Sarah brings in her Freedom poster project: 27 sugar cookies loaded with icing and sugar sprinkles. On the bottom of each one is a small piece of paper, soaked with butter, with a penciled quote about freedom. At 8:45 a.m. I eat my cookie. My Quote: “You have freedom when you are easy in your harness.”
They are all bringing in their projects. Claire has paper mached a large branch, which she will paint white. It stands in the sun-light in a Christmas tree stand. Legos and beer bottles and computer wires suspended from the ceiling. A Freedom Flag. At least 250 quotes. There are two mobiles, a giant green and blue paper bird pasted with quotes. Reed bounds up to me with a box entitled: “Pandora’s Box of Freedom.”
“Look, look what Finn made!”
“Beautiful. What are you, hee agent?”
Finn bounds up. “She didn’t make that, I did.”
“I know, she was telling me!”
Luke strides in, putting his belt on, which he had loaned to Yared for the weekend. “Tal, Tal, I sat with Dalia on her first Yom Kippur!”
“Did she sit with you?”
“For a second, but I had to hold her foot because my dad was hogging her.”
There is morning talk of the weekend. Reflections on the field trip to Eric’s house and the upper reaches of the North Branch River; a concert that some students and the head teacher attended the night before;
A lyme Disease presentation. Deer ticks. 36 hours. Bacteria. Swollen Lymph nodes. Doctor detective work. Sceince. Math. Biology. Chemistry. Symptoms. A quiz! We review the answers after. Most everyone…PASSES!
Later: Who is writing what for newsletter? Who is recording the week’s morning meeting? What time will we play Wiffleball? Who can set up the projector for the Lyme Disease presentation (thank you Miles!).
The kids are off doing something in the science room. I have thirteen minutes to do a little planning and answer some emails…In comes wise-acre of a ninth grader, who looks over my shoulder…
“Tal! Tal! You’re checking facebook. What time is it! Tal! It’s 9:05! Tal, that’s like drinking a jug of rum at 9 in the morning!”
Jesse comes in wearing a Tiara. Luke has a hat that he made that says, “Punk.” Sophie is wearing her nerdish knee-socks and tiara as well. Yared has on a woven hat from Ethiopia that says, “The Lion of Judah.” Tsering has on a plaid pork-pie hat and blue polka-dotted mud-boots. Rowan has on his San Francisco Giants baseball cap spun around backwards.
Simon shows me his drawing of an engorged tick with spirochetes in his claws and belt; Claire says: “Can I tell you a tramautic story of how had to get a spinal tap when I was 2 days old?” Claire says: “Tal, I am leaving for an orthodotist appt..” Reed says: “Um, I have a tick story and also can I describe my Freedom Beautiful project.” Ollie says, “Tal, did you see my freedom project. It’s those two trash cans out there.” Calder says, “Tal, do you think I have lyme disease?”
Aylee is re-doing her science homework because she didn’t do a sufficient job. She looks up and says, “I want one of these cookies.”
Luke says to me: “Tal, you know my Freedom poster? I think I didn’t think outside the box. It’s just a poster.” He is anxious and seeking bolstering.
“Luke, that’s fine, we need posters. We can’t have only mobiles and sculptures. Something has to cover the walls.”
“It has quotes by Nelson Mandela, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, Malcolm X, and Jim Morrison and real people. “
“Luke, that’s great. But did you quote Jim Morrison’s best quote?”
“You mean, ‘Alright, alright, alright, hey listen, listen, listen man, listen man, But I tell you this man, I tell you this, I don’t’ know what’s gonna happen man, but I’ma I get my kicks before the whole shithouse goes up in flames…awrigth awright!’”
“Yeah, that one! That’s a very philosophical and meaningful quote about freedom!”
“I know, right? You want me to add it to my poster?”
“Absolutely!”
Later, on the wiffleball diamond in the cool fall sun, young Luke droves home three runs with a homerun for Malcolm X’s Revolutionaries. He stomps on home-plate and then jumps into the arms of his cheering teammates, then turns to no one in particular and bellows: “I am the Lizard King!”
This was written on the white-board after school one day: “Living in fear is like having a goat tied to your ankle: you just have to sit there and watch it eat everything up.”
The speeches lead us into discussion about what the primary fears are: fear of rejection, fear of failure. We talk about the forms of love. Whether true love, like life-long love of swans, is possible for humans. What happens to our conceptions of love when we see love disappear between two people we love?
I told the kids if they didn’t get their work done properly, I’d be “A donkey on the EDGE!” This is said with a certain hysterical threat in the voice. So now they are really jumping. And everyone is saying, “I’m a donkey on the edge!”
I told them I had learned new phrase: if you ask someone to do you a big favor, you can say, “hey, do me a solid.” So we are saying: “Do me a solid, lickety split! Or I’m going to be a donkey ont EDGE!”
A smidgeon of one of the many, many amazing, spectacular, beautiful speeches we heard this week.
“Eventually the summer was almost over. Then school had started and I had officially become a ninth grader. I came home from my first day and sat down to write my speech. I stared at the blank white space with the curser blinking in the corner under where I had written my name, the date and 'beginning of yr. speech'. I waited for something to come. I waited for so long that the screen saver came on. It was a picture of a beautiful white sand beach with crystal blue water and a palm tree. And I realized that sure, that might be paradise but it was not the only one. There are a million billion paradises and also there are none because paradise is just an idea. It was a state of mind that would free me from the desire for more. And that might be impossible, to stop wanting more. But at least I could try, I could try to get as close as I could to that idea, that freedom, while I stayed who I was, in this place that I lived.
In the fall when I was younger my sisters and I used to go outside to where the milk weed was ripe in the field, we were looking for monarch butterfly caterpillars because they ate milk weed. We would go out into the field and search and then we would find one on the underside of a leaf. It would put out its nasty smelling yellow horns and try and scare us away but we were not perturbed. We didn't think they were gross or weird, we just thought that it was fun to find them because it was like a treasure hunt, back when the fat green and yellow and white worms were exciting and then once we caught them and we put them in the cage with milkweed. They ate it and got fatter and fatter until they were stiff and bloated and then they hung themselves upside-down from the top of the cage and spun a delicate green cocoon around themselves. It hung by a black thread and had yellow and white dots around the edge. They hung there all winter and I thought they were beautiful.
This year my sisters found 12 caterpillars in our field. They came inside and put them in the cage with milkweed. A couple of them were small but mostly they were fat and soon they hung themselves and slowly froze. And when I wasn't looking they became chrysalises. Just like always they were green and perfect. 10 perfect droplets hanging on the ceiling of the cage, and one on the door. Leaving the 12th one. Half way formed, the green coating hanging off its body, it had died. Its skin was stretched, it's body crumpled, one antenna hung limply against it. I stared at it and I shivered. It was awful. It was death. But it was not the end, not the end of this memory of the beauty of transformation. This disruption to the cycle made the perfection be flawed but no less perfect. Because the death of this small being made the lives of the others a little bit more miraculous. And the miracle is in the unopened cocoons that did live, that would turn to butterflies. And all this made me realize that to have freedom, everything cant be flawless, it cant be paradise. If it was then we would be blind, blind to the beauty, the perfection because we wouldn't have anything to compare it to. And freedom is to be able to compare the illusion of perfection to the reality of imperfection, and still love the world because there are so many things to love: My room, my friends laughter, the water in Maho Bay, maple trees in the fall when they turn orange and red. Warm fires in the winter, snowflakes, warm grass, blackberries, making pie crust, cafés, my garden, Kingsland bay, drying my cat off with a towel when she comes in from the rain, when strangers wave, moss, apple orchards.
* * * *
In the spring when the weather is getting warmer a shiny, spotted, green gem shakes and quivers and splits open. Black legs as thin as spiders-web drag out a small mass of crinkled orange wings as weak and delicate as wet tissue-paper. And there the butterfly stands in the cool morning shade, unfolding its wings. In a matter of time the wings are unfolded and brilliant in the sunlight and the butterfly flaps them and lifts off. It floats up and down in the breeze and then floats back and lands on a flower. It flaps its wings in the sun for a moment as if it is still trying to understand what it has just done. And then in the indecision of an instant it lifts off again and flies away. Then it is gone and all that's left is what was there before. The still trees, the breeze and the sharp sunlight. And a memory of this small birth into the green, orange, red, and purple rainbow of a sea of flowers blooming in spring time.
To see this is freedom, to say it is freedom, to know it, is freedom- but there is always more. There are always new things to love, and when I love them I will have more freedom, because when I get a taste of freedom like when I am under the surface of the water, when I see the butterfly fly away, when I am writing and its making sense, when I am laughing with my friends, when I pick up a red maple leaf, when I smell wood smoke in the fall, when I get a taste of freedom, I know that there is more. And I could say that I have found the point of life, to find that elusive freedom, but I think I knew it all along, sub-consciously I was looking for freedom, because all my life, its what I wanted. And now I know that when I glimpsed that freedom, that was when I am truly happy.”
A ninth grade boy is sitting next to me, strumming his guitar and trying to write Geometry Blues songs, First it is “Complementary Angle Blues” and then it is “Geometry B. Goode,” then it is Sublime’s “(Geometry is) What I Got,” with the lyric, “Early in the morning, asked my teacher for help…”
I say: “Why don’t you guys go outside and play a game? Soccer? Wiffleball? Frisbee? Instead of running around like a hyper-active mega cess-pool of testosterone?”
“But Tal, if I go play a sport I have to take my pants off.”
“Rider?”
“ I mean, I have to take my pants off, because they will get dirty. That’s why I have to take off my pants when I play a sport.”
“Rider, if you take off those clean pants, please put on another pair while you play?”
We are discussing a speech by Anneke.
“She was writing about her fear of failing.”
“Or her fear of being rejected.”
“If we are talking about fear,” I say, “what are the drivers of fear beyond fear of failure or rejection? Can fear be boiled down to that?”
“It could be also fear of pain?”
“Yes, but isn’t being rejected, or failing, also painful?”
“What about death? Isn’t one of the fears death?”
So how would death relate to fear of rejection or failure.”
“Maybe because we are afraid of failing to live right in our life, or living life having been rejected.” So we fear death because if we don’t’ succeed, live right, or become accepted, we die having failed. So the feat of death is really the fear of coming to the end of life having lived as a failure and not having been accepted into he world. “
The end of the day comes and we are in the middle of this conversation: “He not busy being born is busy dying.”
Busy being born: What does it mean, and how can we do it always?
One of the last speeches of the week has an answer: “To be free maybe there is not one thing I have to do, but all things.”
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