what is it that's been made clearer to you since we've last met?

apparently instead of "how are you?" or "what's new?" "what is it that's been made clearer to you since we've last met?" was ralph waldo emerson's preferred greeting to kindreds. to answer (or attempt to)...

(this has ultimately been written over the course of about a week from a red couch in a red and orange room, the teacher's lounge and a classroom with a pace flag hanging on the wall. it’s become somewhere between a manifesto and a soliloquy and a reflection on exactly 23 “rotations around the sun” – as jenell would say).

to set the tone and foster some ambiance, top five (high fidelity style) soul-quenching songs a half-an-hour before lunch from teacher's lounge computer CID-4742,

1. “at the bottom of everything” by bright eyes
2. “change” by blind melon
3. “independence day” by elliott smith
4. “closer to fine” by the indigo girls
5. “landed” by ben folds

uygen, my favorite shortie, and the other elementary schoolers get star stickers for doing good deeds. everytime the kids line up to go anywhere, they count down… 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1… blastoff! uygen grabbed my hand and said, “ms. courtney (she and maki are the only ones who call me that), what if when we said blastoff we shot up into the air with silver helmets on and grabbed stars out of the night sky and flew back down to edgehill and put the stars on our chart and all the stars would be unique?” the excitement and hope in her voice brought tears to my eyes.

i take the same way to work everyday. the path is called the eyebrow and earns the name because of the narrow passes and steep descents. the thing is i never take that way home. yesterday i decided to, just to mix things up. i ended up actually getting lost on a path that i take all the time. not extremely lost, but i had to climb up an embankment. when i reached the path, i noticed everything as if seeing it for the first time. trees, views, everything looked completely different coming from the other direction. it’s weird. today i repeated the path, and following a day where i felt like “myself” (aka not crying at work and feeling free and minus my heavy boots) and took the perfect-time-of-day (the hour before sunset) opportunity to sing at the top of my lungs outside.

“life does not become more comprehensible. it becomes more mysterious.” i struggle to revel in the change inherent in the mysterious.

i bought a book of alice walker poetry about a month ago. it lives on my coffee table. my friends and i have dog-eared the most resonating pieces. it’s as if we converse through the poetry, sharing our emotions and announcing our current understandings. the ruts, highs, lows all documented and shared through the words of a poet.

"beauty [is] something that [is] new to you. that [is] why tourists and children [can] see it better than other people, and it [is] the poet’s job to keep seeing it the way children and tourists [do]…" "claire spoke often in her poetry of the idea of ‘fittingness’: that is, when your chosen pursuit and your ability to achieve it—no matter how small or insignificant both might be—are matched exactly, are fitting. this, claire argued, is when we become truly human, fully ourselves, beautiful. to swim when your body is made for swimming. to kneel when you feel humble. to drink water when you are thirsty. or—if one wished to be grand about it—to write the poem that is exactly the fitting receptacle of the feeling or thought that you hoped to convey."

(NEIL FREUDENBERGER, “THE TUTOR”; ZADIE SMITH ON BEAUTY, 214)

on friday ethan proposed to jamie on top of a mountain filled with tibetan prayer flags. he had a nepali road worker help him carry a table, chairs, food, candles and a hammock to the top of the hill. on monday morning brian and i skipped high school assembly to attend their middle school assembly. middle school assemblies have featured songs each morning. the kids seemed a little confused with why we were singing “going to the chapel,” but everything became clear when the powerpoint flashed to, “ms. vinson and mr. vandrunen are excited to announce… they’re engaged!” the gasps and shouts made us all realize that the kids were lost for the rest of the school day.

after i wrote my last email from my st. olaf account and (for the millionth time) realized college was over i went into my classroom, turned on my ipod and cried. as i looked out the window, i heard someone enter. "ms. humm, what's wrong?" bani, one of my favorite students, asked. i told her about my hesitance for change and nostalgia for the past, somewhat embarassed that she was seeing me cry. "that's okay, ms. humm. it's just human." her statement momentarily floored me. it took me three months to say the phrase, “i am a first-year teacher and am in the learning process. i will learn from all of these experiences and be better next year.” i tell my students to know themselves and look for the underlying humanness in others. i have been hiding mine from myself. but at least bani was there to remind me.

last week i almost made a student cry. i had asked rachit twice to please raise his hand before speaking. on the third time, my frustration and exaustion on a friday afternoon came to a head. he sunk his head and i realized i had lost him. a few minutes later, i broke the class into groups and asked rachit to come chat for a second. "did i hurt your feelings before?" "no." "because i think you did, and it's okay to say so. i am sorry that i made you feel badly, rachit, but you need to work on raising your hand before you talk. i love having you in class and i want you to keep sharing your ideas." "okay, ms. humm." five minutes after the last bell for the day rang, rachit bounded back into my room. "ms. humm, i really respect you for what you said before, and i really love being in your class, too. i just wanted to say thanks."

gerry williams, a woodstock distinguished alumni, gave pottery lessons last saturday morning. some people’s spirits emanate calmness and wisdom… gerry is definitely one of those souls. he stressed centering as the inherent process in pottery—pressuring the clay up and down to solidify it in the center of the wheel. you can’t build the form until the clay is fully centered. there is a clear moment when you have to determine what form the pot will take. and there is a clear moment when you have to know when to stop. “one important thing about throwing is knowing when you need to be done.” “i am trying to even it out. but i guess i am making it more distorted…” “yeah.”

every time i have a solid poop (this may sound graphic, but, come on, you can handle it) i feel like doing a dance, hands in the air, singing, “i win, i win…”

in my ap world history class we are learning about industrialization and colonization. woodstock is a school built by christian missionaries at a hill station in the 1850s. woodstock staff members have running hot water and electricity. employees (sweepers, chokidars—guards—office workers, cooks) have latrines and occasional electricity. coolies haul our groceries and ayahs wash our clothes. we teach students in english and observe christian holidays. my hindi is limited to congenial greetings. as jamie put it over our morning coffee, “we are still a colony of hot showers in a nation of bucket baths.”

facing the way

the fundamental question about revolution
as lorraine hansberry was not afraid to know
is not simply whether i am willing to give up my life
but if i am prepared to give up my comfort:
clean sheets on my bed
the speed of the dishwasher
and my gas stove
gadgetless
but still preferable to cooking out of doors
over a fire of smoldering roots
my eyes raking the skies for planes
the hills for army tanks.
paintings i have revered stick against my walls
as unconcerned as saints
their perfection alone sufficient for their defense.
yet not one lifeline thrown by the artist
beyond the frame
reaches the boy whose eyes were target
for a soldier’s careless aim
or the small girl whose body napalm
a hot bath after mass rape
transformed or the old women who starve on muscatel
nightly
on the streets of new york.

it is shameful how hard it is for me to give
them up!
to cease this cowardly addiction
to art that transcends time
beauty that nourishes a ravenous spirit
but drags on the mind
whose sale would patch a roof
heat the cold room of children, replace and eye.
feed a life.

it does not comfort me now to hear
thepoorweshallhavewithusalways
(christ should have never said this:
it makes it harder than ever to change)
just as it failed to comfort me
when i was poor.

(ALICE WALKER)

there are times when an empty inbox makes me feel like an island (though no man is an island). and then there are the days when i feel your presence, whatever the distance. i want to reach the point where i send emails with no expectation of receiving one in return. but i recognize my faults.

jamie bought an aries coffee mug for our kitchen. the kettle hissed as the water came to a boil... the mug deemed aries to be "decisive and bold" though i was reading the mug because i couldn't decide if i wanted coffee or tea.

last weekend the elementary school had their sports day. uygen ran up to me on monday and grabbed my waist as she frantically recalled her race. she told me that during her race she fell down and her best friend, who was in the lead, turned around and ran back to her. tseki reached down and offered uygen her hand. after helping her up, they ran the rest of the race holding hands.

“together is not always better, but it’s better in the end.”

after getting out of the hospital, i had the heaviest boots (i think) of my life. i would wake up in the middle of the night, wide awake, feet twitching, worrying about my job, the future, loneliness, etc. i spent the majority of a friday afternoon sitting under the overhang at our house and watching the rain and clouds envelop our house. i never ran away when i was a kid, taking a red wagon full of essentials (i guess they would have been my bear, klondike, a transformer, a box of graham crackers and some apple juice) and walked as far away as possible (probably into the backyard), and hidden under a tree. i wanted to run away as an adult to make up for what i hadn’t fulfilled as a child. how can a fear of change and a hesitance toward consistency be so strong?

love is when asking someone for help and them responding by carefully taking off your heavy boots and replacing them with bright, red galoshes and then holding you from an adjacent spot on the bed or from across the world. love absorbs pain and replaces the void with strength and assurance.

“we laughed and laughed, together and separately, out loud and silently, we were determined to ignore whatever needed to be ignored, to build a new world from nothing if nothing in our world could be salvaged, it was one of the best days in my life, a day during which i lived my life and didn’t think about my life at all.”

(JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER, EXTREMELY LOUD AND INCREDIBLY CLOSE).

saturday night after the talent show we had a campfire in our yard. the sparks flew off into the distance with lightning illuminating the mountainous backdrop. by definition, campfires equate to big pine lake, perham, minnesota. we roasted marshmallows and i passed on the jenell-stewart method—placing the graham cracker and chocolate on a rock to melt the chocolate as the marshmallow roasts. laura, toward the end of the night, suggested we do “highs and lows,” immediately transporting me to kildahl “girls just want to have fun” and “woodstock” corridor and staff meetings. last week i started crying at school after i sent my last email from my olaf account, a deep nostalgia (and longing) for what has passed. but sitting around another campfire, this time on a mountain top in india, i felt the serenity of two worlds melding and co-existing... eliminating the longing for things past because of an assurance of the richness of the present. i guess that song i sang in girl scouts has proven true… “make new friends and keep the old, one is silver, the other gold.”

questions and ideas derived from existential crises conversations with my wise vision quest master… why do we judge each other? why do people make others feel “less” for a difference in life choices? does a fear of dying alone imply that we aren’t enough in and of ourselves? do we need to feel intense loneliness to find ourselves? “when you try to leave something behind and you don’t take your hand off of the door, there’s no point. you waste the moment when you worry. cook when you’re cooking and love it. don’t think about the papers you aren’t grading or the lessons you have to write. you are not your job—take your hand off the door.” why do we look outside of ourselves to feel complete? aren’t we enough?

maybe the point is to love as much as possible. beginning with ourselves. not feeling guilty for sitting inside on a beautiful, sunny day because inside is where you want to be.

on stripping bark from myself

because women are expected to keep silent about
their close escapes i will not keep silent
and if i am destroyed (naked tree!) someone will
please
mark the spot
where i fall and know i could not live
silent in my own lies
hearing their “how nice she is!”
whose adoration of the retouched image
i so despise.

no. i am finished with living
for what my mother believes
for what my brother and father defend
for what my lover elevates
for what my sister, blushing, denies or rushes
to embrace.

i find my own
small person
a standing self
against the world
an equality of wills
i finally understand.

besides:

my struggle was always against
an inner darkness: i carry within myself
the only known keys
to my death—to unlock life, or close it shut
forever. a woman who loves wood grains, the color
yellow.
and the sun, i am happy to fight
all outside murderers
as i see i must.

(ALICE WALKER)

so, what has become clearer to you since we last met?