Filed under: The Living Room | Tags: artifacts, dust, love, nostalgia, red hair
Below is a post I started and never finished over a year ago.
I still haven’t finished it… but I like it for what it is. Enjoy:
When I was 16 and obsessed with red hair I borrowed the black beret of a particular red-haired young man and was so pleased to find a couple of those hairs left in it. It may have been this moment that sparked my interest in our artifacts. We leave bits of ourselves everywhere, don’t we?
The more invisible the more interesting it seems: someone else’s saliva on your neck is interesting; the evaporates of your perspiration as you run against the traffic on a hot day; impeceptible flecks of the skin we shed wherever we go. We leave pieces of hair and string and lint and never think of it; our perfume in the elevator or on a traveling companion’s clothes… the traces of us, our bodies and belongings, the very most intimate evidence that we exist in the physical world: all of it fascinates me.
Filed under: The Living Room, Uncategorized, Work Life | Tags: feeling small
One of the occupational hazards of being a teacher is that you can start to think you need to be ON all the time… like you’re the star of some kind of nutty one woman show.
Last night I realized two things: 1, that I have gotten proportionally worse at knowing how to be with other adults as I’ve gotten better at being with kids, and 2, that I am terrified both of disappearing and of being seen (these, in equal measure). I think that I am even afraid of facing the fact that I am really good at my job. I look for something to blame it on as though it were some kind of fluke.
I got pretty drunk. And not the good kind. And maybe I was exhausted or sort of manic from working out earlier in the evening, but I made some kind of spectacle of myself. It was so embarrassing.
People generally think of me as this really together sort of a person, but I think, perhaps, while I may not be a fraud at work, it could be I’m a fraud in life.
Filed under: Life as Art | Tags: art, liberty plaza park, love, occupy wall street, zuccotti park
Children sing to learn. To memorize the alphabet and any number of facts, they sing.
On the evenings of the past two Saturdays I’ve gone down to Zuccotti park, also known as Liberty Plaza Park, to support and to witness the Occupy Wall Street movement.
On my first visit, entering the park from the south east corner, the first thing I heard was music. The first thing I saw was dancing. These people, mainly young adults, were creating something beautiful within the action of airing grievances.
There was artwork that no one treated preciously, but that everyone treated with respect. Respect, I saw in the treatment of the park itself as well.
Everyone together, playing by the rules of kindness, respect, and gratitude.
I guess I’ve always had a Peter Pan idea about growing up, with the ties and the serious expressions. But here we are, grown up, and singing together. Singing for peace, for hope for a better future, for the feeling of togetherness it gives us. Singing to learn, maybe. Because being together and acting together as one body teaches us that this IS possible. We can still approach the complex and the difficult with the openness of the very young.
Sensual: Adjective. Of or pertaining to the senses or physical sensation; sensory.
This is the definition I most prefer. Other definitions limit it too much to bedroom eyes territory.
Proximity is a thing we talk about in teaching. It is an element of “classroom management”. Classroom management is a euphemism for “getting children to unquestioningly comply”.
Now, if you will, please follow me on a tangent.
Artists whom I have loved (my great teachers), who’s presence I’ve desired to be in, have always been ones who seemed to derive an ecstatic, nearly (or most certainly) erotic, pleasure in the making of objects, music, theatre; their creation.
Being with myself as an artist, when I’ve touched that place in myself most profoundly, with the most clear and honest access to spirit, it has always been nothing short of sensual. The connection of the pen to the paper, the paint to the canvas, the song to my mouth (like a deep soul kiss), it is of the senses and the body, not just the mind (not the mind at all?).
And so it is that when my body is happy I have more access to my spirit. When I feel joy in my body, I can create more freely. I can touch the core of the matter. I am in the water and I am the water. What makes my body happy is oxygen. And so I find that I am most an artist when I am most an athlete. A discovery that still amazes me every time I rediscover it.
And what does this have to do with proximity and managing a classroom?
Actually, I’m not sure, but I think it has something to do with this:
A classroom is a human place, with humans inside. My classroom is a place where teenage humans learn to realize their abilities (to use their senses) to create beautiful things. My little mantra: It might not always be pretty, but it’s gonna be beautiful.
My school is a place where these teenage humans have a tendency to act out in ways that are not helpful to the learning process.
And yet…
And yet…
When making art they are usually wonderful. They are occasionally magnificent. And this, I think, has something to do with proximity (to each other and to me). In my classroom, by virtue of the fact that nearly all that happens centers around the production of beautiful things, students sit close to one another and I am often close to them. I sit beside them and we assess their work together, make improvements together. They help one another through discussion and encouragement and friendly teasing. The creating of beautiful things together necessitates close proximity, nearness. It offers itself to a sort of intimacy. They’re not in rows and I’m not on the far end of the room talking at them. It would be completely unnatural.
And yet, that is what an awful lot of teaching looks like. I mean, believe me. I’ve seen it. We’ve all seen it. We’ve all been through it.
I know the exact point of all this eludes me still, but I’m getting closer to it. The senses driving creation. The physical nearness of others when everyone is engaged in creating. Being an example of what you want from the world. Striving to be most like those examples that most attract you. Allowing beauty to fill everything. It has something to do with that, too.
When I get closer to knowing it, I will tell you.
Post Script:
This thing can happen with ideas; like you have a vision of something you want to paint, but can’t quite translate it. It’s like falling in love with someone who doesn’t speak your language. There are so many things that get stuck in the throat.
Last night I got hit in the head with an idea about how to approach an idea I’ve been tracking for months. It’s still a baby. And it’s still not sure if it’s one thing or many things, so on the off chance that anybody’s reading this, feel free to comment with your own ideas about teaching and learning and creating.
From nowhere I remembered a day when being a teacher was the last thing I wanted. A day that made me stay home from work the next day. A day that made me ramble like a crazy lady on the bus. A day that made me forget who I was. Forget my place? I had no place there.
There was a boy and he was Muslim. He was proud and brave and smart and I thought, although I hadn’t met his father, that he probably was a lot like his father, because he seemed to always be imitating a man.
One day he came to school wearing a kufi, which he didn’t normally do. I think his teacher was doing some sort of show and tell with the class. When it was time for art things went as they usually did, but at clean-up time a few kids started picking on the boy in the kufi and one knocked it off his head. Another spit in it. And I just about thought I’d die I was so disturbed.
But worse than the children was the principal of the school who truly did not give a shit. Not at all. He did not care.
I stayed home from work the next day.
There are a lot of days I look back at in my early teaching and say, “That was the day I gave up hope”. But that might have actually been it.
Fast forward a few years and I am in another world. I am teaching in a high school, which is what I always wanted. My students are a little nutty, but I don’t think any of them are actually cruel. I am able to create a pretty positive scene in my classroom and most kids respond to me.
I don’t babble about the whole world going to hell around me on mass transit rides anymore. Most days I am tired, but not sad.
So much has changed since then. In me, so much has changed, but not so much in the world. I try to be a person I would like to be friends with and bring a little of what I think is good to the world around me. I think I am doing a good job.
A good job. It’s taken a long time.
Every year the approach of the holidays gets me a little stiff in the neck. Honestly, I don’t know why. They were never so bad. The craziness of my family was never much crazier than anybody else’s crazy.
Still, every year I am surprised by the nice time I end up having. And it always does seem to turn out pretty nice. My family is a little crazy, but they’re all pretty great, too.
And now, after a nice Christmas, a big mega-snow storm, and a few days of doing not much, I’ve got this cool new camera to play with (thanks, Dad!). Be prepared for lots of photos of my cat.
Filed under: Life as Art, The Living Room, Work Life | Tags: seasons, winter
Happy Winter, my lovelies!
I always fear winter’s approach, but every year I find myself surprised by my heart’s unexpected openness to it. Maybe it’s knowing that come the end of December, the days will begin to grow a wee bit longer, slowly, but surely. Of course, as it is not quite yet winter, celebrating the inevitable coming of spring is a certainly premature. Nevertheless, it is a kind of springtime in the little birdcage of my chest, and the little singing bird keeps fooling me.
It is a magnificent thing to feel satisfied and happy.
I am a working Art Teacher again! which is why I haven’t had much time to write. But I will write soon. There is so much to celebrate. I am completely renewed in this work. It’s a kind of miracle!
From time to time, like anyone, I get sad… but deep down apocalypse sad. I start to think I am somehow peculiar; ill equipped for this life. I have always felt I lived a little closer to the dark side than most; but the dark side, it’s called dark for a reason. It is a place more secret than any other. It is something that almost refuses to be shared. There is no way of knowing how it is felt by anyone but yourself. And there is no way of knowing how many around you are suffering the same thing.
I wonder about the secret world of sorrow. I wonder about the way it motivates us. I know that in times when I go to that infinite pool and swim in it I come up nourished in some way, but it’s a treacherous soaking. I also know that not everyone gets through it. Some people fall into that water having never learned to see the way up, the way out. It is frightening. Many are lost to it.
Some folks find it is unproductive to try to work in the dark, but I think that all depends on what you’re trying to produce. Everybody wants to be happy. But happiness, the really rich, really full kind, can’t exist without its equal opposite. It often seems that what is taken for happiness is just a kind of dumb compliance: to be happy is to meet the marks and measures in magazines and on TV. This, if you ask me, seems pretty uncreative and pretty fucking boring.
Given the proper respect, the deep, dark, inky secret heart is a place of terrible wonder. There can be rich treasure at the bottom of that sea. Fast intimacies can be forged in the face of emotional wreckage. Going into the night with someone can reveal that person in a way they could rarely be seen. To let someone go there with you is to lay yourself bare. It is an act of faith. It can be an act of love.
I wouldn’t trade the gifts I get from occasions of sadness, even the really awful kind, for a life filled with 75 degrees and sunny. The recuperative winter is like any other healing: uncomfortable. But it yields to springs full of color and summers full of peaches, so juicy and wet that, if you eat them with gusto, also make a sweet, wonderful mess. The goodness we can share in these times makes the aloneness of the others sufferable. And I guess, for me, that’s kind of the whole point.
