“What do you do with an idea?” -Kobi Yamada

“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.” -T. S. Eliot

                Yamada’s beautiful children’s book, What Do You Do With An Idea?, asks a simple question. At the end of the story, some 30 pages later, it gives us an answer. It’s not a surprising answer. It’s not an answer that no one else has ever proposed. But it’s a useful thought, and an important reminder. Yamada’s genius isn’t in the answer itself, but in the pages of the adventure, when he gets us ready to listen to it.
                I think we have what we need right here. Our task, our challenge, is to learn to use it (and not to use it). To learn how to balance on the edge of a moment, feeling both pride and respect, ambition and peace. To learn how to knock the spark from a flint, and when to light a fire–and when not to light a fire. We are here. We keep journeying, and in journeying we come back to ourselves, to each other, to our family and the earth that holds all the life we know.
                It’s not that children know everything. They’re often mean. They’re often impatient and unkind. But just as they are unkind, they are kind. Just as they are afraid, they are brave. Just as they are disengaged, they are loving. We thought the ocean would wash over us, and it does. We thought the light of everything would dazzle our eyes, and it does. We thought the wind of everything would push us, and it does. And then, if we keep going, if we explore (by running and by standing still to listen), we learn that the waves can support us. The dazzling stars can guide us. The powerful winds can carry us. There are knots in our hearts, but all rigging needs some knots, and we set sail. We begin amid everything. We return, we arrive, as part of everything.
                When we live the story with all our minds and all our hearts, then by the last page we’re ready to hear what would have only been words at the beginning.

                “Amazing grace! how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me! I once was lost, but now am found, was blind but now I see.” -John Newton, “Amazing Grace”
                “Trust the Midas touch.” -Midas’s company slogan

                These days, when I see the word Midas, it’s usually on a yellow sign above a car service center. (There’s one not far from my house). I keep thinking about that. It seems a bit strange.
                I don’t know what you all did for New Years (I hope it was wonderful, and crackly, and connecting), but a friend of mine went to a “Gatsby Party.” She dressed up like a flapper, and sewed a beaded fringe for her dress. Very cool. Still, isn’t the name a bit strange? I thought through the book’s characters: Daisy, purposefully fragile and holding on to her abusive husband; Tom, abusive, racist, and rich; Gatsby, dead and abandoned; Jordan, a hyper-competitive cheat who expects everyone else to make way for her. There’s a sense of hopeless emptiness in all of them. They feel like the pulped oranges that are left behind after every party. Isn’t the party a metaphor for the flash of purposefully ostentatious alcohol-hazed luxury that these characters throw, as bright and useful as confetti, at their own despair? It might look fun, but it’s the kind of fun that’s soap bubble thick and just as shiny. We don’t want to go to that party. That’s what the book’s about.
                The words to “Amazing Grace” were written by John Newton, 1725-1807, who spent the first part of his life as a slaver and the second part as a clergyman and outspoken abolitionist. For me, that story makes the song more powerful. While most of his abolitionist work came a few years after the song, I can’t help but feel the current of his transformation whenever I hear the melody. “I once was lost, but now am found, was blind but now I see.” It’s not a story about being oppressed: it’s the story about being an oppressor. In Newton’s time, many preachers tried to distance themselves from sin and then condemn it. Newton was famous for openly discussing the horrors he’d done. This is a song about facing your darkness, facing the evil you’ve allowed to work through you–facing it, naming it, and trying to make amends. We remember the song. I hope we remember the story.
                So: the yellow sign. If you do a google search, you can find newspapers all over the world talking about how athletes or CEOs or politicians have “the Midas touch.” If we remember the story, that’s not a good thing. The greek god Dionysus offers King Midas a wish, and Midas asks for everything he touches to turn to gold. At first Midas is overjoyed: he touches his clothes, his statues, the stones beside the road. Later his daughter runs in to greet him. He motions her away, but she jumps into his arms. In the place of his daughter, he’s holding a hard, cold statue. (Midas begs Dionysus to reverse the gift. Dionysus, for reasons involving wine and godliness, agrees). The story is about the horror of a dream we thought beautiful.
                If we forget the story, we see only the gleam it was meant to warn us about. That feels strange. It feels a little funny. It feels like hearing the Sirens, and saying, “Hey, do you think I could get this on CD? Wait. It’s probably on Spotify.”

                “I ask them to take a poem
                and hold it up to the light
                like a color slide

                or press an ear against its hive.”
                                -Billy Collins, “Introduction to Poetry”

                The real question, in reading poetry (or reading anything, maybe; or living) is why we put a picture frame on a painting. You might think we put the frame on for protection: inside the frame and behind the glass lies art, and art needs to be kept safe. But you’d be wrong. You might think it’s to make sure that we recognize it as art: the picture frame says, “Stand back, this is important. That’s close enough, folks. It’s art. No touching.” And, again, you’d be wrong. We put a painting in a picture frame because every picture is a doorway, it’s a path leading off to somewhere. It’s a beginning, and the doorframe opens into the world. It tells us, step through.
                Too often my students want to figure out a poem. They want to know where it’s going. They want to know what it means. When I’m actually reading, I don’t see a poem as an arrow pointing down (Here. Get here), but as a landscape opening up. In reading I’m not a detective closing in on the culprit, but a child walking out into meadows.
                Look at the metaphors and the rivers, the trees and the rhymes. Feel the beat and the rough bark. Where should we walk? Where should we look? What do we learn, and where do our thoughts tend, now that we are thinking? What water should we sprinkle on our toes, to remind us to go on growing?
                Every poem, every painting, is an open doorway. It’s an invitation to begin.

                “The person who lives without folly is not as wise as he thinks.” -La Rochefoucauld, Maxims

                Folly, after all, sounds like jolly. Which isn’t an academic argument at all. But I’ve seen brilliant people get themselves tied up in their intelligence. I’ve also seen jolly people happily start working while intelligent people crushed themselves with their own thoughtful criticisms and witticisms and superiorities.
                I think I’m suspicious of any doctrine, whether it’s of the wise or the foolish (or the follyish? The follied? Folly-ise? Folly eyes?). In college, I ate a fair amount of candy. And apparently halloween candy is a bit like waving your hand at Death and saying HEY ME PICK ME SOON OKAY? Years ago, I realized that I wasn’t very much happier after eating candy. For sixty seconds I had the “this is sweet” thing going on, and then it was gone, and I wanted another. Whether I had another or not, in five minutes my life wasn’t any better than it had been before the candy. I decide to remind myself of all this whenever I wanted to eat candy, and for nine months, I didn’t have any Three Musketeers, Twix, Snickers, or Hershey’s bars. With the exception of a few “Where’s the sugary sweet” moments, I didn’t really miss any of them. In fact I was a bit relieved about the Hershey’s. I’m not sure anyone actually likes them.
                Then one day I (metaphorically) looked at my (metaphorically, literally and probably emotionally) scruffy face, and thought, “Wait a minute? Since when did I get so obsessed with self control that I have to sit myself down for a moralistic talking to whenever I want some processed almost food?” Shortly after that I had a Twix, and then another. And, well, onward.
                I’m not saying it’s good to eat candy–it’s probably not. (HEY, DEATH). But I think pummeling myself with logic or shame or social expectation was bad, too. I think the world is too wide for me to know all of it. That doesn’t mean learning and logic aren’t wonderful–they are–but it I think it does mean that wonder and uncertainty and good humor are often the most appropriate of responses. And perhaps heartfelt insanity (sometimes called love) is one of our greatest strengths.
                People who live without folly are not as wise as they think.
                Maybe there’s something important in folly itself. I’m not sure what it is, but I’m open to it. Maybe it’s good I don’t know what it is. After all, if you always know where you’re going, you only find what you know to look for.

“Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.”
                -Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

                Too often, I think, we try to make someone else’s heart our heart. We try to make our passions the passions they think (or rather, we think they think) we’re supposed to have. We try to make their opinions our opinions; we try to twist our talents into the talents they expect from us. We do this with all sorts of love ones. We do this with parents. I’ve seen a lot of students whose primary goal seems to be to please (or, in that dangerous, heart-hurting phrase, “earn the love of;” but all we humans are flawed, and I don’t think we can earn love, only receive it and offer it as a beautiful gift) their father or their mother. I have the utmost respect and love for my parents, and for all parents. They give us the materials of life. But if a child uses those materials only as her parents tell her, if she tries to be theirs, instead of her own, then I think she hurts herself, the world, and in the end, her parents.
                The child cannot have any heart except her own. If she tries, she’ll spend her life pretending.  She’ll live in the shallow water near someone else’s shore, and never find the depths of what she has inside.
                She’ll give less to the world, too. Our duty is not just to ourselves: we become something for ourselves for the world, and offer our passion, our talents, and our work to those around us. Our duty is to find how to use what we have to help with what the world needs. If I advise and insist and am disappointed in my daughter until she becomes a heroic English teacher (like me!), instead of the doctor she thinks of being, she’ll have less to offer the world. When we hide half our tools, letting them rust as we make poor replicas of someone else’s talents, we cannot be very good helpers or healers.
                In the end, she’ll hurt her parents. She’ll hurt them slowly, by being a little less, day by day, than she could be. She’ll hurt them in one big shattering, if her father ever realizes that in hoping for his daughter he’s held back her hopes. A child must live her own life, must have her own heart pump her own blood, must have her own opinions lead her own choices. She must do that for herself, for all of us, and for the parents who love her.
                I’m heart-warmingly grateful to my parents. I am made from them, in both body and mind. I am the person they raised. I often go to them for guidance, and learn from what they share. I have the tools they gave me through all of their lessons and loves and encouragements.  I honor them and love them by using these tools where I can, as well as I can. I honor all of the fathers and mothers who came before them by believing in this world, believing in myself and my ability to help, and by following life’s beautiful dream of living.

                “Traumatized? Not really. The boy scouts do it, the Marine Corps does it, street gangs do it.”
                “All the same thing. And it has the same structure.”
                -Scott Pelley, correspondent, discussing educational ‘boot camp’ with Father Edwin Leahy of St. Benedict’s Prep

                If you watch the 60 Minutes segment on St. Benedict’s Prep, you’ll see Marines working with the students. When one boy is on the ground during push ups, the leader yells in his face: “Why are you on your knees while your brothers are pushing?” That style of leadership and education is lionized throughout our culture, in sports, Kitchen Nightmares, street gangs and the military. It works by breaking you down, by pushing an image into your head: those above you (for the “structure,” Father Leahy motions in the form of a pyramid–a hierarchy, with a drill sergeant or class leader above, and others beneath) push you until you become a Marine, a St. Benedict’s man, a member of the gang. The message is, “You will do these things, as we tell you to do them. And we will make you better.” At St. Benedict’s, I believe that system has saved lives. In our army it has made powerful soldiers. (The boy probably did another push up). But I don’t want to train soldiers.
                I want a system that doesn’t direct you, but rather recalls you to your own growth. I want a system that supports and encourages you in choosing for yourself. Do push ups–or paint. (Or for double points, do push ups while painting). Run, sing, dance, study physics, or write science fiction. Do it deeply, do it fully. Do it for yourself and for the betterment of us all. I don’t know what this other system looks like, but I’m looking for it. It starts, I think, at a disadvantage as far as power and motivation are concerned. Fear is powerful. Ambition is powerful. Competition is powerful. If I scream at you your blood pressure spikes, and the organic systems that support you tell you it’s time for something dramatic. There is fire in that, but I want to find a different fire. I want it to start off gentle and individual, I want it to be your own; and when you roar, I want it to be your voice roaring. Although while the roaring fire forges steel, it also burns houses. It’s the quiet flame that heats our tea kettle and warms our hearts.
                I’ve watched parents who motivate their children by yelling at them. I’ve seen teachers who do the same thing, and coaches. I’ve done that sometimes. There’s probably a place for it. Fear pushes us to engage. At the same time, fear makes it harder for us to think, to notice nuance, to hear the quiet, individual voices within. A few weeks ago I was talking to a student I’ve built a connection with, and in my frustration, “for her own good” I wanted to yell at her. I was afraid she was making the wrong decision. I wanted to take all my passion and push it toward her, so she would choose something else. And then I had to laugh at myself. At the heart, I was worried she was making her decision out of fear. If I yelled at her, I’d be pushing her to make another decision out of fear. I wanted her to choose for the gift of her heart. I wanted her to choose from her hope for the world. I wanted her to choose from her joy, her hope, her kindness, her love–herself. You can’t yell someone into that.
                For us Americans, it seems easier to get gung-ho about competition than about cooperation. It seems easier to be gung-ho about victory and supremacy (WE! BEAT! YOU!) than about tolerance and compassion. Maybe it’s time we worked on that. Gung-ho itself is from the Chinese phrase gōngyè hézuòshè, which is from gōng “work” + hé “to join together; combine.” I’m pretty gung-ho about that. What if we learned from listening, instead of yelling? What if we grew from inside? What if our fires were cook-fires instead of an army’s beacons? What if, instead of urging our children to fight for their causes, we asked that they live for them?

                “Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.” -W. H. Auden
                “The character of any nation or community is really built on how people take care of the poor, or the elderly, or the sick, or the youth.” -Angeles Arrien, in retelling an Eastern European folktale

                We spend so much time searching and asking for Grand Things, and here I see Auden reminding us of the little things that are themselves grand. When I was a kid, on a hot summer day, I sometimes truly tasted my water. Sometimes, when I was washing dishes, I would even stop to fill up a big glass vase, and swirl my fingers in it, feeling the currents. Sometimes I realized that this, this liquid crystal kiss, is the cradle of my life. And it is beautiful. Even then it was rare. It is rarer now. I’m going to practice.
                 Auden often speaks with an edge: go back far enough in your family line, he reminds me, and you’ll find someone who struggled to find water. Travel far enough from your door, and you’ll find someone who struggles now. (How far do you think it would be?). The fact of water, cool water to drink and to refresh, to flow and to change, and to remain the same, is itself a blessing. It is part of the foundation for all blessings. It is life.
                This semester my class has been thinking about “social contracts,” and the creation of governments and societies. All of our laws, all of our organizations–all of our lives–are based on the agreements we’ve made with each other. The agreement that land can be owned. The agreement that money has value. The agreement not to kill you for your french fries, because I’d rather not be killed for mine. Why don’t we have agreements to make sure that everyone has water? In my class a few weeks ago, when I mentioned being outraged and confused that citizens of my powerful country still starve, a student asked, “Yes, but is it really the government’s responsibility to feed them?” I don’t know. There are issues involving government spending and organization. But what would I be willing to sacrifice from my own life to make sure that everyone in my community got water? A lot, I think. I would sacrifice a lot, because we build this community, and I want a community whose character makes me proud. And because no one should go without water. What’s the downside? Less competition? A perceived limit to individual responsibility? Is that as dangerous as a drought that takes away even the tears you have to cry?
                Perhaps remembering the blessing of simply having water to live gives us a good perspective from which to see love, too. Perhaps working to ensure water for us all can help remind us why we want to live. Look at the rain, the river. Beautiful, isn’t it? For there flows life.

                “Action has meaning only in relationship; without understanding relationship, action on any level will only breed conflict.” -J. Krishnamurti

                As a teacher, I often find myself wondering how: how am I going to start this conversation? How do I push this young man to grow, while still celebrating who he is? How do ungraded papers reproduce so quickly? The How questions are good questions, but Krishnamurti seems to say there are only hows once you understand the whos involved. On a mechanical level, until I understand the wind and my sail, and the relationship between them, I’m not going to trim my sail very well. (Until I understand the relationship between these ropes and that canvas, I’m not even going to touch the right line). On an interpersonal level, until I know something of who you are, I’m not going to know how to stand beside you. Until you know something of who I am, you’re not going to want me there. The relationship between wind and sail or me and you comes first. No action can be clever or appropriate until I’ve understood that relationship, or built it.
                “Action has meaning only in relationship.” We work together, after all–and by the way, I’m pretty glad about that. I’ve split wood (and I like splitting wood), but I’d rather not have to split all the wood to heat my house alone, and build my house alone, and grow my food alone, and then sit alone with noone to talk to about building my house alone. I’ve tried one player monopoly. It didn’t mean very much.
                So tomorrow, instead of wondering how, I want to wonder and explore and enjoy who: the person in front of me, the heart and mind that wonders and hopes. I want to celebrate you. I want to share me. I’m grateful that, distant as we are, different as we are, we can come together in a thought or a joke or an endeavor. I’m grateful that you exist. I’m grateful that I get the chance to start to know you. Once we see each other, our own talents and the possibilities of the world open up.

                “The strange words rolled through his mind; […they] talked wonderfully and only half-understandably, a terrible beautiful magic […]” -Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, in describing John’s love for Shakespeare’s poetry

                I want to talk about two different styles of teaching, and then see something about living. It might even work.
                I remember sitting in a college English class, listening to the professor discuss Jack London’s “To Build A Fire.” I read that story as a teenager: it’s harsh view of life as something that can so easily shimmer and seep away frightened me, confused me, made me grow. In the professor’s hands, the story was an example of changing society. He pointed out that the language itself looks like an instruction manual. In society’s new view, he argued, life becomes something that we either succeed or fail at doing. (‘To build a fire you arrange the wood like this; if you don’t, the fire doesn’t catch.’ I think, by the way, that he’s onto something, and I think it’s an incredibly dangerous way to look at life). Walking out of the class, my friend said there were two ways to teach a story: either you use your theory to try to get closer to the story, to move into it and see more of it, or you use the story as a supportive structure for your theory. In the first approach, your goal is to engage with the story itself. In the second, your goal is to explain and defend a theory. My friend said she wanted the first kind of class. I agreed.
                Which is why I was surprised, and to be honest rather discouraged, when I realized last week that I was doing the second in my class. I was bringing in beautiful poems, but I brought them in as another step on the intellectual staircase we were building. I did that because I was trying to present the class as a unified movement, a series of thoughts that we could follow along. I wanted the students to feel how each thing led to another. I wanted them to know what to expect and what to learn, so they could learn it. So they wouldn’t be left behind.
                That approach has its place, but right now, I want my class to do something else. I want to find John, who comes alive in learning from something he only half understands. I want to give students the chance to be confused. To muddle about. To interact with things that don’t seem connected, and connect them in their own ways, and fall in love (reasonlessly, witlessly) with a story for its own sake. I want them to build something new. These stories are overwhelming: there are oceans of life in them. I could limit that, I could pretend there was an easy, progressing path by hiding the story behind a wall and giving us a pinhole view. That way there would be a lesson. There would be a staircase, but staircases only lead to one place. I want the ocean and the wind. I want them, together and alone, to remember that they can swim.
                Confusion, waves, new rhythms to stumble after, and overwhelming loves–all these flows toward us from all sides. In that there is magic.

                “It’s a big challenge for us […] to get the kids to realize their potential, the fact that they’re a gift to somebody else–it’s not easy.” -Father Edwin Leahy, Headmaster of St. Benedict’s Prep
                “Ben Turnbull’s unhappiness is obvious right from the book’s first page. But it never once occurs to him that the reason he’s so unhappy is that he’s an asshole.” -David Foster Wallace, in reviewing John Updike’s Towards the End of Time

                I almost didn’t want to use David Foster Wallace’s line, because it includes a word I don’t much like. In the end, I think that’s why DFW uses it. Selfishness, arrogance, and possessive disregard for others can look moody, dynamic, and impressive when they’re dressed up in the right clothes, but underneath the pose, they’re ugly and shallow and simple.
                Turnbull isn’t an idiot. He’s not evil. It’s just that, according to DFW, he thinks that one escapes despair by being able “to have sex with whomever one wants whenever one wants,” and living by that self-involved power fantasy makes you act like an asshole. Some of my high schoolers who haven’t thought about it very much might agree with Turnbull’s idea of happiness–but then again, they’re high schoolers who haven’t thought about it very much. The fantasy of being able to “have” (and what a strange euphemism that is) anyone anytime makes sense, I think, for someone who’s just thinking about erotic touch for the first time, and who’s bewildered by that great roar. It’s an easy response to a confused, exciting, frightening topic. Hopefully, by the time we’re Turnbull’s age, we’ve realized it’s an adolescent fantasy and leave it behind with giga pets, smoking in the bathroom, and internet quizzes that tell us our one true love.
                All that’s connected to another “easy response” that we can get stuck in: selfishness. The idea that my life is only for myself. I think most of us want to believe what Father Leahy reminds us: that each of us is a gift to someone else. When we give that up, it’s because we’ve become convinced that there’s nothing except self interest. It’s because we’re discouraged enough to say that people are beyond being helped. It’s because we’re scared enough to say that our own little heart couldn’t help. When we give that up, everything is lessened. We stop offering what we have to the world, we’re inconsiderate, and we hurt inside. We hurt because we want, want desperately, to have lives that reach out beyond ourselves–and because we’ve decided that we don’t. We’ve decided that we can’t.
                So, here, I’m writing it down. I’m listening to Father Leahy. I’m telling you. Go ahead and live for yourself, eat a mango, drink in that taste of the world; and while you live for yourself, live for us all. Work for us all. Be part of the sea that is us all: sometimes a quiet drop, sometimes a wave.
                You are a gift to somebody else.

                A Practice: “I am alive for…”
                I want to share a practice that, an hour ago, this writing gave me. Driving into work, for a moment, I didn’t see why it was worth writing, or thinking, or teaching. How could these stories and discussions matter? And then I thought about Father Leahy. And then I thought about my family, my friends, and my students. And then I thought about you. If you’re interested in sharing my practice, I invite you to take a few minutes, and say out loud who you are alive for today. Say their full name, all of their full names, and in the end, say “I am alive.” Who, today, do you live for?
                I started this, and found that I wanted to say name after name after name. I am alive for so many. I am alive for you. I am alive. And I know why.