Author: tedoned
Uncle Jan? In A Miff?
Uncle Jan (not pictured) is miffed. “Too much talk," he says.
Of Amsterdam’s ten best cups of coffee, the one Bruno makes is surely in the top two. Jan, a regular since Bruno opened up three years ago, would prefer to sit out his early morning, late-life cappuccino in quiet or, at worst, in conversation in his native tongue. Though I am the sole figure who chats up Bruno now with my too much talk, the number from which Jan wishes to hear and so be forced to hear himself over is closer to zero.
Eighty-six, Jan spent last week in Mallorca, diving every day. In his previous life he paid one of Hemingway’s bar tabs. (Hemingway paid it back after publishing The Old Man And The Sea.) When it gets too warm he suggests whiskey on the rocks. All this Bruno knows--and believes true--though he does not know Jan’s last name.
A year ago Jan got sick. Alone. Not young. Not easy.
Bruno posted Jan’s status on the Facebook group of his shop. The regulars took note and took action. A medical student went with Jan to the hospital three times to help him make sense of the forms and procedures, another sat in on consultations. Someone met him at the hospital after surgery with a taxi and others crewed up to make sure Jan had groceries at home as he recuperated.
The village took care of Jan, just as it should, the people did their job because Bruno does his.
(Bruno, fyi, used to do office stuff and is much happier now earning much less.)
As the old man with a legitimate old man gripe about expats like me making too much noise, Jan plays his role with maximal and steady endurance. If today he is in a miff, it is just a joke, since he otherwise never fails to talk with any who join him, speaking in English or, if you like, Sweedish. And his departing smile comes with the same happy effort you see in the stuttered walk that gets him around the hood. He could choose to sit at home or ignore you. But he does neither.
As fine as both Bruno and Jan are, nothing here is unique or unreplicable. They are types. The store and the owner, the place that mills patrons into neighbors, the neighbor who will not get ground down by the system, the system made of connections that depend on something other than impressive resumes or big data or extreme vetting.
Might we teach that? Teach the system we want to see in the world?
Dear Ivy,
The business model of elite-ed squelches learning and leadership.
In opposition to the squelch (and with "Ivy" as a placeholder for "private education") I offer these notes of criticism and counsel.
I offer them with nothing but love and gratitude.
ERM
Dear Teachers: Please, I Beg of Thee
Please,
Dear teachers . . .
I beg of you. Try this tomorrow, or the next day, or sometime . . .
A horizontal piece of paper. Give that to the kids and have them write 'a book.'
The book. A book. The words that went into books . . . 500 years of spreading info and upgrading the status-quo of the static brain. Keystone to community, standard-bearer for time well spent in solitude, 500 years as info source #1 and entertainment central. That's not a bad run.
As a frame, the frame of a book has cred. That's my point.
And a frame? You can imagine anything into a frame. A lesson. A writing.
Write a book every day or four days a week or on some kind of routine. The back cover can be the meta/blurb and the front the title/thesis/fun line. Spin this however works for your crew. Put 253 words or a paragraph or a drawing or five minutes (or fifteen) in the two inside pages.
Churn 'em out, these books, you and your class. 500 years: The idea, the sentence, pounded by key of zinc, pressed to paper with pen or ink.
Let not the screen convince you a thing is made of pixels, however space age the appeal. Give not up the ghost of what you do to those silicon devils.
Let your students think themselves writers only when what they do is tangible and real, like the echo of genius, truth, beauty, and wisdom.
Dear Educators,
Somewhere Coach John Wooden says you should do two kind things each day, and do them anonymously.
If your job--provost, headmaster, teacher--is to design the program, make the schedule work, or navigate the class that moves people forward in life, teach them to do the above too, as best you can. And do the same yourself. And make it fun to do.
And thanks for your work.
Dear New Age Ministers (In Pain)
True Slade asks if I can I write something towards the pain of the work in the new church, the new theater, the new school, of carrying the work forward.
I can try.
Have you read lots of Emerson?
Me neither. Only a few essays. But those I know are sermons on the flat.
In one he says this:
Our life looks trivial, and we shun to record it. Men seem to have learned of the horizon the art of perpetual retreating and reference. `Yonder uplands are rich pasturage, and my neighbor has fertile meadow, but my field,’ says the querulous farmer, `only holds the world together.’
Do you get the wry joke? I am nobody. They are all better than me. I labor the poor land, the plot gone fallow, and so I do no more than hold the world in place.
Pain? Of course. Because you retreat to fear.
Because everyone else sparkles with some gift you must reference.
Because your plot might only suffice this horizon.
Like all those to whom you minister, you forget to minister to yourself, to take care of yourself.
Do your job in tiny steps, you suggest.
Laugh, you say.
Let go, you advise.
But you do not say it to yourself or do not hear it when you do.
With your congregants--for them and because of them--you dream down the path of possibility. Down there, through bodily aches, after all causes of distress and because of community you paint the sign of hope, of desire, of life with meaning.
But with you and for you and as you, you go blind or pretend not to see. No painter's brush, no sign.
"We teach what we need to learn,” says a friend who is never in the classroom, never at the pulpit, and is, as you can hear, a minister nonetheless.
Do you ever skip?
Dance?
Pootle away a day?
How often do you inhabit the joy of movement as naturally as your congregants inhabit worry?
Unencumbered you juggle the hot coal of should, are the shop-keep who battles the generic and churns patrons into neighbors. You give away hearth.
Unencumber yourself and focus on the work.
The world is full of ideas and abstractions and people addicted to screens.
Can you offer a brief storm of texture to them? A shelter for their attention? A few minutes their self might connect to some other self?
And then remember too that Mary Oliver says: "You do not have to be good."
Sometimes your brain is on fire and you can’t sleep. Some mornings you are a croaker and can’t get out of bed. But out there, with people who seek better ways to commune, to live, and to be is where you work.
But wait . . . that turns out to be hard to arrange. Little farmer you had a few workshops about making love to the day and now people say it should be a whole thing, the thing you should "do."
Or not so secretly this has always been your work.
Where, now, should your attention be put? Public speaking? Spreadsheets? Facebook? A vision? The market? When did you become another Steve Jobs wanna be? And when, oh when, will it be just you and your Dojo? Congregants smiling at the window, knocking on the door? Entering broken and leaving whole, your magic reliable, your self-satisfaction keeled to even?
Never. The fear, as Seth Godin says, is with us always. So invite it in and dance with it.
Do not reinvent the wheel you will be told. Right. Wheel re-inventing and tractionless-ness go together and you can only minister for so long spinning in the mud.
Yet without time slipping and sliding, covered in earth, you can't much minister at all.
So a little wheel reinvention will be inevitable.
Because the wheel you ultimately find--whatever its shape, however much you borrow it or create it anew--functions when you do. After the slips and slides and mud, what you let go of or let out into the world or choose to accept will gnarls into earth, become a minor roll towards true you. Call it a revolution. Follow that.
You may need to go back, to remember.
You were practicing Kundalini in that field in Ireland and it was you who led as the breath and the body of those gathered with you melded into the green. It was magic. Remember?
Sharing tea and talking pedagogy with those teachers at the conference, the ones who saw you as lamp cast forward? Recall that?
Or was that you, speaking in the coffee house on Sunday with friends and friends of friends who all but refused to leave, their conversations made child-like because of what you had sparked?
That moment that made you think you could serve? Where did that go? That moment that put the dance in your toes?
What was the image you had then? Can you draw it know? Call your lover and say it clearly: This is what I see.
All pain is misalignment: of spine, of schedule, of purpose with life. Are you still in line with the self that felt the work as calling to your soul?
In some not entirely private fantasy you are a fire-starter, a wizard, a spiritual surgeon . . . a shepherd of energy others want.
Is it what mom and dad expected? Probably not.
Is it what the world sanctions and understands? Doubtful.
Is minister the right word to put on your business card? Nope.
Does you pitch convince as much as you would like. Not yet.
But there you are, offering balm and connection, counsel and patience, bringing a little decency into our day. Thanks.
Now write "persevere" in blue neon and flip the switch on and forever.
Now write humility in font size 1000 on an imaginary note and pin it the sky you look at each day.
Now take an embarrassingly small step, as Marc Zegans call them, towards true you.
Return to art or beauty or nature.
Here's Mary Oliver again, in her great poem Gravel, about the fear of death.
Are you afraid?
Somewhere a thousand swans are flying
through the winter’s worst storm.
They are white and shining, their black beaks
open a little, the red tongues flash.
Now, and now, and now, and now their heavy wings
rise and fall as they slide across the sky.
Now and now and now and now. That's you.
Conversation that ambles without interruption from or focus on the world of silicon is all but extinct.
Beauty is everywhere trumped by efficiency.
And because of the times and what we lack and all we miss we need you.
Face to face to face, beyond the click and scroll, floundering about as you hold the space--that's you--a soul porous or open enough to talk of care and kindness, to crank the engine of good.
The world can afford nothing less, your pain a true and required and ongoing tax, one that signals your hard at it, at work that matters.
At the end of the essay about the field and the horizon Emerson says this:
Never mind the ridicule, never mind the defeat: up again, old heart! . . . there is victory yet for all justice; and the true romance which the world exists to realize, will be the transformation of genius into practical power.
Practical power means you make the better world you envision. Yes?
Victory for all justice means true romance realized at a global scale. Yes?
Transformation of genius means to never mind the defeats? Yes?
Yes.
Shall you commence? Shall you continue? Yes.
Where's your heart? Now, and now and now?
Up, again. Now and now and now. That's how you hold yourself together.
And the world.
