#SOL 16: Moving through Grief

from my art journal, 6.19.16 - The Wisest Know Nothing
(stabilo pencil, gesso, acrylic paint, newspaper)

Grieving is largely days of normalcy punctuated by deep sorrow which gives way to feeling sad. Sometimes the triggers are known, like yesterday was Father's day, and sometimes the triggers are not. When grief sets in, I feel like I have been lying most days, faking this life I am making without Rob. Pretending that the loss is manageable when the loss feels so huge. This is what yesterday was like. This depth of sorrow feels as if I might die and no one can fill what has been lost, make me whole again. No one, except myself. And so, I also knew that the feelings would dissipate and I would feel differently again. I knew this because I have been through this pain before and I have marked it, named it. I knew even when I was sobbing that I would feel more normal than not, just not at the moment.

So what do I do when sorrow is deep?  I feel sorry for myself for awhile and I don't will away the tears.  But I don't allow feeling sorry for too long. It simply isn't helpful. In fact, feeling sorry for myself fuels the hurt. When I remember this and can identify what I'm doing as feeling sorry for myself, I get moving and doing instead.

Yesterday I meditated before anyone was awake in the house and then Jane and I hiked before she left to return home.  I prepped a few pages in my art journals with gesso and I wrote and posted on this blog. Writing helps me to name what I don't know I'm actually thinking. Naming is powerful.

Later in the day I suggested to Devon that we go visit my brothers and Dev drove us north for our visit and got a little highway driving under his belt (he did very well). Being with my brothers is bittersweet as it is still strange to see them and not have Rob there.  Yet, we talked and as we did the grip that was tightening around my stomach eased. When we got home I made dinner and Dev and I ate and talked as we do most nights. I did laundry, watered plants, cleaned the kitchen, and I felt really sad throughout most of it.  Now and then I came across something of Rob's and cried a bit. Later in the night, I returned to painting with the idea of painting what I was feeling. The result I have posted here: The Wisest Know Nothing.  Like writing, making art also helps to ease the pain.

When I was ready to sleep and had turned off lights, I felt a bright blue light cover me.  Yes, cover me. I thought at first this must be because I had moved from light to darkness but I know not to doubt what I do not know. Watching Rob die and listening to what he had to say as he edged closer and closer to death has taught me that mysteries abound and that we cannot know all there is--all the possibilities simply through our five senses.  During the night I recall waking and for the first time, feeling as if Rob was lying next to me. This was so comforting.

Today feels more normal than sorrowful. I woke, meditated and wrote. For today, this is enough.

Be the Change We Most Need

Cry Down Into a Big River (M.A. Reilly)

I. Be Still.

Whereas babies are the very image of innocence--5, 6, and 7 years olds are its voice. And that voice was quieted on Friday.

In the remaining silence I find myself wanting to fill it quickly so as to not have to feel what I can not find words to describe and yet thankfully, there is little escape. We need to feel, first.  Perhaps you too are finding that one minute you are cruising through your life and the next you are stopped and in tears.  It feels very much like the immediate aftermath of 9/11 when it was still too soon to understand that life had shifted, changed in fundamental ways.  Now too, I am called from sleep this time by the list of names of these unknown children that I somehow know as they have become for those of us at a distance--every child.

And like 9/11, there are the stories of heroics--this time teachers, a principal, and a school psychologist--all women who did what those of us who teach know is an inescapable act: they sought first to protect the children.

Circa, 1967 (M.A. Reilly)

The deaths of the children and educators in Newtown remind me that too many children, mothers, fathers, sisters and brothers in and beyond Newtown are dying through a proliferation of guns and an absence of sound mental heath protection and care.  Collectively we have the voice to stop such madness and we must.

Circa, 1967 is an image I made while out one afternoon with my son, turning my camera and finding him just after he had made a wish. It is these small moments that the families in Newtown and all who have had family die through guns have lost.   They leave behind a void--a loud silence.

We cannot allow that silence to become the last word.  You and I now speak for those who have been murdered. It is well past time to take collective action.  Here's a few ways to get started.

II. Inform yourself.

Be sure that the rhetoric from NRA will be plentiful. Here are a few links to background information:

1. Mother Jones' Guide to Mass Shootings in the US
2. The New Yorker: Gun Control Action
3. NAMI (National Alliance on Mental Illness)
4. Coalition to Stop Gun Violence
5. States United to Stop Gun Violence
6. from The Atlantic: A Land Without Guns - How Japan Has Virtually Eliminated Shooting Deaths

III. Take action.

1. You can become involved and take action through The Brady Campaign.
2. You can sign on with Mom's Rising - Open Letter to NRA and Congress demanding common sense gun regulation
3. Call your congressional representative on Monday and keep calling to demand commonsense gun control.  Here's a link to the phone numbers.
4. Thank and support those congressional representatives who have been an active force in gun control, such as US Senator, Frank Lautenberg from NJ.
5. Urge our president to replace sentiment with action NOW. Contact President Obama via twitter, facebook, email, phone (202-456-1111) and demand that he uses his political muscle to get a bipartisan bill out of Congress he signs that brings forth common sense gun control. 
6. If you own handguns/automatic weapons, turn them in. I recently read that there are 300,000,000 guns in the US.  Here's how you can get rid of your guns.  Contact your local police and ask when there will be a gun collection. Here is a Facebook Page Dedicated to Handing in Guns.
7. Write letter and send to local media.
8. FACEBOOK
   https://www.facebook.com/guncontrolnow.campaign
   TWITTER
   https://twitter.com/GunControl_Now
   SIGN THE PETITION
   http://signon.org/sign/gun-control-now-1?mailing_id=7650&source=s.icn.em.cr&r_by=272451
9. Crowdsource this issue. Blog, tweet, facebook, youtube... Get the good word out that we will not be managed by the likes of the NRA and their congressional and judicial followers.

Let's get this going without waiting for Congress. In many ways it rests in our collective hands.

How to Be an Explorer, Elaboration 1

From here.

I had gotten this book (How to Be an Explorer of the World) a few months ago, tucked it away for a better day and found it again (on what must be that better day).

Ten things about where I'm sitting right now that I hadn't noticed when I sat down.

1. The speckled brown and yellow leaf on the tree outside, dead.
2. The sound and feel of air moving through the house with all its windows open is soothing, almost impossibly too beautiful.
3. The sound of water running in the sink.
4. How anticipation feels like wind through the trees.
5. Late day light and the pattern it makes of the window pane on the shade.
6. A cricket sounding, an insistent repetition running beneath these thoughts.
7. The smoothness of the round oak table where I am sitting.
8. The sound of keys pressing on a laptop and the hardness of the chair beneath me.
9. The comfort of repetition: ice cubes being dropped, as if they were on a conveyor belt, one after another after another.
10. The inevitable whining drone of a weekend warrior bringing tameness to a lawn.

Some late night thinking about taking a stand or what Huck knew so long ago about praying a lie...

If it is not as a result of not knowing and it is not as a result of having not enough resources, then why do we continue to develop intellectually dull classrooms and schools? Further, why are the very teachers we most need to keep wanting to leave?

Are we so deeply afraid of uncertainty at the classroom, school, district, state, and national level-- that ordered dullness is privileged? Think about this: in order to nationally measure how we are doing, each state administers (a la NCLB) a set of paper and pencil tests to every public school kid in grades 3 through 8 and again in high school. The measures are at best poor. The measures gauging reading and writing achievement are artificial, lack relevance and rigor, and do not mimic what consumers and producers of text actually do. Constrained by time and money,we use subpar assessments and then value the results and consider them a measurement of truth.

We cannot be this stupid, or naive. So this leads me to wonder if we simply aren't so afraid of invention, so afraid of living wide awake lives (think Maxine Greene), that we are willing, perhaps even giddy to maintain the status quo (continual state of bickering about how bad we are) instead of facing our own limitations, uncertainties, and potential failures. It's our Huck moment when we stand with the paper in hand and have to decide if we are gonna pray a lie or go to hell.

Who do we stand for? What are we willing to lose?

I have left employment when I realized that I would need to undermine my beliefs and participate in being mediocre.  In every public and private school system I have worked in for close to 30 years, I have advocated for extraordinary talents who were often seen as problematic by other teachers and administrators and at times even parents. These are the educators (both teachers and administrators) and learners who not only saw how schooling might be different, but worked to make it so and were ostracized by such efforts. Their artfulness at teaching and learning called into focus, the paucity of work being condoned and done down the hall, across town, or in a neighboring city.

At the same time, I understand the organized attack on democracy via its public institutions.  I do get the political nature of the current fight at hand, but worry at those whose voices are most loud.  Are any of these people actually educators?  I realize why the effort to remove the discourse about merit pay, charters, and other distractions needs to occur.   It concerns me that the conversation (and characterizing it as such may be a stretch) is limited to expressions of pro and con. Are you for public education or are you for charters and TFA?  This is a silly question at best and contributes to keeping us mired in reinventing less than ideal education for the mass of children, especially poor ones.

And so I say here that I also understand that we will need to individually make stands and declare ourselves.  Are we so apathetic that we will continue to turn an eye to the awful teaching we see happening in the room next to ours? Will we stand when we see another educator take wrong action against a child? Will we stand when we are given some epic program to enact like we are robots and just go along with it lemming like? Will we stand when we hear colleagues telling us all about the students who cannot and not say, you are wrong. Will we stand when we hear colleagues make claims that are based on bigotry and distortion?  Will we stand in support of colleagues who are mavericks?  Will we stand for  those who most need our advocacy?  Will we stand for those who want to teach better and need support and kindness to do so?

Will we call forth our better selves, regardless of Arne Duncan, NCLB, Race to the Top, merit pay, charters, Common core standards, testing testing testing and not pray the lie?

Let's stop talking about everyone, and make our own individual stands.