#SOL16: I Did Not Die

Stopped (M.A. Reilly, Leonia, NJ, 2012)

I.

Sometimes the distance between the hard earth I am resting on and the sky above is one my eye cannot calculate, cannot clearly discern. Other times, the sky presses so close that I think surely my exhaled breath is helping to form clouds that drift just out of sight.

Everything moves.


II.

When I began writing about the diagnosis, about Rob's too sudden death, about what my life was mostly like during his illness, what it felt like right after his death, and now what it is becoming, I made a promise to tell the truth as I understood it--to not back away from unpleasant thoughts. I wanted an untainted record of the last year. Here in this digital light, I wanted to tell you what it means to be unfinished, to be both scared and courageous, to feel slight against the crush of pain, to utter what is mostly unnamable and to feel a flicker of possibility.

Yes, possibility.

What I could not know during those last days with Rob when I sat beside the hospital bed watching him sleep, looking out the rear window to our yard and the woods beyond was how significant space would become in the months following his death.


III.

Here's a slim truth I understand now and again: The death of your lover, your spouse, the father of your child, your happy-ever-after is mostly a disquisition about collapsing space that is folded and unfolded sometimes at will.

As Rob was dying, the world contracted and grew so very small until the drone and spit of the oxygen machine became the very breath we all took and exhaled. The whole house became attuned to the intake and exhalation of that mechanical breath. We breathed as one unit, a syncopated composition, until on that late March afternoon, we stopped like a flipped switch.

I thought not breathing meant we all had died.
It did not.


IV.

After Rob's death, huge vacancies assembled. Where once there had been flesh covering bone, now I was largely jagged openings, holes you could drive a fist through. Across three decades, Rob and I became more assemblage, less solo bodies. After his death, my body was broken; a mere tracing of the places where I had loved and lost my husband.

In the weeks following, little stuck to me: words, deeds, thoughts, feelings came and went. I was more drifting cloud than hard earth. What little ground I did find in those odd nights and days felt spongy, less solid, less known to my touch.

I so wanted to be all better and I was not. I wanted to be handed the map of my life and told go this way, now. And out of this unattainable state, a restlessness grew and grew until standing in it was so unbearable that I found myself trying to out-run my life and failing.


V.

Each morning I walk. I walk because I must. I walk so I can hear what I need to say and what I am saying now is that "I am not content to be a mere tracing of my life."

I am not content.

Not content.

There, I said it.

And though this feels like a betrayal for moving on, living means leaving the past behind, leaving the fiction. I cannot stand in the world where Rob remains alive and live.

If Rob helped me to know anything during our life together it was this: to replicate the past like a loop gone mad is not to live.

When I walk I tell myself, Don't mistake the tracing for a map.


VI.

And what feels uncomfortable to say out loud, what still feels like betrayal of Rob's love is that in acknowledging this discomfort, this malcontentedness, new spaces are emerging. I am alive. I did not die in early March even though my heart felt stopped, my breath felt gone.

Lately, I sense spaces of opportunity blooming like wild irises that I have suddenly come upon while out walking. These flashes of beauty move in and out of my range of sight, momentarily bridging the vacant spaces within me like strings of lavender and yellow light tossed against the darkness.

Clouds drift.
Starlight flickers.

Each new space arises alongside the odd marriage of wife-widow-mother-woman. I am a complication composed of hard ground, drifting clouds, flickering stars and such uncertainty save this: I did not die.

I don't know what I am becoming and for now that is good enough.

A Passion for Possibility

Want (M.A Reilly, 2009)

“A meaning only reveals its depths once it has encountered and come into contact with another, foreign meaning: they engage in a kind of dialogue, which surmounts the closedness and one-sidedness of these particular meanings, these cultures. We raise new questions for a foreign culture, ones that it does not raise itself; we seek answers to our own questions in it; and the foreign culture responds to us by revealing to us new aspects and new semantic depths” (Bakhtin, 1986, p. 7).

Tonight I was listening to Beethoven's 9th. It is such an expansive and emotional work.  One that never fails to move me--largely because it opens me to possibility.  There's something untamed about listening to the 9th.  

When I think about listening I wonder about about learning--how learning ought to open us--ought to be largely a matter of possibility, not certainty.  And yet, the desire to be certain when confronting an unknown and have it named often determines us and what we value--be it in our homes, our hearts, or our schools.  Consider Maxine Greene who tells us:

We are not the first to feel a slippage under our feet, to grope for a “point d’appui,” something to stand on, a platform, a ground. Like so many of our predecessors, many of us grope wildly for security. We seek a certainty of protection, of salvation.  (from here)

But what is the price we pay for security?  I can't help but think of the cool comfort standards and high stakes testing have offered--twin methods we have been embracing since we were told we were a nation at risk.  Frightened of our limitations, we wondered who might we trust? And in the ensuing years we have learned most not to trust ourselves, our very eyes and ears. We substitute certainty and completeness that wrap itself around national standards and national tests for the slippages we feel when we stand on our own feet atop a world that is always in motion. 

When I think about the CCSS and other educational certainties it is the sameness--the way the language parses itself so neatly, so predictably that most confounds me as it concerns me. Consider how likely it is that David Coleman and company, could name for millions of children (at least those enrolled in public US schools) what they most need to learn and when. Standards are a closed system. And yet, if meaning is most revealed as Bakhtin says when it comes in contact with other, then what might we make of this rather closed movement of educational standards--self-referential, monologic?  Hegemonic?

Again, Greene offers us a way of framing this conundrum when she writes:

As John Dewey reminded us, facts are mean and repellent things until we use imagination to open intellectual possibilities. Imagination may be viewed as a passion for possibility...this is where the effort to achieve freedom begins—freedom as the opening of spaces in which choices can be made and action undertaken. Thoughtfulness, imagination, encounters with the arts and sciences from the grounds of lived life: this is the beginning and the opening to what might be.

It is from the grounds of lived life, where we most need to dwell--the spaces that open and close causing gaps to appear. Nothing living is ever finished.  It is in the lived life where we can best "anticipate and accept incompleteness" (Greene again).   And perhaps that--incompleteness--is what we might value most at school. 

Ring Out The Old, Ring in the New

Time Traveler (M.A. Reilly, 2012)

I. That Which Is Ending

Where is the dwelling place of light?
And where is the house of darkness?
Go about; walk the limits of the land.
Do you know a path between them? 

    - Job 38:19-20

Finding that path by following is wasteful.  Making that path is another story--one worth naming.
The last decade in eduction has been more about following, less about making.
It is time to make, yes?



 II. Imagining a Near Future

Imagining near futures requires letting go of certainties, wrestling with doubts, especially self-doubts, and embracing ambiguities. This brief video from Corning reminds me that the future is not set, open to possibility. The way we have conjured school as the singular place of formal learning is being rewritten. Technologies allow for new ways of co-joining, communicating, contextualizing.  What we make of it is in our hands.

Those Kids Could Dream

Stop Stealing Dreams (by M.A. Reilly, 2.29.2012)

 “Everybody has a secret world inside of them. All of the people of the world, I mean everybody. No matter how dull and boring they are on the outside, inside them they've all got unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds. Not just one world. Hundreds of them. Thousands maybe.”  

― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 5: A Game of You

I.
My father was a dreamer. You know the type. Distracted. Black socks with sandals. A man who studied flowers, represented labor, deeply loved my mother. One summer we trekked across the country and slept each night in a tent.

Each stop was a story. Each stop was an occasion to meet someone we did not know and to listen to them tell a piece of their life.

II.
That summer, my father passed along the capacity to dream to my brothers and me.  It would be his finest gift to us.  He did so by dreaming out loud: finding the wonder in the ordinary and laying it down with words we could follow. My brothers and I were born at the tail end of that generation that Seth Godin writes about:

When the economy hit its stride after World War II, it led to an explosion in dreams. Kids dreamed of walking on the moon or inventing a new kind of medical device. They dreamed of industry and science and politics and invention, and often, those dreams came true. It wasn’t surprising to get a chemistry set for your ninth birthday—and it was filled not with straightforward recipes, but with tons of cool powders and potions that burst into flame or stank up the entire house.
 
A generation dreamed of writing a bestseller or inventing a new kind of car design or perfecting a dance move.

We look back on that generation with a bit of awe. Those kids could dream. - Section 59. Seth Godin.

III.

Garrowby Hill

I can still remember the night when men first walked on the moon.  I was 10 and it was summer and we were driving home from visiting friends, up and down winding hills with all of us tucked into the Country Squire, passing house after house, one after the next, each lit with the soft glow of a television screen.  Years later I would see David Hockney's Garrowby Hill, and think, "Yes, this is like the road we traveled that night."

It would be the first time I heard Walt Whitman's homage to the perfect silence of stars and the first time I

looked up at the moon and saw it as something not made of cheese and myth. 

"Mary, up there men are walking. Anything is possible," my father would tell me.

IV.
In the basement of the house where I grew up, thousands of miles from the Dublin orphanage where I first lived, was an elaborate chemistry set that sat on top of several large sheets of green spray-painted plywood.  It was a complicated concoction that grew year to year as we each took our turn as alchemist.  It was a time when all things could be reused, reimagined, reinvented.

The discarded appliance box was a fort, a carriage, a rocket.
Sheets drying on a line were spirits to dance with, a tent to crawl beneath, a passageway to the East.
Bottle caps were the currency in a game you newly invented.
A stick of chalk and a sidewalk were the opening to possible worlds.

We were bricoleurs, making do with what was at hand. As such, a thing could not be limited by what another had intended. And perhaps that was the deepest secret I was to learn: Do not limit what you imagine by another's definition. 

V.
Tonight, I want to take solace in the moon.  Hoping for full and settling for what is: first quarter. Looking up, I see that we have traveled so very far from that night when we all walked on the moon, from when kids dreamed big dreams and schools, like home, were wonderfully imperfect. Then there was time for getting lost, for wandering about, for doing nothing.

VI.
Now we are told that bigger and better and more precise reckonings of what children need to know and be able to do have been defined.  Each age is the age of the unimaginable and yet now we have the list of things to know. Everything has been defined for us.

We can purchase the list, the clever frameworks, the myriad of tests, the packaged PD, the scientifically-proven research, the white paper, and with all of it, the secret promise to not be left behind.

But know this: beneath those endless products, we purchase certainty at a cost for we have been given a recipe with the intention that we follow it, precisely.

VII.
I think my father would be sad tonight beneath this quarter moon. A man, such as he, who dreamed would find it hard to breathe in this sterile place that we are forever perfecting, where the stuff of school is a möbius strip of endless intent.

There's no way out, the children whisper.

My father would see that with all the perfection and the rushing about that there is no time for dreaming, no time to wear cardigans, to meet the unexpected traveler, to wonder. 

VIII.
In schools, our children practice being very fast, very first, very certain.  They know there will be a test and then another for they are a möbius strip.  And these tests will tell them their worth, their true measure, and fear not--they will tell us our measure as well.

IX.
"We will measure," the new bards tell us.
They mouth this song without sound.
"Nothing else is possible," they sing.

X.
We are without stories. Instead, we have data.

XI.
The distance between the window in my son's room and the moon feels far tonight. It is late when I lean down and whisper, "You must not forget how to dream. When you dream you open a small hidden door."  I whisper it as he sleeps, an incantation of hope from a mother to her son.  A hope that he might hold up to shield himself from the certainty that frames his waking life.

XII.
Long ago men walked on the moon. Beneath them a daughter held her father's hand and knew all things were possible.  The same light that found me then, finds me tonight.