations. And my soul finds peace and joy in knowing that I am alone with others also alone. Together. I know there are some churchgoers who would argue that I am missing an important part of church by avoiding complete integration. That the reason we commune  in church is so that we may commune with one another. But I think that just as there is a place for group interaction and a place for complete solitude, so is there a mysterious and profound relevance in the social aloneness I seek in church.

There are answers in communal solitude that, I suspect, could change the world, improve our schools, dethrone corruption, feed small nations. Though paradoxical, I don’t think it is contradictory to believe that like-minded people can work together in their solitude to make great changes. We have seen, in our history, non-violent non-compliance move mountains. It would be folly, I think, to not give similar credit to the spirit of autonomous community and to believe that it might not be able to accomplish a great deal.

The modern world is not completely averse to this idea. I know this because of the Coffee Shop Phenomenon. Sit, for a while, in a local coffee shop: prevailing trend of the 21st century, bankrupter of the caffeine addict, hipster meeting place, tavern of surprisingly stagnant air. But sit for a while and you will notice a pattern, an ebb and flow, a polite and friendly aloofness between the other sitters and drinkers. Jazz aficionados, free Wi-Fi rovers, small decaf pumpkin spice latte light whip whole milk (did she really just order that?!) sippers, they (we) sit working fervently on things much less important than they seem, hearing the muses speak through the whirring of the coffee bean grinders, being much less productive than we could be if we were at home, or much more productive, but much poorer than if we had just made our own pot of coffee. We sit in communal silence, save for the rare few – the random coffee shop socialites, which are a strange and wonderful breed of their own. And we take inspiration, we pull ideas from thin air, we finally, for just a moment, r-e-l-a-x in the bustling, shared solitude. I read once, on the wall of the Starbuck’s in the Marina, sitting at a table with my journal, in the middle of a half dozen students, a couple businessmen, and a pregnant mother the words: “Speak softly, people will listen. Take your time, the world will wait.” And though we did not talk, we all hoped that it was true. And so I know that the value of communal solitude is not lost on our society, only a minority in a perpetually interfacing world. Which is fine. Because it can get along fine on its own, along with all the others, like-minded, getting along, also, on their own. And when something like the village harvest program, or a community garden plot solves the waste and hunger problems of our country’s urban populations, you know right where I will be: sitting up somewhere in someone else’s tree picking oranges with a bunch of people I don’t know.

-R.E.A.

*The Tuft of Flowers

By Robert Frost

I went to turn the grass once after one

Who mowed it in the dew before the sun.

The dew was gone that made his blade so keen

Before I came to view the levelled scene.

I looked for him behind an isle of trees;

I listened for his whetstone on the breeze.

But he had gone his way, the grass all mown,

And I must be, as he had been,—alone,

As all must be,' I said within my heart,

Whether they work together or apart.'

But as I said it, swift there passed me by

On noiseless wing a 'wildered butterfly,

Seeking with memories grown dim o'er night

Some resting flower of yesterday's delight.

And once I marked his flight go round and round,

As where some flower lay withering on the ground.

And then he flew as far as eye could see,

And then on tremulous wing came back to me.

I thought of questions that have no reply,

And would have turned to toss the grass to dry;

But he turned first, and led my eye to look

At a tall tuft of flowers beside a brook,

A leaping tongue of bloom the scythe had spared

Beside a reedy brook the scythe had bared.

I left my place to know them by their name,

Finding them butterfly weed when I came.

The mower in the dew had loved them thus,

By leaving them to flourish, not for us,

Nor yet to draw one thought of ours to him.

But from sheer morning gladness at the brim.

The butterfly and I had lit upon,

Nevertheless, a message from the dawn,

That made me hear the wakening birds around,

And hear his long scythe whispering to the ground,

And feel a spirit kindred to my own;

So that henceforth I worked no more alone;

But glad with him, I worked as with his aid,

And weary, sought at noon with him the shade;

And dreaming, as it were, held brotherly speech

With one whose thought I had not hoped to reach.

Men work together,' I told him from the heart,

Whether they work together or apart.'