Lifting our hearts from the dirt

It is a Wednesday and my students are beginning a new book.

It is a Wednesday and my students are beginning Lord of the Flies.

It is a Wednesday and I will teach them about allegory, and about the origins of human conflict.

It is a Wednesday and my students are beginning the day with the knowledge that the freshly-minted president-elect of their country--the person who will be president when they turn 18 and earn their own right to vote--has uttered phrases that fill them with horror. They are phrases the singe them, choke them, drown them, and single many of them out as being worthless, dispensable, filthy, unattractive, undignified...and worse.

It is a Wednesday and I talk to them. I try to hold space. To allow for openings, for connection, for confusion, and for pain. But I'm grasping for something hopeful...where is the light?

I decide, halfway through class, that I want to scrap my lesson. It's the one where we discuss William Golding and how "writer's write what they know." Instead, I want to show them an allegory. I want to share with them Plato's Allegory of the Cave. 

I tell the story.

I draw for them.

(They smile at my fumbling whiteboard failures)

I ask them what it all means.

I don't tell them what to feel. 

I don't tell them what I feel.

I let them teach me.

I embrace silence.

They tell me that we're the ones chained in the cave.

That we owe it to the world to explore, 

to reject passivity, 

to question authority.

They impress me and they inspire me.

I am hopeful that this experience of being alive, of existing, in 2016 is one that shapes my students into something greater than the status quo. I hope they will heed the mission of my school which ends, by stating that we aspire to equip our students"...to have the courage and confidence to make a positive contribution to the world."

I found an old poem I wrote once. I wanted to find it because I knew I'd had these thoughts before...these thoughts about being human.

I wonder now, as I reread it, how I can revise it. How I can rewrite it in such a way that begins, "How we unite tells us lots about ourselves..." I don't know how that poem begins, or middles, or ends because I haven't seen it yet. I don't yet know how we unite, or what it will tell us about ourselves. Poetry puts words to what can't be said, but in moving on, I don't even know where to begin. I've lifted my heart from the dirt, yes. But now, alongside my students, comes the noble venture of joining hearts in such a way as to ensure that their collective, resonating thunder will drown out the cries of fear, mistrust, and hatred.

Humans

How we fight tells us lots about ourselves;

about the ways we crumble,

spill, and fall apart.

And when we fight in groups

where unity and cohesion are paramount

and predicated on the drawing of our souls

like water into that vast shared bucket we call consensus,

we fail.

We fail to hear,

to coat ourselves in sufficient enough a lacquer

as to protect our gentle selves from being dented.

We fume. We pace. We eat.

Because, in our fury,

we know not what to do.

Or be.

Or how to do or be it.

We fail ourselves again.

And again. And again.

Overcome with tremors, we clamor to understand

whether we want to put something into ourselves

or get something out.

And so, instead, we lift our hearts from the dirt,

ground to pulp and left in pulsing piles

and mash them back inside our chests

where their burger shapes beat our blood thick

just for the sake of being boiled again.