Let It Enfold You

Yared has learned the “Star Spangled Banner.” He played it for me this morning. It was the best version I have ever heard. It made me cry. Actually. Though I will pretty much cry if any of these kids figures something out, takes pride in it, and then shows what they did.

We all clap and the clapping is for real.

“I played it for my dad last night. It made him cry. Okay, it wasn’t a cry, it was more like a “sniff” because he thought it was cool. Maybe he wasn’t crying about that, maybe he was crying about something else, like his pencil broke.

“Really, Yared? Tell the truth…”

“Okay, it made him have appreciation that I am learning something.”

****

I ask them to tell me what they, or we have learned, after the first ten minutes of the day. They tell me all the things we just heard together. The concrete details. I am not after the concrete details. I want them learning to make meaning out of the concrete details.

“But what have you learned that no one else has heard, that only you know?”

There is a subtle shift. Voices alter as they speak about understanding; about hoped for ideas based on theories, supported by the concrete details.

Calder tells me he is going to read the poem tomorrow and it is either going to be “Clenched Soul” by Pablo Neruda, or Robert Hayden’s “Monet’s Waterlilies.”

“Go with Hayden,” I say.

“Alright. Do you want me to read it to you?”

“Yes.”

“He reads and yes, I am so happy, and proud, that my son is telling me that he is going to read a poem tomorrow about Monet’s waterlilies.

****

Rio sends me an email to tell me to create a Fantasy Hockey Team. A parent in the school with a love of words has scrambled his email message into a Haiku-esque sounding anagram:

link to my hockey fantasy:
Tal makes the team
go to the wall.

I read it aloud to the kids to illustrate how clumsily written words can be arranged to have new meanings which may have been living in them already. This inspires Jesse.

“Want to hear my Haiku I wrote in 2nd grade?”

“Sure.”

"Fire trees have come./ Sparks are fluttering down./ Watch, burning the fall ground"


“Beautiful, Jesse.”

This leads to a discussion of whether or not small children possess poetic powers. Or, more to the point, what poetic powers do they possess that are not available to the seasoned, experienced writer?

****

One of the ninth grade boys walks into the room.

“Tal, nobody likes me.”

He leaves the room.

“He said that last week,” someone says.

“The more important question: If there is some truth in what he says, why does nobody like him?”

“That’s not true, Tal.”

“What’s no true?”

“That nobody likes him?”

“What do you mean?”

“I think that sometimes people think that others don’t like them but it’s just because they don’t see it. The only reason people are irritated at him is because they care about him. Plus he's being dumb."

It is clear then. He is right, they aren't liking him now. Be he needs to look at why.

***

While playing Bimini Ring toss, Tsering announces:

“I am the Ring Master!”

***

The kids seem possessed or stuck on the idea of whether true love or romantic love or eternal love exists.

The topic keeps coming up.

I tell them a story of what it looks like. What conditions may be necessary for it to be real.

“Someone I love told me this: My friend has known what it feels like to be on fire, burning, in the middle of a room, where no one sees her. My friend said it was hell on earth. My friend cried out and no one moved. She screamed and people kept talking. I told my friend I have known what it feels like to be a softly blown sheet, to be lifting and rising in the sun and breeze. And to settle down gently, to land with breeze riffling over. And then to want to rise again on the next breeze, but to feel a stake driven down into to some corner of my sheet, and to feel myself ripping as I rise, again and again, until there is nothing left of me but a tattered rag. I told my friend I would never let her burn alone in the middle of the room. I told her I would always hear her. My friend told me she would never stop letting me rise and become. She said, 'That's not a promise, that's a truth.' And so what is that?”

“That’s love. A form of it. What were we telling each other?”

“That the other one matters. That part of the deal is that you will look out for each other.”

“Yes. We each put the other at the center. When you know that someone you love is doing that for you, has put you at the center, you feel a wonderful, indescribable feeling of joy and safety.”

They are all looking at me.

“We can do that for each other very easily here.”

****

I read Anna’s sketch, about her father leaning his head back in the car while the rain falls in on his head, listening to Dvorak. While we write our responses we listen to the 4th Movement of the “New World Symphony.”

***

“So, who do think is hotter? Kim Kardashian or Taylor Swift?” someone shouts into the room.

There is shocked silence.

I feel this question may be turning us from our appointed mission. Before I can launch into a diatribe and rant, someone enters the conversation.

“Who is Kim Kardashian?” asks a seventh grade girl. “Is she a cannibal?”

Five minutes later, there is a discussion on whether vegetarians or cannibals get more energy from their respective food choices.

***

In morning meeting:

Rider says: “I am thinking about my new niece or nephew that is going to be born. And I was thinking if that wa a good thing or not, this new child coming into the world. And then I was thinking about if I have done anything to make this a better world, and if I have contributed to making it a world a child should want to come into.”

“Well, thinking about it is a huge first step. You can only think of it that way, in that direction. You are creatinge the opportunity to think about how you will live and act.”

“On the bus this morning I was singing gospel songs with Tsering. And before I got on the bus I thought about what I would do on the bus that morning, and if I would create anything, and then when I sat with Tsering, I thought about what I was doing with her, and what I was creating by sitting and singing with her.”

“That thinking is your genius. That’s where you become a person who is worthy to take up space. It’s called being conscious and present in this moment, to an incredibly developed degree. And y’all, how hard is it to do that, to have a still enough mind to be asking those questions every moment?”

“It’s hard because you have to be aware,” someone answers. “But if you can do it it’s not hard. You just have to have the questions in your mind.”

I say to them: “I have these questions in my mind every moment I am in here. I say, ‘I am here to find the light in every kid and to make every kids grow and expand. So every interaction I have I am asking myself, will this make the light in the kid come out, somehow, some way? Every time I talk to a kid, I think about what I am giving and what that may lead to, and how I can give my best and get the best out of the kid in front of me. I do this mostly by asking about five hundred questions. When I ask questions of someone it says I care about that someone. No one will be invisible to me, ever. I will see the kid in front of me and I will make sure that that kid can be seen clearer after I am done asking and seeing and listening.”

“I mean, how much energy is squandered shouting random crap into a classroom like, “Who is hotter, Kim Kardashian or Taylor Swift I mean, where can such a question lead? What is created? What if, on the other hand, every question you ask serves the purpose of revealing the truth around you, in you, or in someone?”

“These are all rhetorical questions,” I say. “Watch this, y’all: Tate, where do you live?”

“New Haven.”

“In a one story house or two stories?”

“Two.”

“And is your room upstairs?”

“Yes.”

“And what can you see from you window?”

“The woods.”

“And do you have anything special that you love when looking form that window?”

“Well, when I was little I would look at the green clearing and I used to watch a family of bunny rabbits that came out there, but then they left.”

I look at the class. “Do you see how easy that is? It took a minute and 12 seconds. In that time I revealed Tate to all of us by asking five questions. In five questions. Do you now know more about him? Has he shown something of himself. Do you see that he is ‘somebody?’ Have I become somebody to him? By asking him questions, what have I told him?”

“That you care about him.”

“Yes, and did I lose anything by doing that? Did I risk anything?”

“No.”

“And what did I gain?”

“You got a friend, you got his gratitude for asking.”

“Yes, I made him feel like he is somebody. His life has substance. His life exists for us. We see him, in past and present time, in a place we have never been. He becomes. I become to him, as a person who cares. It is so easy to do this, y’all. You only have to get out of the place you are in.”

“What would happen if I had asked him about a cannibal named Kim Kardashian? Where would we be?”

“No where.”

“In a no place.”

Tate is still sitting next to me, smiling shyly, looking down at his doodle of a sword in his notebook.

***

I have been ranting about the soulless pop music that I have been hearing hummed around school. I have been hearing the name of Justin Bieber too often. I have decided to fight back. It’s a never-ending struggle and I am a soldier.

“You clowns, do you realize that they are feeding you music made out of crap, money, and Chemicals and if they can get it in front of you enough you will start talking about it and start talking about Justin Bieber as though you knew him. They have secret wires running this crap into you and they are stealing your money and leaving you sucking on a piece of air candy with the IQ the size of a chigger’s eyeball?”

“They are sucking your soul out with these poison things. Don’t let them do it. But if you have the junk in you, today I have a temporary antidote.”

I play them “Hear my Train-A-Comin’” by Jimi Hendrix. The song is dedicated to Yared, who loves the blues and Hendrix. Tomorrow I am bringing is John Coltrane to make them hear another dedicted soul.

Icarus and the Heartwood

I tell the seventh graders something I learned over the weekend: that when Monarch butterflies go into the chrysalis, the body of the caterpillar does not simply grow wings, or transform as a normal embryo does. Rather, in the first 24 hours in the chyrsalis the body of the caterpillar completely disintegrates into cellular soup, a liquid form. From this cellular soup the body re-forms as a butterfly.

Now it has been said that the middle school years are this time of “being in the chrysalis,” (it must be this cellular/hormonal soup that frightens most adults away) but somehow we try to get them out and to the state of a fluttering butterfly somewhere somehow sometime someway. But this disintegrative cellular soup concept adds a whole new dimension to the metaphor. Emotionally, psychologically, socially, intellectually, there is a lot of soup swirling and cooking and reforming in the time frame of these years. By necessity some of this cellular reformation occurs in enclosed spaces—the inner work of the adolescent’s heart and mind, in the time alone, here at school—all the work that must happen for the day when the cells reform and the body splits the chrysalis and flies free.

I tell the seventh graders this.

Tsering says, “I want to be the first person who ever went inside the chrysalis, ‘cause I want to see it turn into soup and see if it sparkles.”

****

Sarah comes to me and shows me a book she pulled off our shelves. “Revolutionary Letters,” by Diana Di Prima.

“Look what I found!” she exclaims.

We open it to the inside cover. 1971, City Lights Books.

“Oh, this is some serious hippie and beatnik poetry,” I say.

“Oh yes,” she says. “I read some of them. They are all about things we are talking about now.”

“Why don’t you write some revolutionary letters of your own.”

“Oh, maybe I will.”

***

“Tal, Tal, come see the bathroom. Yared is playing his guitar in there and there are tons of people in there!”

“Tal, for my project, I am going to have a guest appearance. He’s going to be from the Czech republic. He was there during the Velvet Revolution.”

“Tal, I want to do the Industrial Revolution. That sounds the most interesting.”

A student says, over the din of the pounding and breaking of tiles: “It doesn’t matter what others think about your mosaic. It only matters what you feel about it.”

“Tal, we should watch 1984.”

“Tal, can you tell what my image is on my mosaic?”

“Is Yared crabby?” I ask.

“No, he’s happy cause he was playing his guitar.”

“See, Tal, I got my lit response right here.”

“Oh, you’re working on the crossword!”

“Hey, Tal, we already got a half a math problem done!”

“Tell me one thing you’ve learned in the last 24 hours,” I say.

“I’ve learned what fluvial and benthic means.”

“I’ve learned that Kiley loves her sister very much.”

“Tal, my place description is 900 words long. Is that too long? Actually, it’s not 900 words. It’s 950.”

“Hey, Anna, I love your skirt. And, um, I feel like my cheek was punched.”

***

A seventh grade boy bursts into the room.

“Tal. Tal, take me off the Mosaic list. I finished!”

“Okay, you are off the ‘bad’ list.”

As he scampers down the basement stairs he yells out, “Yay, I’m a good boy!”

****

After Rowan’d speech the discussion turns to questions of how to live in the world after something bad happens. The scars that happen to us, little and big, our fault or not our fault, what do we do about that. What place and privelege do we give past experience. How much control do we let the past have over us.

“Up at Annie Nicholson’s house there is a massive sugar maple. Inside it, sticking out about ten feet up, is the handle of a Civil War calvary sword. A soldier came back from the Civil War to his hill farm in Vermont in 1865 and placed his sword in the tree and the tree grew around it. The tree has the power to consume a weapon if we let our weapons go.”

Rider says: “My dad knows a guy who was cutting down a tree. And he kept wearing down chains and breaking teeth off his chainsaw. He changed the chain three times. And then he realized there was an old ski embedded in the tree.”

“So if you let a negative experience stay too deeply in you..what?”

“But those experiences are a part of you. They become a part of the tree.”

“But do we keep the scar of foreign object on the outside where it shows always, or do we grow new beautiful layers around it?”

“You don’t want to forget it. It’s a part of what you know. It might teach you how to live.”

“So the new rings grow around. Maybe there is a bump or irregularity where the event occurred, but the tree will keep growing.”

“Does the tree have the power or keep itself from deforming itself?”

“So you men, how much will can you exercise in your life when some of the things that happen are out of your control?”

“Yes.”

“You mean to say: your sister might be sick. Your brother left and doesn’t say he loves you. Your parents had a fight or got divorced. You were mean to your sister and regretted it. Your grandfather died. You didn’t say ‘thank you’ even though you felt grateful. You promised you would try and your didn’t. You will be sad, confused, angry, disturbed, bewildered. All those

things will happen. Big or little. They will happen every day and every week. Do you understand what I am saying?”

“Yes.”

“So how will we use those things? How do we let them into us and be a part of us but not let them become us. Or, how do we transform those things. Here’s a way of looking at it. Inside any big tree is the heartwood. The heart of an oak. Heart pine. The center, the old stuff, the inner core, the greatest density, the early rings. That is where the soul of the tree is. No matter what happens, the tree exists. The acorn that the tree came from remains in the tree. It will always be there no matter what foreign objects enter. No matter what happens, the tree’s code and essence is embedded in it in far greater proportion than the ski. The ski is a nothing but a sliver. Nothing can really penetrate the heart wood. The heart wood is dense, beautiful, golden with color. That’s the part that is in place and be kept close.”

“The tree has roots and the tree has limbs. It is so much bigger than whatever happens to it.”

Even if it gets struck by lightning, there may be a scar but the tree will keep growing.”

I tell them: “My friend says she won't let toxic things make her live as a toxin; nor will she let the toxins infect whatever is good that wants to live in her. My friend says she will choose how to let the scars become a part of her, only a part of her, and make her great and mighty. My friend lets the beauty she is grow around the knives, swords, or skis that are jabbed into her. My friend believes that the tree she is is so magnificently pure that she can grow, ring after ring, becoming bigger and greater and more fully herself no matter what is thrown at her. My friend decides who she is and what directions she grows.”

*****

It is late on Friday, the last of the speeches.

“Y’all, my favorite car in the train is the caboose. It is the most beautiful car, the red one, with a little tower where the conductors sleep. Engines are grimy and powerful, the freight cars are necessary but rusted and gray, but the Caboose is the most beautiful. As red as the heart of Icarus.”

“And the caboose is where the famous people stand to make their speeches,” says Luke.

“Yes, and now we have the caboose, the last of the speeches.”

In the space of the final hour of the week it comes clear, again, why we have this school; or, I should say, it comes clear what we can do in this school, in any school, when the kids are let out to do the talking.

We give the kids a chance to say what matters. No matter how fluently or fumblingly, how exquisitely artistic or raw; no matter how much poetry or stumbling and um-ing and tears and snot. No matter how difficult, no matter the amount of tension, we have a chance to tell each other what matters. And we will listen. And the kids sitting around the table are listening with all their hearts open at 2:50 on Friday afternoon. The room is absolutely still, the rains in tapping on the roof, it is gray outside, and once again, we are saying to each other as Mother Teresa did: “We belong to each other.”

When this happens, we are living in and outside of ourselves in the best possible way. Lennie shouts to George: “I got you and you got me!” This is his ecstatic truth, and one of the handful of truths that should really matter before death comes. To know someone has got you and you’ve got someone. There is heartwood all around us and in us. Our task is to see it and show it every chance we get.

Where the River Runs Deep

I hand out copies of “Death of the Ball-Turret Gunner.”

I only chose this poem because we can “get it” in one class period, and still there is so much to see. I want them to know how much there is to see in a small space. To look, as though through a microscope, and see a whole landscape.

“No one should try to understand this poem yet, or tell us what it means. That would be like trying to tell us what a microscopic cell means before making any observations. SO for now, all we are going to do is look and listen and make observations.”

I read them the poem. We start in with the questions.

“How can his mother be sleeping?”

“What’s flak?”

“There are only two rhymes: the second line and the last line.”

“But also there are rhyming words in the fourth line. ‘Black flak’ and ‘nightmare fighters.’”

“What is the ‘dream of life?’”

“Why is he loosed from it?”

“Great question. Why does it not say ‘severed, ‘separated,’ ‘divorced,’ ‘torn,’ ‘removed,’ ‘ripped,’ or ‘taken’ from the dream of life?”

“When was it written?”

“What’s a ball-turret?”

I show them pictures of a ball-turret on a B-17 Flying Fortress. I draw a picture of one on the white board. I demonstrate the “hunched’ posture of the ball-turret gunner. They may be beginning to see it.

“So what feelings come out here?”

“It feels like he is vulnerable. He’s in a glass ball.”

“Where?”

“In the belly of the plane.”

“The belly?”

Some one practically jumps out of a chair.

“He ‘fell’ from his mother’s sleep. When he was in his mother’s womb he was hunched.”

“And?”

“He was warm, and bloody, and protected.””

“You mean the blood was not the blood of death, but of life?”

“Yeah.”

“And when a child is born what happens?”

“They wipe the blood off and…”

"And do what?”

“Wrap the baby up and keep it warm and give it to its mother.”

“So when the child opens its eyes it sees what?”

“Its mother. Protection. Warmth. Love.”

“And what does it “wake” to here?”

“Black flak, Nightmare fighters. Death. Blood. Terror. War.”

“Is this boy/man free?”

“No, he’s born into the womb of a war plane.”

“So did he get to live, to know the dream of life?”

“No. The poem is only five lines…It’s like it barely lives.”

“He only lives for four lines before they wash him out with a hose.”

“How about this five line poem,” I say.

Row Row

Row your boat

Gently down the stream

Merrily merrily merrily

Life is but a dream…

“Did he get to have this dream,” I ask.

“No. He was practically born frozen. Cold.”

“Like what.”

“It says his wet fur froze.”

“How does that picture form in your heads when you hear the words? Is he wearing fur?”

“Yeah, didn’t pilots wear fur coats then?”

“Yes.”

“So he seems like an animal.”

“Vulnerable. He’s just born. He was scared and hot when the plane took off. His sweat froze. Then he gets shot. The ball-turret is full of blood, but he is not even there. They have to wash him out.”

“No feelings at all.”

“He’s like a little animal that was born blood-covered but did not get to open his eyes to the dream of life or his mother’s eyes.”

They keep talking. I keep trying to stop them, but they keep seeing other things, all the. connections between the words. Finally someone begins to draw out a bigger view.

“It seems like normally you would want to say this is a picture of freedom—flying high above the earth, seeing everything, looking down over the landscape and seeing everything.”

“Except?”

“Except he is trapped in this state.”

“State of…”

“War. This state of being. The state of the government placing him in plane. Hunched up like a fetus."

“He’s not free because his only choice is to shoot and die.”

Someone points to the Matisse poster, “Icarus” which hangs next to the white-board.

It’s like he is that guy, falling from the sky.”

“There he still seems alive, because we can see his heart. The red spot on his body."

“Y’all, did you know that Matisse made that work during World War II?”

On the board are the dates of World War II.—1939-1945. Jarrell wrote his poem in 1945. The poem I hand out for Thursday was written in 1939. “In Memory of W.B. Yeats,” by W.H. Auden. They will make connections I can’t imagine.

****

I read a story called, “The Kiss.” It has happened over and over: the kids may be thinking about what a kiss is, or wanting to know what a kiss is, but they have no way of really knowing. I had been talking about what a kiss might be, what it shouldn’t be, how one might feel when a real kiss happens. A kiss is not gotten, it is given. This I know.

In the story I read, a kiss is given by a dying woman to a teenage boy. The woman is in a convalescent home and her skin is practically falling off her body and she can’t speak. Only a moaning whisper escapes her dry lips. The boy is there for community service, to wheel the old people around the facility, help them play Bingo, and light their cigarettes. The woman wants the boy to hold her hand. As he passes her in the hall, she reaches out to him and pulls him toward her. Then she pulls him ever so close to her face, and she places a kiss on his cheek. The boy is not sure what to do. He is terrified, never having been so close to death. But he feels the only thing to do is to kiss her back, and he places a kiss on the soft skin of her cheek. He doesn’t know what he is doing, but he does what must be done.

What has been given? What has been created? How has death been held at bay? Earlier in the day we discussed whether it was possible to become immortal by living well, by making lives grow out of our lives, by making something that would outlive us, as Robert Hayden said we must do, as a way of making Frederick Douglass liver forever. Can we live forever, in some manner, even in this cage of mortality? If we must die, how may we also not die. It was proposed that we live on by living well, by giving something of ourselves to the world beyond, and that would be a measure of freedom within the limitations of earthly existence.

“Like in Wislawa Symborska’s poem, where she says the written word is the ‘revenge of the mortal hand,’” says Jesse. “That’s what she is doing by showing the boy what a kiss is.”

“The old woman was giving something of the utmost value before she died. As though she couldn't die until she gave that kiss away,” says someone else.

“And what did her insistence on giving that kiss to the boy create?”

“It created love, in him for her…So her love is passed on, so he can know it. And now we know it from him.”

Later when we talk about “In Memory of W.B, Yeats,” we began to see that the only thing that counters death is words spoken from the heart, given out freely, even as the shadow of death hovers all around. “In the deserts of the heart, let the healing fountain start.” If each of us is “in the cell of himself almost wholly convinced of his freedom,” then this is the way out.

****

It’s a rainy, misty morning up on the North Branch River. The woods re mostly green but a few leaves are touched by yellow and red, the ferns are browning, shivering in the breeze and shining in the rain. We are gathered under the trees in the wet grass, wearing mud boots and waders glove. Nylon pants are duct-taped to keep the river out. Two dogs are racing around, and licking our faces as we have morning meeting.

“Tal, why are you so grumpy.”

“Not grumpy. Sleepy. Tired. Friday. Long days behind. Long day ahead.”

A ninth grade boy leans into his mate, causing them both to stumble. I give him a stern head-masterly glance.

“What?” He exclaims. “I’m awake, eager, and ready to learn!”

They are holding hands, lined up five-abreast in an all-school phalanx. Eric has them follow him, first walking then running, making them turn and re-turn. They are imitating the width and rush and flow of the river. In the turns the outside “water” must speed up. The inside water must go slow. They head through the woods to find the river, which has filled up over night with all the rain. They’ll be walking down-river, making observations about erosion and flow-rate, ostensibly quietly and meditatively. But already I can hear the shouts and laughter downstream in the woods as the water pours in, filling their boots where the river runs deep.