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.

“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.