“You are in this water…It put you in here so that if your spirit ever wandered, you would know where home was.” -Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing

                “Know thyself,” goes the old adage. The Perks of Being A Wallflower says “We accept the love we think we deserve,” as though we must come to understand or value ourselves before we can accept another’s love. I’ve heard people say that (and, hearing, I’ve repeated that) for most of my life: you can’t work in a relationship until you can work on your own. You need to understand yourself before you understand another. In this model, my first, foundational relationship is with myself.
                Of course, there are other models. You could believe that your foundational relationship is with others (your parents, your siblings, your friends), and that through this relationship you build a connection to yourself. From that perspective, you come to understand who you are by seeing others, and seeing yourself as brother, sister, friend. I think America’s individualism is suspicious of this model, and I’m usually pretty individualistic myself, but right now it feels powerful: I can’t be something I’m not, but I certainly consider others in choosing how to grow. When I look at parents, I might see this: they become (in part) what their children need.
                I like the self-first perspective, too. Compassion can start with the imaginative understanding that other people are “like me:” they want, and hope, and are hurt. (We ask children, “How would you feel if…”). That looks like using a cultivated relationship with yourself as the foundation for an imaginative understanding that other people are just as real as you.
                Me, or you–but it’s really a third perspective that I want to consider today. Years ago, I heard a Native American teacher explain that your foundational connection is really to a place. It is to the stream and the forest and the field where life flows. It is to the coolness of the lake that gives us and others water, and has given others (plants, deer, ancestors) water for time uncounted, and will give water, we hope, for generations to come. It is not to the idea of the earth, but rather to the specific landscape that is your home–to here. He said this a a lot more eloquently than I am, but even so, I had trouble following–my whole worldview was so human centric that I had a hard time making room for this thought. But ever since then, quietly, I think I have been making room..
                “Know thyself,” the saying goes. Okay, but how do we do that? Do we look inward at ourselves? Do we look to our family, our parents, our community? In some ways, the third step is a broader version of the second–instead of just looking around at people, you look around at earth. You consider who you are within the context of the ground beneath you, the rain that falls from above you, and the overlapping waves of life that surround you. I like this third way. I’m going to try to sit within it, feel it, and see what I find.

                “The first thing to do is to lift your foot. Breathe in. Put your foot down in front of you, first your heel and then your toes. Breathe out. Feel your feet solid on the Earth. You have already arrived.”
                “When we first learned to walk, […] we walked and discovered each moment as we encountered it. We can learn to walk that way again.”
                -Thich Nhat Hanh, How To Walk

                A few weeks ago, when we ran into each other on the way to the fridge (we were both going for hummus, I think, though we both would’ve been happy to find chocolate cake. Somehow my hummus never turns into chocolate cake), I asked my roommate, “Have a good day?” He paused for a long moment. He does that. It’s one of his endearing qualities, though I often wonder if I’ve said something stupid or annoyed him. And then he said, “I don’t know.”
                Since then I’ve been thinking: when did I decide to put my days into a hierarchy? When did I agree to put almost everything into a hierarchy? Do I really need to classify this as a good day, a bad day, an inbetween day? In completing these classifications, what am I hoping to do?
                I brought this up to my class a few days later. They were pretty suspicious at first. Being the even-keeled, always-on-point, super dispassionate person I am, I got defensive. We growled and hissed at each other for a little while, and then, somehow, we started thinking and talking together. One of my students said that a day “could be a day.” Other students picked up that idea: they walked with it, sat with it, shared it. Listened to it. What if a day was a day?
                The truth is, I like hummus. In its own way, I like it as much as chocolate cake. Or perhaps more precisely, liking or not liking it isn’t so very important to me. Hummus was there. It was real. Through a chain of chemical and biological wizardry that I’d like to study one day, it fed me. In eating, I felt the gentle rise of energy that once fell as gentle sunlight onto green leaves.
                The first thing to do is to lift your foot. Breathe in. Put your foot down in front of you, first your heel and then your toes. Breathe out. Feel your feet solid on the Earth. You have already arrived.

                “What if you could see that love is always here,
                Living right inside–would you change your mind–
                Why do people love you? Do you think that it’s the things you do?
                No–it’s what you are.” -Charley Thweatt

                I wonder if the most important lesson we can offer a child, the one that should be at the beginning of what we teach, is simply this: I see you. I love you.
                Of course, that’s a hard lesson to teach, so I often try to put more words around it. I say, “You, as you are, are enough–enough to be respected, enough to be loved, enough to be.” Or, “I see the gifts you have for the world, and what you have to give is important.” Or perhaps, “You are brilliant–brilliant in the old sense, in the way that means full of light.” But at it’s heart, I think it comes down to love.
                I have plenty of my own flaws, I fall short a lot, and there are still people who love me. Their love is not a reward for my actions. It’s removal is not a possible punishment for my mistakes–if it were, I’m not sure it would be love. Love, I think, is never earned. Love is a being thing. It’s something we are, when we choose to grow that way. Their hearts are open to me. I’m grateful for that–and to be honest, I’m awed, and inspired, and sometimes a bit bewildered.
                It’s less bewildering when I think about the people I love. My love for them is a response to what they are. I don’t love them because they do what they do, but because I I see in the distance, like the edge of a continent I’ll never explore, the fullness, the realness of them. (Sometimes I choose to see that; sometimes it happens, like a storm breaking). Montaigne says that the only real explanation for friendship is, “Because I am I. Because he is he.” For me, I think, this love goes past humans. I have a stone I’ve carried with me for years, and I love it because it so fully is. Of course, everything that is exists just as fully, but I carry the stone because it reminds me of that. When I really feel the bark of a tree, I love it. When I hear the falling rain, I love it. And when I see you, when I see you as the unknowable world that is you, I love you.
                I think this might be the most important lesson, because once we know that we are loved, we can share our own love. Once we know that we matter, we can respect our own gifts enough to share them with the world. Once we know that we are valued, the value of other people doesn’t need to be a threat–it can be part of our celebration.
                So, my friend: may you see the value of everything around you. May you keep offering your gifts to the world. And may you remember that you don’t shine because of what you do. Brilliant means filled with light, and you shine for the same reason a candle does, or the sea at sunset. You shine because that is who you are.

                “The tree I had in the garden as a child, my beech tree, I used to climb up there and spend hours. I took my homework up there, my books, I went up there if I was sad, and it just felt very good to be up there among the green leaves and the birds and the sky.” -Jane Goodall

                A few days ago I was watching turtles on BBC’s Africa (it’s almost Planet Earth, complete with David Attenborough; but this isn’t to be confused with the other time I was watching Planet Earth, or the other time I was watching turtles). Hundreds and hundreds of baby turtles emerged from their nests in the sand, blinked their eyes at a new sky, and went running down to the water. Birds swooped to pick them up. A crab wrestled with one. Near the end of the footage one small, vibrant spark of life made its way to the water, tumbled in the surf–and swam out into a wide new world. This last shot is gorgeous: the baby turtle flies gently beneath the liquid sky of the water’s surface, suspended impossibly, beautifully in ocean depths that look as wide as the world itself.
                I wonder why I’m so insistent on my own humanity. Don’t get me wrong, I like humans. And I understand that the footage was anthropomorphizing the turtle. But many of the lessons I can learn, the landscapes I can grow in, and the dreams I can share are far wider than just us if “us” means our species. Think of how restful cats are–whenever I watched the family cat sleep, I was struck by how perfectly he stayed, by how fully he shared space with a moment and the light falling into it. Think of that turtle’s heart, beating beneath the waves as its flippers move it forward. Think of the mother bird, pretending a broken wing as she leads me from her nest. Think of a bat, seeing in a way I can’t even understand, or a whale, calling through a thousand miles of ocean and being heard. Think of puppies playing. Think of it, and feel.
                I think we humans get tied up in the knot of proving ourselves, of not being good enough, but I think we do that because we defined a little world. Even in literature, that art I love, I hear people talking about “what it’s like to be human” or “what it’s like to have a mind” (a human mind, we mean) or “the human condition.” What about what it’s like to be alive? What about what it’s like to be? What about the long, slow lift of mountains? What about the gentle, intangible dance of planets and stars? What about the slow gathering of water into shining pools–and what about all, all, all those other living creatures who come to drink from those pools? When I stand in wonder as a little part of that, I feel less of a need to be right. I feel less of a need to conquer, control, or remake. That doesn’t mean I need to be passive–after all, our actions have a lot to do with whales’ ability to sing to each other (National Geographic says our ocean noise might have cut their range by 90%) and turtles’ chance to keep on swimming, but the call to action of being a part of things is s0 much sweeter and so much stronger and so much, for me, kinder than the call to action of being an incapable master of a breaking world.
                According to a stroll through google, there are about 8.7 billion species on this planet. If you spent exactly one minute saying hello to each species, and could work forever without taking a break for anything, it would take you 16,553 years to say hello to all of them. (If Moses decided to do that, and has been focused ever since he got out of the basket, he’s not quite 20% done). To put it another way, if every human, every cat, and every dog in the entire world was declared the guardian for one specific species, we would still have more species than guardians.
                What a wide world we live in.

                “It was probably no accident that it was the cripple Hephaestus who made ingenious machines; a normal man didn’t have to hoist or jack himself over hindrances by means of cranks, chains and metal parts.”
                -Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March

                My father likes to say that your greatest demons, the things you struggle with the most, often become your greatest gifts to the world. Bellow points out that it was Hephaestus, struggling to walk, who made the sun’s flying chariot and who formed moving, running animals from gold and silver. His genius seems connected to his inabilities.
                Most of my life I’ve worried about struggling. It seemed like a thing I wasn’t supposed to do–a thing that showed I was broken, or less than I was supposed to be. I didn’t want to struggle in class. I didn’t want to struggle in my career. I certainly didn’t want to struggle with my mental health, or with knowing what to say to women, or with knowing what to say to women about my mental health. (Not that there’s anything to say, of course; I’m–uh–completelyfineandhavenoissuesofanykindright?okaymoreicecream).
                All of my life I’ve also struggled. I’ve struggled with making friends–not the passing, Oh Hello Yeah Cool friends, but the thoughtful, playful, Let’s Go to the Moonlit Lake and Make Mud Sculptures friends, the Growing Together friends. I’ve struggled (okay, these should all be present tense) I struggle with seeing other people as themselves, rather than as my expectations of them. I struggle with understanding myself and what I’m choosing to do, and why.
                The thing is, struggles call for our attention. And where we put our attention, we grow. (I would say that struggling is different from simply being hurt: some hurts just break us, but in a struggle, we at least have the chance to respond). While wondering how to make connections, I’ve met truly wonderful people, and shared some miles or some years or some thoughts with them. While struggling to see people as themselves, I’ve noticed my own projections, and worked to set them aside. While struggling with what I do and why, I read, and write, and teach, and ask people around me, “How can I help?”
                I don’t think the bad things that happen to us are good. I don’t think everything happens for a reason. People say that adversity builds character, but I don’t think I should go into class tomorrow and offer my students as much adversity as possible. (Though sometimes it’s tempting). But when a struggle calls for our work, and we answer, we end up making something. Robin Williams, struggling with his own darkness, made generations laugh and smile (and feel and learn). A student I know, struggling with the thoughtless cruelty she’d felt, made the decision to step forward when it might not be needed, just to make sure that she stepped forward when it was needed.
                “Struggle” and “demon” both get a bad rap these days. But the Greek daimon means “divine power” or “guiding spirit;” sometimes it’s used to refer to human souls, and sometime’s it’s “one’s genius, lot, or fortune.” When I focus I’m creating something. Pain’s a natural, powerful reminder to focus. There are others, of course. Curiosity. Love. A sense of beauty. It’s wonderful when these inspire joyful creativity and engagement, but sometimes creativity and engagement come from loss, from pain–from a crippled leg.  And when I create something to help myself, to soothe my hurt, to make sense of my tears or give life to my laughter, I’m creating something that I can offer someone else.
                I struggle a lot, so it’s nice to remember that.

                “Someday, you must tell me what it’s like there. Why all who come out of that place seem so very competent…and so very afraid.” -“There” is the magic school in N. K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season
                “Education is a complex human system. It’s about people. If you have an industrial metaphor in your head, then you’re led into the sort of language that we now use about standardization. The thing is, it’s much more like gardening than engineering. If you’re a gardener, you don’t make it grow. I mean the plant grows itself. You don’t attach the leaves and paint the petals and screw in the roots, I mean the thing grows itself. If you create the right conditions.” -Ken Robinson

                In Jemisin’s brilliant, heart-hurting, eye-opening The Fifth Season, there’s only one magic school. It’s called the Fulcrum. (Jemisin also has what might be the coolest, most well-defined magic system I’ve seen in modern literature). The Fulcrum isn’t a place you want to be. The scenes there hurt. They hurt like watching children broken, they hurt like slow determined hate, they hurt like cruelty made law. The people of Jemisin’s world fear magic users, and need them, so the ‘school’ makes them into something obedient and therefore useful, or kills them. It works. The people who go through Fulcrum end up “so very competent,” they end up useful; they end up slaves, and they end up “so very afraid.”
                I think we should carefully consider what we want to make another generation into. That’s not quite right, though, because we can’t make them anything–we can only provide the environment in which they grow. Still, environments shape a lot, and we should think what space we want to hold for them. We should carefully consider what we want to be.
                I’ve just had the wonderful pleasure of talking with David Mochel again. Mochel reminds me that, every day, every hour, I am practicing something. When I sit quietly with a thought, I’m practicing that. When I’m bored and reach for entertainment, I’m practicing that. Most things are outside my control–weather; others’ actions; the speed of light. (Mochel includes the reactions of our own nervous systems: the anxiety I feel, or the sadness, or the sudden tension when someone yells). Those things come from the world, but I practice how I respond. I practice how I see the rain (“Damn wet” or “Life renewed”), I choose what I do when I’m feeling anxious, and that choice, day by day, is my practice. My practice shapes the way I live. The way I live shapes who I am. Since talking with Mochel, I’ve been asking myself, What are you practicing now? What are you training your mind to do?
                We’re all gardeners, planting and watering or stomping and forgetting. Other people visit our garden, they grow a little there, and they leave a little different. What garden do I want to tend, for myself and others?
                It reminds me of the Westerns I watched when I was a boy. They were full of hard, uneducated, handsome men, strangers to town, who rode in from the dust, shot the villain with a flash of courage, and then rode out. There’s a metaphor here about violence: because of what he’s practiced, because of who he is, the man (and it is always a man) who can shoot the greedy cattle baron can’t settle down and live peacefully afterwards. He is violence, not peace. That made him powerful, but it also made him leave. The movie admires what he can do for the town, while recognizing his fundamental loneliness and sadness. The movie suggests that some characteristics come at the cost of others. Some competent people are who they are because they’re so afraid, so hurt. I’ve seen students who’ve grown toward all sorts of things that they were pushed to be–but at what cost? What other characteristics did they learn while learning to be a “success”?
                All this can make me sad. It hurts in the writing of it. I’m hurt that, often, we make cruel choices, and I’m hurt that, often, our children step out afraid. But there is something joyous in it, too, because as that brave girl Anne Frank said, “How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting out to improve the world.” It starts with what we practice. It starts with how we tend our garden.
                I’m not sure how I want my garden to be, but right now I have some ideas. I’d like it to be kind, and playful. I’d like some of the fountains to laugh in their splashes. I’d like the pools to be quiet, and remind us to quiet ourselves sometimes. I want those who spend a little time here to move on with love in their hearts, laughter on this lips, light in their eyes, and the knowledge that their hands can help.

                “This is why she hates Alabaster: not because he is more powerful, not even because he is crazy, but because he refuses to allow her any of the polite fictions and unspoken truths that have kept her comfortable, and safe, for years.” – N.K. Jemisin, The Fifth Season
                “Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.” -Kahlil Gibran, “On Pain”

                 My friends, I’m a strange mix. I’m a melancholy board game geek. I often giggle, and when I cry, I shake. I believe in the best in all of us. I’m horrified and terrified by what I see. I get really angry: at my students for not learning, at adults for not remembering with open hearts, at myself for not helping enough. (I don’t think that anger helps). I’m often hopeful: in a smile, in a kind word, in the “worst” of my students I see the possibilities of a brave mind, a deep heart, and a new friend. I find, in a rock picked up from the roadside, all the beauty and proof and truth I need to know that there is a world, that we can stand and learn and listen in it. I see that we often fall down. I see that the same earth that bruises me gives me a place where I can stand (or sit, or run, or dance) with you. I’m grateful. And sometimes I giggle.
                Sometimes it seems our culture recommends (or even promises) a life without pain. Okay, okay, I’ll go ahead and own that–sometimes I want a life without pain. Sometimes I think I should be able to find one. A life without heartache, without horror, without the great hurt of seeing that we could be so kind to each other–and seeing that, so often, we aren’t. But perhaps my pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses my understanding. We talk about broken things as bad things–broken records, broken hearts, broken bones. But if eggshells didn’t break, then the new bird could never try it’s wings. Perhaps my current understanding is the shell I’ve lived in. Perhaps the cracks I feel in my heart and my head, even when they hurt, especially when they hurt, are the cracks through which a better world shines.
                Pushing others to feel that pain is more ticklish, more dangerous, more confusing. As a teacher, sometimes I want to do that: I want to take students and ask them to see beyond “polite” (comfortable, safe) fictions to some of the cruelties and insanities of our world. Sometimes, as a teacher of high schoolers, I think it’s not fair for me to do that–can I ask a student to face something that they’re not ready to see? On the other hand, as a community, do we get to wait until we’re “ready”?
                I don’t know. It hurts wondering. But then again, perhaps that pain isn’t bad. Things break. Things need to break, things become themselves while breaking. Broken bones are sometimes rebroken so they can be reset. Storms break. Day breaks. Waves break with a rush of sound, power, and laughter. A fever breaks, though not until it’s gotten hot enough to help us. Sometimes we must break the silence. An acorn sprout, beginning to grow, breaks through the acorn. There is a pain that goes with breaking. And then there are new roots, new possibilities. New days.

                “Human beings are afraid of very simple things: we fear suffering, we fear mortality. What I was doing in Rhythm 0 was staging these fears for the audience.” -Marina Abramović
                “I understand that you can bring out the worst in people and the best. And I found out how I can turn that into love. My whole idea [with “The Artist is Present”] was to give out unconditional love to every stranger…” -Marina Abramović
                “Then [my mother] picked up a heavy glass ashtray from the dining room table. ‘I gave you life, and now I will take it away!’ she yelled.” -Marina Abramović describing her childhood in Walk Through Walls

                I interact with art in three different ways. (Well, at least three different ways). Sometimes it’s a surrogate experience; it’s a moment or a movement that I haven’t personally lived through, but that becomes vicariously mine. Sometimes art gives me a narrative through which I can arrange, explain, and understand my experiences. Sometimes art is a stage on which I can go deeper into my own experiences.
                Let’s take an example: I care about my students. I believe in them. When I see one who doesn’t see her own worth (or the worth of what she can give to the world), it hurts. I want to support her in realizing that her hands are powerful, her hands are gentle, and the world needs her work. Sometimes, instead, I want to make her realize that.
                If art is surrogate experience, than I could read a book where another teacher (or mother, or brother; or maybe an elderly wombat) struggles to support young wombats (there they go, breaking out from the parentheses). I could watch the approaches this wombat tries. I could get more examples, more data. That’s the first approach.
                Here’s the second. Abramović’s mother’s line, the one right before she throws a very heavy something at her daughter’s head, is actually a direct quote from Gogol. (Abramović noticed that, not me; apparently, in the moment the thing flew through the air, that was one of her two realizations). In the book, presumably, a parent felt angrier and angrier until they screamed to their child: “I gave you life, and now I will take it away!” Faced by her own struggle, Abramović’s mother organizes her life along the lines of the art she’s seen. (The moment becomes a scene). Art offers a narrative into which we can fit our experience: a story isn’t simply more moments, but rather a pattern by which we can arrange and understand our moments. We want these narratives: that’s why people say “I’m a teacher,” or “I’m a lawyer,” or “I’m an American.” We want to understand who we are and what we’re working toward and where we’re going. To do that, we squish our experience into a story.
                If I look at my wombats this way, then I don’t just see what they did: I start to understand that (perhaps) I’ve been trying to force my students to learn, instead of supporting them in learning. I get to name the self-hate I tend to feel when I see a student struggling (‘if I were smarter, if I worked harder, if I were better,’ I tell myself, ‘Then I could help them’). Art as a narrative of life is useful–and, of course, if you choose a violent or prejudiced narrative, it can be dangerous.
                One, two, three. The last step is the step Abramović shows me. Her art doesn’t  give us more experience, and it doesn’t give us a narrative with which we can understand our experience. She asks us to feel deeply. She asks us to go into our real fear, to shout out our anger. To breath this breath, fully, wholly. To touch this knife, this flame, this ice, this friend. How much of your experience is truly, fully real to you?
                If I look at my wombats this way–well, there aren’t any wombats. There are no new examples, and no stories through which to explain my experience. Instead, Abramović leads me toward truly feeling the hurt, the sadness, and the confusion that comes up when I think about this student. Within that–now that I have a stage–I find love: the love that helps me see other people for who they are, not who I want them to be. I find the pride that was inside my self-hate (I can only blame myself if I have the power to control them), I find the trust in others that is more important to me than pride or anger. I find other things, too. I’m still finding.
                I have a friend who meditates a lot. I once was sitting with him, focusing on my breath, and afterward I proudly explained to him that I’d imagined my breath as a sphere of light moving up and down inside my chest. He listened, carefully. He said: “There’s a difference between the idea of your breath and your breath.” Ideas are good. Ideas are useful. But trees need soil, houses need solid wood or stone, lungs need real air. Until we are here, our gardens are half abstract, the roots slipping away into generalizations. Until we are here, we fight for what we never needed. Abramović doesn’t give us new experience, and she doesn’t tell us how to think of our experience: she leads us into the fullness of where and who we are.
                And there, it seems, she’s learned that we can find unconditional love.

                On my way back home tonight, a very nice man let his big white truck give my little car a kiss. That was about an hour and a half ago. I had another piece almost finished for Uproar, but then, about five minutes ago, I was heating up my vegetable curry. It’s a beautiful, glistening red (that’s the beets), red like jewelry, red like dyed cloth. My hands slipped and a poured a plate of it across the counter, the face of the cabinet, the floor and my shirt. I was on my hands and knees cleaning up when I realized this afternoon was a good afternoon. It was.
                A week ago, David Mochel told me about watching someone he loved try to fix the WiFi. Every once in awhile, this person paused to tense up their muscles and give a sharp loud “RRRGGHHHH!” “I don’t mean to sound mean,” said Mr. Mochel–”But what was he doing with that? What did he think he was doing?”
                It reminds me of the old Zen story about the strawberry. A man runs from a fearsome tiger until he comes to a cliff. With the tiger right behind him, he grabs a vine, and swings himself over the edge. Hanging there he looks far, far down, to where another tiger (where are they all coming from? Is there enough game in this region to support both? Or maybe the cliff separates two different hunting grounds….tigers do have separate hunting grounds, right?) sniffs up at him. The other tiger is more of a thought than a danger–the fall would kill him, anyway.
                Two mice, one black and one white, start nibbling away at the vine this man is holding. He looks around for something else, and finds only a small plant with shallow roots and one red strawberry. He looks around for another moment. He reaches to the little plant.
                How sweet it tastes.
                These last few hours have been wonderful. I met a nice man. He was glad, even surprised that I wasn’t mad at him. “You could’ve stepped out yelling,” he said; that surprised me, because after the first moment of fear (am I under attack by Mad Max Road Warriors?), after his first respectful words, it hadn’t really occurred to me to be mad. A little while later I talked to my brother, heard my niece laughing (and asking for more snacks; “You ate all the snacks we brought,” my brother told her; she seemed satisfied with that), and got home. My brother told my parents I’d just been in a bit of a scrape, so I talked with each of them, told them I was okay, got some advice and support, and said I loved them. Then I talked to some insurance people–they were also very kind. Now I’m eating the curry that stayed on my plate. Okay, and the curry that landed on the counter. The counter’s pretty clean.
                This moment, these conversations, and (it might be the beets) this curry–how sweet they taste.

                “The father on a camping trip who manages to beat a rattlesnake to death with a can of Dinty Moore in a tube sock may rest for decades on the ensuing laurels yet somehow snore peacefully every night beside his sleepless wife, even though he knows perfectly well that the Polly Pocket toys may be tainted with lead-based paint, and the Rite-Aid was out of test kits, and somebody had better go order them online, overnight delivery, even though it is four in the morning.” -Michael Chabon, Manhood for Amateurs

                There are two kinds of danger: the rattlesnake who bumbles into camp, and the slow toxicity of the paint we use to color our lives. There’s the dramatic foe to fight against, and the quiet poison that can become our habit. As a society, I think we need to stop killing snakes so much.
                We’re a culture of snake killing. We like it. We make movies about it. (No one ever saw ToxicPaint 3: New Formulae, but Anaconda had plenty of sequels). At one point in our history, that might have helped us–I read somewhere that humans are drawn to monster stories because, in our ancient communities, we needed to know what was out there with big teeth. That seems true for my own psychology: I don’t like monster movies, but if I see a trailer for one, I look up pictures until I can see the beast itself. I want to know what it looks like, as though, one day, it might sneak up on me in the wild–and I’ll have to know what to do.
                Even if that was useful once, I don’t think it is anymore. I’ve spent some time in the wild–well, the largely depopulated mountains of California, anyway, where we killed our state bear. The wildest things I’ve seen are a black bear and a mountain lion. They both looked at me and walked away. I’ve done a lot of outdoor sports and martial arts, and the most serious health problem I’ve ever had is still the silly, entirely avoidable repetitive injury from how I sat in a chair. Sitting in that chair, I’ve heard about students who were cruelly hurt by another individual–but I’ve seen far more students who were hurt by the ‘everyday’ (as though they are acceptable) pressures of body image, “success,” competition, casual drug use, and conformity. When you look around, I bet you find a few loud dangers. Beneath them, I bet you find lead paint on many walls. And I bet it’s the dramatic, flashy dangers–the snakes–that get talked about the most.
                I don’t think our culture’s grown this way because there are so many snakes. I think it’s because the snake killers have been in charge, and that’s what they’re good at. They like the fighting part. It’s what they know how to do. Doing it makes them look good, it makes them feel good. It makes us feel good. In a way, it’s easy–not easy to win, but easy to know what you’re supposed to do. We like having our hands on the wheel, we like going fast, feeling the wind. We don’t like thinking about how many people die as part of our transportation system. That’s a harder problem to address, and addressing it doesn’t look “heroic.”
                I once when swimming in a little lake in India–and half an hour in, I noticed there were several snakes swimming nearby.
                “Are those snakes?” I asked an old man who’d come to the water with me. I was ready to go get my tube sock.
                “Yes,” he said.
                “Are they poisonous?”
                “Yes.”
                “Should…should we get out of the water?”
                “Why? They’re swimming here. And we’re swimming here.”
                No one get bit. Apparently he’d been swimming there for fifty years, and no one had ever gotten bit. Later that day, the same man talked to me about a nearby village: they’d gotten a new well, so there was more water, but that meant everyone was using more water. It was a farming community so everyone was planting more crops. But crops need water today and tomorrow. If they didn’t work out an agreement, there would soon be a worse water shortage than before.
                That worried him. Not the snakes.