Filed under: Teaching, Uncategorized, Writing | Tags: pandemic, poetry, teaching online, time
I wrote the piece below some time ago, a few years ago in fact. I came across it a few days ago and it made me think again about how much I’ve been longing for a change in the way time is spent, about how hard it is to step outside time’s current. I’m sorry, deeply sorry for the pandemic and the loss and suffering it is causing. I’m also relieved to sit on the bank for a time and watch the river rush on, online teaching aside…
Young god
Just try getting to the heart of anything
in the divided day,
patchworked with tasks
driven by calendar alerts,
servant to the god of Newton.
· don’t forget you have to
· make sure there is enough to
· pick up so and so at such and such a time
· you must remember to
· do you have time for
· make sure that so and so knows
· how long will it take to
(plan teach assess grade sweep clean weed water
feed clear wash dry fold put away pay collect
calculate estimate gather cook serve take away
pick up drop off control keep safe compose send
flag mark as unread trash)
The gods of Jung sow seeds of revolution
in my sleep,
where strange long halls in my house open
to unknown rooms whose ceilings
are nothing but stars,
where icy seas lap the curbs of my city
and navigation requires a true horizon.
The ancient ones are roused,
the gods of breath and pulse,
of water, wind, leaf and stone.
They are shouting now,
Clamoring between my daylight steps,
I must stop or be tripped-
Smash all the clocks!
Tear the leaves from the calendar
and let them fly through the windows!
Throw them all on the tracks,
the train you scheduled is barreling through!
You foolish young god, you,
Time is your own invention.
Filed under: Art of the Day, Faith, Teaching | Tags: #HealthyatHome, #TeamKentucky, Covid-19, Easter, Quarantine, resurrection, spring
I heard the owl at 3am , softly calling somewhere outside my window- ‘Rise love, the world is here.’ I sat for a long time, leaning on the windowsill listening.
Like everyone, my little world has been upended. The carefully constructed fortresses of daily life were just castles made of sand after all. The lesson plans, the plays in rehearsal, the assessments, meetings, celebrations have all melted away. And I’m fine with that, more than fine, my heart swells with relief. There are concerns, there are hazards- worries over exposure, each decision to engage with the world outside my garden is fraught with dire consequences. How do I protect my daughter and my mother from both exposure and the depression of isolation? My daughter’s mental health balances on the edge of a dinner fork even on good days. Her eating disorder has been rallying strength, as has the urge to self harm. Some of these days have been hard indeed. I too must be careful not to fall down my own rabbit hole as I stare too long at the computer screen on some days, as all my teaching and work has moved to the virtual world.
But there is joy too, such joy! Time uninterrupted to meditate on beauty, earth’s unfailing dedication to life on full display as spring pushes up through the nurturing dark and blooms all around me. My heart sings with my good luck to live here in Her garden. Along with flower and leaf, the frogs have made it through the winter and now sun themselves on the rocks at the edge of the little pond. Bats have returned to the sky. Birds of every kind are busy courting and building their nests. I hear the owl every night now, calling me back to myself. I am being given both courage and time to tend to my own work, the secret work of my heart made manifest in the stories I am writing and the art I make.
I tend the garden yes, but the garden also tends me.
Filed under: Faith, memory memorabilia re-membering, Teaching | Tags: Faith, Jesus, spirituality, Unitarian Universalism
Dear Reverend,
Not for the first time have I come out of a worship planning meeting troubled and puzzled. I’ve been thinking about it for days now and need to put some thoughts down on paper so I can look at them and share them with you, if you don’t mind. What I am troubled by is the dismissive and even belittling tone of the comments made by worship ministry members about the Christian tradition, specifically Easter and Christmas Eve Vespers. I have heard these remarks before, in other meetings and in the halls, often accompanied by a knowing laugh as if to say ‘Yes, well, we know better than to believe in all that’ and I have to say it hurts my heart and makes me sad. I don’t believe those remarks are consciously made to make anyone feel bad, but that’s just it, isn’t it? Isn’t this an inclusive community, isn’t the Unitarian church consciously welcoming everyone? All faiths and beliefs and lack of beliefs are welcome here, except those who follow the teachings of Jesus? I am puzzled. Remarks made by the Worship Ministry on Wednesday seemed to suggest that the inclusion of the Gospel stories at Vespers is done only to placate those who ought to know better and that’s plenty of Jesus for the whole year. It is an attitude of superiority that makes me very uncomfortable.
At the same time, I am grateful for the discomfort because it leads me to reflect on my own beliefs and I am surprised at my own warmth of feeling for Jesus and his teachings. I have been a spiritual seeker since I was a child, first embracing the teachings of Jesus in an almost progressive Presbyterian church. I went on to absorb lots of teachings from varying faith traditions, making it a point to attend different services whenever I could- from Pentcostal revivals in Eastern Kentucky to Sikh Gurdwaras in New Mexico. I’ve studied Buddhism, Jainism, Hinduism and Sikhism academically as well as spiritually. In my mid-fifties now, I suppose I’m more of a Sikh than anything (the word even means ‘seeker’), I embrace Guru Nanak’s teaching that all rivers lead to the ocean. Every morning before dawn, I practice my sadhana with Kundalini yoga and meditations with Sikh prayers. But I also observe Christian liturgical holidays and have found the richness of biblical scripture to be an endless source of reflection and inspiration.
I also understand the frustration many people feel with the seeming nonsense of a lot of Christian churches- the holding on to the ancient patriarchal language and dogma, the outrageously ornate and cryptic masses, the ‘my way or the highway’ road to salvation, the unforgivable use of cherry-picked scripture to judge and condemn others. Every time I attend a Catholic mass and the priest, all decked out in gilded glory, ponces over to the golden garage to get out the host to share exclusively with Catholics in good standing, it takes everything I’ve got not to stand and shout with my finger in the air “I protest!” I feel so very angry. And I cannot help imagining the dismay of Jesus if he were to walk into such a spectacle. I imagine him saying ‘This isn’t what I meant at all’. But see, maybe I’m guilty of fashioning Jesus in my own image just as others do. I could be totally wrong about what he meant when he broke bread with his friends the night before his betrayal. Whatever he may have meant, the communion I shared with my church in Chicago, the small but mighty Wellington Avenue United Church of Christ, was so powerful, so dear, so transformative that I crave it still and judge other communions by its standard.
I understand having opinions about the way the image and the words of Jesus have been used and abused over the centuries. I certainly have my own. I also have my own relationship to his image and words. To me, he was one of the ultimate teachers, a powerful yogi, so connected to the source of spirit that others were healed simply by being in his presence. He was a rebel. He embraced those who were outcast and considered unclean, not just with his words but with his body. He was a person of action, he made his words manifest. Love one another. Don’t judge each other. Don’t tolerate hypocrites and those who profit off the needs of others. Like a great work of art, his life and death raise far more questions than they answer. That’s why I like observing the liturgical year, taking time to ponder these things over and over, holding them up in the light to look at them from a new stage in my life. Take Easter Sunday. I never could reconcile the Easter bunny with the betrayal, crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. It’s an awkward fit, this trying to piggyback the ancient church’s idea of what Jesus’s death meant on top of the even more ancient pagan rites of spring. Frankly, I like thinking about them both. It’s easy to embrace the pagan rites- thank you Earth! Not so easy to stomach the insistence of certain Christian churches that ‘Jesus died for your sins, so either you’re scott-free or you owe Him, depending on how we feel about you’. Of course, it’s not so simplistic, it’s a huge question to ponder. What did he die for? One way I have thought about it is that he died because of the sins of those around him. He allowed it to happen, did not run away from it. He used his own suffering, his own life, to expose those sins for what they were. Jesus, the ultimate performance artist. For me the greatest miracle is that at the peak of his suffering, he forgave everyone, he asked God to forgive them. And in doing so, freed his own spirit. It is hard, so hard, to truly forgive injury and wrong. Am I capable of that kind of forgiveness? I don’t know. It’s why I celebrate Easter, so I can think about it.
Remarks that dismiss the richness of Christian teachings are thoughtless, I think, and they can alienate congregation members who have their own relationship to them. Such a mindset doesn’t serve anyone. Yes, Unitarian Universalism is a thinking, rational faith, but I don’t believe we have to throw the baby out with the bath water.
Thank you Reverend, for reading all of this, I’ve enjoyed thinking about it. I’ll continue to keep my mouth shut in worship planning meetings as best I can, but the day may come when I stand up with my finger in the air and say “I protest!” Perhaps I am a protestant after all.
Filed under: Art of the Day, memory memorabilia re-membering, Teaching | Tags: energy systems, gratitude, hearth fires, october, teachers, the laws of thermodynamics
You do not know this, Mr. van Tine, but I think of you every time I light October’s first fire. The morning’s temperature has at last fallen enough to warrant the season’s first hearth fire. It is a holy event, a rite really. I build it carefully- newspaper saved from last year, kindling I gathered from the yard throughout the summer, logs that have been waiting in the wood pile a long time for their turn at transformation. I build the layers, the easiest to burn at the bottom, and strike the match. It never ceases to be a wonder, how flame springs into being and takes over paper, pinecone, twig, branch and log. How flame has no mass and yet I can see it. How it releases energy from the sun that trees have converted over decades to trunk and limb and leaf. I stare into the flames and think of the first and second laws of thermodynamics, yes I do, Mr. van Tine.
I remember how my mind was blown in the lessons you taught in 10th grade biology, over forty years ago now Mr. VT, and we are still here! How energy is neither created nor destroyed, how there is a tendency to go from order to disorder, to entropy. This second bit distresses while the first is a comfort. We humans want so much to be assured that something lasts forever, that we, somehow, will last forever. But we have most certainly tipped the balance towards an ever increasing rate of entropy, throwing earth’s whole beautiful system of creation, growth, decay, renewal into jeopardy. The third principle states that systems which use energy best, survive. It is both a personal and a global challenge to keep this in mind. I think of all this Mr. VT, every year I build the first fire. I will not even begin to tell you how often I think of Darwin and the theory of natural selection, how it has driven enormous collaborative art projects and given me much to think about as I follow my solitary paths.
How marvelous is this world! I’m sitting in a rocking chair made of hand bent wood by a Polish Appalachian craftsman, my feet are resting on a wooden stool my uncle, now gone from us, made years ago from a tree on his Indiana farm, warmed by the tree stored energy of the sun in the hand hewn stone fireplace I am so very lucky to live with, and I wonder about love. It too is neither created nor destroyed, or so I believe. It is an energy that can be absorbed, stored and released over and over again. I believe it is possible to live in the uninterrupted flow of love, I have the saint’s ambition to do so. Though I fail again and again, I do keep trying. So say I to the flames this morning.
It is a wonder Mr. van Tine, isn’t it? On mornings like this, I cannot hold the world close enough.
Filed under: Art of the Day, Teaching, Writing | Tags: life of the spirit, making time to write, threshold worlds
It feels like most of the world lives full out sunlight lives. Everything is clear, not that it’s easy, but the edges of everything are solid, the tasks are defined, the consequences are known, the paths are marked, unknown territory can be mapped. The sun comes up and people hurl themselves into the motion of their days. It is assumed that what is seen in the light of day is, in fact, reality. It is assumed that this is the reality that everyone lives in. It is taken for granted that this is just fine with everyone.
I can do it, live in the daylight world. I can make my to-do lists, tick off the tasks one by one. I can line up my ducks and count them, teach my classes, assess the progress, attend the meetings, write the curriculum, send out the emails, gather the supplies, clean up the mess. I can schedule schedule schedule the days, weeks, months. I can parse out my minutes to each allotted task and watch the calendar pages fly away like a murmuration of starlings.
I can do it, I have to do it, but it is exhausting and it chafes because there are other worlds to live in. There are other worlds in which my soul longs to reside. Too long in the sunlight world and my soul cowers, my heart raises its shields. Too long in that solid what-you-see-is-all-that-is world and I lose my way to those other lands.
Perhaps they may be called threshold worlds- the liminal world of dawn and twilight, the world of darkness that is not ruled by our sense of sight. In those threshold worlds, the pulse of the interior life is strong. There are forces at work that cannot be seen but whose effects can, like wind moving through the tree canopy. Beauty is one of those forces. Love is another. Perhaps they are the same thing. All of creation talks and sings songs to itself in the threshold world. Songs of possibility, of transformation and of forgiveness. It goes on whether humans are there to mark it or not. I long to hear this song and I’m always on the lookout for signs that it’s there whether I can hear it or not- the fallen hawk feather, the sighting of a fox in the city, the sudden cool wind that changes everything. I move through the daylight world with my head cocked, listening for creation’s song. It is very hard to hear most days, drowned out by the ticking of our clocks, the alerts, the ringtones. Sometimes the best that I can do is remember- this is not all there is.
Filed under: Teaching, Uncategorized | Tags: mass shootings, School, Teaching
This week has been spent back at school, a week of preparation for the teachers. Faculty meetings, room prep, brainstorming, catching up with colleagues. All the gears are beginning to turn, meshing with each other, cranking up to launch another school year. We all have things we plan to teach.
Two more horrific mass shootings within 24 hours of each other. The work of young white men who believe they know who deserves to die, who feel they have the right to destroy the lives of The Other. One of their imagined enemies was a school girl who just finished the eighth grade. She didn’t flee when the shooting started, she tried to help her grandmother who uses a cane. Who taught that young man such hatred?
Teaching is a sacred endeavor. What is taught is not nearly as important as who is teaching. Someone who really sees each student. Someone who respects them and believes the absolute best about them. Someone who loves them. That is who I strive to be.
Our head of school began our first faculty meeting by addressing the shootings. She stated that on our journey together we will focus more than ever on taking care of each other, all of us- students, parents, faculty, staff. We take care of each other because The Other is our family. And this is why I am deeply grateful to be part of my school, because it is more than just talk. It is what we do. We teach love.
The Fox at Dawn 