Onward I go

My students have just finished writing poems. Each of them was asked to produce a chapbook of original poems and we spent nearly an hour reading to one another in the reading garden at my school. Every year I am flooded with emotion as I listen to the words of my students...to the emotions they've struggled onto the page...to the way they've put words to what cannot be said.

This year I made a list of the poems they shared. In reading the titles I'm reminded of how much my students feel, how much they know, how much they are learning. The learning they've shared in these poems, though, stretches far beyond knowledge...my students are wiser, their lives are richer, their pain is more aptly identified and catalogued, and they have grown. My, how they've grown. 

May we all feel that sense of freedom and growth, that triumph that comes from putting words to emotions and saying, here world...this was mine, but now it is yours. Do with this what you will and onward I go...

Art & Adventure

I recently made a list of things I enjoy. 

I wanted to do this to help me understand myself, to help me understand that having needs, preferences, desires that are entirely my own is so important...that my entire life, my family, my marriage, my teaching all functions better when I am whole, when I am the best version of myself. In the past I have relied heavily on running, but I now recognize that running has become somewhat of an addiction...something I use to hide from my emotions and the discomfort of life. It's a reset button, but I'm running away from things. I need more introspection and metacognition. I need to find the things I enjoy that help me slow down. I have been racing, racing, racing...and I don't need "reset," I need "pause."

So I made the list.

At the top were the words 

Adventure

Art

Of course there were so many other things on my list. Everything from rivers to switchback single-track trails to splitting wood to campfires to fireflies to coffee...the list went on and on.

But art and adventure encompassed so much of it.

A few weeks ago, my daughter and I visited the Yale Art Museum. I had never been alone with her in a museum like that and I was amazed by her knowledge of great artists. From afar she recognized Jackson Pollock, Georgia O'Keefe, Monet, and Degas. Walking at her pace, navigating rooms of shocking modern sculptures that defied the angles of our understanding, watching her bypass entire exhibits because they simply didn't strike her fancy...it was all so fascinating to watch her.

Her sense of wonder was most inspired by two sculptures: Hiram Powers' "the Greek slave" and Yinka Shonibare's "Mrs. Pickney and the Emancipated Birds of South Carolina." 

Each of them struck her deeply as she walked around them, gauging their depth, scrutinizing the artists' intentions, absorbing the sense that there was something deeper going on inside the images...that they were more about life than about art or, better yet, that they served as evidence that life was art. The artists had made her feel something and had spanned the lengths of time between the artist and that scrutinizing, adoring, six year old eye.

I think Naomi is right. It is all art. As we walked together back to the car, she saw art everywhere. In the shadows, the architecture, even in the melting snow. We talked about the poetry of penumbras (Allen Ginsberg), about the architectural genius of Frank Lloyd Wright and Buckminster Fuller, and about Andy Goldsworthy's art in nature.

I realized as I walked, hand in hand with my daughter, that there is so much I still have to learn...there is so little I know. She taught me to see beauty, to find adventure, in moments and minutiae I could have easily missed. 

Yet in the midst of it all, of one thing I was certain.

This I know:

It is all art. It is all an adventure.