A strange feeling I have been noticing recently while teaching. I've become aware of a sort of quietness surrounding me when I am speaking or working with students. I might interpret it as harmony in the classroom, a condition of optimal learning; or I might see it as something a little more mysterious, ambiguous. Something is going on with my psyche that is creating a certain porosity, a kind of gown around me which is at once pervious and impenetrable. Perhaps it is my age or my demeanor or the inner conflict sometimes evident in my character. Perhaps it is a combination of these things, but I notice among my students, the way they regard me now, a respect--or is it condescension--that is alien to me. I'm not sure what to do with it, except that I need to be on my toes. I cannot become complacent in what I do, for as a teacher there is no better way to fall off the bluff. I cannot allow this strange new membrane to protect me too much; nor can I allow myself to depend upon it. It is not me, and I must work to keep spontaneity and my connection to individuals alive in my teaching and in my life.
However this odd feeling persists, I will need to explore it more. Maybe it is related to the wilderness I carry, the wildness that must, at last, be in the open. At the risk of appropriating the voice of Gandalf, I must learn to use this cloak wisely.
Tuesday, October 22, 2013
Monday, October 21, 2013
10-20-13 Paddle
We went paddling into the wilderness of channels and sometime passages of that inland island of the lower Columbia I will not name. Seven in all, our cumulative experience average to good, though none of us, save our adventurous leader, had previously explored this watery maze. Happily that sunny yesterday we entered the grassy passages, tooling down one snaking channel and up the next, providing the bald eagle perched atop his tallest snag an amusing view: flotilla of crazies in single file, outlandishly attired, giggling and chattering in circles and curls through the tall reeds in the unmistakably confounding manner of humans. Ridiculous to be sure, but from our view, we glided along our own logic, among forget-me-nots impossibly gracing the waters edge, past the bothered bard owl, to the log half-submerged where all of this confusion began, back to the familiar canal again. We will return.
Thursday, October 10, 2013
Story bud
I read in the news over my cereal this morning of the capture of two boys, 19 and 20, cousins suspected in the murder of one of the boys' great grandmother. The story describes the relationship the grandson had with slain woman, how they loved each other. The great grandmother doing everything possible for the young man, who suffers from bi-polar disorder, who has had a rough time in high school. The mother and the great grandmother are the only family members mentioned in the story.
Where is the father?
I wonder this aloud to myself, writing in the morning dark of our sleeping house. How can a young man grow up in such a way as to never express himself violently and then suddenly to murder a member of his family who adores him? I think what gripped me the most is the insult to the grandmother, the severe and emotional trauma so fleeting but intense. She died of blunt force to the cranium, but was there a moment when this final insult occurred to her: to be murdered by someone you love deeply and without condition? There is something Shakespearean in it, something epic. How can we do this to each other?
But where was the father? This question looms tall for me, not because I wish assign blame in any way. I ask the question because as a father myself of a sixteen year-old, I cannot look away. My son is also experiencing the anguish and depression, the desperation of his aloneness. He too has had his struggles in school, mainly with peers and with fitting in. And of course, I had my own similar challenges at that age. I remember very well the idea that no one could possibly be feeling or thinking what I was. No person alive would understand. And like my own son, I also considered suicide. While I still believe that no one can truly understand the precise nature of this suffering, I do know what the suffering is.
A self-loathing, a blackness overtaking reason, steeping in its brine of doubt, barring the corridors leading to redemption or release or both, depression turns off the exit signs, outs the lights, pins its victim to a seat in the cinema of self-devise from which to repeatedly spectate an auto-tailored tragedy in compounding detail. O the mind of the self-absorbed teen is one to fuel a car, lift a plane, steam a ship. Energy untapped and divine, an awful and frightening force it is among those of us unwitting, hapless passengers.
But it is not to be taken lightly and this is what I fear to write: as a father, one who has suffered these dark arenas too; how do I find my way into my son's world? I've been looking for a story. Perhaps this is it.
Where is the father?
I wonder this aloud to myself, writing in the morning dark of our sleeping house. How can a young man grow up in such a way as to never express himself violently and then suddenly to murder a member of his family who adores him? I think what gripped me the most is the insult to the grandmother, the severe and emotional trauma so fleeting but intense. She died of blunt force to the cranium, but was there a moment when this final insult occurred to her: to be murdered by someone you love deeply and without condition? There is something Shakespearean in it, something epic. How can we do this to each other?
But where was the father? This question looms tall for me, not because I wish assign blame in any way. I ask the question because as a father myself of a sixteen year-old, I cannot look away. My son is also experiencing the anguish and depression, the desperation of his aloneness. He too has had his struggles in school, mainly with peers and with fitting in. And of course, I had my own similar challenges at that age. I remember very well the idea that no one could possibly be feeling or thinking what I was. No person alive would understand. And like my own son, I also considered suicide. While I still believe that no one can truly understand the precise nature of this suffering, I do know what the suffering is.
A self-loathing, a blackness overtaking reason, steeping in its brine of doubt, barring the corridors leading to redemption or release or both, depression turns off the exit signs, outs the lights, pins its victim to a seat in the cinema of self-devise from which to repeatedly spectate an auto-tailored tragedy in compounding detail. O the mind of the self-absorbed teen is one to fuel a car, lift a plane, steam a ship. Energy untapped and divine, an awful and frightening force it is among those of us unwitting, hapless passengers.
But it is not to be taken lightly and this is what I fear to write: as a father, one who has suffered these dark arenas too; how do I find my way into my son's world? I've been looking for a story. Perhaps this is it.
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