Global Warming

I just dropped my oldest daughter at the bus stop at the end of our farm lane, along with the garbage and recycling. While driving back, I was reflecting on the fog, and remembered the date. Today is the last day of November. It's 56° already this morning, at 6:30 am. The temperature will be in the 60's again today, as it's been all week.

Who said there's no global warming?

Please watch An Inconvenient Truth. It's out on DVD, and we need to hear the important message over and over again.

Then go to http://www.climatecrisis.net/ and click on Take Action, on the right hand side.

Way in the World

Wait.
This blessing does not require that you close your eyes or bow your heads.
I ask that you keep your eyes open, your head up.
Listen.
The finest blessing a meal can have is great companionship.
Look around this room. Take notice of those who sit with you.
Look around you. Look at these men and women.
Consider who they are, what they have done, and what they stand for.
Consider that you are not alone on your Way in the world.
Consider that you have the honor to break bread with such as these.
Look.
And know that this meal and each of us is abundantly blessed.
Amen.
~Robert Fulgham

This weekend, I’ve had a few people call me out of the blue, that I haven’t heard from in many months. I’m not sure how I feel about it.

I realized this morning, as I was meditating over my morning coffee, that I still harbor negative feelings about losing my last job. I just wrote to a friend that I felt as though I left tarred and feathered. I hadn’t understood that feeling until the very moment that the words flowed out of my fingers onto the screen. Now I feel the need to explore those feelings further.

What does it mean, to leave feeling tarred and feathered? Why did I feel that way, and why do those feelings still persist, more than half a year later?

I think, foremost, it was because I left so quickly, so abruptly, that there was no time for closure. I didn’t really have a chance to say goodbye. My goodbye service was also the congregation’s goodbye for the summer service, so everyone had lots more people to acknowledge. And, because it all happened so quickly, it was almost as though I left under a cloud. Did they all wonder why it happened so quickly? Did they wonder if I had done something dishonest and nasty; some secret shameful thing that would necessitate running me out of town that quickly?

It felt to me as though people were afraid to talk to me. So very many people never even said goodbye; I guess I’ll never know why. Were they sorry? Were they angry at me, that I didn’t live up to expectations and ruined all their plans? Were they embarrassed at how everything was handled? Did they just not know what to say to me, and therefore said nothing? I guess I’ll never know.

I also realized this morning that I wasn’t allowed to say goodbye to them. I never had a chance to tell all those amazing people how much they meant to me, how much I enjoyed working with them for those two years, how much I learned from them, how they touched my life in so many wonderful ways. I don’t know why I wasn’t given the chance to speak at the service to say goodbye, and I was still so stunned, so in shock, that I didn’t think to question that decision, didn’t think to ask for some time. Now I’m sorry. I would have liked to have told them how much I loved them, how I valued my time with them, and how sorry I was to be leaving them.

In my quest to live in the present, I ponder how I can release these questions; release the feelings of sorrow and dismay that have bubbled up in me this morning.

Perhaps the writing down of these feelings will do it. Perhaps the tears that have slowly trickled into my coffee have carried the last negative emotions with them, and I can be free finally to just remember with gladness in my heart my time spent there.

I will consider the men and women, boys and girls, with whom I sat in companionship, and be grateful for knowing them. I will think about who they are, what they have done, and what they stand for. I will remember that I am not alone on my Way in the world. I will know that I had the honor to break bread with such as these, and that I was abundantly blessed.

Thank you.

Nightmares

I woke up this morning in a cold sweat, from the worst nightmare I’ve had in more years than I care to remember.

It started with me flunking a test. Yes, that’s right, a glaring big “F” at the top of my test. I burst into tears in my dream, and my professor (who is not an IRL professor) came to ask what happened, that my work was not up to my usual standard of work. I explained that I ran out of time. The dream morphed, as they all do, and I was explaining about test-taking strategies, how I know that I should answer the easiest questions first, but somehow I got caught up in the most difficult question first and that’s why I ended up with so many unanswered questions. I really did know all this material. The professor offered to let me retake the exam orally that afternoon, and I gratefully accepted.

The dream morphed again, and I was sitting in my car in a parking lot, reviewing my notes just prior to taking the oral exam. I looked up and noticed a suspicious-looking person walking through the parking lot with a little girl. The parking lot had morphed from the bucolic parking lot of my IRL University to what looked like an inner-city lot, and I realized that I had the passenger door open and unlocked, as well as my driver side door. I couldn’t reach the door to shut it by leaning across the front seat, so I jumped up and ran around the car to shut the passenger side door, managed to run back around to my seat and leap in, but didn’t get the doors locked.

Much to my horror, the creepy man reached in the back door, and the little girl was magically being shoved in with her booster car seat, next to my own two girls. S. was shoved into the middle, M. on the right side, and this little girl was being shoved into the left side, and the guy was threatening me to let them both in.

The dream morphed again. Somehow the little girl was gone, and I had slammed the car into reverse, trying to back away from this nightmare guy. But he was suddenly keeping pace with me from his car, reaching through the door, trying to rip S. out of the car. Luckily, there were no cars behind us, and we could just fly backwards without anything to crash into. I was screaming at S., “Get your seatbelt on, do you have your seatbelt on? I’m going to slam on my brakes, I don’t want you to fall out!” when I woke up in a cold sweat.

I can’t shake the dread in my heart. Ironically, I spent the evening last night at a friend’s house for Thanksgiving, talking about Theta therapy, past lives, reincarnation, and living in the moment with a very interesting gentleman. The entire conversation was fascinating, and he gave me a good tool for helping me remember to live in the present. He recommended that when I realize that I’m caught up in the worrying and fretting ego mind, that I realize that it is just busy chatter and sit back and consciously observe the chatter in my mind carrying on with itself.

So I am sitting here this morning, trying very hard to observe the nervous chatter. “Worry about finishing the year well. Worry about my children and their safety. Worry, fret, fret, worry.”

Deep breathe. Observe the chatter without reacting. Go ahead and feel the fear; that’s the essential part of myself. Just sit and feel the fear.

Fear is just too damned difficult to feel without reacting to it. So I’m sitting here, writing it all out, hoping that the simple act of writing it all down will allow that dream to release me, or allow me to release the dream and the fear that it induced.

chatter … fret … chatter … worry … chatter …

Holding on to beliefs limits our experience of life. That doesn't mean that beliefs or opinions or ideas are a problem. It's the stubborn attitude of having to have things be a particular way, grasping on to our beliefs and opinions, that causes the problems. Using your belief system this way creates a situation in which you choose to be blind instead of being able to see, to be deaf instead of being able to hear, to be dead rather than alive, asleep rather than awake.

As people who want to live a good, full, unrestricted, adventurous, real kind of life, there is concrete instruction we can follow: see what is. When you catch yourself grasping at beliefs or thoughts, just see what is. Without calling your belief right or wrong, acknowledge it. See it clearly without judgment and let it go. Come back to the present moment. From now until the moment of your death, you could do this.
~ Pema Chodron, Comfortable with Uncertainty, p. 112.

Thinking about Education

Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.
~ W. B. Yeats

I’m taking a break from researching Language Arts Core Curriculum Content Standards, and thinking about how to make education fun. In today’s schools, the odds are against teachers accomplishing that goal. Instead, they are spending untold hours trying to figure out how to help children learn in spite of looming NCLB high-stakes testing, how to continue to be creative in the face of schools losing funding.

Kindergarten has become a place of high stakes academics. Our poor five year olds can forget about learning how to cooperate, share, take turns, and all the other wonderful concepts we used to be able to teach them that Robert Fulgham wrote about in his book All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. Instead, they are busy memorizing the spelling of 500 sight words. Third graders are learning to cope with mean, median, and mode; concepts I think I learned first in high school.

In my literacy class, I am working on a fun way to introduce a novel to fifth graders in a shared reading class. Not so easy; fifth graders have learned to be rather blasé about fun. It’s not cool any more to have fun, so as a teacher, I’ll need to work extra hard to make it happened for them, to help them retain or regain their love of knowledge.

In my Effective Schools, Effective Teaching class, I am working on an integrated micro-teaching unit and lesson plans with a small team of classmates. This is Junior High level, and we’re choosing to produce a newsletter on “It’s Your Planet!” I’m working as a Language Arts teacher because we didn’t have anyone to take that role. We’re all being certified for different subjects; none for Language Arts. Since reading and writing are both loves of mine, I happily took on the role, and have been having fun working on a plan for this unit lesson.

Much to my surprise, after meeting with my advisor this week, I might qualify for a Language Arts middle school subject area specialization, as well as Social Studies. It all depends on if the state will accept two communications classes. It says on the website that it won’t accept Communications credits or Theater credits, but then later says classes in departments that aren’t English might qualify. So would a course in Folklore qualify? Would a course in Introduction to Speech count? Folklore sure seems to me to be a course in literature, doesn’t it? And why would speech not count? Don’t all students need to be proficient in oral speaking? Well, a bureaucrat will make a decision, and I have no control over that decision, so I’ll register for the Praxis exam, and take the test, and if the state DOE accepts the credits, they do. If they don’t, I guess if I’m offered a position as a middle school English teacher, I’ll have to take two courses lickety split in my first year of work in order to gain the full credentials!

Pondering how I will find my first teaching position reminds me it won’t happen unless I manage to pass all my courses this semester, so I’m headed back to looking at Language Arts Curriculum Standards, and devising lesson plans for interviewing, desktop publishing, and journalism, and global warming. I’m thinking hard about how to make lessons interesting and inspiring for students. I’m thinking hard about how to keep everyone in the class involved, including the at-risk students and the students with IEPs. I’m pondering how our children might be curious enough about global warming to get involved, even as young students, in creating change in our government.

Field Work Finished!

I am finished my field work!!!

It feels like a job well done. This afternoon, the children in the class all presented me with pictures and note that they drew and composed themselves, and so many of them told me they would miss me, or they loved me. I had a difficult time not crying; they were so sweet!

Tomorrow, besides getting some work done for my Tuesday night class, I will be TAKING a NAP!!! That will feel so good. For the last three weeks, I essentially had two full-time jobs, plus single-mommyhood. It was an extreme endurance chapter in my life, and I survived, and even had fun!

I will miss those little kiddies. They were all hoping I’d come back to the school to be their teacher. That would be nice, actually. I have to make sure to write a nice thank you note to the principal.

Enter the day invigorated with the essence of possibility, go through it energized with a sense of purpose and joy and end it with the serenity of completion.
~ Darina Stoyanova

Be still!

I’ve just ended week two of my three-week field experience, working with first graders in a public school. It’s a diverse school, I like that. It’s also a school with quite a few at risk children. I’m sad about that.

This week, in practice for my soon-to-be “official lesson taught in front of an official field observer”, I worked with the children for two days on projects for Day of the Dead. On Wednesday, we read a book about how families celebrate Day of the Dead, and sculpted sugar skulls. On Thursday, we had pan de muerto (made by hand by me!) and painted our skulls with colored decorator frosting, and read another book about a little girl who remembers her grandmother during Los Dias de los Muertos.

My own daughters have had their hands in muck since they first started reaching for food. I have lots of photos of mashed potato smeared faces, applesauce covered hair, mushed banana facial masks, and avocado hair treatments. Eventually they graduated to homemade play dough, then sculpting clay, and the occasional mud pie thrown in! They are skilled at wielding tools to help them sculpt, and can roll a wicked mean ball in seconds flat. They still make mud pies and other messy concoctions, too.

The children in my field experience school, on the other hand, were rather helpless about how to proceed with their skulls. I had shown them, modeling the needed motions, how to roll a ball, how to pinch the chin, and how to use a toothpick or fingertip to press in hollows for eyes, nose, and teeth. We had a real human skeleton hanging in the room for a model. After we passed out the materials and I told them to proceed with their edible sugar clay, far too many children in the class begged us to help, to do it for them. Some children didn’t even know how to roll a ball. They denigrated their own work, they cried because they couldn’t make their efforts look like mine or their neighbors, they whined and moaned through the entire project.

The children did all eventually make their skulls. And they were all beautiful, of course! And when they painted the skulls the next day, those were beautiful, too! They all took their skulls home, I hope to proudly show them off to their families before starting to nibble on them! And I was left feeling sad for all the children in the world who haven’t been allowed to mush bananas in their hair as babies, who haven’t been able to use play dough, who haven’t been praised for their art work attempts.

Children are such beautiful innocent creatures. It breaks my heart to see them held back from living out their potential. It makes me grateful that I have chosen a career that will give one small handful of them some hope each year. It makes me grateful to my own parents for giving me such a gentle kind encouraged start to my life. It makes me grateful to be able to provide that kind of support and start for my own daughters.

I sit in the stillness of my house this morning, sinking into the quiet. I sit, thinking of who I was, who I am, who I might be. I sink further into the quiet, to be the unthinkable one I do not know.

May we all become the unthinkable ones we do not know. Especially those children at Merriam Avenue School.

Be still!
Listen to the stones of the wall.
Be silent, they try
To speak your
Name.
Listen
To the living walls.
Who are you? Whose
Silence are you?

Who (be quiet)
Are you (as these stones
Are quiet). Do not
Think of what you are
Still less of
What you may one day be.
Rather
Be what you are (but who?) be
The unthinkable one
You do not know.

O be still, while
You are still alive,
And all things live around you
Speaking (I do not hear)
To your own being,
Speaking by the Unknown
That is in you and in themselves.
I will try, like them
To be my own silence:

And this is difficult. The whole
World is secretly on fire. The stones
Burn, even the stones
They burn me. How can a man be still or
Listen to all things burning?
How can he dare
To sit with them when
All their silence
Is on fire?

~~~Thomas Merton
The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton, 1977, New York: New Directions, p. 281

Bliss!

Any world is a valid world if it's alive. The thing to do is to bring life to it, and the only way to do that is to find in your own case where the life is and become alive yourself.

--Campbell, The Power of Myth, p. 183-184

Bliss has been on my mind quite a bit for the last few weeks. Primarily because my covenant group is discussing bliss as defined by Joseph Campbell, and also because I spent the last three weeks in a classroom, observing and working with first-graders, as part of my field experience for grad school.

Bliss is a funny idea to think about.

"Our bliss is the what, where, and when that we feel most authentic, most ourselves. What is your bliss? It is what you are doing when time drops away and you reside in an eternal now."

according to an essay by Bodhi Bliss.

Have you ever been in that zone? That timeless and perfect endless instant when all is right? It is such an amazing place to be, and until recently, I considered myself fortunate to find that moment, in rare and precious instances. They felt few and far between.

The idea that we can actively pursue those moments by finding our bliss is a new idea for me. How amazing that I have managed to live my life that way, anyway. I have always sought to live life in a way that feels positive, feels right. It’s a way of choosing authenticity, and the older I grow, the less patient I am with people who choose to live inauthentically, dishonest to themselves and everyone around them.

Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi says,

“What is common to such moments is that consciousness is full of experiences, and these experiences are in harmony with each other. Contrary to what happens all too often in everyday life, in moments such as these, what we feel, what we wish, and what we think are in harmony.”

Ironically, losing a job, a position that I loved in the beginning that became sheer torture by the end, was my first step into what I hope and believe is a new place of bliss for me.

Last night, in my class on Effective Teaching, Effective Schools, we did mini group presentations on the theories of assessment. By the luck of the draw, literally because I was in the right seat in a count to go the right group, I was in the small group that presented a section on student-led assessments. And I’m the only person in class who has been able to experience student-led assessments in real life, at my children’s school, with assessments led by my own children. I could show a real example, bring the concept home to the other students, and make an idea live and exciting for them. Perhaps this class will go out to teaching jobs convinced of at least one new idea that they will try to implement that will make education better for small groups of students, a little at a time.

After the class, a fellow classmate walked up to thank me for everything I shared in class that day. He surprised me; I hadn’t done that much sharing, I try to not speak too much in that class in order to allow everyone a chance to participate. So I wait, and only participate when I see that no one else is ready, or when I have something to share that I am so overwhelmingly passionate about that I cannot in good conscience stay silent. I find myself challenging assumptions a lot in this class, and I worry that I am offending people, making them angry, or shutting them down in defensiveness so that they can’t hear another idea, another way, another alternative.

It was with a great sense of gratitude that I heard this gentleman from class thank me for my participation in class, and observe casually that some school would be lucky to have me as a teacher. It’s the third time someone from that class has made that observation, and each time it blows me away, because I’m not expecting it. I’m often leaving shaking my head, wondering if I’ll survive this grand educational experiment, if I’ll survive in the world of education, if there’s any way I can make a difference in the face of bureaucracy and ill-informed laws on education that hamper schools and teachers from really doing their job of educating children.

Following bliss … that timeless moment when we are not aware of the passage of time, when we enter that zone of perfect wonder and rightness. It feels so good to be there, and the further I go in my education, in my goal to become a teacher, the more I find myself in bliss.

I am grateful that I have had a path open for me that allows me to take those steps into bliss. I am grateful that I have been given another opportunity to follow a dream and make it reality. I am grateful to have the support of friends and family along the way, cheering me on, sympathizing with my frustrations, congratulating me on my successes.