#SOL17: Why I Paint

Mountain Landscape (Reilly, 2016)

A FEW YEARS AGO, I heard a wonderful story, which I’m very fond of telling. An elementary school teacher was giving a drawing class to a group of six-year-old children. At the back of the classroom sat a little girl who normally didn’t pay much attention in school. In the drawing class she did. For more than twenty minutes, the girl sat with her arms curled around her paper, totally absorbed in what she was doing. The teacher found this fascinating. Eventually, she asked the girl what she was drawing. Without looking up, the girl said, “I’m drawing a picture of God.” Surprised, the teacher said, “But nobody knows what God looks like.” The girl said, “They will in a minute.”  from Ken Robinson, The Element, p. 11.

I.

These days I mostly paint. Maybe, like the girl in the story Ken Robinson tells it is to represent God, to author. Maybe painting defies such cause and effect. I blessedly don't know. Some mornings as I stand with a paintbrush in hand, I wonder what my husband would have made of this compulsion. Painting is an in-the-middle type of work (highly rhizomatic) and a  mostly solitary expression. Seeing something arise out of the paint loosens the grip of grief even as it reveals it and deepens my will to live.

I dream about painting. Asleep I seem to be working out problems of space and intention. Rehearsing variations. I feel the paint move beneath my brush and stain my hands. After such loss that is redefined by each new moment, creating is a form of grace. So too is saying yes. Frankly, I indulge myself and I am unapologetic. I have traded earning money for time to paint and I am the better for it and just a bit poorer. Unlike Thoreau, I have more chairs in my home than I could sit on in a given night or week. Im the last 18 months, I have reclaimed the dining room and now it is filled with tubes and pots of paint, gesso, journals, brushes, pencils, and a crock pot.


II.

Somedays I fear I am more Grasshopper than industrious Ant.  But after Rob's death, I mostly know what is important and what could easily be forgotten. If you were to visit  tomorrow you might see a half dozen journals spread across the dining room table in various stages of drying. Some pages might look abstract, while others might display more recognizable images. A hand opening. A woman's face in profile. A murder of crows lifting out of an eye. I paint to tell myself what my words can't seem to convey. Painting loosens what I tacitly know and gives it a temporary voice that remains uncoded.  I paint out of curiousity.

Often my intention when painting is to become better at it and also to have those very frustrating days when nothing my hand touches matches my intention--when painting mostly sucks. I paint to forsake technique, to forget intention and open myself to possibility. Painting reminds me that I can still be surprised.

III.

Some mornings, it is the sheer messiness of it that I love best--that and how meaning sometimes emerges along the length of a line, within the swell of a shape, in conflict with space or tone, and often in homage to color. I must confess that I have loved Mark Rothko since I was a young girl. For every codification I make to explain what it means to paint,

                           the next day,
    hour,

                                               minute                           finds the exception

    and returns me to
                                      a lovely stream

                     
                                                                              where the banks

                         are less certain,

                   the flow less contained,

                                     and Gödel (not God)

is in the house.

#SOL16: Design

(M.A. Reilly, iPhone, hipstamatic app)

I've been planting. A lot. Filling clay pots with geraniums, petunias, fuchsia, lavender, lobelia, vinca, Dracaena spikes, rosemary, spearmint, tarragon, larkspur, snapdragons, and heliotrope. Inside, I have potted plants from last year and as soon as the weather warms a bit more I will be putting the parsley, basil, aloe, and cactus outside. In gardens I have planted over the years I notice that the peonies are up and the Hosta has broken through the ground and is unfurling. Azaleas and lilacs are beginning to bloom, rhododendrons are budding, day lilies are growing and the hydrangeas are beginning to reclaim their spaces. The butterfly bushes are greening and finally the birch trees are leafing. There's something so satisfying about growing plants and bushes; trees and shrubs.

Spring gardening reminds me that something bigger than my immediate sense of life is at work here. This morning find me thinking about Robert Frost who in the poem, Design, asked if design governs in a thing so small as the interaction among a spider, moth, and heal-all. Frost lodges such an important question of faith in a few lines. I remember Rob and I discussing this poem once and Frost's question during an English class. We were impossibly young at the time and matters of faith, of God, of mortality were distant marks we mostly ignored. We were so busy living, loving.

(M.A. Reilly, iPhone, hipstamatic app)

Now, matters of faith, of God, of mortality and afterlife are more immediate. I never expected Rob to die so young, to become a widow while still in my 50s. I didn't expect that my husband who never professed much belief in God would be the one to help me know that design does govern. In the last few weeks of Rob's life he shared with me what he was experiencing as he readied to leave this life. He told me he knew how to leave, how to cross over. He told our friend Jane one night as she sat up with him. As Jane tells me, Rob said, "I am seeing the most glorious things. Things you cannot see." 40 hours before he died, before he slipped into a coma, my brother, Jack and I stood next to Rob's bed and marveled at the look of ecstasy that lit his face as he stared at the ceiling of the room. We knew he was seeing well beyond what each of our eyes could see; he was seeing beyond our mortal limits. Rob told me he knew how to get to the next life and when it was my time he would be there to help me cross over. And he will.

Spring reminds me that life beats on infused with designs I sometimes understand and ones I am graced sometimes to sense.

A Counting God and Being in the Now

Counting (M.A. Reilly, NYC, 2010)

"...To know certain numbers
would be like standing next to God,
a counting God, too busy
to stop for war or famine.
I'd go out under the night sky
to search for Him up there:
God counting, next to Orion
drawing his bow..."

- Douglas Goetsch, "Counting"

I. Tweeting

Last night I took part in a Twitter chat (#leadfromwithin, Tuesday evenings from 8:00 - 9:00 p.m. EST) and the general topic was about being in the NOW.  John Bernard's, Business at the Speed of Now: Fire Up Your People, Thrill Your Customers, and Crush Your Competitors was referenced. I read the opening chapter on line and marveled at the connections between the business world it describes and the educational world I recently left. Consider this:

A company's failure to solve  the customer's problem now can mean the beginning of the end of a relationship (p. 6).

Certainly, there are key differences between education as civic enterprise and business. Yet, there are similarities as well, especially as affordable education options, such as virtual and blended learning, arise and those with the means to access these alternatives to public schools may well do so.

Last night the chat was largely about the differences between NOW leaders and THEN leaders.  As is the norm for this chat, the questions were thoughtful as were the responses posted by others. There's a lot to borrow from this inquiry as educators.   Years ago a chapter in my dissertation examined epic and novel language in classrooms. I theorized that when first grade teachers spoke using the present tense, the learning opportunities for children increased as both the teacher and the children were operating in the present moment--the now.  The now allows us to be free from operating via our assumptions, misunderstandings, imposed standards.  Rather, the present emerges and alongside it our reading of it--a reading that is jointly constructed.  At such moments, we grapple to make meaning alongside the children.  This energy and purpose is significant and I watched as it signaled Csikszentmihalyi's notion of flow.  In contrast, when teachers' discourse contained lots of past tense markers, the learning opportunities for children narrowed.  At such times, the ever present moment that in fact was emerging was left unattended.  Little children tend to operate in the present--in the now, now, now. When teachers fail to do so, there is a gap that widens.

According to Bernard (as best I can tell by reading one chapter), the world of now has gained prominence, importance, and relativity as the speed of information sharing has increased with the use of stagecoach,  pony, telegraph, railroad, airplane, jet, fax, email, and most recently texting.  Bernard writes:

Now everything anyone needs to know can travel at the speed of light, circling the globe 7.4 times in one second or traveling to the moon or back in 2.6 seconds" (p. 3).

Yes, it is foolish to confuse information with knowledge, however the speed of information does alter possibility in significant ways and does influence knowledge, power, and community. Fast info makes the now, ever nower, and raises alongside it increased potential to connect, collaborate, compose, and contextualize--so long as you have access and choose to use it.

So long as you have the means and method to not only connect, but be connected.


II. Contextualizing

Last week I left a school where I will be working next year and took a tour around the neighborhood. Here poverty has a weight one cannot upend.  Boarded homes are now partially un-boarded and on this warm spring night, many people--all people of color--sat on stoops.  I wondered about connectivity here--in the absence of electricity and water.  Yes, the phone can be a great equalizer, but it loses when shelter, food, safety, and health care are not secured.

This leaves me to think that never has there been a time when public schooling is more important as digital differences increase creating significant challenges for those who cannot connect and for those who can.  This makes me wonder why we continue to invest in the naming of things to know such as that which we find in national and state standards. I wondered if such national investments don't work to oddly maintain income inequality and racism.  It's like the image I made at the top of this post, Counting.  It's folly to count stars with the hope of representing the whole of stars. That which is dynamic cannot be contained with any accuracy inside closed sets.  

The antidote to this great naming of things to know, is being in the now. It's having the courage at local, state, and national levels for us to stand up and say: making knowledge requires a community of learners to operate without the troublesome burden of someone else's 'best' thinking as the only path to follow.  As such, we are rolling up the epic constructs known as standards with their long and tiresome lists and high stakes testing and in their stead we are asking communities to define what  and how learners demonstrate learning--perhaps a few key capacities such as: reason well; compose across symbol systems with accuracy, passion, and sustained interest; communicate effectively; exhibit curiosity; make things; and be kind. 

Alongside such a grand gesture, the housing of teachers and administrators for life must equally end.   Imposed standards and tenure for life represent epic constructs that are potentially harmful to children. Teachers and administrators must be excellent, not even just okay, let alone awful.  The work among learners (including teachers) must be fluid, not static.  To be excellent happens in the company of others and these settled households we know as schools, must be places where knowledge is being made, not simply consumed by both the educator and the pupil. The money being spent on testing in this country could be better used to create such settled households--a reclaiming, if you like, of main street. 

Perhaps then, the enormous attention being paid to public education by presidential hopefuls, like Mitt Romney and other pundits, who describe schooling for some as 'third world conditions' could be spent addressing the economic and social structures that maintain income inequality alongside racism in the United States.  A century ago, W.E.B. Du Bois writing about race and oppression wrote:

This is the problem of to-day, and what is its mighty answer? It is this great word: The cost of liberty is less than the price of repression.

Is such hegemony behind us? The economic, political, educational, judicial, and social structures that represent massive power produce and increase income inequality and they burdens us.



III. Counting

The mindless acts that clutter our day would best be left behind.  A closed set of things to count is best left not started.

Counting is a God-thing, even an indifferent One at that, paring his fingernails...well you know the rest.

On Faith and Science: Learning to Listen

Annie Dillard in Teaching a Stone to Talk concludes:

It is difficult to undo our own damage and to recall to our presence that which we have asked to leave. It is hard to desecrate a grove and change your mind. We doused the burning bush and cannot rekindle it. We are lighting matches in vain under every green tree. Did the wind used to cry and the hills shout forth praise? Now speech has perished from among the lifeless things of the earth, and living things say very little to very few... And yet it could be that wherever there is motion there is noise, as when a whale breaches and smacks the water, and wherever there is stillness there is the small, still voice, God's speaking from the whirlwind, nature's old song and dance, the show we drove from town... What have we been doing all these centuries but trying to call God back to the mountain, or, failing that, raise a peep out of anything that isn't us? What is the difference between a cathedral and a physics lab? Are they not both saying: Hello?

I often think of observation as a sighted matter--one conditioned by vision, by seeing.  Perhaps it's because I am an artist I want to think, but even as I am offering up such rhetoric, I know it to be untrue.  Much art, like learning, requires listening.

Some days, I forget what it means to listen and even how to still myself long enough so I can listen, can discern the various layers of sound.  My job often requires me to act.  Some days I wonder if any action would suffice, regardless.

Once in Tuscany I learned to walk taking very small steps: heel to toe for an hour.  I walked about a monastery where I was staying in such a manner, making no attempt to talk and made no images, my camera and sketch pad left behind. 

Each step was a breath. 

Each breath was an act of faith.

Nothing was required, beyond heel to toe. Breathe.

So what might we make of Dillard and her words, especially those of us who reside at schools?  Is science our futile human attempt to call God, like a phoenix rising, from all that we have abandoned?  Do we substitute someone's given definition of "improvement" for learning how to be still enough so we might listen for some local truths being uttered by children? By teachers? By staff members? By parents?  Are we so busy saying hello, that we cannot hear?

Tomorrow when I get to work I'm going to take small steps.

Heel to toe.

Heel to toe.

Breathe.