SOL16: Seeking Lazarus

I. 

I've been listening to Oprah and Deepak's Getting Unstuck: Creating a Limitless Life. This is a 21-day mediation experience that is happening now.  Each day Oprah and then Deepak provide some centering thoughts related to helping listeners get unstuck by connecting with untapped creativity and then providing time for meditation. Each session lasts for about 20 minutes. The purpose is to help uncover how to compose a creative life through some centering thoughts and meditation. Since, I have come home from France, I have been listening. The focus for the first week is on how to be in the present moment. In week two, the focus is on choosing expansiveness, letting go of the past, and living creatively. In week three, sharing the spirit of creative awareness with others is the focus.  

There were several things I heard during the first week that I especially wanted to remember--ideas I appreciated and yet quarreled with.  On day 3, Deepak said: 

"Stuckness keeps us from accessing our creative potential, which is our birthright. To begin a more creative way of life some basic points are important. First stop comparing today to yesterday. Look upon every day as a new world, because in truth it is. Only are stuckness makes it old."

I found the idea of not comparing today to yesterday to be a bit alarming. I can't think of a day that has gone by where I have not compared my days with Rob to the absence of him in my life now.  As I listened to Deepak speak, I thought that neither he nor Oprah could have experienced what I am experiencing and so his directive to stop comparing today to yesterday must surely be for other situations, not mine. 

The more I listened, I began to realize that often I was agreeing, but I also found that I would qualify what had been said when it might require me to live more deliberately and move on from the loss of Rob--to not hold myself in some waiting pattern as if Rob was coming home. And this idea of waiting for Rob to come home made me stop and ask, What is it I would have him do when he arrived? I had no immediate answer.  And so I told myself that the ideas professed by Oprah and Deepak were quite sound and that these ideas did not always apply to me. For example on Day 4, Oprah quoted Eckhart Tolle:

"Life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness. How do you know this is the experience you need? Because this is the experience you're having at the moment."

I thought, Yes, that can be true, but not for me now. Not at this time. Surely these words are not meant for someone who has suffered the loss I have. Surely this tragedy is not a help in any way. 

I conflated not comparing today with yesterday with requiring me to forget all about Rob. I also thought that some experiences, such as the death of a husband, are too tragic to ever serve as object lessons. Somehow my words began to ring a bit hollow and doubt entered. I began to question if perhaps, just perhaps, some of what Oprah and Deepak were saying might also apply to me even as I resisted the two ideas. It wasn't until I got to day 7 that I realized that living brilliantly as Rob asked me to do requires first and foremost, that I live and be responsible for my life. 

Yes, live.

On day 7, Oprah asked,

What makes one person react to bad news with grace and dignity, while another person experiences the same news with a sense of hopelessness, resentment, or anger? Why does one person get stuck while another uses the moment to make changes and reorient   his or her way of being in the world?  Our perceptions. Our perceptions paint our personal realities...As the author of your life, you can rewrite the story by changing your perceptions. That's a key to getting unstuck...

Years ago on a classroom wall, I quoted a line from Hamlet I found pertinent. Hamlet is explaining to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern about the relativity of thought.  Hamlet concludes,  "...there is nothing either good or/bad, but thinking makes it so." 

Hmm. 

Perhaps there were lessons here I needed to heed.

II.

Saying out loud that living, brilliantly or otherwise, requires me to be present in my life is a step towards wholeness. 

A big step. 

I must be responsible for my life. I realize that I have wanted Rob to be responsible-- from the grave--for my happiness. Even as he lived, he was not responsible for my life, my happiness although I have surely placed that responsibility in his hands these last few months.

I have forgotten that happiness and contentment are not the absence of grief.  For the longest time I have been waiting for my dead husband to return and remedy my grief.  I have been waiting for my own personal Lazarus to arise and take this responsibility from my hands.

But being responsible for another person's happiness is not a definition of love. Love is far less selfish. And though Rob loved me, he was neither able nor responsible for my happiness. That rested in my own hands.  It rests there presently and no amount of wishing can diminish that truth.

Grief cannot be remedied. It is not diminished by the number of activities done, the trips made, the sacrifices accounted, the good deeds done, or the events attended. None of these make a critical difference when it comes to healing. Rather, healing is determined by the perceptions I hold regarding the relationship between Rob's death and the quality of my life.

Only I am responsible for my life. 


III. 

Collage made from pages altered by Citra Solv
(M.A. Reilly, July 2016)

Earlier today I was playing around with pages I had altered through Citra Solv and I made a collage. The main figure reminded me of Beowulf and I thought about a line by Leo Tolstoy from War and Peace when General Kutuzov says, "...there is nothing stronger than patience and time, they will do it all" (book 10, chapter 15 ). 

Patience and time. Healing requires both. Knowing I am responsible for my life is a big step. It is a big step that I will surely forget. 

Yes, forget.  

My intentions are often larger than what I can manage. A week from now, perhaps even a day and it will be as if I never wrote these words and I will need to rediscover them again.

And again.

Ahead of me are lots of rehearsals where I will remember the gift of responsibility and accept the ambiguity that accompanies it. 

I will remember and forget well before I more fully author my life.

#SOL16: The Jar Pandora Opened

the necklace...

I.

I'm waiting for coffee when the barista says to me, "I like your necklace."
I tell her thanks as she fills the cup with hot water, finishing my Americano. When she hands me my drink, she laughs and says once again, "I really, really like your necklace." 
"Thanks so much. It was a gift from my husband."
"He has great taste," she adds.  "Tell him I said so."

I smile a bit understanding there is no way for her to know that I will not be telling Rob anything. He gave me the necklace for our 24th wedding anniversary.

I thought we weren't going to be extravagant, I would later say to him, knowing we had agreed to not buy gifts.
I saw it and knew you would love it. Who knows where we will be next year. Enjoy it. I remember him saying this and both of us laughing and later beginning to plan a trip to Portugal for our 25th wedding anniversary, a trip we could not be able to make this past December.

II.

It's been a month since Rob died and I find that thoughts of my husband filter through my mind constantly.  Memories abound and recalling him, us, then--fills a good portion of my day. Triggers also abound, like the young girl in the coffee shop this morning. These jolt me as I am not anticipating the shock that happens. And how could I not be overwhelmed with thoughts about Rob? He is not only within me, but across the last three decades he has given shape to person I have become and am becoming.  Breathing is a trigger.

Love shapes us and now I know so too does loss.

III.

As I write this, Devon and I are struggling so much and watching my son hurt, undoes me.

When my mom died I felt like a weight was crushing me and I didn't know if I would ever feel like me again, I tell Devon tonight.  I can tell you that those feelings of despair and sadness and disbelief fade. The pain can still feel as acute, but the duration is far, far less. I now think of my mom and most of the time there is no slice, no pain, just love. 

I have no confidence left, he tells me. 
I get how you might feel that way. My confidence is shaky too. Our world has been upended and it's so hard to get oriented again--to have to be vulnerable again. You will though. I don't doubt that. You will get through this. Talking with a grief counselor will help. That takes courage and confidence.

When we got back from our mini-vacation on Sunday night we were too tired and it was too late to feel the loss of Rob.  But by Monday morning, the reality of Rob's death and how his death has temporarily rendered our lives so empty and untethered rolled over each of us and knocked us about in ways we had not anticipated.

We each loved Rob so greatly, so completely that a mini vacation does not fill that loss, in many ways it amplifies it. We woke up Monday to a house that was painfully empty.

IV.

I don't sleep through the night. I am restless, somewhat alert, waiting for some new horror to happen. My dreams are waking ones.

What's next? I wonder.  

Is there cancer growing within me? 

Is Devon okay? 

Will the sky fall, again?

And so when I notice that I am slowing down, that my interests beyond the walls of my home feel less vital, less necessary--I first think a lack of sustained sleep may be why. But that's not the reason, or at least not the whole reason.  I have always loved the work I do and now I notice that I feel less motivated to do anything. I can't imagine remaining in education.

I can't imagine.

I feel closer somehow to Rob when I'm home--where he was last alive. Those last weeks of his life were deeply intimate and insular and I crave both.  I want the past and I want to wrap it around me even as I know that it is more like William Carlos Williams's dirty mantle that he writes about in The Desert Music than some form of solace. The past is a corpse.

Williams writes,

from The Desert Music, p. 109.

V.

Now, I am filled with an immense and heavy sadness--the likes of which I have not know prior and oddly I also sense a slim ray of hope within.

I am the jar Pandora opened and then resealed.

You may recall that after Pandora released the plagues and maladies, diseases and evils into the world, hope remained at the bottom of that jar. She put the lid back on keeping hope within.

Hope resides within and though it feels faint, I know it is there. Hope is the poem that Williams said must be made.  It is the present that always beckons.

Unscripted Moments in A Writing Class: Learning from Papi's Cologne

I.

This morning in a fifth grade class, I read aloud a writing piece I had begun about the death of my father a decade ago and his penchant for wearing black socks with sandals. It was a difficult piece to read out loud, unfinished and raw, and I told the children this as I struggled to read.

A bit later in the class, a child told me that her writing piece, like mine, was a difficult one.
"How so?" I asked.
She motioned to her notebook where I could see pencil and blue pen markings all over a page, including lines of print crunched into the margins.  We had talked about rereading with a pen in hand and I could see that she had done so.  She said that it was a struggle to get on paper what she wasn't sure about.  I might have sighed at that moment.  I listened as she read aloud a narrative about memory and how at night when she is alone in her bed, when her home is quiet, she recalls the smell of her Papi's cologne and this triggers her to think about the man who no longer lives with her.

She's struggling to get the words just right and this I think is the more important lesson to learn than the actual writing.  We have been exploring narrative techniques and no technique prepares the writer for the struggle to say what must get said.

I listen as she rereads again, noticing this time she has also drawn her bedroom with herself in bed and a thought cloud above her that contains a man.

"It's a difficult story to tell and it is brave one for you to try." I say this to her, feeling the inadequacy of my words while knowing such words from me are most likely unnecessary.  She's flirting with the power that comes from telling something true. She is an agent acting.


II.

I am learning as I work each day with the children and their teachers that in writing workshop where there are no units of study to be employed or scripts to be memorized, or prescribed evidence to be mined--that the present is mostly all we have. And, there is no grander thing than the present unfolding before us as we make it.

It is in the making that deep learning takes hold.

III.

Later in the day, well into the evening, my husband finds me and tells me about a protracted lesson for seventh graders he has read in preparation for some work with a teacher. The teacher is working from a script and the kids need to debate (using sentence starters) an action the speaker in a poem took.  The students' task is to "find evidence to support or refute the narrator's (not speaker) decision to take a specific road" in Frost's "The Road Not Taken."  They need to ponder (and of course find obligatory evidence) about whether the speaker's turn up the untrodden road was a good or bad decision (I kid you not).

I cringe, thinking about Billy Collins's poem, "Introduction to Poetry," where readers want to tie a poem to a chair "and torture a confession out of it."

Best get out the rope, I tell my husband.

IV.

Scripted lessons, especially jam-packed ones, leave little room for the unexpected, the unplanned, the unimagined, or the turn down an untrodden road.  There simply is no room left for anything novel to arise--such as your Papi's cologne--as time ceases to be about what is emerging and instead presupposes an epic construct.  Scripted classrooms are worlds where the action has already been performed.  The task in such narrow, poorly lit places is to mime.

I think of these scenarios as ones that lead to entropy--where the available energy in a room is sucked out quicker then it can be replaced as students dutifully (or not) complete the assignments.  I mean, really, how can new breath even happen in an epic world?    I think of Maxine Greene who wisely told us:

"We need to recognize that the events that make up aesthetic experiences are events that occur within and by means of the transactions with our environment that situate us in time and space” (p. 130).

Us situated in time and space by means of the transactions we have with our environment?  Not in a scripted classroom.  Already made stuff being enacted over and over in thousands of classrooms defy the physics.

Surely, we might want more for our learners and for ourselves. Surely we might want the satisfaction that comes when the child holds his or her power and pen in hand.

Thirteen: Simon's Story

I was so moved when I read this chapter about Simon a four-year-old child who had been labeled autistic. The text was written by Vivian Paley and recorded in her book, A Child's Work: The Importance of Fantasy Play. It is a most remarkable story about human connections, the possibility of story, and the the need to see beyond labels.  It always irks me when a child is referred to as x ( you can fill in the x) as if the sum of the person could be located as a single descriptor. I think of this often when I hear educators refer to children as bilingual or special education. I wonder if labels don't work to limit what we observe and our capacity to come to know, and in doing so allow us to substitute a false belief that what we think we know represents the whole of it. 

I was reading Tom Altepeter's (@tomaltepeter)recent blog post, Intercultural Responsiveness before and the two pieces of writing seemed to reinforce the belief in how important it is to be in the now--to not bring with me a set of already established assumptions or rules.

Both writers inspire me to be a bit better than I normally am. I have recorded the whole chapter as I thought it an important story inside an important book.  The link to the book is included.  On Kindle, the full book costs a little less than $6.00.  Well worth the cost.

From Paley, Vivian Gussin (2005-05-27). A Child's Work: The Importance of Fantasy Play. University of Chicago Press - A. Kindle Edition.

thirteen 

simon’s story 

Jaime’s use of fantasy play and formal dramatics to bridge our language differences was straightforward and clear. But Simon, another four-year-old whom I met the year before in an Indiana Head Start center, has a more difficult task. He has been labeled autistic and it seems doubtful that he will join the storytelling activities I have come to demonstrate.

The children know Simon well, however, though he paces the room as if he doesn’t see them. “What is Simon doing?” I ask Carly, who is about to dictate a story to me. “He’s a zoo man,” she says. Her tone implies that nothing is strange about the way Simon performs his role.

We watch Simon circle the room, punctuating his orbit with tiny cries and murmurs. His destination is a corner table under which a Lego zoo set awaits him, its plastic animals standing in a row. Once there, Simon crawls quickly to the animals and begins moving them across the tray, whispering to each one until they are all in place on the other side. Then he repeats his turn around the room and the process begins again.

“I think Simon is talking to the animals,” I comment, and Carly nods. “Walk walk,” she says. “He’s tellin’ them to walk.”

There would be much for Simon to observe as he passes around and through his classmates’ activities during “free-play,” if he slowed down and looked. In the blocks, a spaceship is going up, and, next to it, train tracks tunnel under a math table and swing around the doll corner, where a noisy baby bangs on a crib yelling “Mama!” Family members come running, draped in layers of dress-ups and talking into Lego pieces held up to their faces.

Near the sink, children at easels paint large round faces while their neighbors coil long snakes on the clay boards. “This snake is poison,” a boy warns one of the painters. “I’m makin’ him a nest, okay?” the girl responds, painting over the smiling face on her paper with broad purple strokes.

Everywhere are the recognizable scenes and sounds of children making and doing and pretending together. A “Chutes and Ladders” game is crowded with players and onlookers; two tables of children negotiate the use of several rolls of masking tape for their drawings, paper cuttings, and armaments; a child at the computer receives advice from those waiting their turns. Simon weaves through them all and stops for none. His own activity demands his entire attention.

Anthony is next on the story list. “Mine is Dracula,” he tells me and I print Dracula at the top of the page. “I wonder if Simon likes Dracula stories?” I ask. “Probably he does,” is his reply and launches into his story. “This is Dracula and there is a dinosaur and they don’t bite each other because they’re friends.” I can’t help smiling. It’s all about friendship: the play and the stories and the talk. But where does Simon fit in?

After several more stories, the children join me as I outline a stage with one of the rolls of masking tape. It may be the ripping of the tape that startles Simon, or the number of children crossing his path at once, but suddenly he is in our midst, stumbling through those seated along the edge of the tape. Back and forth he wanders, waving his arms until, with a series of shrieks, he returns to his appointed rounds.

“This is Holly’s story,” I say, holding up her paper. “She’s a bird at the top of a tree and she’ll need someone to be the tree, the mother bird, and a fish in the pond.” The actors are chosen in the order in which they are seated, and the story-play begins. I get no further than “The baby bird flies to the tree . . .” when Simon again bursts on to the stage, grabbing Holly’s legs while she continues to flap her wings, barely keeping upright.

“Simon, would you like to be a tree?” I ask anxiously, knowing there will be no response. Holly says calmly, “Simon is different.” She places her hand on his head to steady herself and steps back into her story. She is not annoyed by Simon’s behavior, nor are the other storytellers who follow. The actors carefully step over and around Simon, who now lies on his back moving his fingers across his eyes.

During recess, I remain in the room copying the children’s stories into my journal. Silently Simon reenters the room and carries his zoo tray to the empty stage. I watch as he lines up the animals and I sit beside him on the rug. “Walk walk walk,” he instructs the bear and I add, “The bear walks over the hill.”

Simon stiffens for a moment and glances in my direction. Then he moves the elephant through the blue patch of water and up the hill. His hand stays on the elephant as he waits for me to speak. “Walk walk,” I say. “The elephant walks over the hill.” By the time the children run in, Simon and I have together walked and talked to the lion, the giraffe, and the chimpanzee.

“Why is Simon doing his story now?” several children ask. “He brought his animals to the stage,” I say. “They are walking over the hill.”

The next morning, “doing stories” is one of many choices during free-play time. The story list fills up and I have no time to watch for Simon. Zoey, the second storyteller, requires my concentration. Her speech is hard for me to decipher and the only character in her story I am certain of is a “ki-ee-ca” (kittycat), because it meows. Fortunately the children at the table are familiar with her pronunciations and translate for me. “Can I be the frog?” Toby asks when the story is done, but Simon squeezes in beside Zoey before she can respond.

“Walk walk walk,” he begins, placing the zoo tray on top of Zoey’s story. He leans against us as he walks the bear to the top of the hill. “The bear walks over the hill,” I say. Next come the elephant, lion, giraffe, and chimpanzee, and Simon and I act out his zoo story just as we did the day before. But this time he adds the wolf and he smiles.

In chorus the children at the table recite, “Walk walk walk. The wolf walks over the hill.” Zoey’s voice is the loudest.

Paley, Vivian Gussin (2005-05-27). A Child's Work: The Importance of Fantasy Play (pp. 66-69). University of Chicago Press - A. Kindle Edition.