“To restore passion to the classroom or to excite it in classrooms where it has never been, professors must find again the place of eros within ourselves and together allow the mind and body to feel and know desire.” -bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom

                I’m thinking about the possibility of passion, desire and delight inside the classroom, and near the classroom in other education spaces. Of course hooks doesn’t mean “eros” as in (only) sexuality. She means — well, it’s Chapter 13 in Teaching to Transgress, and I’ll call it a lift and a want and a yes of the heart, mind, and body. Reading hooks, I feel that passion, that possibility of engaging with each other as we become ourselves and become a community. That feeling is rare in most of my reading/studying/writing. I could wonder why, but instead, right now, I’m remembering.
                Remember when you were showering and a question came to you, a how or a what about, and the question washed with the water across your skin? And the water soaked into you, like rain into earth, waking seeds? I’ve lived that. I’ve also “learned” to stop following those questions, but I think we can learn to believe in them and share them again, too.
                Remember when you read that poem (or that song lyric) that took a secret part of yourself, a locked room that you didn’t visit and certainly didn’t share, and spoke to you there?  Spoke to you of the locked stale air but also of the door, the lock that could be unlocked, the window that could be open, and as the poet said themselves you realized I’ve felt that way but didn’t know how to say it? I remember that.
                Remember when we started building something together, I can’t remember if it was a garden between our houses or a book we wanted to co-write, and the could be of our making became a river carrying us along to maybe and we’ll see? I remember that, too.