WALKING ON GRASS

"The Good Grass", oil, by Justin Clements

When sorrows sit on his shoulders, 

he sometimes walks on grass

instead of sidewalks, setting his feet
on the promising green surface
for solace and reassurance.
He realizes again that goodness
grows around and under him,
and that sorrow is not the master
of kindness, but its servant.
He knows that nothing heals
like letting his fussing self
flow away and vanish,
and the goodness of green grass
does that for him,
helps him hold his sorrows
like flakes of paper
that fly off in the softest breeze.

BLESSINGS IN DISGUISE

"Morning Star", oil, by V... Vaughn

An old idiom speaks of “blessings in disguise”, the kinds of blessings I feel are fully present in my English classes. They’re usually in disguise because they don’t seem sparkling and shining with good news – don’t appear to be obvious presents from the universe for my students and me. They usually hide from us as we work on our classroom tasks, somewhat the way the stars are concealed among clouds on stormy nights.  As we discuss stories and poems and ways to write paragraphs, these blessings are quietly wishing us well and waiting to help. They most often come in the form of the resilient and lighthearted wisdom of the students. The kids don’t realize it, but they come to class already with cartloads of understanding, and all of it unfolds, usually secretly, at various points in the school year. Like secret stashes of dollars, their youthful intelligence generates wealth in unobtrusive ways from day to day and week to week. I can sometimes sense it all around me in the classroom – this lavish wisdom of adolescence that usually comes disguised as either silliness or indifference. I’m still learning, after 4+ decades, to see through the disguises to the blessings.

WHO HE IS

He often wonders who he is.

Is he a complex collection

of cells and connective tissues

and bones that easily break? 

Is he his thoughts and feelings

as they fly through his life

like hawks or hummingbirds

or quarrelsome old crows?

Is he a piece of the breezes

that blow by him as he sits 

beside a river with a friend,

the friend who found him last year, 

when he slowly started to see

who he really was,

like a submarine surfacing

and seeing something like paradise?

CHANGING MINDS

"Toward the Light", oil, by Thaw Malin

     I have often “changed my mind” about something, but this morning that phrase made extra-special sense. The words brought to mind someone changing a tire – replacing a road-worn, useless wheel with one that wears the look of newness and strength – or the way the weather sometimes changes in a flash, from the best sunshine to a blustery storm in what seems like seconds. Changing my mind might be a process as all-embracing as darkness changing to daylight. Perhaps when I say “I changed my mind” I really mean my life was somehow made absolutely new.  My students and I, in this sense, are made new in a non-stop sort of way during English class. We are always “changing our minds”. As we sit together in the classroom, fresh thoughts are continuously refurbishing our lives, although in the most private of ways.  Whether we wish to be or not, we are the recipients, second by second, of ideas that didn’t exist one second before – ideas that are as new as any night is when it arrives. We literally change our minds – get new minds -- moment by moment the way every new breath brings newness to our bodies. Our blood is born again and again as we work with each other to understand Shakespeare, and so are our minds and lives.

 

RAIN DURING ENGLISH CLASS

The rain wasn't racing up against the windows,
nor was it a wandering rain
that went aimlessly here and there
across the prospering spring countryside.

It was a rain that remembered
how the universe continues to design itself,
slowly and harmoniously and everlastingly.
The raindrops sang an undisturbed song
as they descended on the darkness
that is sometimes the human race,
and he didn't think the darkness minded.
There was music in his heart
as he heard, with his students,
the tunefulness of this latest storm
in the endless and flourishing history of rain.

SILENT WORKINGS

"California Sunrise", oil, by Karen Winters

“…the silent workings of the dawn…”
          -- John Keats, Endymion

          When I read these lines this morning, moments before sunrise, for some reason I thought of my students and I and the noiseless, secret actions – “the silent workings” – that are constantly taking place in our minds and hearts during English class. As I was reading the poem, the universe was working silently to start a new day around my small house – spreading the stars as they should be, spinning the sun and the planets, setting winds to work in certain ways. I thought all that was happening was my reading the words on the pages, but in fact, wonderful forces were forming, almost soundlessly, a sunrise and a stretch of daylight hours that had never previously existed. While I  was simply turning pages, the universe was, in its always unobtrusive way, spiraling and spinning a fresh start for Mystic, Connecticut.  I should remember this when I’m teaching today, especially when nothing fresh or special seems to be happening in class. Under all the surface nonevents and yawns, there are “the silent workings” of miraculous lives. Each of us in the classroom carries within us the power to prepare thoughts and feelings that have never before existed, and the power is always discreetly at work. While I am sharing some thoughts on the rules for semicolons, forces far stronger than I can imagine are making themselves felt in our minds and hearts in my small classroom on a quiet country road.

DURING STUDY HALL

Someone he thought of
as he was standing by the bookshelf
sent his mind off searching
for feelings that shine like stars.
He was lost for awhile,
while his students whispered
when they should have been studying,
but he soon came back
with brightness surrounding him,
so that his students said
he looked like love itself
had spread across his 70 years.

OPENING UP HEAVEN

“See if I don’t open up heaven itself to you and pour out blessings beyond your wildest dreams.”

     -- God, in Malachi 3:10 (The Message, Eugene Peterson’s translation of the Bible)

    I don’t usually stand and stare during English class, giving appreciative thanks, but perhaps I should every so often. After all, “heaven”, which to me is just the infinitely supportive and benevolent universe, is bringing me and my students inexpressible blessings second by second. It’s as if we are working beneath some kind of cosmic airship full of gifts for all of us, gifts that are given with lavishness as my classes and I carry on our academic duties. We get the gifts of good thoughts, innovative feelings, surprising wonderings and musings, the greatest of reveries and notions and bright-shining beliefs, even stray, skittish thoughts that skip through our minds and are away again. My classes may sometimes seem like silent ships on a sea of dullness, but there are blessings always born anew in the midst of them. Even the changing sky outside, and the birds bringing their sparkle to the feeder, and the seed falling sometimes to the grass, and the old, exhausted, but now newly-growing grass, which some students by the windows can see – even these are presents for us from every present moment. And if all these are absent, my students and I always have sunlight of some sort looking in at us, smiling in its bright or gray way, giving us again a reminder that we live lives of the most implausible splendor and fullness, even when we are working our way through the gloomiest of grammar lessons.

BEING COMFORTABLE

Today, as usual, I would like to be comfortable – and actually, I have no choice in the matter. The word, at its root, means “able to be with power”, and I will be with limitless power all day, whether I’m always conscious of it or not. We feel comfortable when we feel secure – and today, since I will always be part of the measureless power of the universe, I should feel unreservedly secure. There will never be any force capable of doing what we call "harm", because all the force in the universe is constantly present , and working harmoniously, precisely where I am at each moment. (It may not always feel harmonious to me personally, but in the biggest picture, it is always so.) What I would like to do today is be aware of that power, feel it exerting itself in its steady, resolute manner. However, even if I sometimes take no notice of it, this vast and peaceful force will still be working, still be making all things in the universe, including me, utterly comfortable.

    

RIDING WITH HER ON RIVER ROAD

"Two for the Road", oil, by Mary Maxam

The big heron
helped itself to the wind
and went off to the west,
and we followed our feelings
down River Road.
You can't remember sorrows
when you're sailing
on your bicycle
with your best friend,
someone you found
like a flower in a beautiful field.
You followed the stars for years
and finally found nothing at all,
but caring for this quiet person
on her new, snow-colored bicycle
has brought you
the best of this universe,
the best of its spread-out, shining gifts.

SHOWING ITS STUFF

“Do you have an arm like me? Can you shout in thunder the way I can? Go ahead, show your stuff.”

   -- God speaking, in Job 40:9 (in The Message: The Bible in Contemporary Language, by Eugene Peterson)

     This quote is of some significance to me, mostly because I have spent countless hours and days trying to “show my stuff”. I almost always seem to be attempting to prove something about my “self” – that I can "make it", that I have noteworthy talents, that I can do whatever it takes to bring satisfaction to my life Just this morning, I’ve been trying to demonstrate how organized and earnest I am: making my plans for the day, setting up my schedule of activities, choosing my clothes. (Notice all the “my’s”.) In the above passage, God --  the infinite Universe -- is poking a little fun at this kind of “me first and last” attitude – the attitude that says “I” am front and center in the entire Universe, and nothing will get done unless I do it. I can imagine that the Universe, after saying, "Go ahead, show your stuff", continues with these questions: “Can you organize the way I can? Can you teach the way I can? Can you keep your heart beating the way I can? Can you create happiness and magnificence the way I can? The answers are so obvious as to make the questions seem frivolous. The never-ending Universe (sometimes referred to as God, Allah, or the Tao) is constantly “showing its stuff”. All little me has to do today is relax, let go, accept, be patient, and take pleasure in the Universe's astonishing show.

THE DAYS AHEAD

Sitting outside, 
he saw his little life 
leaning toward him 
with happiness in its hands. 
"Here," his life said, 
this is for you", 
and it set a thousand days 
of satisfaction at his feet.
He unfurled his fears 
and let them fly off, 
and then he stared 
with delight
at the days ahead.

WATCHING THE TRAIN

"Into Dusk", oil, by Gerald Schwartz

     Today I plan to watch the “train of thoughts” pass by. It’s true that thoughts will be passing through my life all day, much like an endless freight train, and what I want to do, you might say, is sit on a hillside above the tracks, and simply observe the cars as they pass. Like watching a hundred-car train back in my small town when I was a kid, watching my “train of thoughts” could be an absorbing exercise. When a defensive, self-protective thought comes by, I might say, “Gosh, look at that strange-looking thought!” or, when a happy thought passes, I might exclaim, with sincere curiosity, “How did that beautiful thought get made?”, or, when a horrible, blood-curdling,  boxcar-thought thunders by, “That is one hideous old thought!” The trick is to just observe the train, but not jump aboard. So often in my life I forget about observing my thoughts, and instead, I jump onto a thought, close the door, and ride with it as it careens across the countryside. Fearful thoughts have taken me on many rowdy rides over the years, as have thoughts of envy, anger, defensiveness, and countless others. Today I refuse to get on the train. It’s much more fun, and far less desperate, to merely sit on a hillside and watch with fascination as the long, long train of thoughts rolls by.

"The Warden" by Anthony Trollope

I loved reading this book! How nice it is to discover a wonderful author in my 70th year -- a writer who, in some ways, seems as good as Dickens to me. Trollope's writing is so unadorned and humble, so non-showy and unostentatious, and yet he tells a terrific story. The ending of this book was simple and yet uplifting, and I can't wait to start the next one in the series, titled Barchester Towers.

This morning we took a walk through some of the subdivisions near our home, just walking easily, not working especially hard. We both had to shed some clothes as the weather warmed. Later, Delycia worked in the garden and I sat nearby in the sunshine, reading some of Anthony Trollope's Barchester Towers. Now and then, I got excited about some sentences, and read them aloud to her.

Later, after lunch, we took a short bike ride in the warm sunshine, down beside the river and up to the cemetery, and then back up the long steady hill to home.

A chilly and gray day, but a happy one for us as we spent some good hours with Noah and Ava. Delycia played "baby" with Ava, read with Noah a bit, and generally kept the kids interested and surprised, and I set out some sweet little early-Easter chocolate creatures for the kids to find in the yard. As we left, Ava, often a shy little person, dash up to both of us and gave the best of hugs. That, in itself, might make my week. What lucky people we are!

Now, at 6:00 pm, I'm out on the patio beside the heating-up charcoal in the new grill, listening to the evening chimes coming across the streets from the Baptist church on the hill. Delycia is resting inside after a brisk 90-minute walk.

CLOSE AND CARING ATTENTION

Occasionally there is a scattered lack of attentiveness in my classes, and this morning I checked a dictionary and found that one of the definitions for “attend” is “to accompany or wait upon someone as a companion or servant.” I like that, because it suggests that paying attention during class should be something we do not just out of some humdrum habit, but because we sincerely care about everyone in the class. We want to be a proper companion for our classmates, and so we attend to their needs by giving them our attention. We take care of them by being attentive when they have something they want to say. There are many important duties I have as my students’ English teacher, but surely none is more important than teaching them how to care for each other. Where to put commas and participles in a paragraph are relatively insignificant skills when compared to the skill of being decent to the people around them. I want to show my students how to be serious readers and writers, but I am far more concerned about helping them become seriously caring people. Being kind to others, being observant of their needs, is not an easy skill to learn. Much more than learning how to use participles, attending to others when they want to share an idea or a feeling requires tireless faithfulness. My students and I have to push ourselves, day after day, to practice this essential skill of paying close and caring attention to others.

"The Warden" by Anthony Trollope

I loved Chapter 17, "A Long Day in London", a touching and powerful description of the old warden wandering around London all day, waiting for his late-night appointment with the Attorney General, Mr. Abraham Haphazard. It's a strangely strong chapter - -strangely, because nothing big or special happens, just a lonely and worried man biding his time as the hours pass, but strong because Trollope somehow captures the depth and forcefulness of the warden's feelings, the kind that all of us have at certain times.

INTO THE WILDERNESS

"Wilderness Cascade", oil, by George Coll

“And now at once, adventuresome, I send

My herald thought into a wilderness.”

     -- John Keats, “Endymion”

           Reading these lines this morning brought back my old desire to be an adventuresome teacher, one who isn’t afraid to send his students into the wide wilderness of learning. I do try to teach lessons that students can learn with as little struggle as possible, but surprisingly, I also want them to wander a little, to roam and drift among poems and stories, to search by themselves the wilds of writing first-rate sentences and essays. Like Keats when he was writing his fearless, probing poems, I want my English lessons to lead the students out past the limits of their previous knowledge, out beyond even common sense and the so-called right answers, out to where wisdom always waits with its tools for transforming lives. Keats says his thoughts are “herald[s]” – messengers, emissaries, announcers of uncommon news – and perhaps my lessons can do something similar. Maybe my classes can cry out like couriers carrying news of new trails to take, trails even I, perhaps, have not fully traveled. It takes bravery to make poems that shine like lights in the darkness, and it takes a similar boldness to bring to students the kind of lessons that will send them off on valiant and fulfilling journeys.

SMOOTHLY STEERING

“I’ll smoothly steer

My little boat, for many quiet hours,

With streams that deepen freshly into bowers.”

     -- John Keats, “Endymion”

"Petersham Pond", oil, by Nel Jansen

     I like the fact that Keats sees the boat of his poetry as sailing in streams that always, in due course, “deepen freshly into bowers”, and I see my teaching in much the same way. There’s a confidence, a coolness and buoyancy, in Keats’ words, as if he is absolutely certain that all will be well with whatever he writes, and I feel similarly self-assured. I don’t mean that I know I will be a winning teacher every day – just that I know that nothing will happen in my classes that won’t somehow cause learning to be let loose among us. Like Keats when he’s writing, I feel myself sailing somewhere special in every class, even when the waters seem strange and stormy. I’m not so much a teacher as a fellow passenger in a ship that always brings my students and me to curious destinations, some that I planned for and some that surge up out of somewhere mysterious as I’m teaching. There’s always depth in even the most lackluster classes – always some “bowers”, if we can see them, where the learning is as large and uplifting as we could wish. Like the poet, we simply have to put our trust in the ship of our minds and hearts, sit back, and see what waits ahead.

Delycia and I took a lovely early season bike ride yesterday, about 12 miles along the river and then onto the rolling roads of the farm country northeast of us. It was an especially sunny day with just slight winds, so we were able to bring all our enthusiasm to our pedaling. We talked occasionally as we rode, but mostly we took pleasure in the passing scenes and the sunshine.

Today, a cloudy and cool one, was a good day for a fast walk through town and up a sharp hill and then back, all the while praising some houses and denouncing others and simply enjoying each other's very special company.  

"The Warden", by Anthony Trollope

I am enjoying the combination of civility and seriousness I see in this book -- the mixture of mannerly, dignified writing and genuine sensitivity to the problems all people encounter. I just finished Ch. 14, a wickedly sharp satire on the British press at the time of the writing (late 19th century), and I particularly enjoyed, as usual in this book, the perfectly well-balanced sentences. Trollope obviously took pleasure in constructing sentences as carefully as a skilled carpenter constructs a beautiful house.

The story is growing more and more serious, ominous, and yet uplifting. It seems as thought the warden, the gentle Mr. Harding, is destined to be disgraced and ostracized, and yet something tells me that the might of goodness will get the upper hand.

We shall see ...

COURTEOUS TEACHING

     "Display of superior knowledge is as great a vulgarity as display of superior wealth — greater, indeed, inasmuch as knowledge should tend more definitely than wealth towards discretion and good manners."

     -- Henry Fowler

     We teachers sometimes start thinking we have some type of superior knowledge, which, as the above quote suggests, can set us off on the path to something like vulgarity. By this I don’t mean we start using swear words or saying offensive jokes, but simply that we act in an academically rude manner – sort of riding roughshod over our students because of our supposed more upscale and worthier wisdom. Even if it’s in small and unnoticed ways, this kind of scholarly snobbery can set a mood of standoffishness in the classroom – an atmosphere with the cultured, erudite teacher on one side and his amateurish students on the other. I’ve seen more than my share of this kind of classroom, which is why Fowler’s statement seemed so significant when I came across it recently. I need to remember, when I’m in the classroom, that whatever knowledge has been bestowed on me must be shared with my students with the utmost “discretion and good manners”. There’s a certain sensitivity that should keep company with understanding and  expertise – the sensitivity that allows me to be mindful of my ignorance even as I am taking pleasure in some new knowledge. There are certain good manners that go along with the parceling out of education in the classroom – manners that make it possible for me to be both knowledgeable and gracious with my students, both scholarly and courteous. I may have superior knowledge about participles and poetry, but the civility and politeness with which I instruct my students will shine more brightly, and bring more awareness their way, than any ostentatious display of learning. 

DETACHMENT IN ENGLISH CLASS

In school, we teachers often encourage our students to be “committed” to the particular goals of a class or an assignment, but it might also be useful to remind the students that un-commitment, or detachment, can be just as essential. To use an analogy, if a sports team is unswerving in using a specific strategy during a game, they might not notice when changed conditions in the game create the need for new strategies. They might be so focused on using their plan that they fail to make modifications in order to better break apart the opponent’s defense. Their complete commitment might actually be their downfall. The same thing can happen to students. A young writer might be so focused on following her preplanned framework for an essay that she fails to notice, as she’s writing, a wonderful new direction she could take. Similarly, a student might be so devoted to finding out “what happens” in a novel that he misses much of the magnificence of the writing. It might be helpful if we teachers encouraged our students to practice the art of detachment – the art, I might say, of going after goals but not being held back by them. If they get the ‘A’ they have set their sights on, fine, but if they don’t, they must be able to detach themselves – free themselves – from that goal and notice the useful results that came from the ‘B’. If they commit themselves to travel certain roads, fine, but they must foster in themselves the freedom to take different roads if the conditions call for it. There may be some golden coins at the end of one road, but there may be a true treasure at the end of another.

SMOOTH STONES AND MASTERY

"Untitled", oil on linen, Barbara Kacicek While I was doing some reading this morning, I occasionally re-read certain important passages, and it started me thinking about the value of repetition. It’s surprising how useful it can be to simply repeat something, especially if we are participating in a learning process of some sort. This morning I wanted to understand the significance of some sentences, so I just re-read them several times, and the more I repeated the reading, the better I understood. It’s almost a flawless formula: repetition makes for more and more mastery. After thinking about this for a few moments, I looked up the word “repeat” in a dictionary, and was surprised to discover that it derived from the Latin word for “strive after”. I also saw that the words “compete”, “appetite”, and “perpetual” stem from from the same root. So, when I repeat an activity in order to better learn or understand it, I am striving after understanding because I have a hunger, or appetite, for it. In a sense, I am perpetually competing with ignorance in order to defeat it, or perhaps I am competing with myself to see how much I can learn. It's certainly true that I compete with myself in order to become a better teacher, and perhaps I can use these insights about the effects of repetition in order to further my improvement. Perhaps I simply need to remember how important repetition is in any process.  Nature, of course, knows all about this wizardry of repetition. Sharp rocks become smooth stones over years by the steadily repeating flow of water, and soil for farming gets ever more fruitful by the persistent recurrence of decomposition.  It works in a similar way in English class. Whether we're studying a poem or understanding how to use a participle in paragraphs, repetition is always of service. Often the secret is as straightforward as this: Just repeat the action several times to bring about a startling amount of mastery.

WISDOM IN EVERY ANSWER

A friend today was fondly reminiscing about one of his teachers in law school, a professor in whose class, my friend said, “you couldn’t give a wrong answer.” When I asked what he meant, he said the professor always found something right in every statement a student made. If a student’s answer was a little off track as far as the professor’s original question was concerned, he always managed to discover some praiseworthy gem of wisdom in the answer. My friend remembered many instances when the professor (he was a tax expert) said something like this to a student: “That wouldn’t work in this particular transaction, but it’s a very interesting idea, one that could be easily applied to the transaction we were discussing yesterday.” In this way, my friend said, you always had a comfortable feeling about speaking up in his class, because you knew he would find something to commend in your comment. As soon as my friend described this professor, I knew it was something I wanted to keep in mind when I'm teaching. “YOU CAN’T BE WRONG” might be a sign I could place at the entrance to my room, as a way of assuring my students that some wisdom will be found in each of their thoughtful comments during class. Indeed, my students need to know that wisdom is so huge, so complex, and so omnipresent that some of it always resides in all of us. Like my friend’s professor, I want my students to have faith in their own intelligence, to have the confidence and courage to share their thoughts with the class, and to know that I will always find the wisdom, however veiled, in what they say.

COMING AND GOING

Coming and going, 
he gets what he needs -- 
a night of spreading kindness, 
a day of joyfulness 
that falls upon him 
like pieces of soft paper. 
Something says the best news to him
almost always -- a wish
from a wind passing by, 
a bright baseball in the grass 
like a sign that something special 
shines inside all things.

THE USEFUL AND THE GREAT

An old hymn encourages us “to do…the useful and the great, the thing that never dies, the silent toil that is not lost.” I was thinking of this yesterday after I had a short but superb conversation with some students after class. We only talked for a few minutes, and our conversation covered relatively inconsequential topics, but nonetheless, I believe we did a “useful and great thing” together. It was a just a quick conversation as class was dismissing, yet, in another sense, it was an event of genuine significance. I guess the point of the old hymn is that anything we do can be “useful and great”, and that even our smallest activity “never dies” but extends its importance in immeasurable ways, far into the future and out to the vastness of the universe. No one paid attention to us as we spoke beside the whiteboard, and certainly no lives were substantially transformed by what we said, but still, the words we spoke had – and are still having – their inestimable effects. Like a stone dropped into a limitless sea, every particular action we perform, even the “silent toil” that no one else notices, sends ripples out into the vast reaches of the cosmos. Our lives were reshaped by our conversation – perhaps only in small, unnoticeable ways, but reshaped nevertheless. We sent out a ripple “that never dies” into the sea of existence, and we can only imagine what its numberless consequences will be as the years and decades pass.

TEACHING AND ROCKET SCIENCE

Whenever I stop to think about it carefully, I realize that the work I do as a teacher is more complicated than the work engineers, mathematicians, and scientists do. This goes contrary to the typically accepted attitude toward teaching – that it’s a fairly easy profession to get into, that almost anyone can do it, that it’s not, after all,  rocket science. Most people would never put teaching and astrophysics on the same level of difficulty. The astrophysicist, people would say, must be much more astute and discerning than a teacher because he is dealing with a far more sophisticated subject. People, I think, generally see teachers as having considerably less distinguished minds than engineers and mathematicians. I find this more and more puzzling as the years pass, because teaching seems ever more multifaceted and mysterious to me. What I do each day in the classroom  has become a boundless mystery. When I look at students sitting around the table in my room, I often feel like an astronomer staring into the faraway remoteness of space. After all, these are human beings I am dealing with, and I am attempting to do nothing less than assist in the fashioning of their immeasurable lives from the inside out. In the entire universe, there is nothing more complex than a human being, and I am entrusted with helping to shape the minds of thirty-eight of them. I find that astonishing and scary to consider. I feel like an astrophysicist trying to understand the most abstruse kind of rocket science. However, I'm not an astrophysicist. I'm more fortunate than that. I'm one of the chosen few, the elite, the beautiful people, the true aristocracy, the crème de la crème. I'm a teacher, and I couldn't possibly be prouder.

SHARED WEALTH

Recently, a student asked me, concerning a classroom activity I had planned, if it was my “own” idea, or had I “found” it somewhere else, and, after thinking about her question, my conclusion is that no, I did not own that idea, and that in fact I don’t own any ideas. I find them all. I don’t personally assemble any of the ideas that lead my life from moment to moment. I simply make use of them. It’s as if ideas are floating freely in the universe, and some of them effortlessly land in my life as they are passing by. Indeed, thoughts are drifting everywhere, ready for me to make use of. I often find them in written words, but they also come to me in movies, television shows, music, signs along the road, easygoing spoken words. The universe is overflowing with ideas; all I do is avail myself of them. It’s delightful to contemplate a world like this, where no one owns ideas because everyone generously shares them. Today in class, I will send out countless ideas to my students, and they will do the same for me. We will spend 45 minutes in each class swapping ideas. At the end of class, we will have been slightly reshaped because we will be briefly making use of fresh thoughts. Even more wonderful is the fact that we can distribute these new thoughts to others, and still make use of them ourselves. It’s as if the world is filled with trillions of dollars and everyone freely shares all of it.

THE LAW OF CREATIVITY

"Creative Chaos", oil, by Liza Hirst

A student said to me yesterday that she wasn’t very “creative”, and I’m sorry I didn’t take the time to offer a careful response. I should have told her that all of us are always creative, because we can’t help it. It’s our very nature to create. We produce countless creations each moment, though we are usually not aware of this. All of us, including this young student, are actually multifaceted, efficient factories that constantly produce astounding products. As my students and I are sitting in my classroom, our bodies are working at precipitous speeds -- pulling in air, pumping blood, reshaping cells. This student who thinks she’s not creative is actually housing an enormously complex system of operations, more complicated than the most sophisticated factory. While she sits and considers her deficiency in creativity, her brain is producing dazzling miracles called thoughts at startling speeds. These thoughts, actually, represent the most amazing aspect of her creativity. The very thought that told her she was not creative was the result of an extraordinarily beautiful creative process. In some inscrutable way, her mind continually takes part in the most productive activity the universe has yet developed, called “thinking”. By saying she was not creative, she was simply showing that she is, that she can’t help it, that she has to be, that it’s the law.

LIGHTBULBS AND BREEZES IN ENGLISH CLASS

"Breeze from the Lake", oil, by Karen Winters

 Every so often, one of my students suddenly “gets it”: an understanding somehow arrives inside them so they “see” what I’ve been trying to teach. The analogy most often used to describe this experience is the light bulb, as though someone inside a student’s head turned a switch and understanding was suddenly shining there. One moment the student is in a sort of darkness, fumbling among my words to find the way, and the next moment the lamp of his mind makes a light that says, “I get it!” Jesus used a different analogy. When a breeze blew by, he asked his friends if they knew where it came from. They were naturally puzzled because, of course, it’s impossible to tell just where any breeze began. Jesus went on to explain that thoughts are similar: they suddenly spring up in our lives, but there’s no telling where they began. Like the breeze, they’re just suddenly and mysteriously there. Today, I want to be aware of this wonderful phenomenon in my classroom. All day there will be breezes of thoughts passing through the lives of my students and me, and all we have to do is loosen up and take pleasure in them. They don’t “start” in our brains, just as a wind that unsettles the leaves of a tree doesn’t arise in that tree. The wind is one small signal from the immeasurable atmospheric forces surrounding the earth, and our thoughts are part of the similarly immeasurable mental force that’s been smoothly whooshing through and lighting up the universe for all eternity, and which will be refreshing Room 2 at Pine Point School today from 8:30 am to 3:00 pm.