Walking in December Fog

Images made today while out walking.

Barn in Orchard (Warwick, NY, 2013)

Blue (Ringwood NJ, 2013)

A Road and Some Trees (Ringwood, NJ 2013)

Flight (West Milford, NJ, 2013)

Orchard in Fog (Warwick, NY, 2013)

It's Always About Light

What makes photography a strange invention is that its primary raw materials are light and time. - John Berger 

Light makes photography. Embrace light. Admire it. Love it. But above all, know light. George Eastman

No Simulacrum (Ringwood, NJ 2008)

Faith on the Street (Dublin, Ireland, 2008)

Night I (Ringwood, NJ, 2009)

Samhain's Fire (Morristown, NJ, 2010)

The Watcher (Newburgh, NY, 2010)

Moonrise Over the Atlantic (Rockport, Maine, 2012)

Buildings (Montepulciano, Italy 2013)

Winter Night (Ringwood NJ, 2013)

Night Study  (Sloatsburg, NY 2013)

Mining A Notebook from 2008

This is a page from a notebook of mine, that I wrote on Jan. 20 in 2008.  I had this old notebook out as I prepared to work with different groups of educators. This image of the church door is one I made in Stamullen, Ireland--where I was born.  There, I was named Olivia Muldoon.  In rereading the notebook entry, I was taken by the phrase: "A door--partially open."

The entry below, I penned on my birthday, Nov. 19.  This entry begins another notebook.  I find that I am fascinated by partially opened doors, multiverses, William James, and the slippages between universes that some days feels so possible, so probable.

November 19, 2013

A door--partially opened?

I. 

Perhaps this sense of partiality is as it always is when you try to go home. At best, you know it as a door, partially opened. A partial welcome.  Even old Tom Wolfe knew you can't go home, again.  So why on this night is the partially open door so very provocative? Perhaps such musing of home is even more a conundrum when the home you seek is one you never actually inhabited.  

We are never really whole.

II.

Driving at night, listening in the dark as Rob is on about parallel universes. Just out of reach, parallel lives are happening.  Hold out your hand, I think, and touch the cold window, touch the darkness knowing any number of hands shaped like mine are touching the coolness too.  Who are we there? Travelers through a partial doorway?  Did we each leave Ireland?  Did not one of us stay that possible journey?  Are we any better for it?

III.

The English Countryside (Reilly, iPhone, 2013)

In William James's essay (1895), Is Life Worth Living?, he coined the word, multiverse--expressing the complexity and coexistence of good and evil.  This is what he had to say:

Truly, all we know of good and duty proceeds from nature; but none the less so all we know of evil. Visible nature is all plasticity and indifference,--a moral multiverse, as one might call it, and not a moral universe. To such a harlot we owe no allegiance; with her as a whole we can establish no moral communion; and we are free in our dealings with her several parts to obey or destroy, and to follow no law but that of prudence in coming to terms with such other particular features as will help us to our private ends. If there be a divine Spirit of the universe, nature, such as we know her, cannot possibly be its _ultimate word_ to man. Either there is no Spirit revealed in nature, or else it is inadequately revealed there; and (as all the higher religions have assumed) what we call visible nature, or _this_ world, must be but a veil and surface-show whose full meaning resides in a supplementary unseen or _other_ world.

Physicists reclaimed the term during the last century to posit the idea of multiple possible universes.

The multiverse (or meta-universe, metaverse) is the hypothetical set of multiple possible universes (including the historical universe we consistently experience) that together comprise everything that exists: the entirety of space, time, matter, and energy as well as the physical laws and constants that describe them. (from here.)

IV.

Such brooding thoughts tonight.  

Something to Think About Regarding Time

Bowler (Dublin, 2008)

“Humans see time as a straight line. It’s like putting notches on a long straight stick. The notch here is the future, the one on this side is the past, and the present is this point right here. Do you understand?” 

“I think so.” 

“But actually time isn’t a straight line. It doesn’t have a shape. In all senses of the term, it doesn’t have any form. But since we can’t picture something without form in our minds, for the sake of convenience we understand it as a straight line. At this point, humans are the only ones who can make that sort of conceptual substitution.” 

“But maybe we are the ones who are wrong.” 

Tengo mulled this over. “You mean we may be wrong to see time as a straight line?” 

No response. 

“That’s a possibility. Maybe we’re wrong and the crow is right. Maybe time is nothing at all like a straight line. Perhaps it’s shaped like a twisted doughnut. But for tens of thousands of years, people have probably been seeing time as a straight line that continues on forever. And that’s the concept they based their actions on. And until now they haven’t found anything inconvenient or contradictory about it. So as an experiential model, it’s probably correct.”

Murakami, Haruki (2011-10-25). 1Q84 (pp. 625-626). Random House, Inc.. Kindle Edition. 

Independent Reading in Grade 4

Video from vimeo.

Intentional Independent Reading - Intermediate from Salem-Keizer Public Schools on Vimeo.

Being the Teacher: A Few Thoughts

Want (M.A. Reilly, 2009)

I've been thinking about what it takes for us to be really fine teachers for the children and teens we teach. Frankly anything less is simply not good enough. For the last two months, my colleagues and I have been working in a variety of schools often co-teaching or in some cases taking the lead by modeling how we plan, teach, revise, and respond to students.  To be sure, we work with many incredible teachers and it is a privilege to learn with and from them.  But we also work with others who are not fine teachers--the ones that the students deeply need.  Some  of the teachers we work with seem to have lost their way.

I am reminded while watching a really super intermediate grade teacher work that teaching well requires a commitment beyond what one thinks one can do and know.  Really fine teaching is edgy, unknowable in some primary ways as it happens in the present.  In such classrooms, emergence is perhaps the only constant leaving teachers to continuously work hard reading/misreading/rereading while on their feet.   Against this absence of actually knowing, is planning--those rehearsals we have as we assemble possible classes in our minds. We know this by the voices we imagine as we plan.    We hear ourselves saying, X and students saying, Y and on and on and we follow these possible conversational crumbs to ends that will not be realized.  Nonetheless, this rehearsing is rather critical.  Really fine teachers rehearse, fully knowing that the life of the learning will take turns and will be disrupted in ways that are difficult to know or follow.  Even though the learning will get somewhat away from us,  great planning helps teaching to be more grounded.  Teaching well requires acknowledging the tension between the possible learning we rehearsed and the actual learning we can't quite fully name.

Teaching well requires response.  It saddens me when I see 1, 5, 10 and more teachers collect student work and not respond or return it.  Nary a happy face, even.  It is as if these inked pages once collected fall into black holes--never to be returned.  In places with persistent failure, students seem to act as if this absence of response is a norm to be expected.  This should be unacceptable, not because administrators say so, but because we know so.  Responding with care and intelligence is a cornerstone to teaching.

Teaching well requires that we remain curious, teachable, and kind.  Wondering why a child has said or done something keeps us in the present, theorizing. Being curious about things beyond the school enriches our teaching life.  Our passions and interests are often a type of professional learning that are not directly connected to who or what we teach and yet can greatly inform both.

Out Past the Sun: 5 Walks in Woods

Walking in woods...

Woods V (M.A. Reilly 2013)

Come—I’ll trace you one final autumn,and you can trace your last homecoming
into the snow or the sun.

 - Annie Finch, "Final Autumn"

Woods I (M.A. Reilly 2013)

This morning, it felt like Sunday.
The heavens did their part
By casting no shadow along the boardwalk
Or the row of vacant cottages,
Among them a small church
With a dozen gray tombstones huddled close
As if they, too, had the shivers. 

- Charles Simic "Late September"

Woods II  (M.A. Reilly 2013)

Woods IV (M.A. Reilly 2013)

Woods III (M.A. Reilly 2013)

"O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being.
Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing."

-  Percy Bysshe Shelley