A Prayer for Children

By Marian Wright Edelman

We pray for children
Who sneak popsicles before supper,
Who erase holes in math workbooks,
Who can never find their shoes.

And we pray for those
Who stare at photographers from behind barbed wire,
Who can’t bound down the street in a new pair of sneakers,
Who never “counted potatoes,”
Who are born in places we wouldn’t be caught dead,
Who never go to the circus,
Who live in an X-rated world.

We pray for children
Who bring us sticky kisses and fistfuls of dandelions,
Who hug us in a hurry and forget their lunch money.
And we pray for those
Who never get dessert,
Who have no safe blanket to drag behind them,
Who watch their parents watch them die,
Who can’t find any bread to steal,
Who don’t have any rooms to clean up,
Whose pictures aren’t on anybody’s dresser,
Whose monsters are real.

We pray for children
Who spend all their allowance before Tuesday,
Who throw tantrums in the grocery store and pick at their food,
Who like ghost stories,
Who shove dirty clothes under the bed and never rinse out the tub,
Who get visits from the tooth fairy,
Who don’t like to be kissed in front of the carpool,
Who squirm in church or temple and scream in the phone,
Whose tears we sometimes laugh at and whose smiles can make us cry.

And we pray for those
Whose nightmares come in the daytime,
Who will eat anything,
Who have never seen a dentist,
Who aren’t spoiled by anybody,
Who go to bed hungry and cry themselves to sleep,
Who live and move, but have no being.

We pray for children who want to be carried and for those who must,
For those we never give up on and for those who don’t get a second chance.
For those we smother and for those who will grab the hand of anybody kind enough to offer it.

Health. Care.

Health.  There’s a lot of talk about healthcare right now because of the oral arguments held in the Supreme Court on the individual mandate passed by Congress in 2009.  But the rhetoric has left me confused, disheartened and desperately needing a venue to express how crucial this issue really is.

Health is in our national interest.  How does providing health care for everyone not appeal to, well, everyone?

The only person I know who has been vocal about disliking “Obamacare” (a name I find disrespectful and demeaning), is a woman who makes $16,000 a month.  Considering I made $25,000 in the year 2011 and she made almost $200,000, it astounds me that I am willing to buy in to a system that protects everyone, even if I pay a teeny bit more, while she, who has more than enough to feed, clothe, protect, heal her and her own kids, is unwilling to give up a small fraction of that money for the greater good.  I am confounded by this mindset.  I do not want to look around and see sick people who can’t afford healthcare. I don’t want to live in a country where a disproportionate number of people who do all the right things (work, have a family, save money, have a retirement, etc.) still are getting shafted by a system that denies them basic security when disease and injury creep into their lives.

Speaking of security, let’s get back to the issue of national interest.  Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, an incredibly basic model for understanding what humans need to be productive contributors to society, shows us that at the base levels are simple physiological and physical security.  Food, water, bodily safety, resources, morality, HEALTH.  Those are baseline.  Before humans can reach any of the other levels of friendship, family, self-esteem and respect of others, not to mention the highest levels of self-actualization where one can be open to facts and other points of view, creative, spontaneous and, perhaps most important for our national security, help us solve big problems, they have to be healthy.  So, if we want a citizenry of creative, independent problem solvers, which we desperately need to face the challenges of an increasingly globalized and resource-depleted world, then why would we shy away from providing the basic needs to all American people?

I care about health.  Not just mine.  We are all connected, intertwined, part of one another.  We are part of the same body.  If part of my body is sick, then the rest of me does whatever I can to heal that part.  If part of me is in pain, I do not just ignore it and go about my regular business.  I can’t.  It’s too distracting, too unnecessary.  All my resources go to getting all of me back up to 100%.  So if you believe that humanity is one, as I do, then you must ask yourself why we and our leaders have not similarly invested all of our resources into our national healing.  Our investments have to change.  Our priorities have to change.

If all of us are not healthy, none of us truly are.

Quarter-Century Reflections on Eternity

I turned twenty five yesterday.  February 3, 2012.  Can you believe it’s 2012?! Where’d the time go, this last dozen years?  The world has evolved so much in the last 25 years that I am literally thrilled every day thinking about what I am going to be able to know by the time I die in (at least, I hope) sixty to seventy years.  I read today that forty years ago no one knew whether water existed anywhere else in the universe, and now we know it to be one of the most common types of matter in existence.  There are places out in space, 12 billion light years away in one particular case, where sources of water vapor 120 trillion times the amount of water on earth spins around a giant black hole whose pressure is pushing hydrogen and oxygen particles together and creating enough water for every person to each have all the water on the earth twenty times over.

There’s so much out there–things that most people have never had the chance to wrap their heads around.  Proportionally speaking, we know nothing. And in many ways my life reminds me of the ancient myth of the man who goes out beyond the normal boundaries of his society’s limited cultural existence, sees the life and world beyond himself, and then cannot operate in his “normal” world that he ultimately finds himself returned to.  I feel a sense of what’s possible that most do not share, and I find it silly, unnecessary, childish that we have yet to end poverty and set up a world that supports and affirms all people, helping them become their fullest selves and feel proud of who they are and what they contribute.

My boyfriend and I talked at dinner last night about the ultimate plight of the human species.  I’m far more pessimistic than him in that I feel quite certain that we are going to demolish ourselves before we have a chance to get it right, but thankfully he is of the more positive outlook that humans really are hardy enough to survive what we’ve put ourselves on a path to.

I believe the technology already exists to solve all of our environmental problems.  We can make enough changes to allow cities to be more self-sustaining in a way that will change the dynamics of resource distribution and cut down on fossil fuels and unsustainable, environmentally destructive forms of energy.  When the need arises through growth and development, people start investing in what makes sense.  We are in a disgusting cesspool of a rut right now with the über-powerful elite keeping our world from moving in a direction where more people are able to thrive and share the abundant resources that earth provides us.  We’ve got to empower people to learn and be self-sufficient so the pool can become cleaner.

We need everyone to be educated.  We need everyone to have access to literature and knowledge.  We need everyone to be able to thrive and create and travel, to see the world beyond themselves.  Without exposure to lifestyles, mindsets and inputs that differ from a people’s immediate surroundings, they only know a small portion of the world and therefore will never be fully aware of themselves.  You see, one thing I know to be true is that we are all inexorably connected.   Parts of a whole.  We are all moving together in a ballet of magnetism, my direction moving yours in an unseen but physically real way.  Your every action affecting me and everything else in the world because we share the environment and the air and the water and all the cells of our bodies and everything around us that actually exploded out of stars 14 billion years ago.

Time is beautiful.  I see God in time.  This force–so out of our control and unwilling to be harnessed or impeded by the hubris of humanity–moves everything forward.  Keeps life growing.  With the sun, it moves all things away from center and keeps growth and creation on a clear and steady track.  We get older each day, each second, and there’s not a damn thing we can do about it. Our attempts to do so are laughable.  Like trying to defy gravity instead of leisurely enjoying your stroll tied firmly to the ground.

Now, More Than Ever: Educational Equity Rally at MSU

Theme: Now More Than Ever When: Saturday, January 28th at 1:30 Where: Beaumont Tower, Michigan State University This morning, 15 million children growing up in poverty woke up, got dressed, and went to a failing school. A school which will allow 50% of those kids to drop out before they graduate high school; a school which will allow the other half to perform, on average, at an 8th grade level. They are told that they too can be a part of the American Dream—however, to those low-income students the ‘American Dream’ is just that: a dream. Their voices have gone unheard for too long. Until January 28th… Now, more than ever we need to unite students, organization, faculty, and community members of East Lansing to come together to raise awareness of the educational inequities which exist in the US today. Now, more than ever we each need to ask, “What can I do to make an impact on the single biggest social injustice which is occurring in the United States today?” On January 28th, we will meet at Beaumont Tower, and together (1,000+) we will march to Wells Hall where we will hear from people who have dedicated their lives to solving this issue and will give you the opportunity to find ways that you can play a role in ending educational inequity. Now, more than ever a small direct impact today is worth more than just the thought of a better tomorrow. How can you help right now? Step 1: Register yourself here. Step 2: Confirm your attendance by RSVPing to the Facebook event and invite all your Michigan friends! Step 3: If you have a Twitter, follow @MoreThanEverMSU for exclusive coverage and updates on the event. Let us know if you want to get involved directly as a volunteer! Send an email to John Matthews at john.matthews@teachforamerica.org.

Cultural Evolution

The world would be a much better place if we all started operating under the assumption that we’re probably wrong about most things.

Sure, we can empirically prove quite a few things that we know to be the dominate forces and truths of our  existence on earth: Gravity holds us down.  Time is relative.  We are made of elements born of star explosions.  Evolution is indisputable.

Thanks to a few brilliant souls who faced persecution and ridicule for unmasking these fundamental  and awe-inspiring secrets of the universe, we have access to an incredible and exponentially growing body of information which is giving us greater access to the natural forces that have been at play over the ~14 billion years that the known universe has existed.

On the other hand, nothing that we believe about society (i.e. people and how they interact) is irrefutable.  Nothing else, other than the scientific laws of the universe, is static, unchangeable, provable or intrinsic to our nature or existence.  Choices alone have constructed our culture, and there is no reason to assume that it has been done the right way.

I’m blown away by excuses that justify maintaining the status quo.  It helps me to believe that people just aren’t aware of just how inequitable things really are… that if more privileged people just had greater access and insight to lives of people whose lives are more restricted and difficult than theirs, then perhaps things  really would change pretty drastically.

I like to believe that the average person is kind, altruistic, and even if only latently, wants the best for all people.  But latent caring isn’t going to do us much good in the short-term.

I want to believe that the world started just now.  That the problems of humanity aren’t so complex that we can’t just pick up the pieces and put them back together again if we pay close attention to where the cracks are.

Humanity’s past failures will always exist as a cornerstone to our existence, a volcano lying under the tectonic plates beneath our feet.  It’s been spewing with its atrocities for millions of years, sometimes lying dormant and at times so extreme that the number of lives lost could never have been an adequate metric for the pain that was caused.  These atrocities and abuses of human nature were all a choice, none of them happened by chance or luck.

Volcanoes will continue to erupt as long as they are being fed by the repositories of hot gas buried deep below our tepid lives.   It is not until the world shifts away from the source that the sizeable portion of land above the pit of fire ceases to burn and ooze.  Time takes it toll, but in the end it will come to an inevitable end, cooling and transforming into lush, fertile ground for growth and life.  The hatred and division feeding the flow of destruction within humanity is bound to come to a slow and steady halt as time embeds greater wisdom and caring within our DNA, bringing to life the dormant benevolence of those who have yet to fully understand the implications of greed and discrimination.

Evolution, adapting to a changing environment, is one of those truths I can’t deny.  I’ve got to believe that the work we do now will create cultural shifts, intellectual adaptations, more thoughtful choices… leading us to a more humble, curious, loving form of humanity than has ever existed.

Questions

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about questions.

A friend recently shared this quote with me from a book he was reading, Letters to a Young Poet, by Rainer Maria Rilke.

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything.

Live your questions now, and perhaps even without knowing it, you will live along some distant day into your answers.

This book was written in the early 1900s from one artist to another.  Rilke wanted his young predecessor to ignore criticism and input from others and to simply follow his inner voice wherever it guided him.  Overcoming the fear of rejection, ignoring self-doubt and battling the inherent worry that one might not be “good enough” seems to be a prevalent theme throughout all human existence.  The intense desire to be accepted seems to me proof enough that we are all very much connected, that we each rely on each other in some intrinsic way.

In many ways, my personal story is one of exclusion and an existential search for meaning in an often undefined and confusing space.  I spent most of my childhood in poverty, moving to a new school every year without fail until I reached high school.  I was disconnected, detached, lacking roots.  My mom was a grounding force for me, indeed, the only true constant in my life.  And yet even her moods were subject to intense and unpredictable changes, undermining my desire to feel centered and secure.  I was born into the hands of a young, unprepared, unmarried college student, and in many ways I was growing up alongside the woman who was raising me.  I struggled with questions of identity throughout my childhood.  My biological father was Dominican.  Did that mean I wasn’t white?  I knew I had the capacity to love all people.  Did that make me gay?  I lived in the Bible belt but wasn’t growing up in a church.  Did that make me a sinner?  Doubts, fears, admonitions of who and what I was, all of which stemmed from the thoughts and words of others.

I had questions, but I had no one there to answer them.  Really, I wouldn’t even have known how to ask.

Modern education focuses so much on answers.  A, B, C, or D.  Pick one.  Guess if you don’t know.  Narrow down your choices until you choose the one that’s best.  Fill out a survey and check the boxes that define you.  Male or female?  No, there are no other choices, of course.  Black? White? Hispanic?  Surely you must be one of them.  Ethnic origin?  Socioeconomic status?  Gay? Straight? Bisexual? (Is that even real….?  Doesn’t that mean you’re just trying to ease into being gay?)  And these things are static, aren’t they?  Definitely not subject to change over time.  People are definable, assignable, tropes, stereotypes.  That is what we’re being taught.

We’re putting blinders on ourselves and our youth, teaching them that there is only one path to the truth, to what’s right.  It may seem like no big deal, that standardized testing won’t have much of an impact on kids or on our society, but let me assure you from having spent two years at the head of a classroom, this matters immensely.  Kids are being raised right now within a dualistic, black and white paradigm.  Right or wrong, yes or no, nothing is open ended, nothing is left to the imagination.  Creativity is being stifled, the ability to think outside of the box is not something that is being nurtured and promoted within our public schools.  I had to teach a multiple choice-aligned objective every day, like it or not.  And this focus on standardization, if we don’t get away from it really really soon, is going to have seriously detrimental effects on our future.

Our challenges are far too complicated to be answered with yes or no questions.  There are not multiple choice answers to the question of how we keep humanity from self-destruction when facing an intense and looming environmental and energy crisis.  Innovation and creativity are vital skills that we need our kids to have.  Ultimately, if we are going to change education for the better, if schools are going to be transformational places that set kids on a path to freedom, and if we are going to push ourselves toward becoming a more equitable, environmentally sustainable society, we’re going to have to wake up to the fact that there are in fact endless truths, endless right answers.  The questions themselves, and the discussions to be had from asking the questions, they matter far more than any definitive answers that might arise from the questions we ask.

I want to teach others to trust that inner voice that questions their reality.  Questions about who they are and why they’re here, questions that everyone feels and asks themselves at one point or another throughout their lives.  The value of those questions cannot be overstated because they lead us to better ourselves and look critically at the world around us, which, like us, can always be improved.  Live your questions.  Question everything.  Cause truth is, we’ll never know the answers.  Questions are all we’ll ever have.

Humanization

When I consider how humans are meant to interact, I envision a paradigm where authentic self representation is balanced with modest progression of self disclosure, backed with an inherent assumption of acceptance and validation for all.  People are free to be themselves, while also considerate and thoughtful about how they present themselves to each other.  They seek meaningful connections with others founded in appreciation of shared values or the lessons imbedded in our differences that help us to learn from one another.  Relationships are founded on the idea of growth, of using other people to better understand ourselves and become the kind of people that we individually seek to be.  And we know what that is.  We know who we are, where we’re going, and what we want out of life.  What is the meaning and value of an existence that is not grounded in any moral guide posts or standards?

To say that this vision is far from reality is blatantly obvious.  I see evidence of this every day.  When I see a mother in a department store yell at her three young sons that they are “fucking stupid,” or my student calls me late at night to tell me that his mom kicked him out of the house because he tried defending her from her boyfriend, only she turned on him because she values her abusive boyfriend above her child.  I see this when I hear people use racial or homophobic slurs, or when a man talks down to a service worker because he deems himself more important or powerful than her.  This invisible hierarchy that dominates our social institutions is a fallacy, yet stands firm in the minds of so many who have been taught to view themselves as somehow intrinsically different from others, more (or less) worthy of life or resources, simply because of some arbitrary physical difference like skin color, gender, age, monetary wealth, or country of origin. 

We define ourselves, we confine ourselves.  And we are tearing each other apart.  On my last day as a teacher in Mississippi, one of my students came to pick up her report card.  She came into the school office carrying her baby sister on her hip.  I talked to her for a few minutes and interacted with this sweet child that she is helping to raise.  I commented on how cute her little sister is, and my student said, “Oh, but she bad.”

The baby was no more than six months old.

“Is that what you tell her?” I asked. 

“Well, she is… she cries and stuff.”

I was genuinely taken aback by this.  She was so dismissive of her sister’s humanity, of the goodness and beauty that was inside of her, and I felt a strong need to tell her how important she was going to be in the development of this child.

I said, “Monika, she’s a baby.  Babies cry.  They make messes.  But you need to know something: Babies become what you tell them they are.  You must tell her she is wonderful, that she is sweet and beautiful and that you believe in her.  If you tell her she is bad, she will be bad.  If you don’t believe in her, she won’t succeed.”

Her eyes widened.  She nodded.  For good measure, my friend Tyler, who was standing with us, also threw in, “And read to her.  Starting now.  Read every day.  It will matter.”

I hope that Monika takes our advice, and that those simple words change the trajectory of that child’s life, but this tiny example is indicative of a trend I witnessed time and time again living in the impoverished Mississippi Delta: the devaluing of human life.  So many kids, so many PEOPLE,  felt totally unaffirmed, ignored, unimportant, dehumanized.  People only saw the worst in each other and consequently brought out qualities that exhibited more of the same.  They forgot to look into each other’s eyes with hope and pure, unconditional love and acceptance.  The black community in the Delta, and indeed elsewhere in our nation, has been devalued and mistreated for so long that many people came to actually believe that they held no value.  They were powerless and they passed on their disenfranchised spirit to their children who are still combatting the same feelings of worthlessness, despite the drastic changes that have occurred in the culture around them.  Some would argue that things haven’t changed much there at all in the last century.  It’s easy to see why.  Economically speaking, it’s true.  Spirits are broken.  People just live to survive.

I have a good friend named Jerome who grew up in Germany, where I went to high school.  I spent some time with him this week after not seeing him for six years.  Since then he has moved to the U.S. and gotten bachelors and masters degrees in communications and has come to see this country through new eyes, rather than through the idealistic Hollywood lens so often held by people from other parts of the world.  I asked him, looking back on his time in college and in the United States, what was the biggest thing he felt like he has learned.  His answer was as simple as it was beautiful.  He said that more than anything, he has become more aware and empathetic of people who haven’t had it as good as him.  He grew up in a country where socialized healthcare, education, and childcare are the norm.  In Germany, people are surrounded by art and music and are able to create transcendently fulfilling lives because they have far fewer worries and far more time to spend with friends and family.  They travel, they take time off when their children are born, they don’t have to worry what might happen to them or their family if they break a leg or get cancer.  Higher education is free to those who want it, and people are able to pursue their vision for their highest selves.  As a culture, Germans know where they’ve been and where they want to go, and have created effective and liberating social policies that allow them to achieve that end.  They work purposefully to humanize people, to allow them to live to their fullest potential by leveling the playing field.  Here, Jerome said, people don’t work to have a good life; they are just working to survive. 

It’s easy to believe that the only problems of disenfranchisement exist in the backwards South, where racism and extreme poverty in the black community are so clearly prevalent.  But in truth, dehumanization is not a dichotomy–either happening or not–but lies along a continuum where small forms of mistreatment on the level of micro-interactions are of the same spirit as pervasive forms of persecution and tyranny.  Social policy matters, makes an enormous difference in the lives of every day people, and reflects the value a culture places on a single human life.  And while government actions are a primary source of the uplift or destruction of indviduals, people can, and often do, rip themselves apart from their own humanity.  We can be complicit in our own oppression.

Recently I met a guy whose father owns a strip club.  I was invited to see what it was like, and I readily took the opportunity.  It wasn’t just a topless bar, but a place where the women get completely naked and entice customers to give them money by spreading their legs on an eye-level stage and offering $1 lap dances to the people sitting around the tables circling the stage.  I felt vehemently uncomfortable with the fact that the women were naked; somehow it felt far worse than if they’d just been topless.  They were reduced to objects, caricatures of themselves.  Robots, all performing the same repetitive actions and illiciting the same predictable responses.  It was barbaric, crude, and all I kept thinking was, “This is not how people are supposed to interact.” 

I wanted to understand the womens’ mindsets and I overwhelmed the manager with questions about the dancers.  He was wise to not stereotype them in any way, but said that overall he’d seen that the women who worked there had at some point in their lives experienced some traumatic event that had left them broken.  Abusive boyfriends or neglectful fathers, childhoods in intense poverty or drug abuse problems, something had left them feeling worthless and desperate for a way to get back on their feet.  And our culture’s obsession with the female form as a sex object was an easy out for them.  I was stuck somewhere between feeling bad for them, for the events in their lives that made them feel like this was their best option, and feeling totally betrayed by them as members of the female gender, all of whom were being undermined by their actions with these sad-looking men throwing away their money for a shallow, momentary, animalistic thrill.

I realized then, as I often do, and as I knew in my interaction with Monika, that what matters most is the way that we raise children.  Frederick Douglass, one of the most inspirational people who has ever lived, said, “It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.” And I’ll throw women in there too.  I know what  you meant, Fred.  Infants are incredibly malleable creatures.  In fact, people of all ages are.  Purposeful or not, we are always learning, growing, changing, gaining information from our environment that is teaching us something about our value and our worth to society.  We are all important.  None of us can live up to our potential until we are all doing so.  We are connected, intertwined, and all incredibly worthy of love and acceptance from others and toward ourselves.  Humanization begins with how someone thinks about themselves.  And then it is spread outward in ripples with every interaction we ever have with everyone we ever meet. 

I hope we can move closer to that vision I started this whole thing with.  I want to see a world united by appreciation for humanity, knowing that we are all one, all of the same benevolent life force that brought us into existence in the first place.  Humanization isn’t something we have to seek; we are already human.  We must simply resist the urge to limit others in their own quest to find who they are and who they want to be.  And then just teach them to love whoever and whatever that is.  Seems pretty simple to me.

Tangled

Reaching down into the floorboard beneath her feet, Rachel picked up the book she had been reading since they left Tucson.  “The Power of Now,” she mumbled under her breathe, as she read the title to herself and thought about the awakening of her consciousness that she was beginning to feel more with each passing day.

“How much longer do you think we should sit here?” she asked Ryan, whose left arm was extended above his head, rustling his dirty blonde hair as he rested on the reclined driver’s seat.

“I dunno, maybe five more minutes.  The rain’s almost stopped.”

Rachel glanced up at the sky and saw the clouds parting, the sun pouring over the Saguaro cacti that filled the vast expanse of desert beside the highway.  Each cactus was shaped so differently, they looked like people, Rachel thought, as her eyes moved from one spiny tower to another.  “I think we could go now.  The sun is starting to come out.”  Ryan didn’t respond, his eyes were set forward and he had a vacant look on his face.  She knew he had a lot on his mind and she didn’t want to bother him.  Looking down at the book in her lap, she flipped open to a page near the front that she had dog-eared before she’d been drawn out of her thoughts when the car jolted and began to slow.

“Shit,” he had said, as he hit the steering wheel with the palm of his left hand.

“What is it?”

“We just ran out of gas.”

“What? But Ryan, it’s pouring outside.”

“I know,” he replied, as he looked down at his cell phone, knowing he would have no service here.  He’d made the drive from Tucson to Sedona hundreds of times before, always with the careless freedom of a kid with an easy life, but this time he carried with him flashes of the reality of what he was returning to.  He had been so distracted he forgot to make his normal stop for gas at the exit two miles back.

They had been sitting in the car for almost twenty minutes, wordless, vaguely familiar pop songs playing quietly on the radio.  Rachel sat and thought, and occasionally she looked down to reread the words that had struck her so deeply before.  She considered reading them aloud to Ryan, but she thought better of it, fearing he might think she was belittling his feelings about his father’s death.  She had never lost a loved one, and she wasn’t sure how she should be with him.  They’d known each other for almost five years, having met at law school and then having worked at the same firm for the last two.  She considered Ryan one of her best friends, someone who had seen her at her worst, but she’d never had to support him before.  It had always been her, with her myriad of childhood woes that she carried with her, who had needed support. Ryan had helped her see the watery sphere she was living in, cutting herself off from others for embarrassment of the way she’d grown up.  Her mother had gone in and out of depression throughout her childhood, and had threatened suicide a number of times.  She found it ironic that it was the death of Ryan’s parent that they’d had to deal with first.

“Alright, let’s go,” Ryan said, “if we don’t get started now we won’t make it before it gets dark.”

“Okay, one sec,” Rachel said quickly, as she grabbed her yellow legal pad from the messenger bag beneath her feet and jotted down those stunning words from her book, words that she wanted to remember.  “K, I’m ready.”

They got out of the midnight blue sedan, four doors with a sharp silver strip down the center, a gift from Ryan’s father when he’d completed law school.  “A son’s a man’s greatest treasure,” his father had said as he handed him the keys, “I’m so proud of you, son.”

Ryan tried not to think about that moment, and pushed it into the recesses of his mind, along with all the other unsaid words that would never be reconciled between him and his father.  As he met Rachel around the back of the car and they began to walk together in silence, he felt deeply grateful that she was there.  She always made him feel calm, happy.  He was sure she didn’t know it though, as she always called him “the stoic one,” and prodded him for details about his past that he was unwilling to give up.  In his mind though, Rachel was one of the most extraordinary people he had ever known.  She always thought about others, about how her actions would affect other people, and he found it inspiring that she had overcome such repression from her youth.  He’d had it easy, and he knew it, but he was also humble, and through Rachel had learned to be even more grateful for all he’d been given.

“So what do you think it’s going to be like with your family?” Rachel asked.  Her brown hair was flying in the wind, and Ryan caught a brief glimpse of her sympathetic blue eyes as she looked over at him.

“Not sure,” Ryan said.  “Jeff said that Mom’s having a really hard time.  She hasn’t eaten since it happened.  I’m not sure she can go on without him.”

Rachel thought of her own mother, who relied heavily on others for the emotional support to get through her days.  “If my dad left my mom, or if he died, I know she would kill herself.  But your mom, she’s strong.  She’s devastated, I’m sure, but I know she wants to see you and your brother’s futures.  Your families.  Her grandchildren.  She’ll be ok.”

“I’m sure you’re right.  I just don’t know why he would have done this to our family.  He seemed happy.  I mean, maybe a little stressed, but . . .” His words trailed off as he glanced at the ground.

“You know, Ryan, strength, it’s not something that everyone has.  It’s easy to fake it, and even people who seem happy can be simply putting on a façade.  You know your father loved you.  He was so proud of the man you’d become.  But ultimately, I think, he was too burdened by his own shortcomings to keep going.”

Ryan shook his head. “Shortcomings? But he was so successful.  He was able to provide everything for us.”

“Yeah,” Rachel said, “he was successful.  He made a lot of money.  But I think after his affair he started to hate himself a little, and that feeling likely grew.  People are capable of great things, but they can also cause great pain.  To themselves and others.”  Rachel had always felt free to be honest with Ryan, never feeling like he was angered by her words, even when they were less than flattering of those he loved.  For this reason, he’d opened up more to her than to anyone else in his life, and he had told her about the painful episode three years ago when his father had been caught sleeping with the daughter of one of his business partners.  The woman was Ryan’s age, and it had nearly torn their family apart.  His father begged their forgiveness and chalked it up to a mid-life crisis, but ultimately it had created a chasm of mistrust deeper than the valleys that made up the view from Ryan’s childhood home in Sedona. “People aren’t all good or all bad, you know.  Your father gave a great deal of money to charity, and he opened up that shelter in Flagstaff.  That will be his legacy, Ryan, not this.”

“Legacy.  What we leave behind… what will I leave behind?” Ryan asked this aloud, but it was a rhetorical question.  He knew very well that so far he’d not left much.  He had been so caught up in his own quest for power that he hadn’t taken the time to really give back like his father had done throughout his career.  He began to question, as he often did, why he chose to become a criminal defense lawyer.  It was for justice, for democracy, that’s what he told others, but really he knew his motivations came more from a desire to impress people than to help them.

Rachel sensed his growing anxiety and self-doubt, and without looking at him she reached out her right arm and pulled him closer to her.  She held both her arms around his bicep, lightly resting her head on his shoulder.  He could smell her hair, it smelled different up close, and he took a deep, cleansing breath.  She’d never touched him like this before, and he certainly had never extended himself to her in this way.  They were just friends, drinking buddies, someone to call late at night for an open ear.  But this, this felt so right.  They kept walking in silence until they crested a hill, over which the sign for their exit came into view.

Suddenly Ryan stopped walking.  He paused and stared at the ground for several moments before he turned to look at her.  “Rachel,” he said hesitantly, “you make my life better.”  He saw peace in her eyes with this confession, and he felt compelled to continue.  “I’ve never told you that, but you do.  You’ve helped me see myself, see the person I want to be.”  He paused again.  “Thank you for coming with me.”

She didn’t say anything back to him.  She looked into his grey eyes, glancing from one to the other, studying the contours of his face and the intensity of his stare.  She’d looked at him thousands of times before, but this time there was something different in his expression.  At last, he was seeing her, truly seeing what had been in front of him for years.  She had known this would happen, had been waiting without impatience for him to understand what she saw on his face now.  Time and space are quilted, eternally stitched together.  It the convergence of the two which create life-changing moments like these.  Without this tragedy, Rachel knew, Ryan would never have let her in like this.

She took a crackling step toward him, bringing her face near his.  Leaning slowly to the side, she pulled her mouth close to his, drawing out the moment and basking in the tugging within her heart.  Their breathing synchronized, she held still for a long moment, glancing from his lips to his eyes.  Softly, steadily, their mouths met, parted, touched gently again and separated.  Ryan suddenly felt a deep urge to wrap her in his arms, to swing her around, to show her the love he’d always felt for her but was only now becoming clear in his mind.

He picked up her small frame and whirred her around just once.  A small folded sheet of yellow paper fell from the pocket of her jacket and he stooped to pick it up.  The rain had cleared the clouds from the sky and a vibrant pink sunset was settling over the desert before them.  Ryan unfolded the lined paper and let his eyes fall over her curvy handwriting on the page.  He read it again to himself before looking back at Rachel with an expression of childlike amusement.  Those words, he understood then, were a metaphor for the intense beauty of that moment, of all existence, despite the constant pain and hardships that loomed overhead.  Her simple love and consistency with him, traits he had until now taken for granted, at this moment rocked his soul and exposed him to himself.

Even when the sky is heavily overcast,
the sun hasn’t disappeared.
It’s still there
on the other side of the clouds.

The words she had transcribed, those stunning words, he knew right then he could never forget, no matter how bad things seemed.  Ryan took her hand, laced his fingers between hers, and they walked together into the vastness and uncertainty of their future.  Beautifully intertwined, unalterably tangled.

Strength

I have a strong aversion to weakness.  To a fault, I think.  In the presence of someone whom I deem emotionally weak or lost, I become impatient and controlling, and I try to convince them of my worldview entirely.  For many people I’ve interacted with, that’s been exactly what they needed.  When students I had were feeling totally overwhelmed by their lives and reached out to me, I helped to build their inner strength by reminding them of everything they had to be grateful for and all the reasons that being alive is simply awesome.  But what about those who don’t ask for my help?  Or ones that are so close to me that the boundaries are blurred between respectful distance and an intimately shared history?  What then is my role in helping to reframe their thoughts toward a healthier paradigm founded in minimalism, gratitude, and rational thought?  Do I have a role there at all?  Am I simply to sit back and watch as someone I love barrels through life with such a low level of self-awareness that they are blind to their destructive actions and words both toward themselves and within the important interpersonal relationships in their life?

Things, material objects, used to matter a lot to me.  From the time I was very young, I knew that the most adored people were the ones who had more, could afford more, were carelessly willing to spend, spend, spend.  What I wore, my hair, my size, and looks in general mattered a great deal because they, I thought, were a sign of something deeper: my true intrinsic value.  If I could wear nicer jeans or have better highlights than someone else, then I would necessarily be worth more than them.  I would be more well-liked, more respected, have more power.  The greater trouble here is that when this fallacy was an underlying part of my thought pattern, I would not have been able to articulate it in this way.  Part of the truth of humanity is that most of our foundational beliefs are entirely invisible to us.  I never knew why I wanted these things, I just knew they made me feel good.

Part of the weakness I see in those closest to me is a worshipping attitude towards stuff.  They care so much about what they own, and they have an insatiable appetite to keep trying to find something better than what they already have.  Things build up around them, multiples of things that they may not have even needed one of in the first place, and yet they don’t see how this stuff weighs them down, stresses them out, and keeps them from focusing on inner contentment, peace within their family, and other thoughtful and artistic endeavors that would make them feel so much better about their existence.  But how do you open someone’s eyes to this reality?  What does it take to make someone see, appreciate, and be content with what they already have when it seems all they want to do is buy into the unsustainable market of fleeting trends and empty class competition?

There are millions of addictions to be had.  For some it’s drugs, money, food, sex, things that provide momentary satisfaction but never true happiness.  Addictions to conflict, hassle, abuse and shallowness are also very real and extremely prevalent, though no one is making reality television shows about them.  When I reflect on the lives of the adults that I grew up around, when I remember how they interacted with those around them and how they spent their time and energy, I realize that none of them were truly happy.  Not a single one.  Marriages I witnessed were perfunctory and routine, devoid of real depth and caring, lacking in shared vision or a solid foundation of mutual appreciation for one another.  No one ever took time for themselves to appreciate something simple, like a walk through the woods or the billowy white clouds on a spring day.  Never did I see a childlike sense of wonder and contentment in the people I was around because they were completely consumed with their addictions to the vices that had controlled their lives for as long as they could remember.  Vices that their parents had had before them, no doubt, and ones that I should have picked up along the way.  And yet I haven’t.  Is this simply a product of cultural evolution?  That I might be more enlightened and self-actualized than the generations that have preceded me?  Or is there something else going on here that has given me access to the world of the spirit and glory of life far beyond the things we see around us every day?

One of my favorite quotes, written by feminist scholar Simone de Beauvoir, says, “I wish that every human life might be pure transparent freedom.”   Freedom.  We throw this term around a lot.  Especially in the United States of America, “land of the free, home of the brave.”  Bravery though, true bravery, is entirely frowned upon here.  To dare to be different, to step outside of the boxes and labels that we confine ourselves and each other within, is actually discouraged in lieu of an artifice that we construct to appease the dominant culture which tells us how to be, what to want, how to think, and who to love.  Restraints meant to hold back our genuine desire for authenticity, candor, and deep, soul-rocking love of others and self.  We want these things, we all do, because divine perfection is our true nature.

If we were truly a free society, then we would be embracing the realm of the unknown.  We would be harnessing the extraordinary creative power of children to literally and figuratively color outside of the lines.  We could solve the world’s problems in a matter of years if we stopped underestimating the depth of children (and consequently of people as a whole), and gave them room for exploration and dialogue around the present and future challenges of humanity’s time on Earth.  This is why education is so deeply important to me.  Schools are supposed to be transformational places, and they should be the creative hubs for action-based solutions to real human problems.

Humans are not intrinsically weak.  Weakness is learned, is modeled by adults and passed on to children, along with prejudices, addictions, and destructive patterns of thought and communication.  Have you ever seen a group of four year olds interact?  None of those things exist.  They don’t care what color their skin is, or what gender they are, or whose daddy has more money.  They simply show kindness, curiosity, and enjoy each moment.  For young children, hours stretch on for days because each moment is filled with so much more than simply the material objects that they see.  We can teach these things.  We can pass on a love for life.  We can unite humanity and save the world, but it starts with you.  You have to seek happiness.  You have to be willing to give up things that you value.  You have to know that you are worth more than anything you could ever own.  Your soul, your infinite consciousness, it cannot be confined; it is simply waiting for its unwavering strength to be fully felt.  It’s been there all along.

The Road Ahead

So much has happened in the last week.  So much in fact, that I have not had the mental clarity to even try to write about any of it.  School ended a week ago today.  My emotions were pretty even until the very last moment of leaving the school.  As we were walking down the breezeway Tyler said, “Watch out, after you step off this breezeway, you never have to step foot here again if you don’t want to.”  I lost it.  I started crying and laughing, but mostly crying, and I realized that on some level I really was sad to be leaving.  But I also knew in that moment how much of an impact I had made on that place and on so many of the people who went to that school while I was there.

I stopped in Bishop Apartments on my way out and saw a few more kids.  I said goodbye to Jerlissa and Patrece, and I tried to stop by Marcus’s house too.  He and his mom weren’t there, but his younger brother was.  When I told him I was leaving he looked genuinely devastated and said, “But I thought you were going to be my teacher next year?”  It took me by surprise to know that even kids I haven’t had were invested in me as a teacher.  I became an institution within my two years, and there will be several disappointed souls when they see that I am not there in the fall.

Despite the sadness that came with leaving, my overwhelming emotion was pure joy for leaving the place that has caused me such pain in the last two years.  I know that I grew from being there, but mostly in the realm of knowing just how strong I am and how resilient I can be when necessary.  The most heroic thing I did was finish my commitment.  I didn’t make any long-lasting institutional changes, I didn’t reform any school-wide systems or raise test scores by some astounding margin.  But what I did do was show love, every day, and give every bit of effort and energy I had to give to my students without going completely crazy.  I worked too hard, yes, and I overexerted myself.  The job called for nothing less.  Ultimately, I am deeply proud of having been a teacher in the Mississippi Delta, and I will always have that with me no matter where I go.

More important than the line on my resume, I genuinely impacted many, many lives.  There are people on this planet now who will never forget me, who will say that I changed their lives.  I shared myself, my hope, my joy, my knowledge, my passion and my vision for the future.  I opened up worlds and a great many hearts.  I showed unconditional love to children who were used to being treated as subhuman, and for some kids on some days, I was their reason for getting up in the morning and keeping on pushing through life.

After leaving school for the last time, I left Greenwood and spent the holiday weekend at a lake house in Tennessee.  I had absolutely nothing to do.  There was nothing waiting for me to plan or grade, no backlog of unfinished business looming over my head.  Just pure freedom, silent and still.  In the past when I was given opportunities like this, I felt deeply guilty for being able to indulge in such luxuries, but this time I found myself truly feeling like I deserved and even needed these kinds of experiences.  I needed to restore balance in my life and to be reminded that I was once blind to the immense privileges which my appearance and place on earth have afforded me.  No longer will that ever be true.  I am now almost painfully aware of my lot in contrast to others.  I carry with me a precept of continual awareness about where I fall in the hierarchical structure of our society.  But instead of feeling badly that I have blessings that others do not, I simply feel called on to enjoy and appreciate what I do have, while working towards a world where all others have similar opportunities for relaxation and a pure appreciation for the beauty of life.

In contrast to the simplicity of the weekend, I spent the next two days packing my house and loading a Uhaul, preparing to move to live with my family in Iowa.  Thanks to a few incredible people that I am blessed to call friends, everything was taken care of just in time and I made it out of Greenwood on Wednesday night.  I had some time to relax and reflect on my time in the Delta before I pulled away for the last time on Thursday morning, and as I left, I felt… peace.  I felt pride.  I actually, and possibly for the first time ever in my life, felt like it didn’t even matter where I went from here.  I didn’t feel the pressure I have always placed on myself to go, go, go, do, do, do.  For weeks leading up to my last day, I had been feeling this desperate need to disappear from the Delta, to run away from a legacy of failure that I thought I had left behind.  But that morning I truly felt that what I accomplished as a teacher had altered me for good.  Before I left, I wrote this in my journal:

Brought here to learn resilience
Leaving with so much more
I’m not jumping through the window
Because I opened plenty of doors.

The road ahead is wide open, and I couldn’t be more thrilled.