Here to be here

I really enjoy reading, but the book I've been reading this week has been particularly touching. You see, my mother shared this collection of essays, a word from the field, that her friend Brendan compiled a few years ago. I was drawn to Brendan's words because, firstly, they were beautiful reflections on adventure, life, art, self-exploration, and the thin line between nature and humanity.

There were three moments, however, that struck me most deeply. The first was the following passage.

Like Brendan, I too am still much the same kid I was twenty years ago though I often fear I've changed. Like him I am excited by beauty and a little too easily hurt by the world. I still need to be cared for and, yes, I am still searching for poetry in daily life.

It made me happy to read Brendan's words and to know that others reflect in the ways I do. We grow and we stay the same. We take baby steps forward, we shed our skin, our hair changes, our joints grow creaky...but at the end of the day, we are still the little children we once were if we allow ourselves to be.

I was also touched by the words he shared from Peter Matthiessen: 

"I am here to be here."

I shared these words with my students today as we prepared together for their final exam in my world cultures course. "What," I asked them, "would a Taoist say about this line?" "How about a Buddhist?" "And a Confucian scholar?"

In essence, I wanted them to prepare for the exam by looking through the lens of this statement...by asking "Why are we here?" because that's what belief is...and it is so central to the ways we build culture.

Culture answers the question, Why are we here?

I also encouraged my students to read these lines as they prepare for their English exam...which characters about whom we've read this year would identify with these words? Who stays the same? Who changes? Who, over the course of the novels we've read, transforms and loses themselves? Who finds themselves?

Everything can be an opportunity to think deeply about what we are learning. Everything is a lens into our minds. Everything is connected. And when my students ask "Does this matter?" during an exam review session, I always say, "It all matters! Yes!" then I add, "but it won't necessarily help you get an A."

In his next essay I was reminded that I am here. Teaching at my school. Learning alongside my students. Befriending so many in this community. We have boarded a ship together and we are tacking for the horizon, whatever it may bring.

These are uncertain times. But I am certain that our ability to cling together will sustain us, whatever the storm may be.

On a deeply personal level, this notion of "sister ships," those "parallel lives" we didn't chose, but that have still left a mark on us resonated with me. 

I reflect often on decisions I've made and circumstances in which I've found myself. I daydream sometimes about what might have been. Not because I wish for a different outcome, but simply because I am a dreamer and I wonder where those ghost ships are and who may have taken my place at the helm of that story.

Brendan wrote these words as he navigated Escalante, one of my favorite places in Southern Utah. I happened to have walked the same steps he walked as he wrote about these "sister ships." I even slept beneath the same outcropping of rock he described, gazing up at a ribbon of stars and the ancient petroglyphs on the wall of stone behind me. I walked and slept among these magnificent rock canyons of Death Hollow with my father just before I moved to Connecticut in 2008 to take the job I now love. That hike was my swan song to southern Utah...that ship sailed off in another direction. But the beauty was that my father had also left Utah when he, too, was in his twenties. He embarked on a new adventure, one that included my arrival to the world.

There's something magic about space and time. I am aware of that with a week to go until my students are no longer my students, off on their own ships, navigating new seas.

And here I am. Here to be here. Glad to be aboard this ship, churning slowly forward alongside these shipmates, ready to face the mysteries of the deep. Here to be here.