If the Heart is Engaged the Mind Will Follow

These are the times in which a genius would wish to live. It is not in the still calm of life, or the repose of a pacific station, that great characters are formed. The habits of a vigorous mind are formed in contending with difficulties. Great necessities call out great virtues. When a mind is raised, and animated by scenes that engage the heart, then those qualities which would otherwise lay dormant, wake into life and form the character of the hero and the statesman.

—Abigail Adams

Scenes from this week: a soccer match in Waitsfield in 35 degrees, against the Green Mountain Valley School, all dedicated athletes and skiers, meeting up against our rag-tag squad of rabble: ten girls and Nathan in goal and Oliver subbing off the bench: we scrapped for 80 minutes; we took a lead in the first half, we bent and gave up the equalizer with 13 minutes left. We bent some more, but did not break. Then we slotted two more for the 3-1 win, the first girls game in NBS history.

We hiked through the Moosalamoo Wilderness, southering through the fallen leaves. When we got up a few hundred feet we got some crunchy snow; green and yellow leaves in the trees, black lines of limbs, and the white snow dusting all the fallen orange and golden on the ground. WE had to bundle up—it was well below freezing at the top: feet a little wet, many layers, everyone trying to talk to everyone.

WE made beginning collages, in the hopes of making some bigger ones. National Geographics and 1959 Encyclopedias that contain the most amazing black and white diagrams and schematics. Utopian collages of hands hovering over the Grand Canyon (“Hand Canyon”), abstract squares, Buddha heads floating in fiery landscapes, striped frogs riding on 1971 Chevy Impalas, Balinese dancers climbing the periodic table of elements.

There was the completion of the Round Bale (ask your NBSer about the meaning of that name)—all six Utopian societies rendered in topos; one of the Societies, Vita Perfecta, tried to lure Tal to the come stay by claiming they had a Cheetos factory and a stage hosting the American rock band Wilco; talk about Utopia!? Cooking of vegetable soup, apple crisp, and hot cider in the Math Kitchen, Wiffleball play-offs, the symbolic and metaphorical meaning of domestic cats versus bob-cats; mandalas, place descriptions, self evaluations, and progress on Utopia projects:

In the utopia projects department: different material is beginning to surface: the behavior of Meerkats; ads from 1950 that claim you should start your child on Coca-cola in infancy (to build proper character); Emmit Till’s casket; The Declaration of Sentiments; a slide show of the Drop City buildings in Southwestern Colorado; JFK’s claim that the U.S.A. would land on the moon by 1969; George Fox; “The Grapes of Wrath” and Woody Guthrie; The Vermont Eugenics project; Bucky Fuller’s Dynamic Maximum Tension car; “Sad Letter Blues,” and Jacob Lawrence in the Great Migration; and the social good of capitalist enterprises.

All of this is being discovered in the context of the 350.org discussions about what we plan to do. We are going to be making our own GIANT 350 mandala; school wide activities; individual activities; please be prepared if your child ask to eat dinner by candlelight, or wants to not wash cloths for a week, or wants to only eat cold rice. Her at school we may be doing both practical and impractical things, symbolic actions for the week and also, we hope, some long term adjustments to the way we do things here at school.

Amid the rumble and tumble and small frictions and glissades of the day, we are always trying to create and be “animated by scenes which engage the heart.” If the heart is not engaged, then the mind separates and recedes to another room. If the heart is engaged, the mind will follow.