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
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