BirdSalad

Academic Panic

2009-01-28T09:38:00.003-05:00

I am entering the realm of mom with legal adult offspring in four short months. I am so proud of my young woman, but it's hard to believe how quickly these years have flown by.

Last night, as I was about to pass out into total delirium (I've had a minor cold and am my normal sleep deprived self in spite of trying to baby myself so I can kick this runny nose and general foggy feeling) theater-girl came to ask for some help with her math homework. Thanks to NCLB (for those of you out of the US, that's the notorious "No Child Left Behind" laws that have come close to destroying our school systems due to mandatory standardized testing that makes administrators forget we are teaching children) she will be taking her HSPA exam in a month or two. HSPA is the exam given in NJ during Junior (2nd to last) year, and if you don't pass it, you don't graduate. It's at a basic high school math level; not all students are expected to work at college prep level.

Her math teacher (theater-girl is in Honors Algebra 2) started a review with them, and she was all frantic because she couldn't remember how to do some problems. Word problems, pretty much elementary math, but she was trying too hard to figure out some complicated algebraic formulas for problems that I'm pretty sure were meant to show that you could figure out how to solve a mathematical problem. They required (again, my interpretation) some estimating and some iterations of calculations to find solutions. One problem even had a grid for students to fill out to help them calculate the answer.

She knows how to do this math, now she's over-guessing herself and trying to find complex ways to solve basic problems. And she's SOOOO worried about passing this exam, because she heard the teacher say that if any students did not pass their GEPAs (the old 8th grade standardized exam), which theater-girl did not pass because the charter school wasn't teaching any math for the early years, then she might be in trouble. I'm not sure that's what the teacher meant, and theater-girl is forgetting that she got an A in her freshman HSPA prep course, which evaluates students and helps the high school place students in remedial math classes if necessary.

Today, since I'm home anyway, I'll be sending an email to her math teacher to let her know how panicked theater-girl is about the exam, and asking if she can send some practice problems home each week to help theater-girl prep and reassure herself.

I'm so proud to have daughters that care about their homework and doing well in school and who take pride in their work. It's balm for my soul, working, as I do, in a school system where lack of caring about all things academic is endemic with the students in the school. But holey moley, I really wish I had a panacea to help her calm down when she gets frantic. Reassuring her that I know she will do fine just makes her more hysterical and she screams, "You don't understand, Mom!!!"

Hmm ... the act of writing this has made me think about my basic volunteer counselor training. Maybe I just need to give her more empathy, just reassure her that I know how scary and overwhelming this is. I'm forgetting to do that.

Announcing your place in the family of things

2008-04-22T01:11:00.002-04:00

…..Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting--
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
~ Mary Oliver

I just finished my yearly ritual of hiding eggs. It's bitterly cold out there, ten degrees below freezing, and not one sprig of green on our farm even though the forced forsythia is blooming away in our kitchen.

This morning, I watched birds building a nest in the tree hole ten feet away from my bedroom window, far above the muddy brown spring lawn. When I wake up, I can see straight into that hole – where owls visit, squirrels search for storage, birds nest, and raccoons raid for anything they can find to make a meal. The raccoons are difficult to watch. When my daughters catch them in the act of climbing toward the nesting hole, the girls run flying out the front door with pots and pans and metal spoons, beating desperately to save the nestlings about to make a fine raccoon dinner. It hasn’t worked yet. The raccoons just blink down at them before finishing climbing up toward the tree hole. Even frantic thrusts with brooms don’t dislodge them from the tree; spring raccoons are hungry and more stubborn than the most passionately caring young girls.

We don't often have the vernal equinox and Easter on the same weekend, so it’s unusual to be hiding eggs in a sere landscape of unrelenting tan and brown. Normally, the yellow eggs hide in the forsythia, the blue eggs nestle among the first hyacinth, and the green eggs lie anywhere the spring onion grass is tall enough to hide them from casual observation. This year required some creativity – thankfully, the hemlocks had branches thick enough to hide the eggs up high where they were hard to find. Any trees with split trunks made good hiding places as well, especially if the splits were higher than eye-level for my youngest daughter.

I love this time of year, as the earth wakes up from her long hard freeze. Even though my sea of mud is frozen solid this morning, the sun streaming into my office is warm, and the air is alive with bird calls that we don't hear all winter. It was good to be alive this morning, even in the freezing cold.

---

Twice a year, we have an annual reunion of migrating geese. We wake up to the welcome morning chorus of twilight cacophony in the spring; welcome because the returning geese mean that the weather is changing. The days are longer, the sun is warmer, and even with ice on the pond and temperatures still below freezing, we know that spring can’t be far behind.

The fall reunion is warmly greeted, too. The appearance of the geese heralds a welcome relief from the summer heat as we head into autumn. The wild cry of the annual migration south is an echo of the wild cry in all of us, demanding that we remember our place in the circle of life.
Until we moved to the farm, I didn’t know that geese never sleep. The first year we spent here, we were sleepless for a good portion of the spring. Like wild children at a slumber party, they never stop their chatter and fussing. On those noisy nights, as the geese pass through town on their way north again, I am grateful to have a bedroom on the far side of the house from the pond.

On the evenings when I can walk out into the dark, to gaze at the full moon reflecting in a long shining path across the pond, sipping my tea slowly and reflecting on the day or planning the next day’s relentless endless list of tasks that can never be fully accomplished, I am grateful for the ceaseless chatter of the geese. That wild cry pulls at my heart, draws my attention away from the never-ending lists, and returns me to that endless place of rest that knows no time. Perhaps that’s why nature allows the geese to party all night … it’s her last chance to capture our attention, in the still of the night when no other sounds echo through our world. We listen to their wild cries, our imagination is captured, and we once again find our place in the world, unencumbered by the weights of caring and lists.

The Torture of Sisyphus

2008-04-22T01:09:00.002-04:00

Living life as a full-time student at 51 years old has been challenging. There is never enough time in the day to complete all my school work, finish all my grading, help my children with their homework, and still have time to make half-hearted attempts to bring some order to the chaos that my life and home have become.

Simone de Beauvoir said, “Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition: the clean becomes soiled, the soiled is made clean, over and over, day after day,” and I barely try any more. I helplessly hope that my daughters won’t need endless years of therapy for the dirty jeans worn to school two days running, or the dust bunnies accumulating above our ankles, or the pasta and pizza we’ve eaten for the fifth day in a row. The youngest one rather enjoys that I never seem to remember to remind her to take showers. She doesn’t care that her hair looks more like strands of limp seaweed than human locks; I have learned to let go of my ideals and accept her feelings on comfortable grooming.

There are times when the chaos becomes so blatantly beyond reason that my psyche begins to unravel. It is at those points, when I am grasping for sanity and feeling it slowly slip through my fingers, that the farm will send a small gentle reminder, a hint of the sublime unknowable wonder in life, and I can stop my world, step off for a few moments to be still in myself and at one with the world around me. The gentle reminder becomes a grounding and centering that fills my soul with a renewed sense of self, remembering my place in the world.

One of those moments came to me as I sat in the car, working up the energy for what had become the Herculean effort needed to open the car door and walk into the house. It had been raining for weeks, the house was swimming in a sea of mud, and the sump pump was barely keeping up with the cataracts of water streaming through my basement. As I sat wondering where I would find enough strength to finish the long day ahead of me, a sudden flash of color, almost unnoticed, gently tugged at my attention. It was a bluebird, rosy-bellied and gorgeous, with brilliant blue back and tail, feeding on the newly sun-warmed insects beginning to emerge from the long wet winter.

As I sat watching, the bluebird was joined by a merry fat robin. Plump brown wrens joined the feeding flock. A few minutes later, a brilliant blue jay appeared above the throng of birds feeding in front of my car. I sat mesmerized for many long minutes, until the birds had their fill and all finally fluttered away. It was a breathtaking moment of spring.

Rainer Maria Rilke said, “Spring has returned. The Earth is like a child that knows poems.” I think often about what that means – a child that knows poems. As a child, I never liked poetry; I found it difficult to understand, long-winded, lacking in personal meaning. I began to understand poetry when someone introduced me to Mary Oliver, whose visual imagery captured my imagination and sent it soaring with the wild geese I read about in my first Oliver poem. I found the world offering itself to my imagination, calling to me “like the wild geese, harsh and exciting,” and I began to devour poetry. Since then, I have had the privilege of introducing many children to exciting poetry that fires their imaginations and calls them to the wild places within themselves. I think there can be no greater gift than to hear a child read her first poems to you, full of rich imagery, pulling at your despair and showing you your place in the family of things.

And so, like the child that knows poems, I slid from the car, rejuvenated by the avian dance of spring, opening my heart to the possibilities, finding once again within myself the pure joy and hope that offer relief from chaos -- my psyche made whole again.

Spring has arrived, and with it, a renewal of hope.

Lessons Learned

2008-04-22T01:07:00.000-04:00

Sometimes the lessons learned from nature are profound enough to take my breath away. I find I am often an unwilling participant in those lessons, which frequently happen at the most inopportune times. Maybe that’s the point? Those are the perfect moments to learn a lesson, when we think we have neither the time nor inclination to learn a life lesson, thank you very much.

A recent lesson was due to a flock of Common Grackles … a really large flock of grackles, that just happened to be crossing the farm lane that leads from our house to the road. I was driving my kids to school and me to work, already running late. The birds created a most unwelcome and unexpected delay.

Grackles, evidently, like to make short flights of a few yards while feeding on fields in a large flock. They peck the ground; they rise up in a small cloud, and move past the other small groups to the next clear spot. Then the next small group moves on a few more yards. I drove up to the grackles just as the earliest small groups started to cross our lane. For the first few moments, my daughters and I enjoyed watching the small groups rise up in waves and move to a clear spot to start feeding again. We were mesmerized until I looked out over the field and realized just how many thousands of birds still had to cross.

I was already late. I had an important meeting. I didn’t have time for this distraction right now. Maybe I could just drive through; they’d only just started crossing the lane…

It took only a few seconds of internal anguish to decide that we were stuck. I risked running over too many birds if I tried to drive through them. So I put my car in park, and watched, impatiently consulting my watch many times, half-hoping that clock-watching would make it all happen faster. You know the old adage that a watched pot never boils, right? Well, watched grackles don’t feed any faster, either.

The ballet of the waves of grackles, perfectly timed to avoid each other, was awesome in its majesty. My reaction was visceral, remembering the Hitchcock movie The Birds, wondering if that many birds could crack my windshield. But no birds hit my car windows, even though it was difficult at times to see past the waves of birds flying overhead. I remembered reading accounts of how North America looked before European settlers arrived; how thick the woods were, how the sky would darken with the flight of birds in migration. I started paying attention to the details of the grackles in their single-minded pursuit of food.

As if by magic, my stressed soul calmed, and the day became richer and more tranquil. I was able to slow down and enjoy the moment, relax and stop stressing about the endlessly long list of to-do’s that never seemed to get shorter, to cultivate the Zen moments we need in our lives. They are so rare and precious, the eternal moments of time when I can forget about everything except the immediate present.

If not for the enforced sitting because of the passage of birds, I would have missed these moments. A few minutes earlier, and I would have missed the entire grackle ballet and driven away stressed and untouched by the lesson of the grackles. A few minutes later, and I would have missed the ballet and been that much more pressed for time, more fully stressed and less able to cope with the myriad details of a frenetic fast-paced life. The timing was perfect, nature had spoken, and I had been ready to listen.

Living on the farm has been magical for our family. We never know what unexpected gift will fly up in front of us, slowing down our day, allowing us to surrender with grace to the slower rhythms of nature. Grackle ballets appear as if by enchantment, soothing our frazzled souls. Life is good on the farm.

Appearing for a breathe of air!

2008-04-22T01:04:00.003-04:00

I haven't had time to blog in such a long time - carrying 12 credits plus teaching 12 credits makes it challenging to find time for anything! The next three blog entries are from my English class - a small portion of what one day might be my memoirs! My professor asked me to try to get them published; this is the next best thing!
Robin

Blessed Oestara

2008-03-23T08:12:00.003-04:00

I just finished my yearly ritual of hiding eggs. It's bitterly cold out there, and not one sprig of green on our farm, even though the forsythia we forced is blooming away in our kitchen.

Last week, returning from my Praxis Exam, while sitting in my car finishing a phone conversation with an old friend, I watched a bluebird, a robin, a blue jay, and numerous wrens all feeding on insects right in front of me. It was a breathtaking moment of spring.

This morning, I watched some birds building a nest in the tree hole ten feet away from my bedroom window. When I wake up, I gaze straight into that hole; I have seen owls visiting, raccoons raiding, squirrels storing, and many birds nesting.

We don't often have Oestara and Easter on the same weekend, so I wanted to wish all of you, no matter what you worship or don't, a blessed spring (blessed= happiness and good fortune). I love this time of year, as the earth wakes up from her long hard freeze. Even though my sea of mud is frozen solid this morning, the sun streaming into my office is warm, and the air is alive with bird calls that we don't hear all winter. It was good to be alive this morning, even in the freezing cold.

“Spring has returned. The Earth is like a child that knows poems.”
~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Surviving a New Job and a Shakespeare Intensive

2008-01-25T15:25:00.000-05:00

For approximately the last three weeks, I have been pondering why it is that I feel compelled to make work for myself, to never allow myself down time.

I was looking forward to a winter break from school. This last semester was hard – I’m tired, chronically sleep-deprived, and my poor daughters are probably wondering if I’ve abandoned them permanently. A solid month of no classes would have been good for me, given me a chance to catch up on sleep, laundry, housecleaning, remember what my daughters look like, all the things I’ve been ignoring since going back to school.

Instead, after a conversation with a professor, I decided to sign up for a winter session course so that I could apply for Middle School certification in Language Arts. Three credits in three weeks. Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Don’t get me wrong, I adore Shakespeare, and have been enjoying the chance to do an in-depth study of a play I was less familiar with. I’ve loved the work, the stretching of the mind, the exposure to a couple strange movies that I would never have seen otherwise.

Then half way through the first week of my Shakespeare Intensive, I received a phone call for a job interview, and got the job – teaching computer classes as the local community college. I love that work, too. The students are nice, the lessons are the kind of teaching work I want to do, so the experience will go a long way to helping me find a full-time teaching job. I’m having fun, I’m feeling useful, and the extra pay is really helpful even if it isn’t enough to live on.

But the combination of a 3-week intensive, plus a new job requiring syllabus writing, reading four textbooks, learning a new online blackboard system so I could set up for class, all amounted to overload, even for a work-a-holic. I’m living extreme life right now.

At the end of the week, as I take a break from writing my final Shakespeare paper, I am pondering while sipping my cup of hot chai latte. I wonder, what propels a person to work when a break is well deserved? What unconscious drive compels me to try harder, work harder, keep moving forward? What kind of Sisyphus-complex am I suffering from? Maybe it’s all a plot from my subconscious mind to successfully avoid cleaning my house!

“Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition: the clean becomes soiled, the soiled is made clean, over and over, day after day”
~ Simone de Beauvoir

Silly Horoscope Meme Thing

2008-01-07T15:12:00.000-05:00

For your reading pleasure - an interesting and somewhat bizarre meme that my friend Suna posted. It came from Barb Cooper's wonderful blog. I love Barb's description:

Pay no attention to the fact that they seem to have been randomly generated by some astrological parody engine or a house elf or something.

Here's my response, for January.

JANUARY:
Stubborn and hard-hearted.

This would especially be true when I am yelling at my children after they did something wrong. At least according to them. I am a serious contender for the worst-mommy-in-the-world, quite frequently.

Ambitious and serious.

Uh-huh. That’s why I went back to school and massively back into debt as a single mom to learn how to be a teacher in a public school, working for peanuts.

Loves to teach and be taught.

Well, ok, maybe this is why I went back to school.

Always looking at people's flaws and weaknesses.

This is not why I want to become a teacher, and I spend all my waking hours most definitively not looking for flaws in people. However, that said, I do not hesitate to speak up when I do see weaknesses and flaws, and try to always offer suggestions for improvement. This would be for institutions, though, not people.

Likes to criticize.

Well, I guess the last comment said it all. I try to criticize productively and kindly, if that helps.

Hardworking and productive.

No arguments there. My children will happily attest to how unavailable I am due to the amount of time I spend on the computer (which translates to how much I’m working on school work). The upside to all of that is that my children are growing up with a model of how working hard in school leads to happiness and success. I hope. If I find a job.

Smart, neat and organized.

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Except for the smart part. Single moms in school and working do not have time to be neat and organized.

Sensitive and has deep thoughts.

Yep, that’s why I’m reduced to responding to inane memes before blogger shuts down my blog due to neglect.

Knows how to make others happy.

Not right now. I’ve spent far too long ignoring my friends while I cope with school and work. I hope they all forgive me.

Quiet unless excited or tensed.

Well, ok. One item I might agree with.

Rather reserved.

One of the most important ideas that I am trying to help my children understand is that life must be lived … that we need to throw ourselves into life without worrying about how others think of us … that reserve is for banks, not humans.

Highly attentive.

Not when I’m reading. Again, my children will happily attest to this. Not when I’m in front of my computer, either. (Those two actions kind of go hand-in-hand right now, but my children haven’t figured that out yet.) I prefer to think of it as benign neglect which helps them develop their own creativity!

Resistant to illnesses but prone to colds.

What does this have to do with my birth month, anyway? Did the person who came up with this list really believe that all January babies are more prone to colds? Now that I’m an accomplished user of natural remedies, none of this is true, anyway.

Romantic but has difficulties expressing love.

Nope. If I can’t find a way to say it orally, I usually find a way to say it in writing. Anyway, how could I make others feel happy but not know how to express my love???

Loves children.

Only since I became a mom. That would discount the first two thirds of my life!

Loyal.

Yes.

Has great social abilities yet easily jealous.

No. Really, really no. I don't think I have a jealous bone in my body.

Very stubborn and money cautious.

Again, my children might claim the stubbornness. However, they are more worried about money now that we’re poor than I am.

That was interesting. A bit bizarre. I would truly love to know how this meme originated.

... the best way out is always through

2007-12-14T07:10:00.000-05:00

“… the best way out is always through.”
~ Robert Frost (1874–1963)

Yesterday, several friends wrote in emails about hanging on by their fingernails, barely, feeling as though they were sliding over the cliff despite their most desperate clawing to stay on top of life. They were feeling the effects of their slide in stress reactions, physical effects on their bodies.

The particular friends who wrote are in the middle of job woes. Too little work, one of them, too much work, the other. How ironic that they can’t share the load somehow, evening the balance for both of them.

It’s caused me to reflect on my own sanity, as I finish the semester, and square off to face the mountains of ignored laundry, the bedrooms that look like the aftermath of World War III, and the blessedly clean kitchen, living room, and dining room, thanks to some amazingly kind and generous daughters who took charge last weekend while I had the flu and set them to right.

We have too much to do, too. There’s no time to put up the tree. We have cookies to bake for teachers, presents to make for family and friends, and I need to sort through the boxes that have been delivered in the last two weeks and make sure that I have presents for everyone. The class ring that I bought for my daughter, assuming it would arrive in time for the holidays, I now find out won’t be delivered until February, so I had a last minute scramble for a small present or two for her. I need to make sure I have something for everyone, including my poet child with the early January birthday!

Somehow, except for the physical stresses of sleep deprivation, combined with the constant uncovered hacking and sneezing full in the face by preschoolers, which resulted in a case of the flu this week, I have managed to escape the physical complaints that my friends are experiencing. I spent a few evenings wondering how I’d make it, when too many projects loomed with so little time left. I could have devolved into a puddle of self-recriminating anguish over the lost two hours while I enjoyed a movie with my daughters last week.

Somehow, I have managed to hold onto my sanity. Or, maybe I’ve lost it altogether and just *think* I’m sane … the common definition of insanity, after all, is the belief that one is sane in spite of a clear departure from reality that everyone else sees. Eeek. I hadn’t thought of that until just now, writing these words. Well, I will choose, since I’m questioning now, to believe that the very act of wondering if I have truly and finally gone around the bend validates my very clear and constant hold on reality.

I am crediting my sanity to my fledgling ability to live in the moment. It developed, somehow, in the midst of divorce, job loss, re-entry into the world of non-traditional graduate student, and sheer survival. If I made it through one more day, then I’d done well. I thought only as far as the next step – finish the paragraph, get the laundry load done that was most critical, wash the dishes so we could eat breakfast the next morning. I found, instead, that I have joy, success, love to look back upon, and my hope for tomorrow lies alive and well in my heart.

The best way out is always through … indeed.

For it is life, the very life of life.
In its brief course
Lie all the verities and realities of your existence:
The bliss of growth;
The glory of action;
The splendor of achievement;
For yesterday is but a dream,
And tomorrow is only a vision;
But today, well lived, makes every yesterday
a dream of happiness,
And every tomorrow a vision of hope.
Look well, therefore, to this day.

~ Author Unknown, Sanskrit Proverb

Petty Annoyances

2007-11-26T07:18:00.000-05:00

Drastic and chronic lack of sleep has a habit of creating large emotions from petty annoyances. A perfect example would be the routine closing of my garage door while I’m driving my eldest daughter down to the bus, by the woman who comes to feed the barn cats (not mine) every morning.

Most mornings, I walk to the bus with all my daughters. The eldest is in high school, and we don’t have much private time to talk. I value these quiet times, when she opens up and tells me about her life, her feelings, her concerns, her joys. She’s a morning person, ready to talk as soon as she wakes up; I’m a night person, and usually struggling for alertness through my cup of morning coffee. My silences joined with her alertness lead to openings that perhaps wouldn’t have a chance to come to fruition later in the day when I gear up for the daily whirlwind.

On the rare days that we drive down, it’s almost always because it’s snowing or raining hard enough to make us both miserable. So I drive her down, and we sit for a few minutes while waiting for the bus. I miss the walking those days, since I don’t have time for exercising the rest of the day, and we still get in a little talk during the five minutes or so while we wait for the bus.

I come home in a haze of not-quite-wakefulness, enhanced by the glow of a teenaged sharing, to find that I need to climb out of my car in the pouring rain or blizzard, to open the garage door again. And there goes the magic of my quiet contemplative mood. It takes me hours to regain my equilibrium.

This is a new development. She just started to come feed the cats. She’s a retired woman, given a home by my landlords on a different house on the property while she helps care for her adult daughter struggling with cancer. It was the only way she could move back in-state to help care for her daughter, and my landlords are doing an amazing thing, giving her a place to live in return for feeding the stray cats and barn cats and painting fences. At any other time, I would be filled with compassion for the situation this woman is in.

But on those icy cold mornings, as I plow through the snow, and curse and struggle to heave open the barn door to get my car back inside so it doesn’t layer with two inches of snow before I leave for work, I lose all compassion, all empathy, all peace, and burn with resentment and frustration. Why doesn’t she get it? The door is always closed, I only leave it open when I drive my high school daughter down. She knows what I’m doing; we’ve conversed about it other times as I walk back to the house as she drives up the driveway and she asks what I’ve been doing out and about so early. It’s a really heavy sliding barn door, requiring major heaving effort to open and close the door. I don’t like getting snow and rain down my neck, which is why I left the door open to begin with, so I could just drive right back in and dash for the house.

So why is she compelled to close that door on the mornings that I drive down? Why is she arriving earlier and earlier? She used to come when my younger daughters and I were running around getting them off for the day, getting myself off for the day. She’d park in the driveway so I’d have to wait for her to finish and back out, in order to get out myself. I guess I could be grateful she’s not parking there while we’re rushing out to get the other two on the bus and me to work.

And why is it that such a petty little annoyance can wreak such havoc with my morning, unsettling me to this degree? Where is that calm collectedness that keeps me centered all the rest of the day as life whirls around me and autistic children kick me and job frustrations chip away at my savings and heat spirals out of my leaky old barn house? Why is it so hard to cope with such a tiny thing?

“Be master of your petty annoyances and conserve your energies for the big, worthwhile things. It isn't the mountain ahead that wears you out - it's the grain of sand in your shoe.”
~ Robert Service

Courtesies

2007-11-15T07:22:00.000-05:00

“Courtesies of a small and trivial character are the ones which strike deepest in the grateful and appreciating heart.” ~ Henry Clay (1777-1852), politician and orator

Last night, my eldest daughter and I had an interesting conversation about how to succeed at school. She’s frustrated with one teacher whom she feels plays favorites. I can remember that same feeling, and how horrible it felt. Ironically, it was a teacher teaching the same subject.

I didn’t have many words of advice to give my daughter. It’s a dilemma that I never figured out how to solve when I was in high school, either. All I could do, in the end, was recommend that she be herself, be nice, and ignore the favoritism. If nothing else, she can walk away from the situation knowing she did nothing wrong.

And who knows. Continuing to be straight with this teacher, offering her the same courtesies and acknowledgments that she gives all her other teachers may pay off in the end. Perhaps one small courtesy will strike deep.

Kootchie Koo!

2007-11-13T22:52:00.000-05:00

“At times our own light goes out and is rekindled by a spark from another person. Each of us has cause to think with deep gratitude of those who have lighted the flame within us.”
~ Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965)

Today, I worked with Jake. He is autistic, plus other special needs. He is five and a half. He is finally learning how to use the potty. He is slender, lightening fast, and has better gross motor skills than many nine-year-olds that I know. Jake has very few words, and his ability to communicate is sketchy, at best.

I worked with him at his house this afternoon. We worked on word fluency. He can look at a picture of a ball, and it might take him 10-15 seconds of concentrated effort to pull the word “ball” out of his mind and across his tongue. He might say “throwing” first, because that’s the function he has associated with that item. He might say the color, too, or the shape, or the last noun he named, while struggling to recall and pronounce that nebulous name “ball”.

Jake will scream loudly, like a fire siren, when he can’t think of words to tell you his needs. Or he will hit. Or he will throw himself down on the ground and curl into a ball. Sometimes he will sit and quietly weep.

Jake also has flashes of brilliance. Not intellectual brilliance – the kind of brilliance that lights up his face and explodes my heart with joy. They happen sometimes when he successfully pees on the potty. He looks up, smiles from the depths of his being, and my heart just melts. He knows he’s done something remarkable.

Today, we played tag. It was a strange silly version of tag that perhaps only an autistic child would enjoy. It started after he came downstairs with a pair of socks on, with a hole in the heel of one foot. When I saw him poking at the hole in his heel, I stuck my finger in the hole and said, “kootchie, kootchie, koo!” He shrieked and hid his foot under his other leg.

Part of my challenge as an ABA therapist is to interpret his shrieks, and give him words for communicating. It’s a guessing game at best. Was he shrieking in delight or frustration? I tried, “No tickle, Slaw,” but he didn’t respond. Usually, if I guess a close sentiment, he parrots my words back. Hmmm – he wasn’t minding the tickling. Was he perhaps enjoying the game? I tried again, poking his heel and kootchie koo-ing. He shrieked again, and I said, “More, Slaw!” No response again. But a giant smile this time.

Next thing I knew, we were racing back and forth across the basement floor, with Jake laughing big belly laughs, gales of delight! When I caught up to him, usually when he threw himself headlong onto the bed in the corner of the room, he would wave his feet in my face, and then try to hide the foot with the holey sock before I could poke my finger in again.

When I fell down in exhaustion, I heard some magical words. “Get you!” That was Jake, asking me to chase him again. I told him, “Get me, Slaw!” and he shouted back, “Get me!” So off we raised again, and again, and again, until finally I fell down on the floor again in exhaustion, this time pretending to be asleep.

This time, from across the room, I heard, “Get me, Slaw!” While I snored away, I heard, “Get me, Miss Slaw!” and finally, “Come get me, Miss Slaw!”

That’s a five word sentence! Enunciated correctly, with joy, appropriately used! In Jake’s case, almost miraculous.

As I snored on, still pretending to sleep, I heard, “Wake up! Wake up, Slaw! Come get me, Slaw!” With that, as Sleeping Beauty wakes with a kiss from her prince, so Jake’s words were as kisses to my ears, and off we raced, with Jake shrieking in joy, and my heart singing from a small step toward human contact.

Life can be very good.

Lectio Divina

2007-11-11T22:11:00.000-05:00

“To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best day and night to make you like everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight and never stop fighting.”
~ e. e. cummings

A friend just suggested that perhaps I could use my writing or journaling as my own personal lectio divina tool, to help me find my place in the world. I had to look it up, having no idea what a lectio divina tool might be. The answer I found sounds appealing. I will try a commitment to write every day for the rest of the month, in my own small fashion participating in NaNoWriMo, since I don’t have enough time to try to write 50,000 words this month on top of graduate school and parenting work.

Lectio is reverential listening; listening both in a spirit of silence and of awe. We are listening for the still, small voice … that will speak to us personally - not loudly, but intimately. In lectio we read slowly, attentively, gently listening to hear a word or phrase that is the word for us this day.

Translating that to my writing means that I must enter a place of stillness in my writing, and be open to the words or messages that might come to me. I have often described my writing as an opening, almost a channeling of something outside of myself. When my best writing comes out, I don’t feel in control of it. Rather, I seek to ride the torrent of words that flows through me in the way that a sailor finds the sweet spot in the wind to push her sailboat to the maximum, finding a delicate balance between over-steering and losing the wind or riding so high that the wind flips the boat over.

Once we have found a word or a passage that speaks to us in a personal way, we must take it in and “ruminate” on it. We must take in the words - that is, memorize them - and while gently repeating them to ourselves, allow the words to interact with our thoughts, our hopes, our memories, our desires. This is the second step or stage in lectio divina - meditatio. Through meditatio we allow those words to touch us and affect us at our deepest levels.

I have fallen out of a habit of meditating, lately. I have been busy, thinking, creating, writing, reading, job searching, learning new ABA (Applied Behavior Analysis) techniques, pondering what worked and what didn’t in my work with autistic children. I have been researching for projects, researching for job ideas, thinking hard about where my place is. Perhaps I need to spend more time in reflection and meditation, thinking about the still, small voice that speaks to me.

The third step in lectio divina is oratio - prayer: the offering of parts of ourselves that we have not previously believed wanted. In this we allow the words that we have taken in and on which we are pondering to touch and change our deepest selves. In this oratio, we allow our real selves to be touched and changed by the words.

Perhaps, in taking the time to write regularly, to think deeply about the words I write, and to allow myself to be touched and changed by those words, I will understand the path my life needs to take.

"The secret of success in life is for a man to be ready for his opportunity when it comes."
~ Benjamin Disraeli

Tyranny

2007-11-07T07:07:00.000-05:00

"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."
~ C. S. Lewis, English essayist & juvenile novelist (1898 - 1963)

How ironic, that there is a great movement afoot to ban children and families from viewing the movie "Golden Compass" or reading Philip Pullman's wonderful series, His Dark Materials. I've received emails telling me the book is anti-Christian, that the author, an atheist, is attempting to recruit children to atheism. It's true, Pullman is a self-avowed agnostic (see his website), but I found the series incredibly spiritual and profound in its questions about the meaning of life and how we should aspire to live.

The banning email in question refers to the Narnia series, the great work that C. S. Lewis wrote for children, as an example of what Pullman is trying to destroy. And yet, Lewis abhorred censorship, as evidenced by his quote above.

I plan to watch the movie when it's released. We already own the books, and love them.

Technology and Education

2007-11-02T14:16:00.000-04:00

“It is not the strongest species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change.”
~ Charles Darwin

This semester, I am taking a class called Computers as a Teacher’s Aide. It’s been somewhat interesting.

At the beginning of the class, the professor asked us what would make the class boring for us. I responded by writing that if the class was geared to absolute neophytes in MS Office products, which is what we’re learning about, I would be bored. Sadly, most of the students (most of whom are under 25) are neophytes, and can’t keep up with the projects or lectures in class. Luckily, I learn at least one new thing each class, which keeps my attention engaged enough to be able to stay awake through class. This week, I learned about that cool little marker tool in PowerPoint, that you can use to mark up slides in the middle of a presentation. Never noticed that before.

I’ve been pondering why I am the most technologically literate person in the class, as a 50-year-old returning non-traditional student. I am shocked at how non-proficient the younger students are, since in my family, the younger the sibling, the more technologically proficient we grew to be. I didn’t have computers in the home before I hit young adulthood. My youngest brother grew up with an Apple 2c.

Taking this class has led me on a time-consuming and fascinating path to discovering exactly what is out there on the new internet: a wealth of tools that I never dreamed about, a Pandora’s Box of ways for my children to get themselves in trouble without education and supervision (which NONE of them are receiving at school) and an amazing array of ideas that can revolutionize education.

And what are the teachers that I meet saying about these tools? “Why do we need them? Children learn just fine without them.” or “It’s just too much trouble to learn how to do this.” And our children are merrily marching off to a future that we can’t even begin to dream of, and will work in jobs that haven’t yet been created, doing work that hasn’t yet been invented, using tools that are unimaginable to us today.

Today, I got lost in cyberspace, reading a wiki on education and technology.

Tomorrow, and for the rest of my days as a teacher, I will be thinking about the implications of all the new technology on how I will teach. I am already writing a paper on how to use wikis to facilitate group writing projects.

I am glad to be alive in today’s world, with all its glorious potential.

“The illiterate of the 21st Century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”
~ Alvin Toffler

The Osprey

2007-10-26T20:07:00.000-04:00

We must learn to respect others and their boundaries. Osprey comes into our lives to specifically teach us that those we want to treat with disdain or contempt should be treated with respect regardless of how we feel. We might be drawn to fierce personalities, and then clash with them; osprey energy teaches us that we are able to maintain our integrity but taking a step back and practicing respect.
~ wildspeak

Nature, when we pay attention, always finds a way to teach us a lesson.

This week, my middle daughter’s class had an upset. A female classmate experienced an incident of sexual harassment from one of her classmates, and the entire class was unhappy about both the incident and the apparent lack of action by the school administration to this particular incident, especially in contrast to previous similar incidents where boys were suspended. Two days later, the same class went on a 3-day, 2-night camping trip. I drove the students to their site, and got to hear (and participate) in an interesting discussion about their feelings.

The feelings were strong, causing some vengeful behavior and reactions verging on an old-fashioned shunning. I was a little surprised by the vehemence of reaction on the part of the boys. Some of the parents (myself included) were concerned that they would copy-cat the action and all the girls would experience an escalation of undesirable behavior. These are young adolescents, in a mixed class of 12-14 year olds. Young adolescents are not particularly known for their thoughtful behavior.

Instead, the boys reacted with strong disapproval. Ok, partly because the entire class was forbidden to play tag for an undetermined amount of time. None-the-less, I was surprised and pleased to see that the girls wouldn’t need to fend off unwanted attention all through the camping trip. Instead, the boy needed to fend off unwanted and heavy-handed censure. It’s too bad; had the administration acted as they had for similar previous actions, perhaps the boys in the class wouldn’t have felt the need to impose their own censure. Instead, I think the boy experienced much worse peer-punishment.

I dropped off the students at their camping site, and returned the following evening to chaperone for the night. After arriving at the campsite, the students and teachers pointed out an osprey who had taken shelter at the edge of the lake where they were camping and hadn’t moved all day. About an hour after we returned to the site, the osprey finally moved position, flying to a branch even closer to the campsite, as though to make sure the students noticed it was still there. They did and shrieked with delight to see it even closer.

One of the other parent chaperones went home for some supplies and to relieve his partner while she taught an evening course, and returned with the above quote on the significance of the osprey as an animal totem. When one of the teacher guides read the statement to the class, they responded with deep and profound silence for an incredibly long time. I was moved, not only by the statement, but by the way the class thought long and hard about the message the osprey was delivering to them.

Nature, when we take the time to see and listen, can teach us how to be better humans.

A Prayer of Sorrow

2007-09-22T18:38:00.000-04:00

We have forgotten who we are.
We have alienated ourselves from the unfolding of the cosmos.
We have become estranged from the movements of the earth.
We have turned our backs on the cycles of life.
We have sought only our own security,
We have exploited simply for our own ends,
We have distorted our knowledge, we have abused our power.

Now the land is barren,
And the waters are poisoned,
And the air is polluted.

Now the forests are dying,
And the creatures are disappearing,
And the humans are despairing.

We ask forgiveness.
We ask for the gift of remembering.
We ask for the strength to change.

~ U.N. Environmental Sabbath Program

Yesterday, I substituted in a local middle school. I had heard that the school could be challenging. It wasn’t; they were just normal middle school kids – that’s challenging enough.

Did they try to push the envelope? Of course they did. I used the excuse, while on the phone with my mom later while wishing her a happy birthday, that I expected them to act that way, that we all did with substitute teachers while growing up. And as the words left my mouth, I felt a twinge of regret that it was so, that I was even expecting that the students would try to see how far they could go.

I know that it’s partly because they don’t know me. They haven’t had a chance to develop a level of mutual respect and trust with me. And I wonder what it says about our educational system, that for generations now, we have assumed that we should begin our relationships with teachers with a sense of distrust, suspicion, an unwillingness to enter into a relationship of accord, even with strangers who enter the classroom to help for a day when a teacher need be elsewhere.

Somewhere in a deep string within my body, an atonal chord has been plucked. It’s all twisted up with knowledge from my adolescent psych class about how young adolescents are taking steps into adulthood, and the twisted way we in the western world have kept them in babyhood and helplessness for far too long. We want to shelter our children all our lives – I know my mom feels so helpless for me right now, and wishes more than anything that she could magically make a job appear, or magically heal the breach that occurred in my marriage.

We don’t give our adolescents the ability to grow into adulthood gracefully or meaningfully, so they find other ways to assert their independence. No lion to overcome? Well, then, let’s overcome the traffic laws and policemen trying to enforce them, or let’s overcome the teachers in school, or let’s overcome the boredom of enforced infancy for far too many years, as our parents deny their children the ability to wander in the woods, learn from their own mistakes, or head off to college on their own….

That chord reverberated wrong in my heart because at some deep level, I know that we need to have respect for elders. Some of my most amazing conversations and insights have come from casual conversation with my elders. And in our twisted Western world, elders aren’t respected, revered, trusted. They are shunted off into homes with caretakers, where we can’t see them, where we don’t need to face our discomfort with their physical ailments, their slipping minds, their slowing ability to keep up with our insanely frenetic pace of life.

I’m not sure what the answer is. This reading struck another strong chord in me, as I read it this morning. We have truly lost touch with our world, physical and emotional. While the words reflect on the environmental damage done to our world, to me, they also reflect the damage we have done to our psyche as humans, when we stopped being oriented toward community, and started orienting ourselves to self above others.

Perhaps that’s the explanation for why children (and adults) no longer have a deep and abiding respect for elders. Perhaps that’s why we suffer from alienation and powerlessness. Perhaps we need to think about others again, to remember how it is to put others first, to live unselfishly, to work for the common good above our own needs.

It’s a nice thought.

Irony

2007-09-13T09:36:00.000-04:00

In a completely rational society, the best of us would aspire to be teachers and the rest of us would have to settle for something less, because passing civilization along from one generation to the next ought to be the highest honor and the highest responsibility anyone could have.
~ Lee Iacocca

This semester, I’m taking a course in literacy for upper elementary students. I find it rather ironic that my current readings for class are telling me that the best and latest research on how we learn is coming from corporations. They’re doing research to help their adult employees learn quickly and effectively to keep up with all the rapid changes in the world. And the research is trickling down into schools, allowing teachers to help their child and adolescent students learn more effectively, too.

Yesterday, while browsing school websites, looking for open teaching positions, I came across a district that was promised money for school improvements, then had their funding yanked. This is an Abbott district, which in NJ means that the district is under-funded and under-achieving, academically-wise. I find myself wondering how we managed to get to this place where our children come absolutely last in the efforts of our politicians. I’m pretty sure that they care about their children, their grandchildren, their nieces and nephews, their neighborhood children. So why can’t they see their way clear to making legislation that supports our children above the interests of corporations and greed?

It’s a sad indictment on our country that we aren’t spending enough money on our schools to help children learn effectively.

Class

2007-08-31T11:43:00.000-04:00

Oh. My. Goodness.

I think I have finally figured it out. The reason for the lesson the universe is insisting I learn right now. The one that has made sure I’ve endured trial after trial after trial.

For a while, I thought maybe I needed to learn grace under pressure, or how to allow stress to just flow through my body without affecting me, or something zen-like that would help my coping skills. I was, after all, a rather reactionary teen, easily erupting into flames upon the slightest provocation. My brothers called me Lucy (from Peanuts) growing up because I was so bossy. And there were many, many slammed doors during my adolescence. So I felt as though perhaps I was enduring a bit of “what goes around, comes around” kind of same-lifetime karmic debt. Except it wasn’t my own adolescents reacting that way, causing me the trials and tribulations of what my parents had to endure during my adolescence. It was life from outside attacking from all quarters.

I had a wonderful conversation yesterday with a friend from my covenant group, who called because she was concerned about my well-being, given all I’ve been through in the last couple years. She told me about “The Cloud of Unknowing”, written by a 14th century monk as guide to achieving perfect union with the creator. Since our conversation, I’ve been contemplating how a lesson might be pulled from the idea that I must let go of all earthly concerns to find perfect peace.

And then this Ann Landers quote arrived in my inbox this morning:

“Class is the sure-footedness that comes with having proved you can meet life.”

and I realized … it’s that simple. I am learning class. That’s the lesson the universe is currently force-feeding me.

Maybe it really is all about grace under pressure.

I think I will be some classy chick when life is through with me.

What do you think?

Wanted: Job for a creative teacher!

2007-08-30T11:24:00.000-04:00

So why is it that baby boomer teachers are retiring all over the country, causing a major shortage of teachers, and in northwestern NJ, no one will leave???!!!

According to the NY Times, schools are offering bonuses as they compete for a limited pool of teachers. And the local schools here have no openings.

I have one friend telling me about the many positions in Fairfax, Virginia. Another telling me that Las Vegas has hundreds of unfilled positions. And my children beg me to not make them leave their schools. Makes it really challenging to know what to do.

In the meanwhile, I’ve registered to sub at every local school. I’m hoping that will help me at least get some interviews.

200+ applicants for one position are odds too just overwhelming for any normal person.

But someone, somewhere, will want a teacher who is passionate about learning, great at building rapport with students, excited about teaching (AND with years of experience working with children and adolescents, so knows what she is getting into!), and with extraordinary gifts to share with children.

If you are such an administrator, want my resume?

“The essence of optimism is that it takes no account of the present, but it is a source of inspiration, of vitality and hope where others have resigned; it enables a man to hold his head high, to claim the future for himself and not to abandon it to his enemy.”

—Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945), theologian

What Tarot Card are You?

2007-08-16T13:50:00.000-04:00

You are The Moon

Hope, expectation, Bright promises.

The Moon is a card of magic and mystery - when prominent you know that nothing is as it seems, particularly when it concerns relationships. All logic is thrown out the window.

The Moon is all about visions and illusions, madness, genius and poetry. This is a card that has to do with sleep, and so with both dreams and nightmares. It is a scary card in that it warns that there might be hidden enemies, tricks and falsehoods. But it should also be remembered that this is a card of great creativity, of powerful magic, primal feelings and intuition. You may be going through a time of emotional and mental trial; if you have any past mental problems, you must be vigilant in taking your medication but avoid drugs or alcohol, as abuse of either will cause them irreparable damage. This time however, can also result in great creativity, psychic powers, visions and insight. You can and should trust your intuition.

What Tarot Card are You?
Take the Test to Find Out.

Nebula!

2007-08-10T18:56:00.000-04:00

Some photos of Nebula Workshop, for your enjoyment.

It was a grueling hot week, and we had fun anyway!

Guide Bradley helped us learn all about wild edibles.
(We learned how to brush our teeth with sassafras.)

We cooked with Guide Robin.

We letterboxed with Guide Andy.

We gardened with Guide Mike.

We built fires.

We slept overnight under the stars.

It was hot. We survived.

We cooled off in the stream.

We fell in love all over again with nature.

It was an awesome week!

Staying on the Surface

2007-08-09T09:14:00.000-04:00

Your life is not
an endless series of open doors!
Listen to your heart!
Do not stay on the surface
but go to the heart of things!
And when the time is right,
have the courage to decide!
~ Pope John Paul II

This is a week for me to be pondering whether or not I am managing to get to the heart of things. Looking for a teaching job can be discouraging.

When I started, the unemployment office told me that elementary teacher positions were the second highest need job in New Jersey. I took that as a good sign … there were lots of opportunities to find a teaching position once I received my certification. So I took a leap of faith, went back to school in a grueling endurance test for me and the girls, and now am the proud owner of a K-5 teaching certificate, plus a middle school social studies cert on its way!

And those jobs? Well, they certainly aren’t local. Teachers in this part of the state stay in their jobs for an eternity. I mean 30 to 40 years. Nobody leaves. Once in a blue moon, someone gets pregnant and a maternity spot opens up, but those are few and far between because most of the teachers are in their 50’s or older!

Which means this summer has also been a test of my faith in myself. Can I maintain my confidence in myself when I’m not even invited in for interviews?

That quote by Pope John Paul II has made me stop and take stock of my life. Have I walked by an open door? If those open doors are truly finite in number, have I passed by an opportunity? Does that mean I should be looking at teaching positions as far away as Jersey City?

Have I gone to the heart of myself? Have I faced my fears? Do I have lingering questions on my capabilities to be a teacher that remain unaddressed, that might sway an interviewer to consider me less than perfectly capable? Have I allowed doubt to creep into my voice, my demeanor?

Have I kept courage? Have I maintained my faith in myself? If I can’t believe that I’m the best person for a teaching position, how would I ever convince someone else to hire me?

This morning I sit, pondering the heart of job-seeking. It’s an amazing process, to re-enter the job market as a neophyte at 50 years old. That quiet confidence that results from years of success needs to be solidly shored up from previous unrelated experiences. I have to dig deep into the Why I was successful; pull the core essence of my strengths into a new vision – a vision of a new me – a vision of a new future.

Not so easy to do.

Each morning, as I sit to review the new posted ads, I also review what drew me to teaching. I remember my successes, and my failures, in all my work with children and youth. The successes rebuild my confidence each day, the failures help me determine how and where I need to grow to become even better.

Each morning, as I sip my coffee in the quiet of a house with slumbering children, I think about what makes a good teacher, and I resolve within myself to recognize those gifts within me, to celebrate the lessons learned, to recognize my call to teach.

And I trust that the right door will be open, that I will recognize that door when I pass it, and that I will have the courage to walk through that door when I find it.

I will stay in the heart.

My Dæmon

2007-08-08T11:26:00.000-04:00

We just watched Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix yesterday, driving an hour and a half (in an air-conditioned car!!) to an air-conditioned mall, to watch the IMAX version of OoP, and the girls treated me (with their recently earned babysitting money) to dinner, in the air-conditioned mall!

Can you tell that it was hot yesterday???!!!

I loved the movie - thought it was the best since the first movie. And the special effects in 3-D at the IMAX theater were awesome, so if you have a chance to see it that way, go!

We were talking about upcoming movies, since we didn't see any previews at the IMAX, and Traveler Girl asked me to get her copies of Phillip Pullman's Dark Materials series, so she could reread them before the movie is released. We both loved the books, so I spend my Amazon coupon buying a copy of the series, since now there are three of us (perhaps four by then) who will want to reread the books before the movie arrives.

Then a friend sent this link, to find your own Dæmon. And the site gives you a few days to ask for feedback from friends before the Dæmon is finalized. So here's your chance ... click on the link and let me know if you agree or disagree with my self-assessment!

NOT MY DAUGHTER! YOU BITCH!!!
- Molly Weasley

HP is HERE!!!!!

2007-07-21T14:43:00.000-04:00

and I can't open my box until late tonight .... egghghghgghgh

From my adolescent psych class

2007-07-21T14:30:00.000-04:00

I haven't posted in a long time, because I've been drowning in my summer courses and planning two camps! I'm children's director at UUMAC and co-director of Nebula Workshops.

I thought you'd enjoy my latest ponderings for the Adolescent Psych course that I have thoroughly enjoyed this summer.

The Question:

“B. Which adolescent problem detailed in your book do you personally see and the most threatening to our young people today? Explain your answer and remember to use the information in the texts and not just rely on your personal opinion. Do you know (or did you know) an adolescent with one of the problem behaviors, and if so, what has been the outcome for that teen?”

The Answer:

Wow. This might be the most challenging question in the entire class.

All of the problems the text evaluates are serious problems … risk-taking behavior while driving, substance use, crime, depression, eating disorders. All of them have great potential to be life threatening. All of them are typical behaviors for adolescents, far too prevalent for my own comfort. And none of them appear to be “new problems” that can be attributed to the ills of today’s society. Even Shakespeare, in 1610, said, “I would that there were no age between ten and three-and-twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest; for there is nothing in between but getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting …” And anorexia was first identified in 1689, with the clinical diagnoses still the same today.

After much introspection over my coffee this morning, I believe that delinquency and crime are the largest threat to our youth today. Here’s why:

Adolescence-limited delinquents (ALDs) are criminals who engage in delinquency or crime for a shorter period of time, primarily through adolescence and emerging adulthood. They show no signs of problems during childhood, and few of them engage in criminal activity after their mid-twenties. ALD’s can be distinguished from life-course-persistent delinquents (LCPDs), who show a pattern of problems from birth onward, and tend to continue criminal activity well into adulthood. Studies in multiple cultures show that ALD types of crimes appear in part because of the role expectations of young males as they demonstrate readiness for manhood, as the Truk Island young men exemplify.

In the US in particular, courts and laws have become much tougher on even minor crimes, and more people than ever are being sent to jail instead of rehabilitation. The US has the highest incarceration rate of all the industrialized nations. There are also stark disparities in racial composition in our prisons, with African Americans accounting for fully 1/2 of prison population, but only 13% of the total population.

Punishment continues after prison sentences are completed. Former prisoners are denied social services, many potential jobs, even federal college loans for a minor drug offense. Reintegration into society is exceedingly difficult; if they lack opportunities to support families or selves, recidivism is almost inevitable.

Adolescents are developing their self-image, according to Erickson, and depend heavily on peers for that work. Crimes committed by youth and young adults are frequently done in a group. The search for excitement and sensation-seeking adventure may lead to activities that violate the law. It almost seems that the cards are stacked against our youth, males in particular. Combine racism to that volatile mix, and we end up with lots of incarcerated youth for minor infractions, and lives ruined. The potential for repeat crimes grows with each incarceration, in part due to peer contagion, where high risk youth are brought together who then form a delinquent clique (also normal adolescent behavior).

The costs to society, in terms of dollars spent on incarceration, recidivism, and the ruined lives of our young people, are too high to comprehend. The cost to society of repeat offenders, who return to a life of crime because they cannot find a way to make life work after incarceration, is also too high, in terms of property loss, life loss, and mental anguish, for families of criminals and victims.

There are no easy answers. Criminal reform is happening slowly, in a few places, and it appears to be working. Our text describes multisystemic approaches, which are cost effective as well as effective in reducing crimes. My hope is that we can make positive changes in prison reform and societal reform to correct some of the endemic societal ills that lead to incarceration.

To that effect, I work on prison reform as part of my religious beliefs. I also volunteer time in a program called Alternatives to Violence Project (AVP), which is a proven effective program to teach prisoners a different way of living and helps them avoid recidivism. The AVP program has also been carried out to the community, and has shown to be effective in preventing crime with adolescents, especially when run with a combination of former criminals and volunteers.

Do I know any adolescents currently going through this program? No, but I do know adults who have been in this place of delinquency and are incarcerated as a result of mistakes made in their youth. These are the incarcerated adults that I work with in AVP, and knowing them has in turn compelled me to work with all of my energy toward preventing crime in adolescents. It’s part of my decision to become a teacher.

Robin Slaw

Public Service Announcement:
To find out more, you can visit:
(AVP) http://www.avpusa.org/
(Prison reform) http://www.uua.org/socialjustice/socialjustice/statements/13397.shtml

No one can be perfectly free until all are free.
~ Herbert Spencer

Travel Girl, day 6

2007-07-07T13:33:00.000-04:00

I am going to admit to feeling somewhat jealous of Travel Girl's adventures! Look where she is today!

Kula Bird Eco Park

Imagine, if you will, a cool green forest nestled in a small valley. A stream wanders between the trees, making its way through the valley to the Pacific Ocean. Trees bearing strange fruits, nuts and blossoms have names like Dawa, Ivi, Vutu and Vesi and tower above the valley floor filtering the sun. The banks of the stream are dotted with brightly colored flowers and shrubs. As you wander over the many bridges spanning the sparkling ribbon of water, you're greeted by the call of a barking pigeon, the shrill of honey eaters and the constant, pulsing concert of unseen forest dwellers. This is the South Pacific. This is the wild side of Fiji and you've arrived at Kula Eco Park.

The World is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page.
~St. Augustine

Tracking my daughter, Travel Girl

2007-07-06T19:54:00.000-04:00

Please indulge me as I wonder aloud about my eldest daughter, who must now be named Travel Girl, who is off on her People to People exchange trip to the South Pacific. I'm so proud of her, this daughter who wouldn't leave my knee until she was five years old, who was so worried about starting school at age 13 for the first time (even a tiny charter school with a total of 105 students, K-8), who successfully navigated her first year of high school (first time in a real public school), and then who decided to take off for the South Pacific on her first trip away from home, and managed to fund raise and earn half her considerable expenses! And I can't believe how my heart shattered into a bazillion sobbing pieces as I drove away from the airport on Tuesday, after hugging her goodbye! I never anticipated I would miss her this much!

On Day 3 (her first day on the island, she was whisked off to a local arts center, where she watched fire dancers and other esciting events. This is what her itinerary says:

You will be met by traditional warriors who will be your host throughout the day in which you will get to see up close the making of Fijian artifacts, folk dances, chief’s traditional thatched hut plus many enriching experience.

And this is a picture I found on the internet of the Arts Center.

Yesterday she spent the day in a local Fijian school, having an amazing time meeting other students from another culture, I hope!

Today is her 5th day away, 3rd day in Fiji. She's currently on a boat somewhere around Tivua Island. This is what the island looks like, and she's snorkeling, according to her itinerary:

Enjoy local games and beach volleyball including glass bottom boat tours and snorkeling.

I hope my girl is having the time of her life!

Wandering re-establishes the original harmony which once existed between man and the universe.
~Anatole France

Travelogue, part 3

2007-07-02T10:53:00.000-04:00

My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing.
~Aldous Huxley

After we dropped Karen off, Diana and I drove up the hill, past the Japanese Gardens, and found a cemetery up at the top of the mountain with an amazing view of Mt. Hood, Mt. St. Helens, and another mountain we couldn’t identify, nearly as tall.

We first hiked down the other side of the hill to find the meridian line marker, the Willamette Stone. It’s the meridian line and baseline from which all the property lines for Oregon and Washington were marked. As a history teacher, how could I resist? Plus the hike was beautiful, through a lush green forest. You can read all about the Willamette Stone here.

We hiked back up the hill (quite a hike, and we were tired – this was one long day of hiking, and I’d been up since 6 am, and my roommies not long after because as hard as I tried to be quiet, once someone’s up in the room, it’s hard to stay asleep. I was just grateful I’d been able to fall asleep when I woke up at 3 am (6 am NJ time, and my normal rising time!) and walked across the street to the cemetery. There were some beautiful gravestones, filled with poetry. You’ll have to wait for that picture – it’s still on one of the disposable cameras Di and I bought after we realized we were REALLY sorry we hadn’t brought a digital camera. (I won’t make that mistake again!)

At the end of the cemetery were memorial benches, and we sat and admired the view and talked for a long while, until we got too cold and went back down the hill to pick up Karen and crack open a bottle of our Hip Chicks wine.

We finished the evening giggling and talking and drinking wine. It was an amazing day.

Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves.
~John Muir

Accents

2007-06-26T23:38:00.000-04:00

Having been teases mercilessly all week by my roommates at GA, I was glad to prove them wrong with this simple quiz. They swore up and down and all around that I had a “Jersey” accent, I swore I didn’t.

Here’s the results of the test to prove I don’t. So there, Karen and Diana!
:-P

What American accent do you have? (Best version so far)

Mid Atlantic

Also known as a "Philadelphia accent" but also heard in south Jersey, Baltimore, and thereabouts.

Click Here to Take This Quiz
Brought to you by YouThink.com quizzes and personality tests.

Travelogue, part 2

2007-06-26T15:23:00.000-04:00

After we finished touring around the Japanese Gardens, we drove down to a Japanese restaurant and had sushi/teriyake for lunch.

Melanie suggested next that we tour the Portland UU Church, which we did - we had an hour long tour conducted by their Director of Religious Education, Cathy Cartwright. It's an amazing church, grown so much they took over the church next door, and have expanded to a full city block! How wonderful to be a part of a growing vibrant community like that! I'm a little envious, I do admit.

We also had the best little adventure, looking for a winery by the name of Hip Chicks Do Wine. We used Diana's GPS system, and followed right into the heart of an industrial park. Well, you can just imagine our confusion - no vineyards, no greenery whatsoever. A winery, here?

Sure enough, we turned the last corner, to be greeted by a nicely painted garage door and small human door, in lavender, and a very small sign announcing Hip Chicks Do Wine. Hmmmmm...

We slowly opened the door, a bit hesitant about what we'd find inside ... it was dark as we first walked in, and we couldn't see much as we waited for our eyes to adjust. We walked further into the building, and sure enough, we found a warehouse full of kegs of wine, and a small tasting area. And was that wine yummy! We bought a few bottles of wine to enjoy in our room, and Di bought a bottle to take home as a gift for Brad. I'll be ordering some in the fall, after I have some spending money and a job!

After the winery, we dropped Melanie off, and picked up Karen for dinner. We found a nice Thai restaurant downtown, and crammed in a fast dinner so Karen could make it back to her evening session at UU University. Here we are looking at pictures of each other's children.

Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough,
A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse - and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness -
And Wilderness is Paradise enow.
~ The Rubiyaiyat of Omar Khayyam

More to come ...

Diana's and Robin's Travelogue

2007-06-20T11:47:00.000-04:00

It's Wednesday morning, and we have had two magical days on the west coast. On Monday morning, we decided to rent a car when we arrived in Portland, and drive out to the ocean. We wouldn't be able to get into the hotel room anyway, and I had never seen the Pacific Northwest. So we picked up Karen at the airport, and the three of us piled ourselves and our luggage into a minivan (they had no cars left in spite of Brad's excellent speedy reservation work while we were en route!) so they upgraded us very cheaply due to Diana's smooth pleading!

The drive was magnificent! Here's a picture of what the scenery looked like - not great, it was from my cell phone as we were driving down the Cascade Mountains toward the beach. Most of these pictures will be cell phone pix, I left my fully charged camera sitting on my desk at home.

When we arrived at the beach, we were amazed! It's stunning. We meandered up the coast, starting at a tiny sweet beach town. We pulled over any time we found an overlook point, or a sign for a beach, or even a road name that sounded intriguing (like Falcon Beach Road). But the best stop of all we named "Full Bladder Cove", because we finally all had to pee quite badly, and made Di pull over at the first available spot. Not sure we would have tried that turn off, because it didn't indicate a beach view, but we suspected there might be a toilet there. We did indeed find an outhouse.

But the best beach spot of all was Full Bladder Cove! It was stunning. Lots of rocks on the beach, and a small cave! Diana and I climbed down to the beach and walked into the cave. Di snapped this picture there. This is the view from inside the cave. At the very back (only about 15 yards in, I would estimate) was a small shelf that made a slightly lumpy chair - I called it the Epiphany Chair. It was truly a magical place, and we might not have found had it not been to pressing full bladders!

We continued up the coast, and eventually found ourselves at the mouth of the Columbia River. We found a good restaurant, where I treated myself to Dungeness Crab and Provolone cheese cakes with fruited rice, and Di and Karen had something boring that didn't include seafood, since neither of them like seafood. They both claim their meals were good - I am doubtful, since in my opinion nothing beats a seafood dish right straight out of the ocean!!!

We finally made it to our hotel at about 10 pm (now up for 21 hours straight) and talked for about an hour before passing out.

On Tuesday, Diana and I continued to explore while Karen attended her UU University sessions. We first went up to the Japanese Gardens, where we ran into a DRE friend of mine named Melanie. The gardens were so peaceful and soothing, and amazingly beautiful. Here's a picture of us in front of one of the waterfalls and a Koi pond. Throughout the gardens, there was a constant sound of trickling water, through streams, waterfalls, fountains, and other delightful surprises tucked under trees and shrubs, or hiding in a tiny nook. We were told the one thing to not miss while in Portland was the Japanese Gardens, and we both were so glad we chose that to start our morning.

I do not understand how anyone can live without one small place of enchantment to turn to.
~ Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

More later ...

Passages

2007-06-14T22:39:00.000-04:00

Today was graduation at my children's charter school. The graduation was beautiful; it made me cry. I was pondering why I cried so hard this year when I didn't even have a child graduating. One reason was that I did know all the students who graduated very well, and the daughter of one of my dear friends graduated, and I've known her since pre-birth and will miss her very much at that school!

But that wasn't the true reason why I became so emotional. I realized it was because I have had the privilege of watching a graduate blossom and take wing. I have seen the potential realized, and it has been good. In spite of all my frustrations with that school, there is something very powerful there that I continue to believe in.

When I drove home, I stopped at the mailbox and found one precious and hard-earned piece of mail that was very welcome. My teaching Certificate of Eligibility with Advanced Standing! 25 credits and one shit-load of work later, I am now a genuine teacher.

Now all I have to do is find the right match for a job. I admit to being nervous. I am working very hard to trust that the universe will provide what I need to live a life of bliss and joy.

The Squeeze

2007-06-13T07:34:00.000-04:00

If we want to communicate and we have a strong aspiration to help others-in terms of engaging in social action, helping our family or community, or just being there for people when they need us-then sooner or later we’re going to experience the big squeeze. Our ideals and the reality of what’s happening don’t match. We feel as if we’re between the fingers of a big giant who is squeezing us. We find ourselves between a rock and a hard place.

There is often a discrepancy between our ideals and what we actually encounter. For instance, in raising children, we have a lot of good ideas, but sometimes it’s challenging to put together the good ideas with how our children are, there at the breakfast table with food all over themselves. Or in meditation, have you noticed how difficult it is to feel emotions without getting totally swept away by them, or how difficult it is simply to cultivate friendliness toward yourself when you’re feeling miserable or panicked or all caught up?

There’s a discrepancy between our inspiration and the situation as it presents itself. It’s the rub between those two things-the squeeze between reality and vision-that causes us to grow up, to wake up to be 100 percent decent, alive, and compassionate. The big squeeze is one of the most productive places on the spiritual path and in particular on this journey of awakening the heart.

~ Comfortable with Uncertainty, Pema Chodron

Last night, helping my middle child with homework left from our farm adventure last week, was a trial in how much compassion and patience I could muster.

We were both overtired. I’d subbed at her school yesterday during Earth Olympics. That’s the experiential and sustainable version of Field Day in other schools. We were outside all day, doing activities like fire-starting with a bowdrill, building a cob oven, throwing sticks at rabbit cones a la indigenous throwing stick style, purifying stream water, edible weed walking, and building natural art. I was a runner – escort service for children needing the nurse, toilet – or break relief for the teachers between groups. It was a fun day, and I was tired from hiking up and down steep hills all day.

My daughter was exhausted. She’d been at Earth Olympics, and then had a school dance that evening. We won’t even try to go into why a decision was made to allow the students to hold a dance on a Tuesday night on the evening after they’d been outside all day in extraordinary physical exercise.

And she was frustrated, because the farm scavenger hunt wasn’t finished, there were three other students in her group (one of whom had already left for the year to travel with her family, the only other student who works as hard as my daughter). And no one appeared to be helping with the last bits of the assignment. She was trying to accumulate the last pieces of information, including finding Latin names for all the produce grown by the CSG. She was beyond exhausted, in tears, and losing it big time.

I did manage to calm her down, gave her a 15-minute time limit to finish as many as she could before she had to go to bed. I reminded her that her team had probably completed more work than any other team there, and that she’d put an additional number of hours in on top of what her team accomplished that day. That it was her drawing in the final report, her poem in the final report, and that she would be handing in the project. The teacher would know who did all the extra work, and she would receive the credit.

She managed to get another half dozen Latin names in her 15 minutes, plus complete one essay answer on how invasive species change ecosystems (none of us had noticed that we hadn’t answered that question). And she went to bed and left me the most heartbreakingly beautiful thank you note, thanking me for my patience.

You can only imagine the cringing I was feeling inside, as I reflected on my lack of patience with her last night, how annoyed I was that she was taking this assignment too seriously. I was also annoyed with the lack of foresight in that school about giving assignments over a time with so many activities at the school, and no time during school to work as a group. I was annoyed that I had no chance to sit down and recover from a long exhausting day, as I carted both older children back and forth to the dance, ran to the supermarket to pick up chips because we’d forgotten to buy them on Sunday.

These were welcome words this morning, a reminder that I need to take the time to breathe through the difference between my ideal and my reality. That big squeeze that Chodron talks about is a daily reality in my life, and my challenge is to walk between my vision and reality, and find the compassion to continue to give to others, and help them find a peaceful way to live.

My dream is to enable my daughters to find that peaceful place inside themselves.

The Hike at Genesis Farm

2007-06-11T21:22:00.000-04:00

On Friday, I took a field trip to our local Community Supported Garden, with my middle child's class. They had a final exam on bioregional studies, in the form of a scavenger hunt. I had a blast, even though the temperature was 40 degrees higher than the night before, and 20 degrees higher than the two days before (upper 90's F).

One discovery was to be the highest point of the farm. We decided to visit all three points (on three different very steep hills (verging on small mountains) and take photos, so that we wouldn't have to trudge all the way back up after finding the highest point.

One of the pieces of the scavenger hunt was to be a poem about the day. My team of girls decided they'd get more points if EVERYONE in the group wrote a poem. Then they decided that included me. So here's my contribution to the group effort, all about the climb to the top.

The Highest Point at Genesis Farm
by Robin Slaw

Heat rising in fiery blasts.
Steep hill to climb.
Short breathe, dry throat,
Wondering if we will make it to the top.

Pounding head, vision doubled,
Skull baking in the heat of the sun.
Path rising endlessly before us,
Will we make it to the top?

Hill crested.
Shade of the grandmother tree inviting.
Flop down, restore breathing,
sit up and look around.
Did we make it to the top?

Crickets buzzing, birds singing.
Twenty more feet to go.
Gulping water, wiping down faces,
eying the top with questions.
Will the top be worth the trip?

Arising with groans and expletives,
We trudge the last remaining feet,
heads down, counting the steps,
Are we there yet, at the top?

Muscles quivering, we raise our heads
and wonder at the view before us.
Effort forgotten, amazement awoken,
We whisper our awe to the world.
Did we make it to the top?

Distant blue mountains, shimmering in the haze.
A hawk soaring in the currents above us.
Breathless with wonder, overcome with the beauty.
Was it worth it, to make it to the top?
Yes!

Finished!

2007-05-13T02:15:00.000-04:00

Do not train children to learning by force and harshness, but direct them to it by what amuses their minds, so that you may be better able to discover with accuracy the peculiar bent of the genius of each.
~ Plato

I spent the evening reading over a bag full of thank you letters from my students. The letters are more precious than I know how to describe. They touched my heart deeply, because they let me know how deeply I touched their hearts.

One of the most precious letters is from a boy with an IEP. He doesn’t appear to be interested in lessons. Lots of days he sleeps through class; other days he sometimes appears to listen. Mostly, I considered him one of my failures, someone that I might one day learn how to reach, but someone this year that I failed.

To my great surprise, he wrote a thank you note, to tell me how much fun I made class. That he learned a lot from me. And he touched my heart in a very special way.

I think what I need most to carry away from this experience is to never give up on one single student; that I will never know what kind of effect I am having on a student. To keep trying to get through, even when it seems hopeless, because as a teacher, I should never give up on a student. I am touched more profoundly by this simple, misspelled note than by any glowing and well-written missive in my bag full of notes.

I’ve also learned that I need to not listen to opinions about students from other teachers. I’ve learned that teachers can get jaded after a while, and I can’t, or won’t, let myself become that way. If I do, then it will obviously be time to leave the teaching profession and fine another career. I hope it will be obvious to me, if I ever reach that point.

Every child has some genius in her or him. I must never forget that.

The job of an educator is to teach students to see vitality in themselves.
~ Joseph Campbell

Risk

2007-05-05T14:02:00.001-04:00

Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.
~ T. S. Eliot

I have one more week of apprentice teaching left. It’s been a long and exhausting trip, and more exhilarating than I could ever have imagined. Well, ok, I imagined it, but was almost afraid to dare to believe that it would be so much fun.

I don’t ever remember being so bone weary. I’m sure I haven’t ever gone so long with so little sleep and not been deathly ill. That’s a huge testament to how positively I feel about the entire grand experiment – the fact that I haven’t been sick at all this semester, in spite of so little sleep for so many weeks.

The last four months have been an interesting experiment in learning how far I can go. How long can I go without adequate sleep? A long time … four months. How much would I enjoy teaching? A lot … as much as I dared to hope, more than I expected. Will I be able to survive in a teaching position? That remains to be seen … I’m looking for work now. Will children respond to me as a teacher? Yes, resoundingly … to the point of trying to bribe my Field Supervisor to make sure he gave me an “A” when he asked the children what grade they thought I deserved. Would the girls and I survive the intense pressure of essentially working and going to school at the same time? Yes, barely … they have a good example now of how a person can just keep going, even when she’s broken down in tears, not sure how she’ll make it. My girls have been amazing throughout this process! Will my house fall apart? Well, yes. Almost. Oh well.

In contemplating how far any one person can go, I ponder what inherent qualities a person must have in order to follow a dream, in order to live life by risking, and trusting, that we will be able to carry ourselves through, that we can and will find the strength, the will, the faith to continue against what seem like insurmountable odds. How does one develop a faith in oneself? How does one believe in oneself? How does one trust in oneself?

From where did all those qualities in me come? I don’t know how I managed to develop them, how I found the strength to just keep going on. I just did, one baby step at a time. When the next day seemed like an impossible goal, I looked at the next hour, and managed to make it through. When the next hour seemed insurmountable, I concentrated on hanging on or producing for five more minutes. And when I reached those five minutes, the next five minutes were possible, too…

Human endurance is amazing. Human willpower perhaps knows no bounds. And I now understand that I still don’t know my limits, except that those limits are further than I ever dreamed possible.

I’ve begun sending out resumes, starting to look for a teaching job. There are two possible positions in nearby schools. One advertised, for a middle school social studies teacher, which I would love to have! And that position, since it’s advertised, will have lots of competition. I had a friend’s husband deliver that resume & letter, hoping it would give me an edge, since he works there.

The other position is with another local school; I heard there might be a position open and it hasn’t been advertised.

Wish me luck!

Week 10 finished

2007-03-31T14:53:00.000-04:00

I am two-thirds of the way through apprentice teaching!

It's hard to believe that so much time has gone by! I am loving every second of it, too much work and all. And at the same time, I am sooooo relieved to see that I only have five more weeks of writing extremely detailed lesson plans and keeping up with night classes all while being as perfect a teacher as I can.

My house is a wreck; my children are barely hanging on while not receiving enough attention from Mom; and I am taking oodles of vitamins, hoping not to wear myself out completely due to lack of sleep. I think after May 11th, I will sleep for a week straight through!

I had a semi-sad experience this week. The fifth grade just finished studying the US Constitution. Ok, not the most interesting thing in the world, I admit. Especially for a bunch of 11 year-olds. So I tried my best to bring them interesting ways to make government studies alive for them, and went out of my way to really help them understand. And then gave a test, straight out of the textbook, because it was a short unit and I was concentrating on getting two more units up and running. And they did so poorly on the test.

I should say, they did as normal for the test. The B students got B's. The A students got A's. The C students got C's. It was eye-opening; despite my best work, some children are ready to learn, others aren't.

Thank goodness the same day I also was able to introduce a new project to the students - a fourteen day journaling experience to help them understand Lewis and Clark and the Westward Expansion of the United States. The journaling project was used by my cooperating teacher in previous years, I took to the project and designed my own spin, since I didn't know how she implemented it in previous years. It was good to hear some of the students say, "Wow, this will be a fun project!" and a needed reinforcement that I do indeed have good ideas; I can make a difference as a teacher.

The other gem for my week was the understanding that some of the alternative projects that I designed did help some students. The sixth grade did a presentation on Greek Mythology, and some of the students pulled up their normal grade when given a chance for an alternative assessment. Seeing children blossom when allowed the chance to learn and teach in a way that is better for them than traditional schoolwork is truly rewarding.

The task of the excellent teacher is to stimulate "apparently ordinary" people to unusual effort. The tough problem is not in identifying winners: it is in making winners out of ordinary people.
~ K. Patricia Cross

Fun Tarot Quiz

2007-02-19T16:11:00.000-05:00

This was a fun Tarot quiz that my friend Suna had on her blog.

The Sun - Interesting. I am happy right now. Things have gone right since last summer, and I do feel like I have managed to overcome so very many obstacles in my life this year!

Strength - it's about inner strength. I have felt like I had to depend on my inner strength this year, for sure. It's paid off, with an opportunity for education that I made happen through sheer determination. And good grades, again through sheer will power.

High Priestess - knowledge. Good card for someone back in graduate school.

Empress - all about gestation. Good card for someone in apprentice teaching this semester!

Justice - regaining equilibrium. Yes, this is a good reminder for me that I need to find my equilibrium, not only for the semester, but in my new chosen career, and in my life. For a year, I have chosen to hibernate while I study, not work on my social or emotional life other than with my children. That will need to change soon.

Death - I hope this is my indication that I will rise again like a phoenix from the ashes. From change comes something better is what this card tells me.

Fool - my second chance? And maybe a warning to be careful.

Emperor - be bold. hmmm. A chance to practice more of my idea of what makes a good teacher?

Tower - rude awakening. Am I the rude awakening, or am I to receive a rude awakening?

I also thought it was interesting that my scores for Devil and Lovers was so low. No time in my life for impulse or falling in love. That would be true, in my mind, right now.

I have some things to think about ...

You scored as XIX: The Sun. This is the happiest card in the deck. It is full of joy and optimism, everything is right with the world. We are as innocent children playing in the fields without care. The Sun brings success, well-being and happiness in all spheres - material, emotional, spiritual -wherever our desires lay.When this card appears in a Tarot spread it indicates success, joy and happiness. Obstacles will be overcome, goals achieved.When badly aspected, it can indicate a stagnation through over-indulgence, too much of a good thing.

XIX: The Sun

88%

VIII - Strength

88%

II - The High Priestess

81%

III - The Empress

81%

XI: Justice

75%

XIII: Death

75%

0 - The Fool

63%

IV - The Emperor

63%

XVI: The Tower

63%

I - Magician

50%

X - Wheel of Fortune

44%

XV: The Devil

13%

VI: The Lovers

Which Major Arcana Tarot Card Are You?
created with QuizFarm.com

Time Flies When You Are Having Fun!

2007-02-17T07:53:00.000-05:00

Well, so much for my resolve to post every day of student teaching. I made two weeks, then skipped two weeks! How did that happen?

We are shut up in schools and college recitation rooms for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bellyful of words and do not know a thing.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

I am loving the work. I am hating the amount of work! No, scratch that. I am actually loving the amount of work; it's fun, I lose myself in it. And that's the problem, I haven't learned balance yet. I have to figure out how to write a lesson plan and get the work done for a lesson without it taking six hours for a 45 minute lesson. I need to learn how to do this fast, because I'm sinking in a mass of out-of-control paperwork, on top of the dust bunnies floating around the house.

This week I started to get a handle on the paperwork. I have half built a binder to organize all the lesson plans I'm writing. Now all I have to do is get the backlog all hole-punched and organized in the binder. I have another folder with pockets to hold the week's worth of lessons, to carry back and forth every day. I'm carrying my data key back and forth regularly now, and only once this week forgot to copy the files I need onto the key, mostly because it was my fifth night in a row up past midnight (and a 5:30 am waking time) and the old brain wasn't working so well any more.

Yesterday I had my second observation. It was another good evaluation. I'm grateful for that, but not really surprised. I've been working with children for many years now, and I know I'm decent at the job. I'm putting in time at school so that everyone else can recognize my gifts with an official piece of paper. And learning a LOT in the process, not to belittle my education. The education has been incredible, and I'm loving that part of it.

I asked my field supervisor to pay special attention to my questioning technique yesterday. The lesson was a normal lesson from the text book. We were finishing up the last text book lesson on Greece (not finishing the unit, we have two more weeks to go, with lessons that I have already created or will finish creating this weekend.) Part of why I want to be a teacher, and part of why I chose Social Studies for my middle school specialization, is because I have always loved history and social studies. That's why I had enough credits, because I took history courses as electives, along with sociology, psychology, and a host of other social studies courses beyond the required economics courses for my business degree.

So now that I am teaching Social Studies this year, I'm improving my ability to get children to think all those higher level thinking skills. And I want to be the best I can be. To me, that's the highest purpose to being a teacher - to get children to think, to encourage them to question authority. And I want honest feedback on how I can be better than I already am.

The feedback I did receive was on how to improve the look of my lesson plan. That will help me while I'm searching for a job. I'm disappointed at how little feedback I got for concrete suggestions on how to improve my ability to hold a group discussion. I got one suggestion to change the seating around. That would help, it's true, but my cooperating teacher has to agree to that. And she's not sure there is enough space in the class to do that.

I got one very specific suggestion to tie the wonders of the ancient world into modern wonders, which I applied to the last lesson. That was a good reminder, to always be thinking of how to tie history to present day. Even though most of my lesson was aimed at how relevant history is to us today, it didn't hurt to have that reminder.

Well, maybe there's just not much feedback to give for a lesson that is a typical lesson for a public school classroom. I'm wondering, when I'm actually in a classroom, if I will use shared reading like my cooperating teacher does, or if I'll try a different technique to help the children get through the book. Shared reading really helps in many ways. It improves literacy, gives children practice in reading together. It helps the less able readers to hear someone else reading aloud to them while they follow along. I even think it builds confidence, to hear others struggling with difficult foreign words just like them.

The chapters or units are short, four to five 45 minute lessons, unless I spend too much time on discussion. And the teacher takes the children well beyond what the book teaches. She's very creative, gives them lots of different ways to learn the same information. I like that, and happily join her in thinking of new creative ways to remember history. And yet I feel like I need to take it one step further. I'm struggling with how to bring history alive for those students in the same way it is for me.

I am grateful that I am not hampered by NCLB requirements that stifle children and teachers alike. I can concentrate on bringing history alive, and if I improve reading and writing and evaluation skills at the same time, all the better for my students. What I really want to do is create students who are alive and thinking. And that means going the extra mile for them.

So I'm back to the question of the week, or maybe semester, for me. How do I put enough into a lesson, and still keep my family and life intact and not kill myself with overwork?

You cannot teach a man anything; you can only help him find it within himself.
~ Galileo Galilei

Day 9 - Plays and Persuasion

2007-02-02T00:05:00.000-05:00

Today, the fifth grade had fun producing short little plays about groups of people who had to decide whether to be Patriots or Loyalists at the start of the Revolutionary War. It was interesting watching the light bulbs go off. Or not, in some cases.

They enjoyed making up the skits, I only provided them with a short vignette, and they wrote their own lines and acted them out for the rest of the class. I also asked them to answer questions as their characters. That was especially important for the groups who didn't bother to use the facts provided to justify their decisions.

The students took home an assignment, due Monday, to write a letter home (as in England) about their decision to be a Loyalist or Patriot. I gave them a grading rubric for persuasive essays. I can't wait to see what kind of job they do.

Today I picked up kalamata olives for the sixth grade on Monday. They're starting a unit on Ancient Greece, and I'm teaching the first day. I thought it would be fun to hook them in by offering a taste of a food that Greeks are famous for - olives. Kalamata olives are pretty skunky. I wonder how many of them will be brave enough to try the olive, let alone eat one?

On Thursday, I have my first observation. I'll be teaching the fifth grade, and will do a lesson on George Washington's amazing spy ring. I'm looking up ideas for writing in code ...

I'm enjoying bring ing history alive for the students!

Day 8 - Believing in Our Students

2007-01-31T22:17:00.000-05:00

There are so many wonderful quotes about how students live up to our expectations. As teachers, we are adjured to believe in our students, give them the highest expectations, strive to integrate learning across the disciplines, differentiate lessons so that everyone will learn to their maximum potential.

And then you run smack into the wall of reality.

The question then becomes how do you make reality match the ideal? Is it even possible?

I hope I never become blase or pessimistic about that. I know far too many teachers who have become that way. I also know lots of amazing and wonderful teachers who are still positive, still enthusiastic, still changing the world one student at a time.

Today I spent time reviewing the IEPs (Individual Learning Plans) of students in the fifth and sixth grade classes. I'm still learning names - remembering names might be the bane of my teaching career. 120+ names is a LOT to learn, when you've never met any of them before! I think I have faces to go with all those names; we'll see tomorrow, as I check against the seating charts.

I'm impressed with how my CT has decided to accommodate the students with IEPs. I've learned some good stuff. I've realized I still have a long way to go. I am more determined than ever to include some special ed classes in my electives for my degree. It's important stuff, differentiated learning, and not so easy to know what to do.

Teachers, at least the good ones who care, are pretty amazing people.

Many instructional arrangements seem "contrived," but there is nothing wrong with that. It is the teacher's function to contrive conditions under which students learn. It has always been the task of formal education to set up behavior which would prove useful or enjoyable later in a student's life.
~ B.F. Skinner

Day 7

2007-01-30T19:47:00.000-05:00

Taught today. Did a lesson on Paul Revere and his midnight ride, and Sybil Ludington and her midnight ride. Did you know there was a sixteen year old girl who did the same thing? I didn't, until I started planning this lesson.

This lesson was delivered to me by my CT, and I just added the frills, so it wasn't too much work. I read the Longfellow poem, they read the Ludington poem plus an abridged version of the Revere poem, then completed a Venn Diagram comparing the two.

My CT liked how I pulled some higher level thinking skills out of them. She told me not to get discouraged when they didn't answer, that they weren't used to it.

I told her that's why I went into teaching. To get kids to think.

It was a good day.

The aim of education should be to teach us rather how to think, than what to think -- rather to improve our minds, so as to enable us to think for ourselves, than to load the memory with thoughts of other men.
~ Bill Beattie

Day 6

2007-01-29T22:12:00.000-05:00

Today was a quieter day. I only observed, except that my CT and I decided that in order to learn the names of the children as well as possible in the class that will be taught during the time my field supervisor (FS) observes me, I should lead the class for that lesson. Since it was a lesson out of the text book, mostly guided reading and some discussion, I watched Linda teach it once, then I taught the second class. Talk about tap dancing!!!

eek. It went well. Thank goodness I have experience working with children and can think quickly on my feet. My CT even commented that I asked some interesting questions that really made them think, and she was stealing my ideas. That was a nice an unexpected compliment. CT did the intro, and handled the worksheet portion of it, so I only taught about half the class, but it was nice to know that first, she trusted me to do do it well enough, and second, that I can do it well enough that I could easily sub for one of these classes, just in case.

Technically, as an apprentice teacher, we aren't allowed to sub. But because I have my sub certification, I'm legal to sub, and the principal asked me to get the cert approved by that county (different than the one I live in, so another county Board of Ed has to stamp it) so that I could be allowed in the classroom. And the professors who are guiding us through this experience kind of went, wink, wink, nudge, nudge, if the principal asks you to sub while you are student teaching, it means they trust your work, so say yes, because it will help with getting a job when you are finished.

So, I now feel confident that I could handle at least the fifth grade class very well if necessary. That was a big confidence booster.

What was even more amazing is that I only had three hours of sleep last night. I was up quite late getting things ready for this week, plus writing a letter to the principal of the school where my children are attending, because upsetting things are happening to my middle daughter again.

I'm so tired of my poor sweet girl, who is so good (beyond my comprehension) in class, getting punished along with everyone else for the transgressions of a few. This time, they are being randomly assigned to seats at lunch because a few boys wouldn't stop having food fights. So my poor girl was stuck two days in a row with no other girl at her table, and she's quiet and shy. She sobbed and sobbed tonight, because she had such a lousy day.

I love the idea, or maybe the ideal of this school. My oldest daughter was lucky enough to have a wonderful amazing experience there. My youngest daughter is doing ok, too. I'm not happy about some slipping in her skills last year, but that's water under the bridge, and she has a wonderful teacher this year! I hope. Seems to be so, and I'm eager to see what her new progress report says, and hear about the results of her midyear assessments.

But my poor middle daughter is just in an untenable situation this year. The teacher is not at fault. She's doing the best she can without support and with a challenging class that is just overwhelming. I am struggling with horrible guilt that I am not being a good parent to my poor daughter right now. I'm thinking long and hard about what to do to help her. And waiting to hear what the principal says.

I think that working in a different school just brought home to me how radically different they are. The dream of the charter school is awesome. It worked for eldest daughter. The reality is that it's not working for middle daughter. So I have to figure out what to do to help her.

I will take comfort from the following quote, for a little while longer while I ponder what our alternatives are.

The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.
~ John Powell

Day 5 - First lesson

2007-01-29T21:57:00.000-05:00

On Friday, I taught my first lesson, to three classes. It was fun; the kids were great, and we all had a good time.

I like the school where I am apprentice teaching. The teachers are all nice, the kids are respectful and well-behaved, and still enjoy learning. This is a fun age, 10-12 year olds. They still like school, aren't quite blase yet - you don't have to work quite as hard to have fun with them!

The lesson was on the New England states. Because it was my first formal lesson my cooperating teacher (CT) picked out the lesson, and explained what she wanted me to do. Technically, I was only supposed to observe for the first week, so I am glad that I was given a chance to just jump right in, even though I was nervous a little.

Growing up in the northeast, learning to swim was always a challenge, because the warm water season is very short. I've never been one to slowly and torturously wade into cold water, I usually just take the plunge and get it all over with at once. It felt a little like that, just dove right into the class and got my first lesson over and done with. Now I can relax the tiniest bit and have more fun!

So I did a little intro discussion, to both draw out the students' prior knowledge and help me understand what they knew and didn't know. They'd already studied the colonies, so knew a lot about the states we would look at for the lesson, didn't know as much about the Revolutionary War period.

I found a fun state maze book, with really hard mazes! Pulled two out - Massachusetts, because they would get lots of info about Massachusetts in the video, and Maine, because the maze looked fun. They watched the video, we talked about some vocabulary, and then they worked on the maze while I walked around with the solution book, in case anyone thought they solved it. I think only about 3 or 4 students solved it during class, out of the almost 60 in all three classes, so I am truly a mean soul to give them such a difficult maze! They laughed a lot while calling me cruel and evil.
:-)

I'm glad to have the first one finished. I'm looking forward to the next two, because I am putting much more of myself and my own ideas into the next lessons. I'm pulling in my own experiences as a communication skills instructor, a DRE, a mom, and my ancient old theater background from high school and college and young adult years.

Practice is the best of all instructors.
~ Publilius Syrus

Day 4

2007-01-25T16:34:00.000-05:00

I'm having fun. My cooperative teacher, Linda, is very flexible, as am I, so we're enjoying my being able to see an opportunity in class, ask her if she wants me to add to the discussion, her saying yes, and me being able to work with all the classes for short periods.

Today, the 5th grade had a mini lesson on political cartoons. They used a couple cartoons in the text book, one from the Revolution (what they're currently studying) and one from current politics. Linda commented that there would be lots of political cartoons out this week because the President talked, and I asked if she wanted me to look for some. She agreed, reminding me to make sure they were safe, and I took 10 minutes to bring some current political cartoons up about Bush's State of the Union address.

The kids had a blast, I led the discussion from the online cartoons, because Linda is less comfortable interpreting political cartoons, and the entire class had some good laughs!

Today I'm putting together a smart board interactive presentation on labeling New England states. The tech teacher loaded up my laptop with the software, handed me a user guide, and I'm set to go. Nothing I like more than a new tech toy!

I'm thrilled to have the opportunity to learn new classroom technology techniques! My field advisory recommended I also become intimately familiar with Powerpoint, which I haven't used often and don't know very well. He likes powerpoint, wants to see me use it for lessons. By the time I have a chance to take the "Technology in the Classroom" course at FDU, I should be able to teach it!

All who have meditated on the art of governing mankind have been convinced that the fate of empires depends on the education of youth.
~ Aristotle

Day 3

2007-01-24T21:58:00.000-05:00

Today I taught my first partial lesson.

Listen to how lucky I was ... I found a school and a class where they are learning world religions as well as world history & geography. And this week was the start of Ancient China. On Tuesday, the sixth graders learned about Confucius and Taoism, so I volunteered to bring in some additional information about both. That's fun, for me!

So I got to have a nice discussion about yin-yang, The Way, Tai Chi, and why Confucius' words still apply to us today. Can't imagine a more fun way to teach!

On Friday, I'm teaching a geography lesson to the fifth graders. It won't be as much fun, so I'm working on making it more interesting! I found a book of state mazes ... that's a start.

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.
~ Confucius

Day 2 of Apprentice Teaching

2007-01-23T21:20:00.000-05:00

Today I met my Field Supervisor. The amount of work that I will have to produce this semester - the reality of it - sunk in quite suddenly, as he discussed the magnitude of the work I would be producing for apprentice teaching. Then I went to tonight's class - the accompanying seminar. On Monday nights, I have my teaching math course.

egh.

After two days in school, plus rushing off to two evening classes in a row, still recovering from a bad cold, and starting to understand just how much work will be expected again this year, I'm feeling overwhelmed.

I'll be taking it one small step at a time, one day at a time.

The good news is, I have a very nice cooperating teacher with lots of experience. The kids are nice, friendly, good kids. Curious. I like that! And I like my field supervisor. He's funny, gregarious, and I think he'll be very helpful. He already gifted me with a full set of New Jersey Core Curriculum Content Standards. A true gift indeed, especially to my printer ink budget!

Let us not be content to wait and see what will happen, but give us the determination to make the right things happen.
~ Horace Mann

Starting Student Teaching

2007-01-22T07:14:00.000-05:00

The past few weeks of break have been a recovery period for me. The end of last semester was so intense, I'm not quite sure how I survived it. No sleep, over 300 pages of written material written and turned in, plus two days a week of subbing.

I took some time off of the computer, to pay attention to my children and my house, all of which was pretty well ignored between Thanksgiving and December 22nd. My daughters needed attention, and the dust bunnies were ankle high!

Today I start my first day of 15 weeks of student teaching. I'm nervous, excited, emotions all over the place.

I think I will keep in mind Buddha's words today:

Your work is to discover your world and then with all your heart give yourself to it.
~ Buddha

I'm going to attempt to log every day of student teaching. I don't know if I can keep it up, because I also have two evening classes, but I expect that documenting a little every day will be fascinating to read, years or even months down the road ...

For Devin Yurga

2007-01-01T20:46:00.000-05:00

On Saturday, Devin Yurga was working on a Knowlton farm, using a tractor to uproot a tree, when the 2-ton vehicle flipped on top of him about 10:30 a.m., State Police and relatives said. The boy died almost 11 hours later at Morristown Memorial Hospital.
http://www.nj.com/search/index.ssf?/base/news-5/1167631841177860.xml?starledger?nnj&coll=1

To read the devastating news that a good young man has died before his time is to lose a piece of our soul. A tiny piece just goes spinning off into the universe, as we watch helplessly, wondering at the futility of taking care of our children, how in spite of our best care, they go and get pinned under a tractor and die on us. It’s unreasonable to expect us to know how to deal with such pain, such trauma.

So we cry quiet tears, rocking in anguish as the tears track slowly down our cheeks, drip from our chins, moisten the earth or the kitchen floor or our daughter’s head as we hold our children close, to keep them safe for one more precious moment. We keen our wild crazy grief in the shower, clutching our bellies in despair at our inability to keep our children safe. We startle from sleep in the dark hours of the night, and waft silently from bedroom to bedroom, checking on our children to make sure that they are still there, still safe, still with us.

How do we answer one mother’s anguish? How do we offer comfort in the face of despair? How do we still our own deep dark panic? How do we begin to come back to center ourselves, and continue on with life? How do we find an answer for untimely death?

We may never find an answer. The only way I know to answer a mother’s anguish is to reach out a hand, a hug, a shoulder to cry on, an offer to share the load of grief, to sit in silent witness. We still the panic by sitting through it, holding onto ourselves and each other until the panic passes, as it always does. We come back to center the same way, by sitting with the grief, sitting with the pain, understanding always that while it will never entirely leave us, it will lessen. Moments of joy will work their way back into our lives, if we but open our eyes enough to see them.

Our job here is to live our lives, with all the pain and agony, with all the tenderness and compassion, with all the glorious spirit we can muster. We live our lives in spite of everything that happens to us, and because of everything that happens to us. We live our lives for the sake of living, because life, after all, goes on. It goes on through agony, through heartbreaking sadness, through misery, through healing, through joy and laughter, through passion, through quiet simple peace.

We have a choice therefore, to live as a silent prisoner of misery, or to allow ourselves to finally float up to the air, up to the light, buoyed by our own ocean of salty tears perhaps, but float, allowing the gentle sun to finally dry our tears, balm our souls, heal our wounds.

We begin those first motions toward the light by acknowledging our pain. It hurts, deeply, shatteringly, exquisitely. We feel our pain, and by sitting with it, allowing it to waft through every cell of our bodies, we allow it finally to begin to trickle out of us. And those first drops of pain that finally melt from our bodies along with the rivers of tears begin to lighten our souls, to give us the buoyancy we need to start our journey forward back into life.

Healing will come.

Devin, we will miss you!

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

from Dream Work by Mary Oliver

Conspiracy of Love

2006-12-26T11:47:00.000-05:00

Blessed is the season which engages the whole world in a conspiracy of love.
~ Hamilton Wright Mabie

Sometimes, in the rush and chaos of a major holiday season, we forget the original reason for the season. Being a single mom, going back to school full-time on an overloaded schedule, all led me to an overloaded month of December. Having to write over 300 pages of papers and projects in the three weeks leading up to Xmas is almost cruel and unusual punishment.

Ok, so I chronically overproduce, and maybe it wasn’t necessary to write quite that many pages. But I did have 9 papers or projects, plus a history final to take.

This last week of school, I worked a full day plus two half days. I helped with two class parties. And the girls and I baked and baked and baked, getting cookies ready for their teachers. We made 5 kinds of cookies, went through 5 pounds of butter, I don’t know how much succanat and spelt flour. The cookies were delicious, the teachers grateful, and my girls were happy that they helped make someone else happy. My back was a bit sore, but I was happy because my girls were happy (and had the bonus of eating lots of yummy cookies for the last couple days!)

This year, again, I had the misfortune of dealing with a last minute emergency present substitution. Once again, Magic Cabin ran out of stock, and didn’t bother to inform their customers that they weren’t going to receive their orders. I don’t get it. They’re a toy company. Why do they think customers are ordering from them? How could they ever think that one stupid postcard, mailed who knows when, would be enough notification that a present would not arrive? How could they not understand that when orders are placed online, acknowledgements received online (including everything in stock and on its way acknowledgements), and emails sent advising customers to track their orders online, that customers will GO ONLINE to check the status of their order. And how could they think they could print on the package invoice that other items will ship separately, still have a message online that items will be shipped separately, and not have customers trying to wait patiently for items to arrive?

So, Magic Cabin will never again receive another order from me. Never.

I’ve made this vow before, and it took me about six or seven years to change my mind or relent or whatever I did this year. What a mistake.

In comparison, the two companies I found who helped me replace a Santa present at the last minute made personal phone calls to work with me to ensure delivery on time. So if you like Waldorf-inspired toys, and have girls who adore fairies, I heartily recommend these companies:
http://blueberryforest.com/
http://www.willowtreetoys.com/
http://www.seasonsnaturaltoys.com/

Ooops. Sorry. Little detour into feeling sorry for myself there. Bak to what I started to write about: remembering that conspiracy of love. In the end, the endless round of cookies and the last minute frantic internet searches don’t matter. In the end, the look of wonder on a child’s face as she walks into the room, the look of awe as another opens an unexpected box, the hug from the daughter who received the unexpected, those warm wonderful feelings are why we parents put in the time and effort that we do.

This year, in spite of the frenetic pace leading up to Christmas, was quite peaceful for the last two days. We bought a tree very late – Christmas Eve afternoon. I was grateful to find a tree farm still open. A small place, and a very nice gentleman who was able to accommodate my insane schedule. He helped us find a perfect tree, loaded us up, and we arrived home at 4 pm on Christmas Eve, frantically swept and vacuumed the downstairs, put up the tree, and then relaxed to decorate with a new single mom friend without children that evening. We share a bottle of wine, the girls bickered a bit over which decorations should go where, and we survived the experience, got everyone to bed by midnight, and all got a decent night’s sleep.

On Christmas, we had a leisurely morning opening presents and playing games! It was the kind of Christmas that I love, no needing to run out to grandparents, no frantic rushing to get ready. Instead, we drove 20 minutes to another friend’s house, where we had a simple dinner together, played with her little children, talked and shared more wine, bemoaned the problems of poverty and whether they were solvable or not, ooohed and aaahed over pictures of the cosmos, taken by the Hubble Telescope, and remembered that we are just tiny specks in an enormous universe.

We gave hugs, came home to bed, and slept a long peaceful night. Today, we’ll head over to my mom’s for the Christmas party with my extended family!

Joyous Solstice, everyone!

Semester DONE!

2006-12-17T09:02:00.000-05:00

I am finished the semester! In the last four weeks, since Thanksgiving week, I have produced over 300 pages of papers and projects! That doesn't count the duplication or borrowing (with permission) that I did from one unit plan to another!

It feels good to be finished.

What was amazing to me is that I realized, as exhausted as I was, that I was still filled with joy, still full of enthusiasm, still working in bliss.

Does that mean I am where I am meant to be, at least for now? Perhaps Pema Chodron says it best:

If we learn to open our hearts, anyone, including the people who drive us crazy, can be our teacher.
~ Pema Chodron

Art Lessons

2006-12-06T07:24:00.000-05:00

My daughter learned a tough life lesson this morning. I suppose, in the overall scheme of life lessons, it could have been a whole lot worse. In retrospect, she’ll understand that it truly was just a little thing.

She didn’t think so this morning.

And as I watched her trudge onto the bus, head hung, posture screaming absolute defeat, my heart broke into a million pieces for her.

Parenting is truly a heartbreaking work of art. We put a gentle touch here, a stronger statement there, a delicate hint another time, and a bold statement that just screams right across the middle as we work longer on the piece of art. You’ve had those screaming bold statements, haven’t you? The ones that we just can’t help … passion overtakes us, and in the end, the bold touch has as dramatic an effect on our children as it does on a Van Gogh painting. Hopefully we don’t lose an ear in the process, although I sometimes wonder, as blistered as my ear feels after some of those bold touches.

This morning, as I watched one of my pieces of art, one of the pieces that grew as if by magic, one of the pieces that just poured through me as a vessel which I had very little control over, my heart was shattered once again. After spending far too many hours helping her prepare a watercolor for an art show ... hours on the phone trying to find a way to cover the artwork in plastic (not framed), a long detour to Lowe’s to find stretch wrap, the best alternative I could come up with after phone calls to every frame shop in two counties, and an early waking this morning to help her cover her piece ... I finally read the rules to make sure she had everything attached properly.

And there, in black and white, right in the requirements for the show, it says, “Maximum size 11x14.” Her painting is 11x18.

She’s devastated. She really wanted to show this painting. It’s good, produced at the end of a summer workshop on watercolors. I’m proud of her work; even better, she’s proud of her work. The contest had a cash prize, and she was hoping to win some cash for her exchange program this summer to Australia and New Zealand. Her last words, as she climbed out of the car to trudge to the bus were, “I had a sketch the right size. I could have entered that instead.”

I’m angry at myself. I should have read the rules at the beginning, too. I would have caught the size requirement. I might have been able to save her some anguish.

On the other hand, she did learn a lesson this morning. It was painful. She won’t ever forget to read all the rules to a contest again, though.

It could have been a whole lot worse, like drugs, or teen pregnancy. For that I can be grateful. One day, she will be able to laugh about this. And in the meanwhile, I will guide with delicate strokes and hints of color here and there, allowing her to make the kind of mistakes that will help her grow into an amazing and awesome work of art. She will become stronger, more vivid, full of the confidence of someone who learns lessons well. And my heart will shatter again and again and again as I watch the struggle of the birth of a full and rich human being.

If I accept you as you are, I will make you worse. However, if I treat you as though you are what you are capable of becoming, I help you become that.
~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Information Junkie!

2006-12-02T18:24:00.000-05:00

It’s the end of the semester, and I have nine major projects or papers due in the last three weeks of the semester. I can’t remember the last time I slept a full eight hours, and I’m so groggy in the morning that it takes two cups of coffee to get me going, and tea steeped a long time for max caffeine to keep me going all day!

All I begrudge, really, is my sleep. The work is exhilarating, and my head is ready to explode with new ideas, theories, creativity…

I realized at some point last week that I’m an information junkie though. It’s sad, really. Papers that should take me five hours to write end up taking 20 hours instead, because I start researching, and one article leads me to another, which leads to yet another, ad infinitum, and next thing I know, I’m reading about disciplinary literacy instead of multiple intelligence theory, and it’s all so fascinating I can’t stop, but the next project is due on Wednesday and I’m still trying to finish my lesson plans on global warming for the Thursday group project and now I just found another fascinating literacy paper on the Carnegie website. Ack!

So far, the disciplinary literacy paper that I found last week will be used in my global warming project due this week, and the Carnegie paper will help me with my Literacy course unit study. And the fascinating site on mini-offices has visuals that will help me with both the literacy project and the tutoring I’m doing twice a week for IEP students, so it’s all good, but I need to make it stop so I can write!!!

Anyone have any suggestions?

Our minds are finite, and yet even in these circumstances of finitude we are surrounded by possibilities that are infinite, and the purpose of human life is to grasp as much as we can out of the infinitude.
~ Alfred North Whitehead

Global Warming

2006-11-30T06:52:00.000-05:00

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

2006-11-25T09:17:00.000-05:00

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

2006-11-24T07:53:00.000-05:00

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

2006-11-18T14:53:00.000-05:00

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!

2006-11-13T21:41:00.000-05:00

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!

2006-11-11T11:56:00.000-05:00

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!

2006-11-11T11:06:00.000-05:00

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.

Learning to drive!

2006-10-19T22:24:00.000-04:00

Let us remember all children and commit ourselves to their growth and safety, their health and education, their uniqueness and their unfolding beauty.
~ Connie Sternberg

Today, on the way home from a parent/teacher conference, my 15-year-old daughter asked if she could drive up the farm lane. She’s only half a year away from her learner’s permit (eek!) and hadn’t been behind the wheel of anything.

More than 20 years ago, I had the pleasure of teaching my youngest brother, twelve years younger than me, how to drive a stick shift. It is a funny story, and it starts all the way back to when I was learning how to drive a stick in my early 20’s. I borrowed (with permission) another brother’s car to drive into town. I’d been riding dirt bikes for years, and understood the concept of shifting, but hadn’t had much practice in cars. My youngest brother was along for the ride, plus my sister, who also didn’t know how to drive stick.

We got to the light in town, and I slipped the clutch a bit too fast. Didn’t know what I’d done, and as we jerked up Main Street, my sister and I laughing hysterically because we had no idea why the car was behaving so bizarrely or what to do to correct it, my brother dove to the floor of the car. This was before seat belts. He shrieked at the top of his lungs, “This is so embarrassing! I’ll never be able to come into town again! Get me out of here!” cowering on the floor.

My sister and I laughed all the harder, which only made him shriek louder, and the circus bucked its way down Main Street until I finally realized I should be shifting into second gear, and the ride magically smoothed out.

When we got home, my brother crawled out of the car, kissed the ground, and vowed never to ride in a car again with me. I was about 24, he was about 12.

Fast forward another four or five years, and he’s driving, and now guess who has the only manual transmission in the family? That’s right, the sister who humiliated him so badly he couldn’t go back into town ever again. He humbly came to me one day, and begged me to let him learn to drive stick in my car. I smirked, and agreed.

My parents lived on the side of a mountain. They lived on a nice back road, the equivalent of the farm lane I live on now, complete with stop signs, curves, and steep hills, all at once, and every 100 yards or so. That long ago trip around the block at the top of that mountain is almost indescribable. If I wasn’t shrieking not to hit the tree, I was cracking up because the car had stalled yet again, or even funnier, was strangely jerking its way up the hill. Sometimes two events at once.

Eventually that afternoon, my brother humbly apologized for that day in town when he dove to the floor and vowed to never ride with me again. He eventually became a skilled driver, unlike my ex who set the parking brake and climbed out of a car rather than risk sliding backward into the car behind him at his first intersection on a hill.

Fast forward another 20 or so years, to this afternoon on my farm lane. This time, it was a minivan, automatic, power brakes, steep hills, sharp curves. No trees, thank goodness. The seatbelt, which I’d wisely put back on after we switched sides, saved me several times from slamming my head into the dashboard or flying through the windshield. Power brakes and panicked 15 year olds are not a healthy mix for passengers, even when they are only going 4 mph! Especially when the handyman roars up the hill in his mud-covered and rather large SUV, laughing like a hyena when he sees who’s behind the wheel in the minivan pulled 15 feet into the field to allow him to pass. Thank goodness they’d just done haying a couple weeks ago. We might have gotten lost in the field…

The “hairpin” 90º curves were a bit hairy, especially because there was one lone tree we had to maneuver around. Accelerating down the steep hill to 8 miles an hour was another occasion to bless my foresight in re-buckling my seatbelt. The cat, calmly watching from across the field was another reason to bless the seatbelts. Thank goodness she hadn’t moved; I might have needed surgery to remove the embedded seatbelt from my belly!

We navigated our way down the 3/10ths of a mile farm lane safe and sound, with only a few thousand miles of life gone from my brake pads, and a dozen or so new grey hairs for mom. My daughter was quite proud that she’d made it without a mishap, and excitedly asked when she could try it next. I took a few deep breaths, and with only a minor quiver in my voice, replied, “Soon, dear. Soon.”

Moonswept

2006-10-05T07:35:00.000-04:00

a soft caress across my cheek
rousing me at 3 am
the house asleep
I hear the whisper of your sigh
as you fade back into my dreams
at the last
soft curling fingers
gently brushing my cheek
your luminous eyes
touching my soul
moonswept

~ Robin Slaw

Thunderstorm Haiku

2006-10-04T23:35:00.000-04:00

Thunder crashing down
Lightning flickering brightly
Computer off now!

Watching the Blossoming

2006-10-04T10:45:00.000-04:00

While we have the gift of life, it seems to me the only tragedy is to allow part of us to die whether it is our spirit, our creativity or our glorious uniqueness.
~ Gilda Radner

I have a friend who is blossoming after a very long dry spell with no love in her life. It’s an amazing process unfolding, like watching a rose bloom in slow motion photography. To hear the joy as she describes a new relationship makes room in my own soul for joy and hope for our world.

This morning, I caught up on the news from Lancaster, the incredibly sad story of the young girls who were shot by a man ravaged by his past, in senseless brutality. I cried as I read the names and ages of the girls, and saw that sisters had died. I cried for the lost innocence of a people who try to inure themselves from the violence and waste in our society, choosing to live in simplicity and community. It’s a place where the people don’t feel the need to lock their doors. It’s a place we all wish we could have in our lives.

I mourn my own loss of yet more naiveté. There is no rhyme or reason to when or how violence can enter our lives. My children attend the equivalent of a one-room school house. It has a few more rooms than one, but there aren’t metal detectors at the doors, there are no police or security guards on campus. Nor do I want that for my children. I want my children to live their lives free of fear for a little while longer.

I noticed the difference when I went to an observation at another local elementary school. The front doors were locked; I had to buzz the office to be admitted. What does that do to the soul of a child to have to ask permission to enter your school? What does it do to the soul of a teen to have to pass through a metal detector to enter your school? I am not ready for my children to fall into distrust of the world. I want them to continue to believe that if they work hard enough, they can make a difference; make the world a better place.

I want to retain that innocence myself. I’m not ready to admit defeat; I’m not ready to admit that the world is inherently evil and a bad place. I’m not ready to give in to fear. I refuse to allow myself to believe the worst of people. I still insist that there is an essential goodness that we can build in people with kindness, caring, acceptance, and love. We can still choose to live in joy rather than fear.

So I continue to read the news from my friend who is living in pure joy in her new relationship. It’s wonderful to watch her unfolding, watch her learn to trust again, watch her blossom into her beautiful whole self. It brings me hope, because I can still see joy in the world.

My school is still not locked, and the children run out at the end of the day, still joyful because they took a walk or saw a new bug or planted their seeds for the coldframe or greenhouse.

Life goes on. We can still choose joy.

The Worst Fear Ever

2006-10-02T07:26:00.000-04:00

Last night, I received the kind of phone call that wrenches your gut, spins your mind into a maelstrom of what if’s, and breaks your heart into a million pieces. A friend called to see if we’d seen her 13-year-old daughter, she wasn’t home. It was past midnight.

We live on property that abuts their property. The daughter, J., used to walk over to see my daughter A. when they were in girl scouts together. The state police and the father and older brother were out searching; the mother was calling everyone she could think of who might have seen J.

As a mother of three daughters, I know that fear. It’s a heart-stopping surreal fear for someone you love more than life itself, and when you don’t know where they are, or what’s happening to them, life as we know it goes into something resembling an Escher painting more than life as before.

This is the kind of situation that challenges us to our very highest self. How do we continue to function without dissolving into constant puddles of tears? How do we not let our fears take over our mind, filling it with negativity and drawing to us the worst of our fears? How can we continue to picture a child returning healthy and safe, when we don’t know where she is, what’s happening to her?

Please join me in envisioning J. safe at home, surrounded by a loving family. And go find your children, hug them, tell them you love them, and surround yourself and your family with visions of safety and joy.

God, make me brave for life: oh, braver than this.
Let me straighten after pain, as a tree straightens after the rain,
Shining and lovely again.
God, make me brave for life; much braver than this.
As the blown grass lifts, let me rise
From sorrow with quiet eyes,
Knowing Thy way is wise.
God, make me brave, life brings
Such blinding things.
Help me to keep my sight;
Help me to see aright
That out of dark comes light.
~ Author Unknown

Gratitude Journals

2006-10-01T23:40:00.000-04:00

If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life is “thank you,” it will be enough.
~ Meister Eckhart

This month, my covenant group is working on the subject of gratitude. One of the suggestions in our topic outline is to maintain a gratitude journal. Studies have shown that people who maintain a gratitude journal, who take the time each day to think about how they are grateful, live happier, healthier, more productive lives.

I think I’ll start writing down ways I have been grateful each day. It’s part of my journey to live in joy rather than fear.

Today, I am grateful for my children getting up early enough to make sure we could get to church on time. I wanted to hear a specific minister.

Today I am grateful for the grill my sister-in-law helped us buy, that cooked the wonderful steak we ate for dinner.

Today I am grateful for the wonderful afternoon I had with my girls, going to the movies. I’m grateful that someone opened the Washington Theater, so we could go to $5/person movies.

Today I am grateful for the geese who flew overhead as I was cooking dinner. I’m also grateful they didn’t opt to do target practice on me or on dinner as they flew overhead.

Today I am grateful for the rain which watered my plants.

Thank you, life.

The Sky is Falling

2006-09-30T11:08:00.000-04:00

What are you worried about? Why do you think that the sky may be about to fall? Have you never encountered negativity before? It is amazing how quickly we forget the way in which fear exerts a hold over us. Perhaps it is just as well that our memory is so short, or we might all lead dull, flat lives with no drama and no tension. Here comes a little excitement, that's all. What's happening now is challenging. You can be forgiven for imagining that some of it is problematic. But it isn't.
~ Jonathan Cainer, Capricorn forecast for Friday, 29 Sept 2006 http://www.cainer.com/

Why is it that a setback does immediately set me to thinking the sky is falling? How appropriate yesterday’s astrological forecast was for me. Good thing I read it after the fact, so I could and did acknowledge that help will always arrive.

It was a long week. A paper was late (with permission) because I couldn’t find a cooperative school to allow a classroom observation. I was trying desperately to finish the paper anyway, with the knowledge that any delay would only have a ripple effect into the work due later this week and next. So I was trying to survive on four or five hours sleep a night.

I should know better. Sleep deprivation always makes every pebble in my path look like a boulder too high to pass. That’s pretty much what happened this week.

First, I received a phone call from the principal of the school where I was scheduled to do two field placements. That’s where we go into a class all day, for five days in a row, and observe and work with the children, and at the end of the second week, actually teach a lesson and have an observation by an experienced educator/field observer. The principal was calling to tell me that he would accept me into one field experience (good), but that he felt it was important for me to have a second experience with another school district, so he would only allow me the one field placement (bad).

When I called the gentleman in charge of field placements, Mr. M., he informed me that he had many FDU students who had no field placements, others in the same boat as me, and he would place me next semester. That would be fine except that I’m enrolled in this program at FDU where I’m to push through 22 graduate credits in two semesters, so that I can have my NJ Teaching Cert by May, and I need to do my Apprenticeship Teaching (Student Teaching) in spring semester, and must complete both field experiences before the Apprenticeship. eek. As a single mom, with a singular opportunity to finish this program in one year and no financing beyond May, this was it, the do or die moment. (More bad.)

Mr. M. suggested I send an email to the professor who admitted me to the program, to see if she had any additional suggestions to help. I got the feeling I was in the middle of a political maelstrom around the concept of rolling admissions, with some faculty supporting it, others dead set against it. And me in the middle, not for the first time.

The second challenge for my week was a phone call on Thursday afternoon from my girl friend, letting me know that our daughters, best friends for the last two years, did a BIG BAD THING. These are two girls who are sensitive good girls, who wouldn’t intentionally hurt a flea, let alone another person. Well, they screwed up big time. They spray painted “D & D must die” on the fort the friend’s brother and next door neighbor will building. They didn’t get caught, but finally admitted what they’d done when the friend heard that the parents were getting ready to call the police.

My middle daughter spent a night crying herself to sleep. She’s learning a difficult lesson on how to think about what you are doing, what your friends are doing, and how to stop something you know is wrong, even when your friends won’t listen, not just go along. I’m sorry the lesson was so painful for her, and glad that it was something rather innocuous that can easily be fixed.

The third challenge was attending the orientation sessions for my field 1 & 2 placements, and understanding the scope of what’s expected of me, on top of the regular courses I’m taking. eek. I’m a little worried that I won’t make it.

My friends laugh gently at me, and remind me to take one step at a time, and I’ll come out the other end not quite sure how I managed it all. They all have confidence in me and tell me so. My professors have confidence in me, and tell me so. I’m glad to have some people in my life reminding me that I am a wonderful person who can accomplish amazing things.

This morning, I woke up and started planning my weekend. I have a lot to accomplish, and didn’t need to spend the day helping a daughter repaint a fort. But there it is, life presenting me with another FGO (fucking growth opportunity). I fretted, then suddenly understood that there might be a benefit to my field experiences being split up and one possibly being late. It will give me breathing time. It will give me time to learn more about lesson planning before I actually have to produce one in practice. I will have time to breathe inbetween two intense weeks. That’s a good thing.

One of these days, I will learn to take the pebbles in my path in stride. I won’t turn them into boulders, I will just breathe through the moment, and trust that there is always a solution, one that might even be better than if I hadn’t been required to make a sidestep around a pebble, or even sidle around a large boulder in my path.

I will spend a morning helping two lovely young girls understand that they must always think about how their actions affect others.

And I will spend a day outside, living in the moment, even if it means some intense writing later on tonight or tomorrow. My mind will be fresher and clearer because of it.

Gratitude

2006-09-26T07:15:00.000-04:00

Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life.
It turns what we have into enough, and more.
It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity.
It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a
home, a stranger into a friend.
Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace
for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow.
~ Melodie Beatie

Today, in the midst of a house that looks like four separate hurricanes blew through, as I work on two small freelance jobs, two papers for school, back to school night, and the finalization of my divorce this week, I am still grateful. Oh, yeah, and paying bills, feeding the girls, trying to catch up on laundry, and making sure we all bathe on a semi-regular basis, in spite of all of that, or maybe because of all of that, I am still grateful.

I have the money to pay my bills. I have food to feed my girls, I have hot water for showers. I have a house to live in, on a beautiful farm that we all love. I have schools that are wonderful for my girls, in spite of one daughter’s teacher quitting in the second week of school. I am in school, with funding to be able to make it through the year, and I’m enjoying my classes even more than I hoped! I have some work to enhance my meager income. I have my three fireballs of energy and wonder who, yes, wreak havoc through the house and are still learning to help keep it in order, make my life joyous day after day after day. And I have a life full of friends and full living, after years of quiet misery.

There is indeed much to be grateful for this morning. The singing of the birds outside my office as the sun rises. The pride of my eldest daughter as she reports that she successfully rappelled on her challenge course yesterday (the same daughter who has a crippling fear of heights – or used to, anyway!) The majestic beauty of the geese as they rise to wing their way south. The warmth of the cat laying in my lap, warming me on a brisk fall morning. The love of friends who give me essential oil treatments when I’m sick and give me work when I need it. The love of other friends who support me when I am sad, sending me virtual hugs and love and btdt survival strategies.

I am indeed grateful this morning.

A hand reaches out

2006-09-20T23:13:00.000-04:00

A hand reaches out in love,
to save, to offer sanctuary.

A hand draws back in fear,
containment, survival.

Can we bridge the gap
between fearing for survival
and living lives fully?

Can we walk out under the stars
and understand our puniness
our insignificance
in the glory of the universe?

Can we rest in the peace of the night
knowing we are a part of the whole
nurturing the dust from a faraway star
carried from the beginning of time
held safe within us for a life
passed on to the next creation
when we are through?

Made of stardust,
eternal, glorious, part of an
unspeakable
indescribable
universe.

Hands reach out in love
offering sanctuary.

From fear, we extend our hands,
welcoming the love,
accepting the fear,
living the glory.

~ Robin Slaw

© 2006

The Field

2006-09-17T08:49:00.000-04:00

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
There is a field. I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
Doesn’t make any sense.
~ Jelaluddin Rumi, The Essential Rumi

To love someone, with all your heart and soul, free from the constraints of society, free from fear, free from judgment, free from pain, free from misunderstanding. We all strain toward that, don’t we?

In learning to live again after divorce, messages to my soul have been arriving one after another after another. Some of them are difficult, challenging, make me weep in anguish or frustration. Some sooth my soul like balm on a fiery burn. Some make me go still and quiet and begin to listen with the quiet core of my soul.

I suspect it’s those messages that I should most pay attention to – the messages that slide deep into my quiet inner core. The ones that make me go still, and sink deeply into myself. The ones that help me lose all sense of self while contemplating an essential truth, a truth about myself, a truth about the world. Those messages hold my soul in thrall with the essential rightness that I need for learning at that moment.

I also have friends that take me to that field where ideas and language don’t make sense. They are the friends who see clearly in the world, who can say words to me that cause me to stop, take stock, and give my soul another eternal moment of pause to be, to grow, to acknowledge my essential self. Friends like that are rare; I cherish them beyond words, and find myself grateful every day of my life to have found them.

To my friends who are there, meeting me in that field beyond ideas, language, or even each other, namaste.

May you join me in the field often.

Unlived Lives

2006-09-16T12:09:00.000-04:00

Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment, and especially on their children, than the unlived lives of the parents.
~ Carl Gustav Jung

Last night was perhaps the best and worst of possible nights. I spent the evening trying to sleep in the parking lot of my daughter’s high school, while she attended a dance.

Earlier that week, I’d had a party planned. I was supposed to be divorced this week, and was looking forward to a night spent celebrating my new life with some good friends. Instead, the divorce was postponed, the party cancelled, and a quiet evening spent with a girlfriend whose husband was away traveling replaced my original plan. It still would have been a nice evening.

Friday afternoon, while attending a volunteer training at the charter school where my younger two daughters attend, I received a phone call from my oldest daughter. There was a dance at the high school, and she wanted to go. This is the high school, mind you, that is a good 45 minute drive for us, because she attends the county tech school’s theater academy.

Her first dance as a high school freshman, how could I say no? I’m so proud of my blossoming daughter. I rushed home to make sure she ate something, and she apologized for screwing up my evening. It was ok, I reassured her. Dances are fun, I was glad she was going. I noticed her outfit, and in one of those bizarre brainless moments of parenting that you curse yourself for later, I ignored it. I choose my battles wisely, or at least I try to, and it really wasn’t that important what she chose to wear to the dance. It was nothing bad, just dressier than I would have chosen myself for a dance in high school.

So, into the car we went, and we had a nice discussion on the way down about how she was feeling about her new school. We haven’t had a lot of time to talk in the first week. I started school, and A. goes to sleep early because she leaves for school at 6:30 am, so her little sisters are still awake when she goes to bed. I was valuing my parenting time, enjoying our conversation.

When we arrived at the high school and A. realized how everyone was dressed, she panicked. She had on a funky skirt and top with sandals, exactly the kind of outfit that I wear to parties and camp dances, she was using my example as a choice for her outfit, and much to her dismay, her mom is just plain weird and follows her own unique path. Certainly she doesn’t follow a high school teen’s path…

“Please, Mom, take me home. I’m so sorry I made you drive me all the way down here. Please take me home, I can’t go in there dressed like this.”

I tried brainstorming … do you have any clothes in the car, do I have any clothes in the car, is there anything else you can put on? Do you have anything in your locker? You’re not that dressy, maybe the other theater people will be dressed like you, let’s wait and see. (It was only 7 pm, and I knew others would still be arriving.)

“Mom, please take me home,” she begged, with a rising note of panic and desperation in her voice.

My mind was now racing at top speed. She was looking forward to her first dance, this was a *huge* step for her socially, and I was so proud that she’d made the decision to go. How could we set this right??? I know, I know, let’s find somewhere to buy a pair of jeans. There must be somewhere we can go.

At that point, I would have paid designer prices for something for her to wear. This was my daughter, trying to blossom, and I was worried that a failure tonight would set her back months or years in self-confidence!

We live far from the school, so I didn’t know the neighborhood at all. I hadn’t noticed any stores that would sell clothing, but Wal-Marts and K-Marts are endemic – surely there must be somewhere that we could go for an emergency replacement. I was racking my brains to think who I might know that lived locally to the school, and A. finally remembered that she had a friend from the charter school who lived nearby.

We called, got directions to the closest Wal-Mart, and found a pair of jeans for only $18. Can you hear my sigh of relief from here? Back to the dance we went, with Alanna happily waltzing into the building to find her new friends.

Meanwhile, I’m looking at the clock in the car, realizing that it’s now 8 pm, the dance is over at 10 pm, and I have at least a 45 minute drive each way. No sense driving home now. Can’t have my nice quiet evening that my friend and I had planned, drinking wine and commiserating over the newest changes at school. Now what???

The best I could come up with was to lower my seat back, and take a nap. I was far too sleep-deprived to even think about reading a textbook. I was so sleep-deprived I couldn’t even think about trying to find a movie theater or somewhere else to spend time. I was cursing myself for not thinking to bring my laptop – I would have paid to buy a dvd at that same Wal-mart, only 7 minutes away.

So, an uncomfortable hour and a half later, complete with stiff neck, I woke from drowsing, drove down to the Dunkin Donuts (the only thing I could find open) to use the restroom and buy myself a bagel, since I hadn’t had dinner, and sat waiting the last 10 minutes for the dance to end so I could drive A. and I home.

She had fun. I didn’t, but I had a proud mommie moment. It’s almost impossible to describe the feelings of pride that we experience as we watch our daughters stretch and blossom, grow into young womanhood. My daughter took a deep breathe that night, and threw herself headlong into life.

Maybe the divorce was worth it. I chose to live my life fully, to reach out and grasp happiness when I could no longer find it in my marriage. I’ve worried that I might have done damage to my children by thinking about myself, in spite of reassurances from my therapist that I wasn’t helping them by modeling self-sacrifice for their sakes.

Last night I watched, and helped my daughter realize, that it’s better to live life fully, and not retreat to an unlived life. Last night my daughter made a choice to help herself choose to live fully, eagerly, with passion.

I am content. Even with a stiff neck.

The Death of Love

2006-09-13T12:43:00.000-04:00

Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of withering, of tarnishing.
~ Anais Nin

Today was supposed to be the day my divorce went through. There was a last minute delay of two weeks, I’m not sure why. The paperwork was not quite ready, perhaps. The dissolution of my marriage has me thinking about love today, and how and why it disappeared from my marriage.

As I ponder the ending, I’m led to sadness. I didn’t start my marriage expecting it to have a finite life. It didn’t come with an expiration date that would mean automatic disposal by a certain time. I never expected to end up divorced, a single mom with still-young children. I would have never chosen this route had I felt there was any other option left to me.

I struggle sometimes with bitterness. In the end, in order to survive, I chose flight. I was dying a slow lonely death in my marriage, loveless, ignored, hurting, so painfully lonely, alone. I begged for help, it was ignored. I’m left wondering why our marriage was so unimportant to my partner that he could choose ending it over working to save it.

Of course, he would probably say that he didn’t choose ending it, because when I finally left, he woke up and realized that he was losing his family. My mom tells me he was, and still is, devastated. She wishes that we would get back together.

I wonder how my own mother could wish for me to go back into misery and loss of self. In the end, as I asked for help, as I asked him to go to therapy and he would walk out of the room without even answering, I was left with the choice between survival and leaving, or staying and dying a slow death of my essential self. I chose flight, in that eternal decision of fight or flight for survival. The fighting hadn’t worked.

I flew for myself. I flew for survival. I flew for joy. I flew for life.

I am reaching, arms and soul wide open, for a life of vulnerability, happiness, friendship, and love.

Following Your Life Path

2006-09-07T14:31:00.000-04:00

We learn to live consciously through becoming aware of inner and outer events as they are happening. Building a conscious self means becoming increasingly aware of inner events, bodily events and interpersonal events. A conscious self is able to experience in full awareness all the distinctly different components of the self, including feelings, needs, drives and values. A conscious self lives consciously.
~ Gershen Kaufman/Lev Raphael, The Dynamics of Power

In my journaling book, the one on using journal writing as a spiritual quest, I was asked to write about my life path. What do I know about where I am coming from and where I am going?

What a question to ask someone in the middle of all the life turmoil that I am experiencing. I’m not sure I can even bring myself to answer those questions, let alone do it objectively, without whining or feeling sorry for myself.

On the other hand, I had too many errands to run and not enough time this afternoon to finish them, so I find myself with a fuller day tomorrow than expected, and an emptier day today than expected, in order to not waste too much gas driving to the same town twice in two days. So I might as well try.

My life path has certainly taken some unexpected twists and turns, lately. Yesterday the mail brought my PRAXIS exam scores. You could have knocked me over with a feather, as I anxiously stood at the mailbox, ripping open the envelope and frantically scanning the results. The scores were important – without passing scores, I can’t get approval from the state to teach in New Jersey. I was pretty sure I had passed the Elementary level basic knowledge exam. I was also quite certain I’d not passed the Middle School Social Studies test. It was a stunning surprise to find that not only had I passed both tests, I’d done exceedingly well on both of them.

That was a good twist in my path, another good twist, one that’s brought me even further out into a bright sunlit path full of trust that the future will be better, along with the last minute twist of funding for school. I think my life these past few months might be a testimony to never giving up in despair, that a window will finally open somewhere, even after you think that every last door, every last window, every last chink in the wall has slammed shut for you.

I have been pleasantly surprised by my MAT courses, too. I was afraid that I would be enduring many of them, putting in time and work playing to a party line that would make me acceptable to the state, but not trusting that educational theory would have caught up to practical application at university level coursework. Silly me, I forgot that out of academia come many of our brilliant discoveries. It’s been a truly gratifying experience to hear a professor explain that pop quizzes really aren’t a good way to assess a student’s grasp of subject matter. It’s been even more amazing to hear a teacher explain that she still calls each parent of her kindergarten students every week, to touch base with the parents and let them know how their children are doing in school.

I was a bit envious at that piece of information. My own children’s teachers were quite lacking in that effort last year, never asking us to volunteer in class, and getting only four formal progress reports and very little or no feedback in between. To be fair, it was really only one teacher who never communicated. One was very good at sending home notes each week, and another good at giving me in person updates on progress.

I find myself making mental notes about ideas that sound good to me. Ideas like calling my parents each week. I’m thinking that I might need to start a teacher’s book of good ideas, because I may not remember all these little hints and ideas next year when I start teaching for real.

My goal has suddenly been thrust into a much more viable possibility. I am in school, learning how to be a teacher. I am getting back test scores that indicate I might be quite good at my job. I already know that I have the communication skills to succeed, from previous work and volunteer experience. Now I’m building up the paper qualifications.<

My path is clearer and brighter. I can see ahead to a future that I might actually enjoy. There are people out there bucking the federal (ridiculous) requirements of NCLB, doing the kind of work that I dream teachers should do. Maybe I’ll be able to be that kind of inspiring teacher, too.

Bittersweet

2006-09-05T11:09:00.000-04:00

We cannot hold a torch to light another's path without brightening our own.
~ Ben Sweetland

This time of year is bittersweet to me. My children are hard at work repacking their backpacks for school, making lists for the local office superstore, so we can make the last minute purchases necessary to start off the year properly.

My teenager needs pens, the middle child needs marbled composition books, and the youngest needs a new clipboard as hers cracked over the summer. I need binders. We need to reschedule beginning of the week trips to the grocery store for lunch materials. And this year, I’m in school myself, so the need for organization is even more paramount to our survival!

In the midst of the mad scramble to get ready, I wanted to take a few moments to mourn, and another few minutes to express gratitude to the universe for the gifts we have received. Three years ago, we were happily homeschooling. I miss those days. I miss the leisure to take our time on a project, I miss the slow-paced days, I miss the company of my girls. I’m mourning that time all over again, because I was able to be home with the girls for part of the summer, even though our time was disjointed because of visitation with their father and weekends away from them.

It was not all paradise, though, that precious time of homeschooling. I found myself unable to live an unfulfilled life any more. The girls alone weren’t able to enrich my life the way I needed, and my partner had quit interacting with all of us. I was incredibly, desperately lonely.

Opportunities presented themselves. An amazing charter school was ready to open at the same time as a full-time position in my chosen career opened. The girls were accepted at the charter school, I was offered the job, and our lives changed. We weren’t together all the time any more. That was sad, that was good. My girls were closer to friends, learned how to gain in peer leadership skills. They had fun at an experiential school that had them outside all kinds of weather, every day. My middle child discovered a passion for gardening!

I relearned how to live with passion and intensity. I remembered how much fun it was to be in engaged conversation with other passionate people who cared to make positive changes in the world. I threw myself into a rewarding career. Happier mommy meant happier children.

More changes – my partner sunk so far away from us that it was no longer tenable for me to live with him, so I made the decision to move out with the girls. We moved three miles from school, into our community. Then I lost my job, which required a career change because there were no open positions within commuting distance of our home. I gained an opportunity to go back to school for the classes necessary to get a teaching certificate in New Jersey.

It’s been a whirlwind of changes for the last year. It’s been frightening, joyous, overwhelming, ecstatic, sad, lonely, happy, amazing. My head still spins to think about what the girls and I have been through in the last year. We have survived, we will continue to survive, we will thrive in spite of the curve balls thrown to us. We are strong; we have deep strong roots from being able to count on each other. We are flexible, like the saplings, able to endure strong gales by bending with the winds of change that blow over us. We are alive; engaged with each other, engaged with the world, engaged with life, like the geese who now fly over us every day, headed bravely toward their goal, helping each other take turns at the lead, breaking the way for others who are tired, continuing on no matter what the weather.

So this day, the last before school starts, is bittersweet. Full of promise, full of sadness. We are excited for the new possibilities, mourning the older, more comfortable way. We are starting anew. We are ready!

Seasons of Change

2006-08-31T09:23:00.000-04:00

It takes a lot of courage to release the familiar and seemingly secure, to embrace the new. But there is no real security in what is no longer meaningful. There is more security in the adventurous and exciting, for in movement there is life, and in change there is power.
~ Alan Cohen

This morning, I woke up to Canadian Geese taking off on their flight south. They were the first geese this season, at least that I’ve consciously noted. The sound was a vivid and poignant reminder that our lives are moving on; it’s another season of change.

Geese live their lives in a normal state of flux. Twice a year, they uproot themselves from everything they know, fly over all kinds of dangerous and unknown territory, and arrive in a new (and yet familiar) home. The geese remind me of how important it is to remain alive and vibrant by embracing change in my own life.

This morning, in one of those strange synoptic hiccups that brings together two seemingly unrelated trivial facts, I started to think about changes in my life, and how we weather those changes. Somehow, in that weird and wonderful synoptic path that I created in my mysterious brain, I related it to our hunter-gatherer ancient ancestors. We all had them, no matter how ancient a culture we hail from. Somewhere, far back in time, we all were hunter-gatherers. Which means that in our cells somewhere is the ancient knowledge of how to live life in a constant state of change.

We humans even thrived in a constant state of change, as sociological studies of most recent hunter gatherer societies have shown. Hunter gatherer societies have more time for play, spend less time working, and have more carefree and joyous lives. (The Other Side of Eden, Hugh Brody)

What happened to us human beings? How did we become so afraid of change? Why is it so difficult for us to embrace new ideas, new situations, think about change? When did that happen to us as a society?

I have been struggling with those questions for the past few months, as I learned to deal simultaneously with divorce, job loss, career change, and identity crisis. At times, it seemed it would be much easier to issue a blanket apology to everyone in my life and go back to the old and familiar, no matter how miserable I was. That security blanket of the known would sometimes looked so irresistibly safe and warm and comfortable that I would almost long for life to go back to the way it was.

And then I would remember how sad and lonely and miserable I was, before.

I learned to breathe through the discomfort of change. I learned to embrace the changes that did arrive in my life, because they were always a positive step forward. I became vibrantly alive because of the changes that entered my life, looked for or not. I woke up!

My journey of the past few years has been agonizingly painful at times. Other times, it has been joyful, alive, powerful, transformative. On the whole, I have learned to prefer the change, for with the change comes power in the form of emotions, trust, engagement, and feeling more alive than I have in years.

Hearing the geese this morning has reminded me of how far I’ve traveled in this thrilling journey of life. They reminded me of my patient friends along the way, who simply sat with me while I agonized, gave me or sent me hugs and a shoulder to cry on when I needed it, always responded with love and caring. The geese reminded me to be thankful for what I have ever present in my life – three loving and lovely daughters, excited to be on this grand new adventure with me, throwing themselves wholeheartedly into the adventure of living with very limited resources while I go back to school. I am grateful to have found a way to go back to school, one stepping stone into a new career that I hope will be enriching and rewarding.

As we begin our journey into autumn, listening to the sounds of our itinerant friends, the Canadian Geese, remember to be thankful for the changes in our lives. Embrace change with your whole heart. Live wild and free and joyfully.

School starts!

2006-08-30T22:15:00.000-04:00

Your work is to discover your world and then with all your heart give yourself to it.
~ Buddha

School started tonight. I forgot how much fun it is to go to university!

Finding Clarity

2006-08-26T18:29:00.000-04:00

In the attitude of silence the soul finds the path in a clearer light, and what is elusive and deceptive resolves itself into crystal clearness.
-- Mahatma Gandhi

From the utter chaos into which my life has devolved, I must inject some clarity of thought.

I found out late last night that the money I need to attend school is available. By the end of this weekend, I need to make a decision about whether to take out a massive student loan or not.

It’s a dream finally come true, and the scariest thing I’ve ever done, because I’ll be dragging my girls along this new path.

It feels right, and yet, I still worry about whether I’m making the best decision for my girls as well as myself. It would be a no-brainer, if it was just me. Of course, I wouldn’t be jobless if it weren’t for wanting to keep my girls in their amazing and wonderful school, and therefore not being able to relocate.

The longer I sit in silence, quieting my brain from its fussing and worrying, the more I believe that school is the right choice for me right now.

Finding clarity in the midst of chaos. Not such an easy thing to do.

Re-learning to Believe in Myself

2006-08-25T07:11:00.000-04:00

When you clearly envision the outcome of victory, engrave it upon your heart, and are firmly convinced that you will attain it, your brain makes every effort to realize the mental image you have created. And then, through your unceasing efforts, that victory is finally made a reality.

-- Daisaku Ikeda

Yesterday was a day of ups and downs. I woke up early, to do some research into a non-profit. I’d submitted a resume for a job that sounded intriguing, they were calling for an initial phone interview, and I wanted to know more about this non-profit before I spoke to them.

The organization sounded good, the job sounded interesting and rewarding, I began to feel some excitement about a possibility that might open in my life. When we actually spoke, I found out the job would require almost constant overnight travel and lots of evening work, none of which would work with my life as a single mom.

The interviewer, upon hearing that I wouldn’t be interested in further pursuing this particular position, asked if he could forward my resume and information to others in the organization, in case there were positions that didn’t require quite so much travel. I told him yes, and scratched another possibility off my list. It’s nice that a 20-something year old can appreciate that I have valuable skills, now I just need a position to open up that will use those skills in a meaningful way.

Then I received a phone call from the University of Phoenix, with information about their online course of study, for a Masters of Art in Teaching program. It sounds intriguing, and is cheaper than Fairleigh Dickinson, where I have already been accepted, but it’s studying alone at home, no chance to interact in real life with people. I already feel isolated; I’m not sure that would be a good decision for me. The possibility remains, and I won’t throw it away.

A little while later, I picked up the mail, and found the financial aid letter from FDU. Almost no money offered. I was only going to qualify for loans, and was already agonizing over whether I should throw myself into that much debt at 49 years old. But now it seems pretty nearly impossible to make this dream happen. I have no income, I’m a single mom with three dependents, how could they offer me less than half the tuition needs for a semester? Where do they possibly think I can get this tuition money? Alchemy from my blood?

I was looking into scholarship and grant money when I ran into U of Phoenix. It seems that summer is not a great time to look for grants, when you are expecting to start school in the fall. One more possibility scratched off my list. I could possibly qualify for awards for next fall, in case I don’t manage school this year, so I won’t delete all the information that came up while I was browsing websites that help find scholarships, but the likelihood of school is looking less and less possible.

While running errands this morning, I finally heard back from the Creative Group placement people about the possibility of finding some writing or editing work. They would like to see some of my writing, and will make an appointment for an intake interview, so they can decide whether to represent me or not. I can look for freelance and permanent work. Another possibility opening for me?

In the afternoon, the girls and I went shopping for some school clothing. Salvation Army was a great hit, especially when the girls realized that the blue tags were at 50% sale on the already wonderful prices. I could even afford to buy Sarah an exquisite black velvet dress, which she can use for winter holidays and a school dance, when they have one this year. eek. Is my middle daughter really old enough to start going to school dances???!!!???

Alanna is happy. She found lots of clothing for very little money, and other than having to try it all on behind a sheet that Sarah and I held up for her in a corner (they tore down the fitting rooms because people were stealing too much), found the experience fun and rewarding. Shopping is usually torturous with her. And Marlena and Sarah were each able to stretch their $20 they were allowed to spend quite far. (They already have plenty of hand-me-downs, so spending was just for the fun of something new.)

The day ended on a positive note, with my three girls and I sorting through our purchases and trying everything on again. I am grateful for finding a way to bring some joy into our lives, and proud that my girls not only aren’t embarrassed to buy in Salvation Army, but consider it the right thing to do, in living their sustainable lifestyles. And I’m happy to make less expensive purchases for better quality clothing than I could afford on my unemployment benefits. Ann Taylor beats Walmart any day of the week.

I’m pondering this morning what yesterday’s multiple messages mean for my life. I found some nice clothing for little money for the girls, and knew I could do it, knew where to do it, knew how to do it. I believed in the possibility, and found a way to make it happen.

I did not find a way to work yet, did not find a way to go to school yet. In fact, the possibility of school seems even more remote, in spite of searching even further afield to find ways to make this dream happen. Is that because I don’t believe hard enough yet? Have I not firmly convinced myself that this is the right thing to do? Do I have a niggling doubt that I will enjoy and succeed at teaching? Are my doubts and my fears still getting in the way of making this dream a reality?

Will I believe strongly enough in the possibility of finding writing work to make that a possibility?

How does one engrave a dream upon one’s heart? Can it happen by simply living in the joy of the moment, whenever and wherever we can find it?

Karmic Opening

2006-08-23T17:25:00.000-04:00

People get into a heavy-duty sin and guilt trip, feeling that if things are going wrong, that means that they did something bad and they are being punished. That’s not the idea at all. The idea of karma is that you continually get the teachings that you need to open your heart. To the degree that you didn’t understand in the past how to stop protecting your soft spot, how to stop armoring your heart, you’re given this gift of teachings in the form of your life, to give you everything you need to open further.
-- Pema Chodron

In the current session of my covenant group, we are talking about being at home with ourselves. The opening reading, by Mary Feagan, is a poem about how we can embrace our whole selves, be at home with our essential nature.

I’m finding this session particularly challenging, because I’m not at home with myself right now. It’s all part of a big package of transitions: transitions in marriage, transitions in career, transitions in lifestyle, transitions in identity.

Pema Chodron’s quote about karma is perhaps what I need to hear. Is my life lesson that I need to open fully and completely? Is that fact that I’m being thrown challenge after challenge, to the point where I’m brought to my knees, because I am not fully open?

Something to ponder.

Living with Nature

2006-08-20T15:27:00.000-04:00

Our task must be to free ourselves by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty.
-- Albert Einstein

This morning, I came down to the kitchen to be greeted with the sight of a brand new bag of cat food, chewed open; a brand new bunch of organic bananas, dragged into a corner and chewed and shredded and demolished; a tray of croissants, opened and chewed; and papers from my kitchen island strewn across the room. And a cat inside who hadn’t been in when I went to bed last night.

It was a little freaky, to say the least.

I finally found a kitchen window with part of the screen ripped off. I think that was the access point. We have raccoons that visit, and steal our cat food from the porch. We feed the cats outside, to minimize the possibility of mice, since we live in a big crooked old farmhouse. And this spring, a momma raccoon and her six babies found our supply of cat food and are now regular visitors, even though we bring the cat food in every afternoon, in a vain attempt to discourage them from visiting every night.

The babies are grown now, so we have seven very large and plump raccoons that stop by on a regular basis. They don’t worry about timing too much, and visit late in the morning, and late in the afternoon, not just at night, so our window for feeding the cats grows smaller and smaller. And they startle my daughters all the time; the girls are now afraid to run out to the car once it’s twilight, even though the car’s only 10 feet from the side door.

We’ve taken to making a great racket with pots and lids, clanging like crazy in another vain attempt to scare them off. It works for bears … why not for raccoons. They ran away the first time. The second time they scurried a bit slower. The third and fourth time, only about half ran away; the other half only went a few feet and squatted to watch and see what we’d do next. Only when I ran out in bare feet and my nightie, still clanging pot and lid, chasing them back down the hill into the woods, did they finally run.

Now they just go under the car and laugh at me, running around like a crazy woman in my nightie and bare feet, making noise and shrieking like a banshee, in case that helps. My eleven-year-old is brave enough to run out with me, and has a much better shrill banshee scream, and the other two shriek from the kitchen door. The raccoons still laugh at us. And now, evidently, they feel they can visit our kitchen and eat our food with impunity.

We’re learning to live with bats in the attic, house flies that won’t quit and laugh at the fly paper hanging all over the house, spiders galore, and a major infestation of sugar ants who laugh at the ant traps I put out. I’m headed to the store to buy borax today, to make some better homemade time-tested ant traps. The bats do keep away the mosquitoes, though, and look beautiful flying around outside in the evening. And so far, none have found their way downstairs into the house, so I don’t mind the bats.

So our challenge this summer has been to live with a new face of nature that we didn’t need to endure in our last house, which was newer, more air tight, less crooked, and crevice- and crack-free. It’s been a challenge, especially waking up to a raccoon mess in my kitchen this morning. That window is now permanently shut, and I’m thinking maybe a dog wouldn’t be a bad idea after all…

Albert Einstein probably didn’t have to live with pests.

Here's a link for good homemade ant traps:
http://www.grinningplanet.com/2004/04-27/ant-control-ant-killer-article.htm

Blossoming

2006-08-19T14:56:00.000-04:00

And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom. ~ Anais Nin

I think about blossoming all the time, because I am the mother of three daughters. I have one in the middle of adolescence, one just ready to start, and one watching her older sisters very carefully, pushing the boundaries for what I consider appropriate behavior for an eight-year-old.

They are all blossoming. It is an amazing and beautiful thing to watch your daughters blossom. I ache for them, I am their best cheerleader, I watch over them, I support them, I love them. They blossom in spite of anything I do. They blossom at their own time, in their own way. And it is an amazing process to watch.

I find myself in forced blossoming right now, kind of like a hothouse flower, or a bulb that we force in midwinter, after keeping it in the cold and dark for a while to allow it to regenerate. savvygardener.com says, “The term forcing refers to inducing a plant to produce its shoot, leaf, and flower ahead of its natural schedule and out of its natural environment.” That would be my life, right now – out of schedule and natural environment.

Blossoming.

Merriam Webster online tells me that to blossom is to come into one’s own. Is that what the universe wants me to hear, by placing me, some with my permission and active encouragement, some without warning and very little volition on my part, in so many situations at once that have caused me to lose my equilibrium? Divorce, job loss, identity crisis, loss of calling: all happening at once. Is it time to come into my own?

For far too many years, I lived without a lover. That was a sad and lonely time in my life. That was the cold winter of my love, the time for my essential core to build its roots. When you force bulbs, the cold period is the period that allows the bulbs to develop their root system. Without that time, the bloom will come up short and distorted. Perhaps that’s why it took me so long to initiate a divorce – I was building up my root system, developing a support system of friends to see me through into my new life. My blossoming.

Job loss.

That was a shock to my system. Perhaps I need to move over to Monarch butterflies for the metaphor that makes sense in my life. Monarchs start life as eggs, and the eggs hatch into pupa. Pupa shed their skins four times over their larval stage. Am I shedding another skin? Was my first career back in the work force a job that I needed for my growth as a human?

I went through four separate and distinct stages as a religious educator. First, walking into a church for the first time in over 20 years, and finding a place that could be a religious and spiritual home. I hadn’t thought that was possible. That must have been my hatching from the egg stage, finding myself on this miraculous milkweed-like place where I could feed myself, even gorge myself on the kind of spiritual growth that I hadn’t found in my entire lifetime.

Second, working for a tiny congregation, where I learned what it meant to be a religious educator. Third, working as a youth advisor at camp, where I learned just how much growth is possible in a human in a short amount of time (for the youth and for me). Fourth, working for a larger congregation, where I learned how it might be possible to fly, where I made the contacts that are in my life right now who are helping me survive, grow and thrive. That was also the first job that gave me the financial freedom to think about leaving my marriage.

And now, this last change I’m in the middle of? I think maybe I’m in my chrysalis stage. Butterflies shed not only their skin a fifth and final time during the chrysalis stage, they kick the entire caterpillar body off (head, eyes, antennae, stripes and legs). That’s about how I feel right now. Blind, not able to hear or see what’s coming next, wondering how I will move on in life with my legs pulled out from under me, my insides a complete mush from all that’s happened to me. Chrysalis soup, from which a miracle can climb.

The final stage of a Monarch is the butterfly stage. She climbs out wet, with wrinkled wings, and slowly fans them until they are pumped full of blood and she can fly off into her new and exciting life, totally transformed.

I’m listening to Meg Barnhouse’s song Chrysalis right now, thinking about breaking out of my chrysalis. Maybe it’s time to break through my walls. Maybe the falling apart is really just an unfurling of my wings.

I've got to tell you something important you need to know.
You're going to be fine.
They said the walls were there for protection. That used to be true.
It's time to break through.
Butterfly, you can try your bright wings. Let your colors fly.
A chrysalis really is a fine thing -- 'til it's time to take the sky.
It feels like it's all falling apart. What's happening is an unfurling.
Where do you migrate? How do you get there?
When it's time to go, you'll know.
Butterfly, you can try your bright wings. Let your colors fly.
A chrysalis really is a fine thing -- 'til it's time to take the sky.
Wishing you honey, wishing you sunlight; a little rain -- not too much pain.
And in the end, your body may break, but your spirit's due to surprise you.
Butterfly, you can try your bright wings. Let your spirit fly.
A chrysalis really is a fine thing -- 'til it's time to take the sky.
--Meg Barnhouse, Chrysalis, Mango Thoughts in a Meatloaf Town

Learning life lessons

2006-08-18T10:10:00.000-04:00

Perhaps nothing ever really attacks us except our own confusion. Maybe the only enemy is that we don't like the way reality is NOW and therefore wish it would go away fast. But what we find as practitioners is that nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know. Even if we run a hundred miles an hour to the other side of the continent, we find the very same problem awaiting us when we arrive. It keeps returning with new names, forms, and manifestations until we learn whatever it has to teach us.

Where are we separating ourselves from reality? How are we pulling back instead of opening up? How are we closing down instead of allowing ourselves to experience fully whatever we encounter?
-- Pema Chodron, Comfortable with Uncertainty

Learning life lessons. This seems to be my year for learning lots of difficult lessons. Divorce, loss of job, questioning my identity, questioning my orientation … it’s all hitting at once, and hitting hard, with lots of questions and little understanding of where I should go next, why this is all happening to me at once, and how to best proceed with the next tiny step forward.

Perhaps my goal should be to just sit in peace and listen to what the universe is now screaming for me to hear. With trepidation for how I might jinx myself, I could say that life couldn’t get much more difficult and confusing. Of course I know it could – someone could get sick or die. Please, goddess, don’t add that to my life right now. I promise to sit still and pay attention.

I could wish for life as it currently stands for me to go away! I am tired of struggling to understand, tired of trying to figure out what to do next, tired of thinking so hard I’m making my very brain hurt. I am tired, period. I don’t sleep well, I am worried, it’s draining to live in constant uncertainty.

And yet, in my deepest core, I understand that it’s time for me to learn a life lesson. Another fucking growth experience, my friends and I call it. My life is full of them right now. How will I sit still and listen?

I started drawing tarot cards. I have friends who use tarot very successfully to guide them in their lives, help them understand the choices they are facing, understand the challenges life is giving them, help them bring their unconscious out to conscious, to ponder and explore.

I am trying to be more deliberate about prayer. I am trying to light a candle each day, and think about someone who needs help, energy, kind thoughts, light, vibes, or is in need in any way. I am also trying to remember to be conscious and deliberate about sending out my cosmic requests for a fulfilling lifework that pays enough for the girls and I to live without discomfort, and for me to find a partner in life.

I am reading, reading, reading, trying to learn about some of the changes I’m going through, how to understand why I’m going through them, how I can best survive the experiences, and how to thrive in spite of the changes.

I am talking with friends. Processing aloud or in writing helps me. Talking about my experiences helps me. Talking with others who have had similar experiences helps me. I have joined some new groups specifically for support. One is a new online covenant group with the UU Church of the Larger Fellowship, where I am able to explore the spiritual aspects of where I am in life. Another is for women who are questioning. And I continue to stay in communication with some dear local friends and long distance friends who are either going through the same things, or have been there before me and can share resources. All of these groups of people in my life are helping me process in different ways.

And finally, I have made a commitment to writing on a regular basis, as a spiritual practice. I am journaling on paper, and blogging.

So I am here, universe. I am listening. I am ready to learn my lesson.

Ministry to Others

2006-08-16T07:54:00.000-04:00

Over the last few weeks, I entered into one of the most challenging self-reflective periods of my life. It was a required exercise, part of a structured discussion within a covenant group.

We were asked to look at our ministry to others: how we live our values, how we affect others. I found that the exercise had a profound impact on me.

What a surprise, at the onset, to find how difficult it was for me to even ask for feedback from friends. I was to ask someone(s) I trusted how I had affected their lives, how they saw me living my values. I was nervous about making that request. What if they didn’t see me living any values? What if I hadn’t had an effect on their lives, what if I hadn’t made any difference at all?

It’s funny. Making a difference in the world has been of primary importance in my life, from some of my earliest memories. I can think all the way back to Kindergarten, as a four-year-old, just starting school. I walked into a situation where several classmates were teasing one other, mocking him for looking like a chimpanzee. Now I admit that the poor child had the most prominent ears that I’ve ever seen, before or since. But that still was not a reason to tease him about his unfortunate ear shape, especially not in such a cruel way. And tears in a child are always a sign that teasing has gone too far and should be stopped immediately. Even a four-year-old knows that.

I can’t remember what, if anything, I did to help in the immediate situation. I do remember coming home to cry with my mother about how unfair it was. I can remember resolving to not let it happen again. And that was a start to a resolve to fight injustice in the world that continues to this day.

Asking those questions, “How have I affected your life? How do you see me living out my values?” was a stretch for me. It took me a week to work up enough nerve, first to figure out who I could even ask that would understand the question, and then later, to actually pose the question in an email and click on the send button.

One friend who responded reminded me that direct positive feedback was one of the most effective ways of modeling desired behavior that we know. We had both worked as communication skills instructors, teaching volunteers the skills to ask questions, improve their helping techniques, and resolve conflict. She also admitted that it was something she feared herself, too. “What if they give me feedback about things I want to deny about myself?” This friend then went on to give me some beautiful and direct answers to my questions, as did many others.

The responses left me weeping. Sometimes a small word or gesture has a transformative effect on another, and we have no idea. To be given the opportunity to hear and read that I have made specific and positive differences in the lives of others was a humbling and healing event for me. I recently lost a contract for a job that was ministry to me, a ministry that I believed I was called to do. Losing that contract was a severe blow to my self-confidence, my belief that I could make a difference in someone’s life. Receiving specific feedback from others about how I have made a difference in their lives has helped me recover some of that basic trust in self that I need to survive in this world.

What still remains for me is to find a new way to minister to others. How can I share my passion for righting the wrongs of the world? How can I issue a call to action? How will I now make a difference in the world?

Missing You

2006-08-15T17:52:00.000-04:00

Lips, tender and sweet.
The curve of your cheek
soft and smooth under my lips.
Long silky hair that brushes my body
as you trail your lips along my side.
Soft sighs.
Smiles touching your eyes,
losing me deep in your soul.
Arms, hands, and fingers reaching,
stroking,
teasing.
Deep moist throbbing.
Catch of the breath.
Soft beautiful noises
with my fingers deep inside you.
Quivering.
Melting into sleep,
legs entwined.
I miss you.

Motivation

2006-08-12T13:09:00.000-04:00

Motivation has been especially difficult for me lately. Perhaps it’s because I don’t seem to be doing much of anything right in my life. I’ve had so many hopes dashed lately; it becomes more and more difficult to try the next option.

How does one keep motivated?

I was reflecting to some friends yesterday that I found it almost impossible to keep up with the demands of family, job search, house, food; I am allowing my friendships to fall by the wayside. In part, it’s because I don’t see many friends on a daily basis, at drop-off or pick-up at school. So it requires more effort to pick up a phone or send an email to check in with friends. And they aren’t checking in with me, either. Are they equally as busy, and also taking a needed break from the incredible demands placed on working mothers during the school year?

We become so overloaded during that September to June time frame, juggling family and work, making time to volunteer in school, see the class play or attend the party, find time to cook, clean, wash the laundry, cart children to classes and play dates, help with homework, sleep (what’s that??? I forget!). The blessed relief from school pressures – no homework, no extra demands – perhaps that’s made us all hole up in our homes, relishing the relative reduction in responsibilities. Are we all in the same boat?

Well, that might be one explanation for one small lack of motivation in my life. I know another small concern of mine (ok, not so small concern) is that I will be a burden on my friends. It’s harder to be cheerful and positive with no immediate hopes in my future. I don’t want to be a wet blanket. So I struggle with how I can allow myself to be with friends when I need their support, and fear overloading them with my lack of confidence and neediness right now.

Then there’s the plain and simple fear of making the wrong decision. I need to get over that one, and can’t put it any plainer or simpler to myself. No sense being paralyzed with indecision because I fear making the wrong decision. If it doesn’t work, then I can try something different. I have nothing to lose but a small amount of time. I am cursed with the personality trait of needing to be ready before I leap. And that might be a good trait to have when I am anticipating jumping out of an airplane with only a small parachute to carry me safely to the ground, but it’s not such a great trait when I need to decide what to do with my life. Especially when I’m running out of time and options for further education, and aware that unemployment will run out in too few short months.

I have a bad habit of concentrating too hard on the one immediate project. I get so caught up in the latest idea or possibility that it becomes nearly impossible to think about other options. That needs to stop, too. I can be working on several job leads at once, and don’t need to wait to go onto the next one only after the current option falls through. Having several options open at the same time might be the confidence booster I need to succeed in an interview … knowing I don’t need this job might be just the attitude that will help me get the job!

I’m also wondering why it has been so difficult to network for myself in the way that I can so easily network for a cause or my children or a friend? Why is it so difficult for me to ask for help? Am I afraid of showing my weaknesses? Am I afraid of looking like a failure? Am I afraid of not looking self-sufficient? Am I afraid of showing my vulnerability?

Ironically, I know the answer to all of those questions. Yes, I am afraid of all of those things, especially the vulnerability issue. I am working really hard on that one, helped by a friend who took me over the edge of my security and back again in an amazing way. It’s not been easy, learning how frightened I am of appearing vulnerable, how difficult it is to show my vulnerability to my friends. I’m afraid I’m really walking around naked, in my emperor’s new clothes.

Little baby steps are taking me along the path of showing my vulnerability. I can open up to one friend at a time, and the rewards are immeasurable, rich beyond belief. To be afraid to show a part of myself that feels vulnerable, to give that piece openly to another, with trust in my heart, and to receive back love and support in return. That reward might very well be worth any number of rejections that I might possibly receive.

So I keep trying. One baby step at a time, I put myself out there, in all my glorious vulnerability and fear and uncertainty, with trust and love, and the universe seems to answer with a return that gives back so much more. I get back acceptance, love, more trust, and it builds my self-confidence.

Why then, does it continue to be the very hardest thing in the world, to trust a person with my vulnerability?

Keeping Faith

2006-08-08T14:23:00.000-04:00

What an extraordinary thing faith is. When everything is going your way, when you feel on top of the world, it’s easy to keep faith. But what do you do when your world comes crashing down around you? How do you keep faith as you watch the fabric of your life unravel?

For me, faith is my trust in the rightness of the world. Trust that people will act with good intention. Trust that in the end, life will work out in the best possible way, even when I’m not understanding why I’m facing the challenges I currently have. Trust that when a door closes, a window will open somewhere else. Trust that life will be good again.

Today, finding that trust is especially challenging for me … I trusted a bureaucrat to know what he was talking about (mistake #1). I made the mistake of not verifying all the details myself. Now that a deal has fallen through that I was counting on, I am feeling bereft. I am struggling to regain the trust, the faith, which will carry me through another tough period of uncertainty and worry as I watch the unraveling of my life.

I have had one friend write to me that she is praying for the knitting up of my unraveling sleeve of life. Another friend wrote that I was just building a new pattern of stitches, and yet another that I would have a beautiful new quilt to comfort me when I am done. I struggle once again to regain my already shaken equilibrium, wrack my rattled and severely bruised brain to think about how I can recover from one more deep disappointment and still stay sane for my daughters. It would be much easier to dissolve into a puddle of tears, crawl into bed, and not come out for a few weeks.

That question of faith is especially on my mind this week, because I think I may have lost it all. It’s frightening to watch my slow descent into the pits of despair. I don’t like it here, I don’t like the feeling of not knowing whether I can succeed in life, I don’t like the shaken self-confidence I’m experiencing, and I’m not certain how to pull myself out this time.

At the same time, I am painfully aware that I am a single mom, that I have three beautiful daughters depending on me, and I can’t just give up. I have to find a way to crawl out of this pit, and rebuild a life for myself. There must surely be the right job out there for me; there must surely be someone who is willing to take a risk on me, even without relevant experience. There must surely be a place where I can share my gifts, and find healing in the capability to help others.

I find, when it comes right down to the broken fingernails and dirt- and tear-streaked face, as I claw my way out of my pit, that my faith has to come from within. I must remember my faith in myself – I am strong, I am creative, I am an amazing person, I am worthy. And when I can remember that faith in myself, I will once again be able to trust in the world as an essentially good place. I will be able to find the good in others, I will be able to forgive the humanity, complete with failures and incompetencies and foibles, of the people who have let me down. I will be able to give back to the greater good in humanity, to share of myself in the essential ways that make me who I am. I will find wholeness again.

A friend asked me, a few weeks ago, whether I sent out my cosmic request. I had to stop and think about it, and realized, perhaps not. I’m so uncertain about how to proceed, with my life falling down around me, that I’m paralyzed with indecision, fraught with fear of making the wrong choice, bested by my deteriorating self-confidence. I thought long and hard about what it was that I wanted next from life. Do I want a new challenge that will fill me with joie de vivre? Do I want to settle for enough money and time to be a good parent to my girls? Do I want to hold out for a combination of both?

My answer, after hours and days of deliberating, was my cosmic request. Here it is, pay attention universe. I’m expecting delivery, as soon as possible!

My request is for life work that will complete me, for a relationship that will be healthy and loving, and for financial security, while I’m at it, just in case the work that completes my soul pays shit.

Family sacrifices

2006-08-05T15:10:00.000-04:00

What is it about family that makes us so crazy? Why is it that family can make us sacrifice more than any other single being in our lives, and why does it drive us so insane to make those sacrifices?

This weekend, I'm taking Praxis exams. I just finished them, actually. My brain is fried. I dredged stuff back up that I'd happily forgotten for the last 20 or 30 or more years. I wrote pages on ideas that I didn't understand, expostulated on theories that I pulled out of my imagination, made best guesses after ruling out the obviously incorrect choices. In short, I relived high school all over again, in six long and grueling hours.

And I'll be darned - I came back to my mom's, looked up one of the answers that I took a wild stab at answering, and wow! I actually answered it fairly well. Essays, of course, are subjective evaluations, so it remains to be seen if my answers were literate enough and included enough reasoning to get the points I need. But the basic facts were there, amazingly enough, in spite of rather wild guessing. Well, ok, given the US history I do know and the recent cramming to squeeze more facts into my poor tired old brain, perhaps it wasn’t quite wild guessing, but reasoned hypothesizing with a good dose of luck and some decent writing skill thrown in.

Here's where the family stuff comes in. Upon returning to my car, when I could turn my cell phone back on (they are outlawed while testing, understandably so), I found frantic messages from my mom, letting me know that dinner had been changed, it was now two hours later, and one hour further distant. So I could relax and not break all speed barriers trying to get back for dinner. (We're taking my aunt out to dinner.)

Now, instead of dinner at 3, only an hour and a half from home, we're having dinner at 5:30, two and a half hours from my home. We're driving home tonight because we have a friend from Vancouver visiting us for about 18 hours, stopping overnight on her way from Boston to Florida. My mom did know this at one point, because we originally scheduled the dinner for Saturday so my girls and I could attend, squeezing in our time between the testing schedule and the visiting friend schedule.

To further complicate the matter, instead of a restaurant where I know all three of my picky-eater daughters will find at least one dish that they could enjoy, we're now headed to the middle of nowhere to eat in a restaurant where none of us like the food, and probably pay a lot more for the privilege of not enjoying our dinner, on a non-existent income, anticipating being a pathetically poor single mom full-time student.

I’ve been up since 5 am, left the house at 6 am, and spent an intense day testing. My mom knows this, too, because she got up with me this morning to make coffee, and said a prayer this morning for me to have success in testing, since so much of my future rides on the results. I had a two-hour round trip drive to the test, and spent 6 hours at the testing center. She knew all of this, too, because we were calculating whether I’d make it back in time to drive my girls to the original dinner place/time, since my mom can’t fit all three of my girls, my aunt, my sister and herself all in her tiny car.

So what would possess my mom to make her change the dinner to a much later time, adding an hour onto my drive, on top of an exhausting day? I’m not sure.

And the thing is, we’ll go. And I won’t say a word about it, because it’s too late to change back at this point, so what good will it do to complain? It will just make everyone else miserable. I’ll suck up and eat a lousy dinner, spending too much to do so. I’ll endure the whining of my teenaged daughter, who will be upset at how late we’re getting home tonight because she’s tired, too, and needs the weekends to catch up on her sleep and doesn’t have much time to sleep this weekend. And my mom will never know, unless she happens upon this blog, how much chaos she’s added into an already chaotic life. And I’ll never tell her, because what good will it do to tell a 73 year old woman, trying to pacify her 81 year old sister, that she’s made her daughter’s life worse?

It’s funny. It doesn’t feel good to make this self-sacrifice, the way it would make me feel good to help a friend get to the doctor with a broken foot, or to give up Thanksgiving Dinner in order to work in the homeless shelter, or to bypass the chocolate cake for the sake of the dress I want to wear to the conference next month. Is that because I’m equally taking for granted my parent, thinking she should just know that she’s made my life more difficult? Or that she should at least have hesitated before making the change, maybe tried harder to reach me first, or even ask my 15-year-old if she thought I’d care? At least my daughter would have reminded her that we had company coming on Sunday. And had she recognized the restaurant name, she might have remembered that none of us liked it very much when we were there before.

I wouldn’t resent a friend calling me to ask if I’d take her to the ER because she thought she’d broken a bone in her foot. I do resent having to spend all the extra time and money on an already overloaded weekend, without even being asked. Maybe it’s the asking. Or rather, the not asking, the being taken for granted. Perhaps there’s a lesson I can take away from this.

Perhaps, the next time I force my daughters to make a difficult choice between attending the last day of camp and attending their cousin’s birthday party, I can be more sympathetic. And maybe I should remind them, while I’m at it, that at least I’ve allowed them to make their own difficult choice, rather than present them with the ultimatum of a done deal that is all around bad for them, without even thinking of consulting them first.

Nah, probably won’t do any good. After all, I’m their mom …

Curiosity

2006-08-04T07:11:00.000-04:00

What is it that drives humans to learn? Why are we curious? What causes some people to continue to question and drive themselves further and further along the path of knowledge, while others are content to receive an explanation from a figure of authority, and hold that explanation as the final truth, never to be questioned.

Learning theories have been front and center in my mind, as I cram several decades of book learning back into my brain, at least temporarily, so that I can spew it out on a standardized test that I must pass in order to change careers and become a teacher. I wonder, will I be doomed to force my students into the same path, or will I be able to find another way to encourage joy in learning, so that they willingly embrace questions, actively and continuously seek answers, and thirst for new knowledge?

I’m pleased to admit that I remember more than I have forgotten. And sad to admit that very little of that came from school learning, and much more came from the relearning that I accomplished with my children during the years we homeschooled together. It was those years of homeschooling that returned my joy in learning to me. I don’t think it went away altogether; I still continued to take classes, either for professional development or for enrichment and my own enjoyment, before I had children. But it wasn’t until I threw myself into Ancient Egyptian history for several years, delving ever deeper into the mysteries of hieroglyphics and how mummies are created (complete with a model using an orange) and how those pyramids really were built, that I understood how learning can be sheer joy.

As I continue to cram into my poor tired old brain unrelated facts and theories like “What is onomatopoeia again?” and “How do I use the Pythagorean formula?” and “Why is the Monroe Doctrine important to our country?”, I ponder how I will be able to relay these ideas to children, in a way that becomes meaningful and fun.

Where I begin a new life...

2006-08-01T10:26:00.000-04:00

This summer, I managed to lose a large part of my life's work, my ministry to the world. It's been a summer of ups and downs, magnificent life-changing highs, lows that kept me in bed with raging headaches all day. This week, the future is looking positive again, and while I'm walking around a bit dazed by my recent spate of good news, I am feeling better about myself, my ability to care for my three beautiful daughters as a single mom, and the understanding that life really does present us with opportunities, when we have enough wit to recognize those opportunities as they peek around a blind corner at us.

I lost my job at the beginning of the summer. It was a difficult life lesson. I thought I had a calling as a religious educator for a Unitarian Universalist congregation, but I wasn't what my last congregation wanted. It was a demoralizing experience. It removed just about every shred of my self-confidence, at a time when I needed to hang onto every shred that I could. I'm also in the middle of a divorce of an 18-year marriage, and have three beautiful daughters in my care.

Just to make sure that I learned my lesson well, the universe decided to not give me anything easily. The two amazing jobs that I thought would be perfect for me were not offered to me. In both situations, there were other people more qualified than me. How could that be? I'm 49 years old, I've worked hard all my life, I have some good solid skills and lots of knowledge under my belt, I'm good at sharing my passions and interests with others and helping them see how they can help make the world a little better for us all. Why wouldn't anyone just jump at the chance to offer me a job? How much more demoralizing can life be?

To further complicate things, I couldn't find any work in religious education within commuting distance, and didn't know what else I would be qualified to do. At 49, I was having to think, again, about what I wanted to do when I grew up. I couldn't go back to my original career in information systems - I had been home raising children and working in another field for 11 years, I had no viable skills left and would have to start over in that field, which I couldn't afford. I thought I had enough skills to teach, but didn't have the credentials to get a teaching job in my state, and missed deadlines to take any of the alternate routes to teaching, because I didn't know I was losing my job in time. I like to write, and even have editing experience, but how to break into that field without actual job experience?

While trying to do a realistic evaluation of my skills and interests and abilities, I realized that the parts of my last job as religious educator that brought me the most satisfaction were the times when I was actually able to work with children and youth. I was most engaged when working with children about how to live in right relations in our world, how to work toward making our world better, for us, for others, for the planet itself. Somehow, I needed to be able to continue to work with children, to engage their curiosity, to encourage them in their efforts to become incredible human beings. Teaching seemed a natural choice, but I didn't have the right paperwork qualifications to get a job. What next?

Well, the message I am taking, in the end, from this summer of panic and loss is that I need to learn more. And so the universe has provided, in an opportunity that has taken my breathe away, left me stunned and reeling in amazement at my good fortune. I am offered an opportunity to attend university, on vouchers that will cover my entire tuition, at graduate school level. I will be able to keep my unemployment benefits, as part of a retraining package. Next May, I will walk away with teaching credentials, highly qualified, and be 2/3 of the way through a Master of Arts in Teaching degree. I can't quite wrap my mind around my good fortune.

So I'm starting this blog to take you, dear reader, through this amazing journey with me, as I go back to graduate school after more than 20 years. As a single mom, too. With a heavy load of 11 credits each semester, plus the need to substitute teach or do some freelance writing for extra income, because in New Jersey, unemployment benefits are barely going to cover rent, utilities, and food. And I'm thinking about how high fuel prices are already, and the draft old farmhouse that we're renting, and how much I'll have to pay for heating this coming winter. eek.