William Butler Yeats said this about poetry: “It is blood, imagination, intellect running together…It bids us to touch and taste and hear and see the world, and shrink from all that is of the brain only.”
Growing Older
A friend of ours will soon turn 50. We’ve known each other for years, and he will be having a party to celebrate. When my father turned 50, he let us all know he was half a century old. That seemed old at the time, but Dad didn’t really seem that much different than what he was when he wasn’t yet that age. When are people actually “old”? That probably differs from person to person, and from era to era, but something changes in the way you feel in the world when people perceive you as old.
In a capitalist culture where what’s new on the market drives people’s perception of what is “cool” and worth noting, old things are generally considered passé–out. People change their Facebook profile pictures sometimes daily. The new computer or phone model comes out and people discard the old one. The average American, for example, replaces his or her cell phone every 22 months, according to Scientific American. Following along with this mindset, Mother Nature Network reports that “[t]he U.S. produced 11 million tons of e-waste in 2012.” It’s expected to grow 33% by 2017. Maybe the capitalist consumer perspective affects the way we look at old people and causes them to be seen similarly to old products. They aren’t “cool” anymore, and are put on the back burner or are tossed out, even though they still might have much to offer–and though throwing them out, so to speak, creates toxicity in the way we relate to each other.
Researcher on aging and consumption patterns, Michelle Barnhart from Oregon State University says on the University’s News and Research Communications site “Our society devalues old age in many ways, and this is particularly true in the United States, where individualism, self-reliance, and independence are highly valued.” This may account for why our thinking about older people is mostly negative, she suggests.
The general public’s thinking about old people is erroneous. Why should it be true that if you’re old, you’re obsolete as well–that your ideas and ways of thinking, perhaps even your being, doesn’t quite count for as much? As democratic societies, we say we value human rights, but how do we demonstrate the value of what older people give to society? The Guardian describes a study by the Royal Volunteer Society in the UK in 2011, and notes that older people are in fact an asset, not a drain to society. “Taking together the tax payments, spending power, caring responsibilities and volunteering effort of people aged 65-plus, it calculates that they contribute almost £40bn more to the UK economy than they receive in state pensions, welfare and health services.” In an effort to make visible the positive and tangible impact of the caring and volunteering that elderly people do, the study goes on to say that the “calculations on the net contribution of older people have been made by economic analysts SQW. It estimates that older people benefit the economy to a total of £175.9bn, including delivering social care worth £34bn and volunteering worth at least £10bn, compared to welfare costs of £136.3bn.” This is a considerable influence in monetary terms, even more so in human terms. Instead of fading away into irrelevance upon old age, the elderly make significant contributions to society–contributions that are not necessarily recognized.
Additionally, contrary to the cranky, negative stereotype many have of older people, elderly people are actually more adept than younger people in social emotional skills according to Helen Fields, in her article “What’s So Good About Growing Old” on the Smithsonian magazine’s site. Fields explains that, “Subjects in their 60s were better than younger ones at imagining different points of view, thinking of multiple resolutions and suggesting compromises.” It takes decades to learn how to manage social skills, Fields asserts, and older people are on the whole actually happier than younger people. Psychologist Laura Carstensen, at Stanford “led a study that followed people ages 18 to 94 for a decade and found that they got happier and their emotions bounced around less.” There is a stereotype that persists regarding older people, says Cornell sociologist Karl Pillemer, “and that stereotype is typically incorrect.”
Forgetfulness is something often associated with old age–forgetting the name of an author you read some time back, or the name of the book, the name of a co-worker, or a place visited. Billy Collins’ poem “Forgetfulness” describes a number of these incidents, and how little by little, the numbers, figures and names depart,
“as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.”
I love the way Collins’s poem brings us to a new view of forgetfulness–
“No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.”
In fact, some new research emerging might change the way we understand aging and the mind as well. NY Times blogger Benedict Carey, in a recent post, “The Older Mind is a Fuller Mind”, quotes the lead author of recent research about memory and aging, Michael Ramscar from the University of Tübingen in Germany, that puts into question how steep the age-related decline for cognitive processing is, as well as bringing into question some of the research measures cognitive scientists have used. According to this study, “the larger the library you have in your head, the longer it usually takes to find a particular word (or pair).” The amount of information in long-term memory might be affecting the retrieval of short-term memory. “It’s not that you’re slow. It’s that you know so much,” suggests Carey.
Quite a few years back when my husband and I first began living overseas, we used to often spend the evening with an older couple we worked with at a school in Turkey. They were probably 25 or more years older than us, but we loved being with them. They would share the unique foods they scoured the markets to find. We’d share stories, and laugh with them for hours. We traveled with them as well, driving up the Turkish coast to visit Troy, and then on up to Alexandropolis in northern Greece—the area where the Cyclops from Homer’s Odyssey is traditionally believed to have lived. This older couple inspired us in our journey of reaching out to understand and explore other cultures, to step inside history, and to connect to it anew. They had a deep love for the culture we were living in, had returned to live in it a second time, and helped us to love it in all its variety and uniqueness. The role this older couple played in our lives was an important one, influencing the direction we moved into with our lives, and I am very glad for that friendship and its lasting effect on who we have become.
Old age might, for some, be seen like a foreign country, with different reference points and ways of living, thinking, and being. When we encounter older people, do we really see them? Do we notice them and allow ourselves to know them, and to learn from their perspectives? Age and death will surely come some day. How are we living now that will enable us to be the person we want to be when our own end comes? This is a question Joan Chittister explores in her book The Gift of Years. The pain of the wrongs that occurred when we were young is the thing older people must come to terms with, she says in the YouTubes, part 1 and part 2 about the ideas she presented in her book. We must go down into the innermost part of ourselves and learn how to find peace, she explains. Old age is the time to look at ourselves in the light, and come eye to eye with the mirror of who we are. “If we’ve been dishonest,” Chittister asks, “can we face the truth of ourselves? Can we see ourselves as the small part of the universe that we truly are, rather than the center? Can we speak our truths without having to be right?” Chittister says life isn’t about age. “It’s about aging well and living in to the gifts offered in every stage of life.” We all must come to terms with growing old. More than that, we can use our life to learn how to live well between whatever age we are, and whatever age it is when we realize, that “yes,” we are old now. Is it because it is hard to look closely at our interior selves that our culture has difficulty appreciating old age or valuing those who are older? The end time of life, Chittister says, is the time to “put down the remnants of the past and to learn from the present moment, and find it enough. It is the time to live with life as it is, and find it, too, is enough, to live with ourselves as we are and find it enough.” This is challenging, but something that seems worth doing at any age. Noticing, listening to, and cultivating friendships with older people seems a wise thing to do to set us on that path.
Nicholas Samaras’ Poetry, Poems That Enable Us to See
Is poetry relevant to us today? Do poets speak to the questions we live with? When I read writer Nicholas Samaras’s poetry, I say yes. Samaras’s new book is coming out this spring, American Psalm, World Psalm, and I can’t wait to read it. Samaras’s previous book, Hands of the Saddlemaker, received the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. About that book, Laurence Lieberman said, “Hands of the Saddlemaker earns all of late James Dickey’s enthusiasm, and then some…truly an overwhelming masterwork; the whole work is a transcendent marvel.”
Taking a closer look at some of Nicholas Samaras’s poetry found on Connotation Press, “Metaphor As Identity”, “Old Calendar”, and “Petition”, I love the way these poems create space between the images and lines, opening a space for the reader to step inside.
“Metaphor as Identity” uses images that are vividly alive and felt. The stanzas describe a self that reaches below the surface into the dark space of creation where we live. This is a place where presence and becoming co-exist, a place of longing, reaching, and deep yearning to connect to the Mystery. “I am the exact space between bell-tolls to chapel” Samaras writes, and continues later in the poem to say, “I am an ascetic who cannot pray. / I am a prayer in slow making.” These images, like others in this poem, are both present and absent at the same time. They open a window into a way of seeing that enables readers to notice and step inside the ephemeral nature of our being.
If you’ve ever visited historical monuments, you will have noticed the names written in stone with dates, kings and queens, perhaps, who ruled a country, but whom you know nothing about other than their names. Obituaries list what people have done, their accomplishments. Family trees list who married who and what their occupations were–lines leading back into time. But who were these people? What was the essence of their lives, their spirits? What was it to stand in their presence? Can a whole of a life really be summed up in these references? No. What we are is some deeper mystery, and if we ask our selves who are we, and keep asking, we will eventually move past the labels to a place where we stand wordless, a place of knowing and not knowing at the same time, and this is the place that Samaras’s poem, “Metaphor As Identity”, brings the reader to. This place of knowing-not knowing is where we meet our selves, in the place between naming and not naming.
This place of not naming and naming, connects to another one of Samaras’s poems, “Eve Naming Other Animals”, found on the Adirondack Review‘s site, where Samaras describes Eve observing animals. Eve notices the way the animals move and behave, and this deep looking enables her to define and name them. Definitions separate us from the whole. They name what sets something apart from other things, and they shape the mind by calling us to notice specific elements. The very language we speak and use shapes the mind in this way, and this poem calls attention to the process. When I was an undergraduate, I had a biology teacher that took us on a walk to notice plants. Students would ask him the names of plants. He refused to tell us the name, saying if he told us, we we wouldn’t look at it longer. We’d think we knew what it was and we’d turn away to another plant, or simply walk on. Instead, he wanted us to observe closely, ask questions, notice–to really see, not just take a snapshot with our brains. Samaras’s poem shows us Eve doing the opposite, she is looking long, noticing, and calling out the essence of what she sees.
Slender horns approach, and I find
my touch makes them shapely: fronds
of opaque light that dances from angles.
I like their intimacy more than angels,
more than that shimmer that stays in place.
Into the meadow of limbs and motion, I trace
the bent wheat to be with them there.
Like a gesture moving through the air,
it is a gesture moving through the air.
I find this given language spare,
suddenly. It leaves too soon in breath.
The poem goes on, but you can see how Eve, and the poet as well, are living with the animals as presences, taking them in, not merely naming them in a random act and walking on. She notices the animal’s gestures, and how it is a kind of language it uses to name itself, she is calling attention to what its essence is, and using that to name the animal. We live too much in a world where being seen, the way you present yourself and how you are labeled, how you brand yourself–as if you are a commodity, is given considerable weight, and the actual substance is hidden somehow underneath. It’s as if we have been taken over by a media presentation. The poem, “Metaphor As Identity”, however, takes us back into that place of mystery, where we can rediscover we are more than what we have branded ourselves as or how we have been labeled. We are like Eve again, looking into the face of the animal, noticing who and what it is before we name it. We are first of all being, the Samaras’s poem reminds us. We are presence, and we stand in a presence that is hidden from obvious view, and wondrously rounded in silence–“the dusty path out of sight.” We are more than what we have labeled ourselves as. We are enigma. We are mystery.
Our lives are the crossroads of all the other lives from which we come, one of the knots in the great fabric of being that we are connected to. This is part of the mystery, and we carry the history of those people and places in our bodies, even though we may be unconscious of it. We are ourselves, and we are part of the others who came before us as well. Samaras’s poem, “Old Calendar” carries the reader into myth, and into the ways we are connected to time–our own lives, but also to history in ways we don’t necessarily understand, but can feel the presence of if we listen in the dark silence. The clock, his poem suggests, may be ringing out the years of time, but we come from a place of darkness, and go back to it. The ancient Celts started their year in darkness. Out of darkness, the place of unknowing–the great void, so to speak, comes all that is. This is the wisdom of the ancients. “You sleep in darkness, and rise in darkness,” writes Samaras in “Old Calendar”. We grow used to the clock tower ticking on satisfactorily, as Samaras says, but,
You hold on to the silence and chanting filters up to stars,
You hold to silence and let the years come.
Samaras’s poem shows us we live in time, but know we are part of the silence as well.
Another of Samaras’s poems, “Petition”, is utterly beautiful, so beautiful it makes the heart ache in the way it portrays the silence, the emptiness. But the silence this poem speaks of is one that opens the heart to awe, and allows us to see ourselves more clearly, humbly. There is almost an existential quality to this poem in its opening stanzas in the way the poem poem points us toward our aloneness in the universe, but it is not an empty darkness.
Ask the night to let you not be lonely.
Ask the night to heal your heart.
Step out into the black eve of winter
and breathe in the clarity.
Let the scarcely-seen stars glimmer
their small mercies on you, the air
The darkness and cold here are not hollow. Instead, they enable us to see ourselves more clearly, they offer us “small mercies.” I love the lines that go on to say, “to push a little past weariness is a good thing.” When we have pushed ourselves into weariness is when we are especially able to understand the intrinsic value of stillness, the absence of activity that enables us to regenerate. It is this stillness, the sabbath time, where we learn in our bones the “blessing of silence,” and where dialog with silence can begin.
Samaras’s poems speak to the deep places in the mind that we find ourselves wandering in as we try to understand who we are and how to live, and these are poems that teach us to listen in the silence and live inside the questions. I feel grateful for these poems, for the way they call my attention to what it means to be alive. The poems in both structure and content create a kind of space where learned answers are left behind, and we enter a kind of holy darkness that allows us to touch questions of existence and feel them in a tangible way. Reading them is like listening to the fine notes of a flute drifting across a winter’s meadow on a starry night from some distant place, crisp light outlining the tips of branches, and drawing shadows on the sides of buildings. You hear your feet crunch through the snowy meadow as you walk toward home. Just before you step inside your house, you turn and look at the sky–the myriad points of light, both faint and bright. You see the immensity of all that is, and know the wonder that you are alive amidst it all.
If you want to read more about Nick Samaras, you might want to check out an interview on the blog, “Just My Eyes”, or on the Antler blog here.
Some Quotes About Writing Worth Reflecting On
To continue to nurture the creative life, it’s good to read what others have to say about art, writing, and creativity. The quotes here resonate with me. How do they speak to you?
“We have art in order not to die of the truth.” — Frederich Neitzche
“A good poem is a contribution to reality. The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it. A good poem helps to change the shape of the universe, helps to extend everyone’s knowledge of himself and the world around him.”–Dylan Thomas
“Life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one.” –Stella Adler
“You don’t make a photograph just with a camera. You bring to the act of photography all the pictures you have seen, the books you have read, the music you have heard, the people you have loved.”–Ansel Adams
“A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful which God has implanted in the human soul.” ―Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
“Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?”–John Keats
“The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious – the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science.”–Albert Einstein
““The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.”–Albert Camus
““I write to give myself strength. I write to be the characters that I am not. I write to explore all the things I’m afraid of. ”–Joss Whedon
““After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.”–Philip Pullman
Fallow Time
For several months now I’ve kept a sketchbook as I attempt to learn to draw. When I examine the pen and ink drawings in the book I’m using as a guide, Rendering in Pen and Ink, and as I try to draw what I see, over and over I notice how one small squiggle on the page, one tiny turn of the pen can either make something feel real, or make an object look distorted. Details matter, and learning to get them right will take years of practice. I have to face the fact that most of what I’m going to make will look wrong, and will probably continue to do so for sometime. If I’m going to learn to draw, that’s something that must be accepted. This isn’t what drawing is really about, though, seeing well, and getting the details all down correctly.
So, why do I want to learn to draw anyway? What’s the motivation? It’s something about that when the pen is in my hand, I’m living right there in the tip of the ink flow on to the page. I am in the texture, the line, each turn of a curve. It doesn’t matter so much to the direction the world is moving in that I learn to draw. Of course the world will go on. It always does. Will it change the course of my life or anyone else’s for that matter? Who knows, really, if something we learn will directly lead to something else significant in the future. This will certainly be true in some cases. But this is not necessarily the best measure of the value of all things—their practical use. There are a number of things I am trying to learn that don’t necessarily have an immediately understood practical value: playing the clarinet, learning to speak Spanish. These could have utilitarian value at some point, but not in my immediate circumstance, and that is not why I want to learn them. Some things just call to us for mysterious reasons, and have value in themselves. The act of learning, just being with that process is somehow intrinsically engaging. Maybe these kinds of motivations are akin to playing in the mud when a child. Something about them just feels delightful. We don’t have to understand why we want to do everything we do; we just know we feel more alive, more human, or more full when we participate in them.
Over the past few days I’ve spent a few hours pulling weeds from the garden walkway. My husband offered to use the weed whacker to cut them back, but I preferred to pull them all by hand, sitting quietly in the sun, picking out the tiny blades of grass between the thyme I planted last summer. Slowly, the thyme plants reemerge from beneath the weeds. Even though the pathway looks very pleasant after the weeds have been pulled out, and it might have been a waste of time to pick weeds by hand, it somehow seems better. It’s satisfying. You can pull out the roots, not just cut off the top of the plants, and the thyme will have an easier time growing in the long run.
Like many other people, I work in a job where pretty much every moment counts, or you want to make it count for something. When I am drawing, or pulling weeds, however, I do not think of time. I’m not trying to make every moment count. Instead I’m gliding inside of time like a bird turning in an updraft of air at the edge of a cliff. I’m waiting there in space, doing some kind of mysterious thing soil does when it regenerates itself while sitting fallow. There is something wonderfully rare and precious about such moments. They are moments of being balanced against the moments where everything is measured out tick by tick. I don’t think I am the only one in this world hungry for such moments—for the space inside of time that existed before clocks. They keep me well, and as I peer forward into the new year, this is what I wish for, for more space in my life and of those around me to be found and given to unmeasured moments of being.
May you, too, be well.
Being in Love is Cool
“Being in Love is Cool” her t-shirt read. The statement surprised me. It’s not the kind of statement you generally see often. The woman wearing it was probably in her mid forties, and it made me happy to know that there are others who are publically willing to affirm the value of a love relationship. I remember interviewing my father about meeting my mother after they had been married nearly 50 years, asking him what it was like when he first met her and if he remembered the feeling of falling in love. He told me how he would run 16 miles through the woods after work in order to see her on the weekend, but he didn’t use the words “in-love.” Neither did my mother. Life in those days required people to think about relationships in more practical terms, she explained. My parents may not recall feeling like they were in love, but they most certainly loved each other, and were dedicated to each other to their last days. They helped each other make it through the difficult years of the Great Depression, working together to make money by hanging wallpaper. They scrimped every penny they earned. Later, Dad worked away from home running jobs for a painting contractor for a many of years while Mom kept the house going—sewing our clothes, making all our food from scratch, doing extra ironing and babysitting for neighbors. As a child, I knew my mom and dad were partners in all they did, and they held on to each other through whatever came their way. After my parents had grown older, and all the children were out of the house, I recall how they sat on their back porch swing holding hands in the evening after dinner, the picture of contentment. That is no small thing to have arrived at in life.
Loving someone in a relationship of commitment, admittedly, is not necessarily the same as being in love. To love someone in a relationship of commitment, such as marriage, is to say “yes” to life and to open one’s self to knowing the other—to being fully present with that person day after day, decade after decade, through weakness and incompleteness, both theirs and your own. Loving someone with a commitment to a relationship means to listen to and stand by the loved one through times of both joy and difficulty. On the other hand, being in love might not necessarily involve a commitment to relationship, though it could. I believe my parents at the end of their lives after decades of marriage with all the trials and uncertainties life brought during those years, found they had grown together so as to feel they loved each other and were in love as well. When there was a question of opinion, Dad would say Mom “agreed with him 100%,” which she did, though that might also be because she had lost nearly all language at the end of her life, and this was one of her last sentences she could speak. Nevertheless, they happily to sat side by side in their last days, wanted to be in each other’s presence as they ate together or watched the hummingbirds that came to their window to feed. In their final years when dementia and Alzheimer’s had worked their way into their way of being, they still recognized and valued each other’s presence and seemed fulfilled by it.
The ancient Romans celebrated Saturlina, a celebration of the sun at the time of the winter solstice—December 25, on the Julian calendar was the date for the solstice, and early Christians celebrated Jesus’ birth on that day in symbolic awareness of the light given in the darkness. This is the Christmas season, and if we look at what John tells us about why Christ was born, it was because he loved us. Love in any relationship is given in darkness, without the ability to see the future or know if all will work out well. Love is an act of imagination—imagining life together, and how you can live in a way that allows you to come together in wholeness. In the act of loving, daily giving ourselves to each other, we are made whole. Christ encouraged us to “Love one another as I have loved you.” To love one another leads us to ask ourselves what does it take to become whole? How do we relate to ourselves, to each other, and to the world in order to be whole? Love is a way of relating to the world that enables us to care for it and for each other. When we live in this way, doing the daily work of learning how to care for each other, we find ourselves catching glimpses now and then through windows that enable us to see that we are connected to a greater mystery in which the whole of nature is doing its work to sustain us—through the water cycle, the biospheres, the life cycle, so that we can be here and experience relationship.
When we are in love, we feel alive, sensitive to our interconnectedness with someone else. The whole world is imbued with wonder. The sense of being in love, then, can be connected to the awareness that we are walking around part of this great web of being. After decades of being together and working through the rough spots in relationship, it’s possible to see, as my parents did, the preciousness of the small moments, for in them the universe is found. William Blake, in “Jerusalem” wrote,
“Labor well the Minute Particulars, attend to the Little-ones,
And those who are in misery cannot remain so long”
It is in the minute particulars and attending to them that we learn how to live in relationship. When I was first out of college and working as a waitress, a particular older couple would often enter the restaurant. After a short conversation, they would inevitably end up in an argument. One might throw down the menu after a few angry words, or stomp out. I never understood what kept them together through so many years. How did they grow into that way of being together? When I told my mother about them, she explained that how people respond day by day to the little things in life is a link in the bigger chain of who you become. That older couple had become what they had practiced becoming over many years, and I realized I would rather not be married than to be married like that. If I want to be happy and whole in this world, I need to practice what I want to become, and that practice comes with the small choices I am making day by day, moment by moment. Do the work in the small moments, the minute particulars, as Blake suggested, and misery will not linger.
Every so often people mention to my husband and I that they can tell that we care about each other as deep friends and partners. Sometimes they laugh at us for the fact that we hold hands as we walk. We know it’s not in vogue to show you’re in love when you’re old, but let them laugh. We’re happy. Early in our relationship we realized that if we could learn to love each other through the years and the difficulties we were sure to face and continue to say “yes” to each other, then we could be giving something good back to the world because who we are together affects the lives of those around us. It takes practice to make relationship, but it is good work, and satisfying. Being in love is cool, like the t-shirt said, but learning how to love someone in a long-term relationship of commitment is more than cool, it is deeply fulfilling.
Holding On
It’s Advent season again–the time of waiting and longing for change. Here in Delhi, winter is the season of smoke–smoke from wood fires, and burning garbage as the millions living below the poverty line on the streets here in Delhi light what they can find in an effort to keep warm. Winds are rare here in the winter. Smoke arrives and settles in to the chinks and crannies of every room. There is no escaping, and I’m reminded once again of how interconnected our lives are with those around us.
What does it mean to wait what you know you can’t change, to hold on for the arrival of what is a long way off? How do people continue to persevere over extended periods of time for many years? This week I found out about the beautiful and powerful story of Augustin, a man debilitated by polio from Honduras portrayed in this short film, Everything is Incredible, who has spent his life building a helicopter. It is his dream, and bit by bit he builds it using scrap metal. The helicopter is heavy, not made with knowledge of aerodynamics. If it flies, it will be a miracle. Why does Augustin keep working on it; why doesn’t he give up? Perhaps you have known people in your life who have persisted in bad habits for so long, or who have pursued a way of living that has been harmful. Maybe even you yourself wonder why you have continued on doing the thing you don’t want to do, but then for some reason some day, you find you are able to choose a better way and you keep choosing it, or the person you have been hoping would find their way, begins at last to follow a different path, and you find yourself wondering why did you give up on them before? Why didn’t you keep lifting them up in your heart? The change that finally comes reminds us that there are deeper mysteries inside our lives and hearts, that work beyond the visible to move and change us.
There are questions I’m living that I don’t have answers for, and as Rilke suggested, I continue living the question, hoping someday I will live into an answer. Suffering and death, these are part of life. Recently, I’ve been thinking about the value of lighting candles in the evening during this time. It doesn’t lessen the air pollution outside, but it reminds me to remain hopeful. This is the reminder of Advent, in the midst of dark night, light can be born. It is this choosing to remain hopeful that saves us. In our weakness, and through it we can be made whole.
A Thought for Winter
The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.
– W.B. Yeats –
Head, Heart, Hands–An Education For the Whole Person
Education in America has been undergoing a series of reforms, from flipped classrooms, to adopting the Common Core, the growing interest in adopting methods for teaching reading and writing following the methodology from Teachers College at Columbia University, to using the MAP test as a standardized assessment, and a growing emphasis on collecting data. When I first began taking teacher training classes at the University of California at Santa Cruz, professors there emphasized the importance of defining and developing a philosophy of education, and encouraged and challenged us as future teachers to prepare students in our classrooms to be active participants in the democratic process. Now, many years later, the question that continues to arises in my mind is what is the purpose of education? The answer to that question affects the direction we believe educational reform should take.
Last week a small group of us met with Satish Kumar, who was visiting here in Delhi, and Satish shared with us his thoughts on education. Satish Kumar is co-founder of the Schumacher College, whose motto is transformative learning for sustainable living. In a nutshell, Satish’s ideas about education are that it should be an education not just of the mind, but one that joins together the whole self in an education of the head, heart and hands. “If we don’t develop our heart qualities,” said Satish, “we can’t be proper human beings.” Learning, Satish suggests, can’t be limited to the study of math, science, and language, and shouldn’t be focused on competition in the market place, as this would make us into mere material commodities, a 9-5 clerk that performs his function day after day in endless rotation and then dies. We are more than workers, more than physical beings. Our presence counts. Relationship is based in the non-physical, non-economic world, and as Daniel Goleman describes, the emotional atmosphere of the classroom matters, and explains in his Huffington Post blog post “What Helps Kids Focus Better and Why They Need Help” that “a child’s ability to resist the temptation of distraction and stay focused predicts how she will fare financially and health-wise in adulthood. Some call it “self-control,” others “grit” or “delay of gratification.” It boils down to the tenacity to keep your eyes on your goal (or schoolwork) and resist impulse and distraction.”
Satish encourages schools to balance brain with heart and hands so that children become makers, not merely consumers. Gardening, cooking– these acts connect us to the earth and to each other, to the processes of our own lives. Learning for Satish includes book knowledge, but should also be experiential. When students learn through experiences with their hands–growing a garden, making art, they have a direct connection to the transformative power that comes through the interactive experience, and they gain knowledge at the same time. A maker is an artist, a poet, explains Satish. The root word of poesis means to make. “Every maker is a poet. ” When you’re dying, Satish suggests, you don’t wish for more days spent in the office. What is important then is what have you made with your life. There’s more to life than money and a car.
I like the way that Satish’s view of education moves beyond quantification as the final measurement of what is valuable and what demonstrates learning and growth. It isn’t just humans who find art essential to feeling they are fully human and alive. Other animals do this as well, including bower birds and fish, as you will see if you take a look at this link. The planet is alive in the act of ongoing creation. The miracles of life are before our very eyes, but hidden because we are not looking at them. We don’t see. So what are some practical things teachers, or people in general can do to keep their souls alive? Satish suggests the following:
- Introduce silence in order to bring focus.
- Go out in nature to connect to something that broadens horizons and that nurtures deep mindfulness, expands consciousness beyond the self
- Walk in nature, the garden, walk or sit under trees, notice the connections to nature
- Sing
- Meditate
- Move beyond being a deliverer of a result within a system to one who brings the imagination alive and inspires
- Create structures where students can pursue what they are interested in. This implies knowing how to see who they are so you can help the child to see themselves and how they can blossom. Be to the child what spring is for the cherry blossom.
“Industrialism is a new form of colonialism, and it is destroying our culture,” says Satish, and it is destroying our culture. Instead of cursing the darkness, we have to light the candle…The human spirit is stronger than industrialism.”
Life is a continuing journey of education. Most of us, I think, want to live, not merely fulfill a duty or a role. Rather than settling for an education that teaches how to fulfill a function, or an education focused on gaining and maintaining power or status in the marketplace, let’s educate for joy, so we can learn to be fully human, fully alive.
Writer Natalie Goldberg on Writing
“Sometimes when you think you are done, it is just the edge of beginning. Probably that’s why we decide we’re done. It’s getting too scary. We are touching down onto something real. It is beyond the point when you think you are done that often something strong comes out.”
Anna Citrino---Poetry, Place, Pilgrimage 