Manifest Your Destiny

Good Teacher. Bad Student.

I am a good teacher but a hopeless student.

But that ends today, for I have recently given my students an excellent assignment. And I intend to do it. My seniors, in their last month on campus, have been tasked with writing their own manifesto, a document that will elucidate their goals, specify their values and lay claim to their destiny. I too am writing such a document. I do this to model for them, but primarily for myself. The assignment is so good, that I deserved to ask myself the same questions and draft a template for my existence.

I hereby do declare, by the power vested in my by God, the lightning and the universe, that my life will serve the benefit of others. As a teacher, a woman, a healer and a friend, I will bring the lessons I have learned to fruit to nourish others. I will practice what I preach and when I cannot, I will be silent. I will practice kindness and gentleness with myself. Daily, I will nurture my body and my spirit as my greatest treasures; I will lavish myself with loving care that previously was allotted only to dear friends, pets and lovers. I will ask for what I need from others and from the world for I know that asking yields the greatest potential for receiving it. I will live gently on the earth with attention to my choices and their impact. And I will love.

I will be open to and reflective of love in the world, sharing that gift of appreciation and symbiosis. I will embrace the courage to be who I am under all circumstances and under any conditions. From there I will love myself and be able to love all and any in return. With a confident and well-tended heart I will grow the strength to be vulnerable and the willingness to be imperfect in a world of increasing expectation. I will practice devotion, gratitude and kindness. I will practice unyielding appreciation for the gifts, physical and metaphysical, bestowed upon me and earned. And in every way possible I will cultivate and nurture a passion to live gently, a desire to be honest and a practice of curiosity first within myself and then in individuals and societies.

This is my declaration as a student, as a teacher, as a woman, as an artist and a cook and an explorer. This is my Manifesto and it is with this intention that I set out on a year of curiosity, discovery and self-nourishment. But as with every great endeavour it takes time. Like the garden my father planted and his father before him planted, I need to cultivate the soil, select the best seed, plant and tend the young sprout and let nature take its course. I can control a great deal of my destiny but the rest I have to leave in the hands of fate, good hands to be in.   

The story starts here: Love of my life

March 22-2012

I grew up resisting /fighting  the dreams my mother chased. A familiar story .

But after not believing in prince charming, falling for the line that I need a man to take care of me and make me happy and to looking for the love of my life, I came to discover something remarkably unexpected.

Today after retrieving my adopted dog from a 3 day emergency stay at the vet, taking her on a walk after dinner and then wandering to the market for an ice cream cone, I had a moment to sit. As she stared up at me with falsely expectant eyes, waiting for a drop or crumb which I am too meticulous to let fall, I realized that the love of my life already exists, and not as you may be expecting. Although I love her tremendously, this creature, this adoring dog is no the love of my life.

I have traveled and wandered and fled and escaped and wandered and traveled some more to finally have a resting place in the most unlikely of places. But it is in this twist of fated location that I believe that I come to realize that the love of my life is my work, my students, my career, my pursuit of understanding, for myself and the exploration of that learning in others. The love of my life is the people I meet, the humor, curiosity and resilience in youth around the world. They are tremendous; from rural Vermont to urban San Francisco then to Shanghai and on to a sleepy little city in Colombia, that no one has ever heard of.

It is here among these sounds and the people and in this remote and destined location that it has come together. And that I have found the love and the comfort and the satisfaction that I have been looking for.

It does not come on a horse or with a perfect soundtrack. It does not come in a tall, dark or handsome body. It does not come as I had expected and then never expected, it comes slowly and seeps in. Latching on to parts of my soul like a parasitic infection—one that I could never remove, medicate or operate. Nor would I ever want to. It is in this life that the strangest things some.

And it is completely true that this love is not all encompassing and it does not satisfy all my needs… but I don’t think any love should. We all need balance and diversity to maintain a healthy body and mind. So the love and passion I have found in my work inspires me to find more in other parts of my life.

I spend my days with teenagers who are energetic, ridiculous, sponges of eager intellect. They wait and sometimes don’t wait to learn and engage and interact.

They respond to encouragement , nurturing and tough limits and high expectations. They respond to logically explained reasoning and humor in return.

They adapt and they thrive.

The love of my life is in my classroom. The questions, the dance of neurons and the process of looking for answers even when there is no single right answer or dozens.

It is the desire I feel to find the understanding I seek, to help guide and show these open faces how to look for the answers they seek in their own lives.  This passion drives me home in the afternoon. It fuels late night reading and investigation sessions.  It challenges me and nourishes me.  When this kind of intense work should drain a person, I feel motivated and hungry for more.

The neglected intellect I carried around with me through my own educational years is hungry and finally ready to absorb and navigate all those unexplored pathways. Maybe if I had been a better student I would not have the curiosity that now overwhelms me.  I might be satisfied with what I know about the world, but now… now I am ravenous and it is the hunger and the feeding that motivates me. It is the pieces of puzzles that work 3 dimensionally and then more through time and space that allow me to make more and more sense of a less and less straight forward world and age.

Will I ever get married and get the table setting for eight? Will I ever wear a white dress and obsess about flowers or … I don’t even know what. Maybe the passion will only reside in this part of my life. I cannot see past next year. I imagine that year to be very much like this one and similar to last year. In a years time I cannot imagine wanting anything different from another year like this, again. If I do, I am sure I will pursue that direction. But for now, this is it. This is the love of my life and this is what I wake up early for (very literally). This is what keeps me up at night. It brings me home in the afternoon and it (and the dog & cat) that keep me warm while I sleep.

I learn.

I wake up to learn more and the impulse to share that… and explore the intricacies and complexities of the world along side my students is enough.

Maybe they will only remember a fraction. A sliver. Maybe they will only the same amount that I remember from high school, which is not much. But I used to say that more than the content I teach, I wanted my students to learn how to learn so they can learn and pursue what THEY are passionate about. Other than that, learning to be good to each other is all I can hope for. If they have a good time and they remember that, then we are ahead of the game.

I learn so much from them. We are engaged in an exchange of ideas and it is in this that we are equal participants in curiosity.  

I may well be a better teacher than story teller, but I truly believe that they are one in the same. The stories I tell all day long are the constructions of history that I have gathered and gleaned. They are the mixture of all the sources I have ever encountered and the belief structure of my parents and influential friends. The history I teach is the history I have lived and the story I tell is as much a part of me and anything else.

For example, I could no easier extract my DNA from the class I teach than travel back in time on a field trip.

Who I am is entwined with the story I tell, the classes I teach. Some would clearly and justifiably argue that teachers should be impartial and that there is no room for perspective and opinion in history. I will argue the negative, in that the  danger in history is believing that it is just that, neutral, unbiased and therefore fact and indisputable. I challenge my students to form their own perspectives, by illuminating mine. I expose them to ideas of bias and interpretation, for history can be unwritten, rewritten and without a keen eye to identify the multitude of messages in the “facts” that we are learning we are doomed to become  victims of them. This is the antithesis of the reason I teach.

It is much less about what my students think and believe and more about that they are critically analyzing the world around them and the information they encounter. It is not about agreeing with me. In fact it is much more interesting when there is disagreement, it is however about engaging and evaluating. This is what makes us ……… 

A story deep inside

I have a story deep inside me. It moves like a hibernating dragon.  Slowly breathing in a roar. Randomly twitching like a sleeping dog chasing a rabbit through Andalucian dream fields. And then going silent until it is forgotten. But this story, like a body bag, drags behind me when I travel, sits on my chest as I sleep and whispers in my ear when I am eyes are closed. It tells me lies and for so long I have been listening without realizing that it is time to break up with this story. It needs to be set loose in greener pastures.

When I run it runs faster. When I sleep it watches me. When I dream it thwarts me.

So this story is not of me or for me. Like a cancer it has been thriving and resides inside my rib cage. It is time to start cutting and scrapping.

The only problem is that it means I have to go back to all those places I left and swore never to return to.