“Let us be grateful to people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.” -Marcel Proust, “Regrets, Reveries, Changing Skies”

                On my birthday–you know; today–I suggest to each of my classes that we do an appreciation circle. (I usually spend a few minutes trying to come up with a better name, too; a “Friend Zone,” one student suggested; a “round of respect;” a “grateful-go-round.”) The set-up is pretty simple. We sit in a circle. On your turn, you listen quietly while everyone else has a chance to say what they respect, admire, or appreciate about you. Then it’s someone else’s turn. I don’t think it’s the kind of thing you can require anyone to do, but I invite each class to try, and almost all of them want to.
                Today, at 8:52 on a Wednesday morning, before we all went off to our tornado drills and history tests, one student commented, “I think we’re getting better at this.” And we were. At the beginning, people joked and teased each other–they messed around on the surface, not sure about diving down. Twenty minutes later, they were ready to share the recognitions they usually kept to themselves.
                “You really listen, to everyone.”
                “You laugh at your mistakes, and learn from them.”
                “When I came here, you were the first person who made me think this could be home.”
                “I appreciate how you look out for me.”
                “I appreciate how much you listen.”
                Proust says there are people who help our souls blossom, who give us space to open into ourselves and share whatever fruit ripens. He says our blossoming is related to happiness, to cheerfulness. Perhaps joy reminds us that we can sink our roots into whatever we’re working on, and open our leaves to the sun. I wonder if the gratitude itself is another kind of blossoming. The more I look toward what I appreciate, the more I see it. The more I talk about what I admire in anyone, the more I see to admire. Gratitude opens, and I fall through it toward all the charming, blossoming, promising things that have always been here.

“Pine, catalpa, pin oak, persimmon,
but not tree.

Hummingbird, hoot owl, martin, crow,
but not bird.”
-Janice Harrington, “What There Was”

                I remember reading a science fiction short story (I can’t remember what it was, or who wrote it; if you recognize this, let me know!) about someone whose mind didn’t make any groups. He saw everything as a unique individual. If you asked him for a tissue, and pointed out what you meant, he would give you one; if you asked him for a tissue again a few days later, he would have to go back and find that same piece of white. Because that was a tissue. The story explores how this someone can’t function: without groups of things, he can’t open doors, use keys, or recognize food. (Imagine sharing a snack with him: this is Grape1. You can chew and swallow it. This is Grape2. You can chew and swallow it. This is Grape3…) Everything was a new lesson, and there were too many lessons.
                And then, on the other hand, we have Janice Harrington: our groups are too broad, too general. We lose too many identities when we define collections, when we make hummingbirds and hoot owls and martins and crows into “birds.” If teaching high school has taught me anything, it’s taught me that the same approach never works. Not with a new person, not with someone I know on a new day. There are attitudes that stay relevant–engagement; awareness; honesty; an open mind for their experience, for how the world looks from their eyes, and for what they want–but as soon as I find a “play book” and follow it, as soon as I slip into thinking people are problems and I can apply my past solutions, then suddenly my interactions slump toward meaninglessness. The only strategy, as far as I can see, is to see people, and then work with what I see. To put it another way, I’ve never successfully “taught a student;” sometimes, in a particular moment, I manage to learn with Bobby, to share an idea with Audrey, to listen carefully to Raya.
                As far as I can tell, we need generalities to function, but we need particulars to love, to make friends, to interact with any landscape as it actually is. Do we oscillate between these views? Is there a way to balance them, or combine them?
                I’ve no idea. But all this makes me want to learn a little more about the different calls of hoot owls, martins, and crows, and listen to them.

                “People, like all animals, were best when you treated them with quiet patience. You couldn’t go throwing around your own hopes, your own worries, your own confusion. It was better not to push, not to grab, not to run. It wasn’t that you had to bottle yourself up, exactly, but you did have to keep…still.”
                -Ted Sanders, The Harp and the Ravenvine

                Like lots of us, I made some of my closest friends in college. (My closest friends so far, anyway; some people act as though friend-making ends by your late twenties, but if someone wants to meet because we’re floating leaf boats down the same gutter, make faces at each other, climb a plum tree and eat ourselves sleepy, I’m in). I also failed, spectacularly, to make some friends. And I think it was because I was running.
                One person in particular comes to mind. Let’s call him Josh. If I’ve ever been part of a bromantic comedy, he was probably my co-star: we met through mutual friends in the dining hall, and then for a month or so, we talked about almost everything, we walked and walked, we were inspired and curious and drawn by related thoughts. And then something happened: a meaningless little ripple I can’t even remember. An argument, almost over nothing. But as quickly as we were friends, we weren’t. I haven’t really talked to him since.
                In talking about “interventions” with troubled adolescents, Dr. Gordon Neufeld says something like this: ‘Don’t expect them to work.’ Don’t expect one conversation, one brilliant piece of advice, one pointed punishment to change the course of how someone’s growing. We change very slowly, day by day. The impact we have on each other happens like that: not in one brilliant burst, but in the slow, soaking sunlight that helps trees grow new leaves.
                It’s strange, because I’ve also had connections (I think?) that went like Josh’s story, except went well: we fell into conversation like falling into a lake, and dove down, exploring. We laughed. We wondered. Except now that I think back through these, all of the stories that went well had something that Josh and I never managed: work. The work of paying attention to each other, of noting and respecting differences, of making room inside our closeness for disagreement distance. Not just work we did side by side, but work together so we worked together. The connection that started easy grew, sometimes, thoughtful and attentive.
                Perhaps getting to know someone always means getting to know their complexities and their contradictions. Perhaps sharing yourself with someone always means getting in touch with your own hurt and hurtfulness, as well as your joy. If we go running in, then we’re not ready for the new world we’ll be finding. If we go throwing around our hopes, we plaster them with our expectations before we can see who they are, what they’re trying to share.
                Maybe we’re all flocks of blackbirds. If you don’t go out to the park, you won’t find one of us. But if you go running and waving your arms, we’ll scatter before you get too close. Maybe the clearest way to get a little closer is to let yourself be still.

                “The world is a looking-glass, and gives back to every man the reflection of his own face. Frown at it, and it will in turn look sourly upon you; laugh at it and with it, and it is a jolly kind companion; and so let all young persons take their choice.”
                -William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair

                Thackeray reminds me that the way the world feels is usually a reflection of how I’ve been moving through it. When I’ve been sitting, helpless, watching things go by and hiding in entertainment, it all feels too big, too cruel, too fast, too overwhelming. When I’ve been walking through the forest it feels wide and beautiful, like tree limbs branching out and roots reaching under and beetles skittering along. When I’ve been writing, it feels like a story I’m helping make. When I’ve been teaching, it feels like a valley with the storm of another generation blowing in.
                Of course, some viewpoints help me see more and some make me see less, and the fact that one happens to be mine just now doesn’t mean it’s that important. Years and years ago, I heard a rabbi tell a story about someone trying to pray. They didn’t know what to say. They didn’t know what was right to say. They thought about it, and thought about it, and didn’t know, and then at last, with a shrug, they said, “God, if travelers are praying for clear skies and dry roads, and farmers are praying for rain, please listen to the farmers.”
                After I took introductory geology, I spent a year in stream beds, looking at rocks, breaking them open to watch the sparkle of the pristine minerals inside. I walked through a world of tectonic plates and magma chambers, of heat and pressure and more time than I could really understand. Last semester, when I got behind on grading, and afternoons became a blizzard of paper that I really wasn’t ready for, I felt snowed in at my desk: I didn’t work any more or less than I usually do, but I felt buried by the work. It lay around like drifts. When I walk out wanting something from the people I meet, then I feel them holding something back–as they probably should. I’m trying to take something from them. When I go out smiling and asking, laughing and giving, then I find people who could be new friends.
                The world looks a lot like how I’m looking at it. It gives me back a reflection of my face. I want to be mindful of the faces I tend to make.

                “You can only listen when the mind is quiet, when the mind doesn’t react immediately, when there is an interval between your reaction and what is being said.”
                -Jiddu Krishnamurti

                “For a word to be spoken, there must be silence. Before, and after.”
                -Ursula Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea

                This week some students and I are designing board games. We looked at some great examples (not Clue or Monopoly, or dusty things like that; Tokaido and Dixit and Sheriff of Nottingham), we talked about game mechanics, and then I expected something to happen. And it did. But it wasn’t much. Our ideas were sluggish, fumbling, incomplete. Then we sat in a loose knot, lounging on our chairs, looking out the window, and talked to each other about what we were trying to make–and suddenly there were so many more ideas. So many more options. So many more things to build.
                I don’t understand when people say they “aren’t creative,” when they say they “wouldn’t know what to write” in a poem or a story. I want to start pointing at things, at people: “What about that, or that, or that, or her, or him?” There’s a cascade of somethings to think about, to write about, to learn from–more than I could ever follow in however many years I have.
                I don’t understand, and I do, because I find myself at home with “no ideas.” I find myself sitting “with nothing to say.” Next time that happens, I want to remember that saying isn’t worth half as much as I think it is. Then I want to listen. Last week I visited a graduate program at the University of Illinois, and whenever I listened–to an archivist, to a professor, to a student who loves modern adaptations of Beowulf–I fell into another painting and walked around in the world inside, the world which, of course, was the one always around me, when I saw it more clearly and from another point of view.
                Creativity isn’t about closing all the windows and making light from nothing. It’s about hanging the prism of your mind in the window, and weaving color with light. It’s about welcoming in far, far more than you’ll ever send back out. It’s about the silence, before and after, about the mind that doesn’t react immediately with its own assumptions, and so has the chance to listen to something new.

“The art of losing isn’t hard to master.”
                -Elizabeth Bishop, “One Art”

                For most of my life, I’ve been afraid of losing words and ideas. Usually I don’t mind losing objects quite as much, although there are notable exceptions. I hate losing books. In high school, I couldn’t stand losing my pencils. I had three of them, big, clunky and mechanical, that felt solid in my hand. Having three was supposed to mean that I could lose one without worrying about it, but it ended up meaning that I carefully carried all three around. When I mislaid one I went stomping through the house. It was usually somewhere obvious.
                Words, though: I worry about words. I have napkins and envelopes and paper bags with scribbled notes on them: thoughts I had, thoughts that were just beginning. Words that I hoped would help, someone, somehow. I still want to help, and I’m still excited by the encouragement or support or repositioning that a few words can suggest, but I don’t think I need to be worried. I don’t think I need to clutch at so many things.
                Years ago my co-director and I were talking about what plays we wanted to do. We came up with a dozen interesting ideas. When we stood up from the conversation, I asked, “Shouldn’t we write them down?”
                “No need,” he said. “We’ll be able to find them again.”
                I don’t remember what plays we talked about that day, but I have watched our ideas and interests spiral outward, leading us to new discoveries. If a thought was good, if it was important, if it is well suited to the time, we’ll find it again. If it was true, then it’s already had an effect. It’s a seed in the ground. Rainer Maria Rilke talks about arranging the flowers we give to those we love, and Edmond Rostand has his hero throw “armfuls of loose bloom” to a lover. We can do that. We can make bouquets. We can throw flowers. But there are also the fields themselves. What we drop might seed itself, and bloom.

                “To injure an opponent is to injure yourself. To control aggression without inflicting injury is the Art of Peace.”
                -Morihei Ueshiba, founder of Aikido, in The Art of Peace

                I don’t remember how young I was–10? 11?–when my Aikido sensei started teaching me to use a boken, a wooden training sword. I remember the first first lesson. He showed me a strike (maki-uchi) that sent the wood arcing through the air, and then stood a long step away.  He told me to stand still. I nodded.
                “Don’t move,” he repeated.
                I think I knew what was going to happen, but it was still surprising: he moved like a wave, like a whip unfurling. I watched his hands but couldn’t see the wooden blade itself as it flashed through the air. And then I could see it again, motionless, an inch from the side of my head.
                After that I started learning how to strike with my own boken.
                He never explained the lesson, at least not with more words. Most of his explanations had more actions than words: “Lead with your mind, not the blade. I’m going to tell you that again and again, and again, and then one day you’ll do it, and say, ‘Why didn’t you tell me to lead with my mind instead of the blade? And I’ll just look at you, and smile.” Or: “I can’t teach you the right way. You’ll keep finding ways that don’t work. I’ll teach you not to do them. And then eventually you’ll stumble on the way that works.”
                Recently my students read Le Guin’s commencement address, her comments about our society’s infatuation with hierarchies, competitions, aggression, violence. Half my students didn’t see what she was pointing at, and the other half started listing off moments when they’d seen someone admired for hurting someone else. The moments when hurting was seen as showing power, as showing superiority. And then I was back, a ten year old kid, trusting my teacher while he swung a training sword.
                Imagine a society in which hurting someone is shameful. Not just wrong: shameful. A failure of attention, of control, of responsibility. Whenever we trained with a partner, my sensei made it clear that our goal was to help our partner get better. We understood that we should be as proud of each other’s progress as we were of our own. We understood that, if someone trusted you to throw them and keep them safe as part of your learning, and you hurt them, then you’d failed in your responsibility. You’d stepped away from the path, from the Art we were studying.
                In swinging the sword, I think my sensei said: I’m teaching you to be strong. And as I teach that, you will learn to hold onto your strength. You will learn to control your movement. Because we are learning together, we are responsible for each other, and “to injure an opponent is to injure yourself.”

                “‘We don’t have to have everything worked out,’ I told him. But you know how people say things to convince themselves, how every word is part lie because it crosses out and denies one quadrant of truth.”
                -Emily Fridlund, “Lake Arcturus Lodge,” Catapult

                From one perspective, I suppose I’ve never said anything true. “I’m frightened;” well, yes, but I’m not only frightened. “We don’t have to have everything worked out;” I wouldn’t say that unless part of me wanted everything worked out, unless part of me felt that we needed everything in place and solved. “The sky’s blue;” no it’s not. Go look at it. There’s so much more to it than that.
                Fridlund points out how English words can push us towards exclusions: this, not that. Since reading her story, I’ve been imagining a people who communicate through layered sounds, not individual words. That way they can sing anger and sadness and hope all at once, if that’s what they’re feeling. They can hum blue while adding in the trill for shining, the beat for changing, and sing to you about the sky. Sometimes I imagine these people as needing many vocal cords, many mouths; sometimes I imagine them playing interlocking rhythms with their breath and their feet and their hands.
                My words don’t usually work that way, but there are still different ways to interact with language. I remember hearing about an argument between two college professors. One of them, a math professor, wrote that the five-person Faculty Steering Committee (I imagine them in robes, with torches; they were in charge of Everything) “must have two women.” The other, an English professor, sent an email asking why there couldn’t be three or four or even five women on the Committee.
                “There could be,” answered Math.
                “You wrote that it must have two,” replied English.
                “Yes,” said Math.
                Perhaps the long email chain that followed, back and forth, grew from some professional peevishness, but it’s hard to understand when someone is using language differently than you do. The math professor thought “must have two” specified that two of the five were women; it didn’t say anything about the other three. The English professor thought “must have two” dictated and only two.
                There are moments when language needs to deny “one quadrant of truth.” If I say “stop,” I’m not allowing “go.” But there are other moments when language can add puzzle pieces without denying that there are other puzzle pieces: worry is here, but that doesn’t mean that excitement is or isn’t here, too. What happens when we treat our words as translucent paints that layer on top of each other, instead of covering each other up? We probably lose our primary colors pretty quickly. We might get a little closer to the people who hum their thoughts. I wonder if we’d find the bars of Fridlund’s trap a little easier to escape from. I wonder if we could say words that didn’t cross out “one quadrant of truth,” and so were not part lies.

“To keep your marriage brimming,
With love in the loving cup,
Whenever you’re wrong, admit it;
Whenever you’re right, shut up.”
                -Ogden Nash, “A Word to Husbands”

                When I first started putting my toes into writing–which is an awkward image, but also a tempting one; I imagine a pool of burnt-tan parchment with ripples of black ink, undulating as my chubby toes dip in–people kept telling me, “Don’t write answers.”   Other teachers repeated variations of “show don’t tell. “I distilled that into “don’t write answers,” too, and then I hated it. Why couldn’t I? I knew so many things. Why couldn’t I just say them?
                Reading Nash, I think the answer might be, Because there are so many things more important than being right.
                Sometimes I’ll start class with little exercises. “Write down ten words you think you learned in the first two years of talking,” for instance, or “Cover this little piece of paper in colors,” or “We’re going to play with free word associations, back and forth, for a few minutes.” Sometimes, afterwards, I’ll ask students why we did that exercise just now. They’ll come up with wonderful answers: “Our first words show something about how we grew up looking at the world, and that’s what Huckleberry Finn is exploring.” “Yesterday, people didn’t want to contribute to the conversation because we were all too nervous about getting it wrong. Free word associations open the door for us to start listening and responding.” I love thinking about my students’ answers. At the same time, I usually didn’t have a “why,” or perhaps, more precisely, my “why” was to let them wonder. I thought of the game, and we took five minutes to do it. They made it relevant by enjoying it and looking at it. Their own “whys” were more rewarding than anything I could’ve given them.
                There are so many things more important than being right. There are so many parts of gardening beyond listing off the Latin name of a flower.
                A few days ago, I heard a story about a father and his daughter. When she was very young she started asking questions about the sun and the earth, and why it looks like the sun moves. One day, a sophisticated five, she started explaining it back to him:
                “You know, daddy, when it looks like the sun’s over there and then it looks like the sun’s over there, the sun’s not really moving. It’s the earth spinning.”
                “Wow, really?” he said.
                “And when the earth spins all the way around, that’s a day,” she explained.
                “That’s so cool.”
                “But the earth is running around the sun, too, not just spinning.”
                “Is it going fast?”
                “Really fast. When it goes all the way around the sun, that’s a week.”
                The father glanced at her: “A year, you mean.”
                “Uh huh,” she agreed. “A week.”
                “It’s a year.”
                “Yeah,” she said, glowing with curiosity, with the coolness of the solar system, with a mind’s ability to learn about it. “A week.”
                So the dad smiled. They could come back to this part later. There were so many things that were more important than being right.
                “That’s so cool,” he said. “So what about the stars? Are they as little as they look?”
                “They’re big,” she said. And for a moment, the way the dad tells it, her surprised, curious eyes were almost as big and as sparky as the stars.

“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”
                -Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

“If a lion could speak, we would not understand him.”
                -Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

                I heard Wittgenstein’s famous comment about the lion when I was nine. I had no first-hand experience of lions, so I carried the idea over to the dog down the street. The dog had no mane, but it was large, and fierce, and barked at me in something that felt like a roar, so “close enough,” my young mind thought.
                All the same, I couldn’t understand what Wittgenstein meant. If I could only talk to the dog, in its language or mine, it seemed obvious, even inevitable, that we would work out our differences. “I’m scared you’re going to hurt me,” the dog might say; “I’m scared of the same thing!” I’d respond, and then we’d wag our tails and jump the fence. Or maybe it didn’t like the smell of my soap. That would’ve been fine; I didn’t like baths, either. A year later, I considered the strange scene of an angry, talking dog attacking me: a dog who could speak and think through what I said, but with whom I still couldn’t come to an understanding. It felt almost impossible, but I saw a glimmer of something else–a glimmer through my certainty in communication, my trust in words, as though the mountains were painted canvas and a seam was coming undone.
                I still would like to think that the dog and I could’ve worked out our differences, and to be honest, I might’ve practiced barking a bit, but it isn’t easy. Even when we’re both human and we’re both calm it isn’t easy. I’m a teacher, and in classrooms I sometimes find this assumption that a mind is a shelf, and if the mind is paying attention, someone else can reach up and set an idea inside it. The idea stays there, intact, informed, functional. I don’t think it works like that. I’ve spent as much time talking to my friend Mike as I’ve spent talking to anyone. We like each other, listen to each other–and when we get near the edge of our understanding (which is where we tend to steer), we end up checking and rechecking, asking and answering and asking again, because seemingly simple concepts turn into unknown islands wreathed in fog. That happens when we talk about his higher level mathematics (he has a PhD; I struggle along, trying to understand the outline), but it also happens when we talk about values, goals, or how we see the world.
                I think we each live in the palace of our mind. We make rooms, hallways, stairways; we make windows, and using our senses, paint watercolor interpretations of what might be beyond them. Some rooms are in most palaces: there’s a doorway from 2+2 into the room of 4 in my palace, and the same door exists in Mike’s. (Although the rooms are distinct: for me, the 4 room has a corner dedicated to Doyle’s The Sign of Four and another to Dumas’ refrain, “One for all, and all for one,” because my brain thinks of words more as sounds than as spellings). Other rooms are individually mine, and most rooms are always being built and rebuilt with stone and thread and fog. When Mike explains a new, nuanced idea, I can’t go walking though his palace, looking at what he’s done. It’s more like both of us trying to build, separately but cooperatively, a few rooms in a shared style, and then trying to stand in the same part of the same hallway, and call to each other. Of course, even the words we send out are tied to our palace: “I’m at the top of the stairs” means my stairs, not his. If he says, “Okay, now look to your left; see how this connects to altruism?” and my answer is, “No,” then we go back to our respective blueprints and start asking questions, trying to figure out where in the world (of the mind) the other is standing.
                I wonder how much of this made sense in your rooms. I wonder what it looks like as you build it. I wish I could see, though I can’t–but you can tell me about it, you can describe it, you can send me something that is transformed as I remake it in my world, and we can play this wonderful game of imagining, asking, listening and building.