“I believed that [feelings were unmanly], especially complicated feelings. I didn’t admit to them. I hardly knew I had them.” -Tobias Wolff, This Boy’s Life

                “You don’t have to be a slave to those experiences if you can find a way to process the emotions.”
                -André Guttfreund, discussing the film Cachada and how we interact with old pain

                I keep hearing how emotions “get in the way” of our “rational mind:” how they trip us up on the way toward what “makes sense.” The more I look at myself and the people around me, the less I think that’s true. Sure, sometimes my feelings start pulling me apart. They’re like roots, working their way into the foundation of this life and mind I’ve made. They always seem to find my cracks. Then again, all that usually happens when I’ve been ignoring or denying them. When I pay attention, my emotions are also the roots that grow my forest, my garden, that give me the wood I build with.
                Sometimes I don’t know what I’m feeling. I’ve gone months, maybe even years, not sure if I’m angry or sad, astonished or tense or serene or indolent or quiescent. (All those are different). It’s in those times, the times that I’m farthest from my own emotions, that I’m most frustrated by them. It’s in those times that I start trying to tie them up or push them away or have Tony do something irreversible to them down at the docks. I also start lashing out: when I don’t know what pain I’m feeling, when I don’t know what I need, I have an urge to strike back at anything and take everything.
                In the last few months I’ve spent more time feeling through what I’m feeling. That’s meant some hurt, and a lot of confusion; some silliness, and a lot of energy. As I spend more time in this garden, I believe, more and more, that all the plants here are sharing something. I don’t want to miss out on the pear because I’ve only noticed the prickles. I don’t want to chew on the tea leaves and decide they’re not good for anything. Maybe uncertainty helps with my curiosity. Maybe hopelessness is only the rotting fruit of wanting to help, and I can learn to harvest a little sooner. Maybe I can brew hurt into an understanding of what it’s like to be hurt, and that can help make me kind.
                 The first time I saw artichokes growing, I thought, “The first person to eat one of those must’ve been really hungry.” Maybe they were just paying attention to their feelings, even the complicated ones. I can’t eat everything the same way. I can’t just keep chewing the pointy bits. But I can learn to fillet puffer fish and soak cassava and steep tea, and scrape my teeth over the inside of an artichoke’s petals.

Tell all the truth but tell it slant —
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind —
                -Emily Dickinson

For whatever we lose(like a you or a me)
it’s always ourselves we find in the sea
                -e. e. cummings

                I’ve heard the first part, the strategy, quoted again and again–but almost everyone I’ve ever heard stops before Dickinson explains why we should “tell it slant.” And the why is the most powerful part.
                If you had told me, during my first week in Oklahoma, that I would stay here six years, I would’ve said “No way.” I might have even become a little more resistant to the idea, because it would’ve felt so foreign. If you would have told me, the first time I talked to someone, that I would fall deeply, openly in love with her, in love like I hadn’t imagined–well, I wouldn’t have been able to imagine it. There weren’t roots, yet, to hold up the flowers and the leaves. In high school and college plenty of people did tell me that I’d be a good teacher, and I pushed back against every one. I’m not saying that teaching, or loving, or living in Oklahoma were the only path I could’ve walked. I don’t think they were. But I found those paths slowly, gradually, while my eyes adjusted.
                Too often I’m in a hurry, and in hurrying, I hurry by. I hurry by the puddles and the petals, the questions and the bits of coral on the beach. Maybe finding ourselves is often a matter of losing our way, losing our yous and mes, until we’re spun around enough to start seeing what’s here. So I want to slow down. I don’t need answers now. I’ll try not to mind if the mountains don’t seem to be getting closer, no matter how long I walk. I’ll try to keep tottering along through slanted rooms, playing with the pieces I find, wondering at the changes larger than I yet understand. Day by day, all this is dazzling. It’s wonderful. And it’s helping me to see.

“Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky…”

“That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all.”
                -T. S. Eliot

                A friend died a few days ago. His name was Rishi. I don’t know what you’re supposed to do after someone’s death–“feel your feelings,” someone said. It’s good advice. I’m trying. I’ve been on several long walks. Rishi and I were part of a little group that used to walk together, discussing poetry and the way the fields blow in the wind. Which is also poetry, he said. It was on one of those walks that Rishi told me to go read T. S. Eliot again. I’d never liked Eliot that much. I’d always felt like I didn’t understand him. But Rishi told me to listen again, and that conversation, those walks, come back to me now.
                I still don’t understand. Perhaps that’s the point? I don’t understand how to say goodbye to Rishi, or what to say to some of his other friends as we mourn and remember him. Still, though, his memory makes me smile. In a little group we walked out through old hills, touching the rocks, watching the wind. Let us go then you and I. We wandered along through what we didn’t understand. I’m glad for that.
                A few weeks ago, a high school senior asked how you stay in touch with friends once you’ve moved away. I told him I didn’t know. I’ve tried it: sometimes it’s worked, sometime it hasn’t. This student and I talked for a while longer, and stumbled across this: perhaps you just remember that you want to stay in touch. You keep the intention, you return it, and though that isn’t a path, it’s a view towards where you’re headed.
                The group that Rishi and I walked with didn’t ever get where it was going. There wasn’t a place we were going. We found paths, and left them. Like our feet, our ideas found possibilities, and followed them, and turned aside to something new. And perhaps all of that was as it should be. That is not it at all…the path was never exactly right, but we were out, looking for it, and sharing the confusing, happy work of wondering along.
                None of this is what I meant to say. I don’t know what I meant to say. But I think Rishi would understand that, and might say that the important part wasn’t the path we’d walked but our attempt to walk it with an open heart.
                Thank you, Rishi.

“Dormammu: You will never win.
Doctor Strange: No. But I can lose. Again. And again. And again. And again, forever.”
–Doctor Strange (2016)

                We all pick our heroes, and there are different heroes to pick. Hercules is a hero because he’s strong. Odysseus is a hero because he’s clever. Moana is a hero because she recognizes Te Fiti the loving through the flames of hurt Te Kā (“They have stolen the heart from inside you / But this does not define you / This is not who you are / I Know who you are”). In The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, John Wayne is a hero because he’s violent enough to kill the bad guy, and Jimmy Stewart is a hero because he’s idealistic enough to resist violence. (If that doesn’t say something about how America likes to imagine itself, I don’t know what does). In Gaiman’s Neverwhere, Richard Mayhew is a hero because he’s kind. In the movie, Wonder Woman is a hero because she won’t give in to hate or apathy, even when Ares taunts her with humanity’s flaws. She keeps loving.
                Doctor Strange is a hero because he’s clever (like Odysseus) and because, at the end of the day, he’s willing to lose. He’s willing to lose and lose and lose, lose until Dormammu is tired of hurting him, and agrees to leave everyone behind Doctor Strange alone. (That’s a story we’ve seen before: one of my favorite versions is Tyr’s part in the myth, “The Binding of Fenrir.” Ask me about it sometime, and I’d love to tell you). Our society is so interested in “winners.” Some of those winners “sacrifice themselves”  for the final step, but they still win. Strange’s sacrifice (“sacrifice,” originally “to make sacred”) is different: he’s choosing a path where he gets hurt, where he loses, again and again, because that’s the best thing he can do for the world.
                Lately I’ve been feeling more hopeful than I was feeling when I saw Doctor Strange, so I’ve been thinking more about Moana’s open eyes. I suppose we all choose our heroes, day by day; we choose who to look up to, and that’s who we grow toward. What about your hero, then? What’s their superpower?

                “no one is a stranger, this whole world is your home.” -Franz Wright, “Promise”

                A week ago, in response to a student’s poem, I found myself asking: “This makes it sound like you think there’s only one place you’re supposed to be, one good outcome, one right path. Is that true?” She answered quickly: “Yes.” I don’t know if she kept thinking about that, but I did, and yesterday we talked it over.
                I know I’ve felt like she did: I’ve felt like living and working and growing up were a single tightrope, and if I messed up, if I fell, I’d never get back to where I was, let alone to where I was going. Sometimes, instead, life’s felt more like a field–I can walk here, or there, or lie down, or listen, or double back, and there’s always ground beneath me. My student saw those two images, too: the tightrope and the field. As we talked it over, she said she wanted to practice seeing the field more often.
                Back when I was choosing what college to attend, I thought I had to make the right decision, and I thought there was only one of those. Then my brother said: “You did the work to find interesting doors, and now you’re lucky enough that some of them are open. You choose which one to walk through.” If all goes as planned, next week’s Uproar will be my last before I move away from Oklahoma City. There are lots of quotes about leaving (“Tomorrow to fresh woods”), but I find myself thinking more about Franz Wright. Maybe moving isn’t the same as leaving. Maybe moving isn’t going off to walk alone through a disconnected crowd. Maybe it’s going to another place where I live. Maybe it’s almost like going back, even if it’s going to someplace I’ve never been. Wherever I’ve walked there’s someone to meet. Wherever I’ve stepped, there’s ground or rock or water beneath me.
                No one is a stranger, this whole world is your home.

                “A saying from the area of Chinese medicine would be appropriate to mention here: ‘One disease, long life; no disease, short life.’ […] Once you face and understand your limitations, you can work with them, instead of having them work against you and get in your way, which is what they do when you ignore them, whether you realize it or not.”
                -Benjamin Hoff, The Tao of Pooh

                I’ve been diagnosed with piriformis syndrome, and it’s wonderful. I mean, okay, the actual having of it is a bit of a pain: a little pear-shaped (hear the latin? Piriformis?) muscle in my butt is too tight and inflamed, so it rubs against my sciatic nerve, and ouch. But still, it’s wonderful. Because as far as I can tell, I got my piriformis in a bunch by slouching at my desk, hanging on muscles instead of supported by bones, and carrying my backpack on one shoulder, and stressing so much at work that I stopped doing other things. You know, like walking. Like moving through the trees near my house, and noticing that the junipers nearby have something called cedar apple rust (which is gross, and beautiful, in a weird way), and that once every year a happy crop of baby spiders sail through the sky on silk strings, land in fields, and leave a world webbed with tracing light. And there are foxes. And friends, sometimes, to go walking with.
                By the way, the spiders fly by using electric fields.
                “One disease, long life; no disease, short life.” I’m a little uncomfortable learning about Taoism from someone named Benjamin Hoff, but all the same, ever since I read that line it just makes sense. I think I might well have gone on obsessing about work and forgetting to move for weeks at a time if a little pear-shaped muscle hadn’t have started saying ow. But it did. Now, mostly, I remember to walk, and when I don’t, there’s a building ache that says go do that. And then I realize that the ground is thick with today’s rain.
                Perhaps being hurt, being imperfect, being limited isn’t so bad. If I understand my anatomy (and I don’t, really, except in as much as a certain piriformis is explaining it to me), it’s the rigidity of bones and the pull of muscles that lets a body move. Or to put it another way: when he was teaching us to write poetry, Richard Wilbur said that a poetic form would be a cage when we started. And then, at some point, the cage would become a scaffolding in which we could build.
                Look at that (says Hoff, or Pooh): we all come with our own cages, our own bars beyond which we cannot go. And those bars can be the ladders we climb.

                “Mr. President, we and you ought not now to pull on the ends of the rope in which you have tied the knot of war, because the more the two of us pull, the tighter that knot will be tied…”
                -Letter From Chairman Khrushchev to President Kennedy, October 26th, 1962

                “I don’t agree, Mr. President.”
                -Llewellyn Thompson to President Kennedy, in response to Kennedy’s statement that an acceptable diplomatic solution was no longer possible. October 27th, 1962

                I recently fought with a friend. I don’t like that, but it happens, and I think I’m wondering What’s next?–or maybe, just as accurately, what’s now? In parts of my life they’ve been a good friend and we’ve grown together. In other moments we’ve felt far away, and in other moments we’ve bristled. But now, in the middle of this fight, after I’ve said things that don’t sound like what I meant to say and they have done the same (at least, I hope they have; otherwise, some of what they’ve said is pretty final), I find myself sitting here looking out the window with a few words from Khrushchev and Thompson playing in my head.
                Both of them emphasize not doing. Khrushchev feels how the Americans and Russians are pulling on this “knot of war,” and everyone can see the destruction that could follow. But they could stop pulling, Khrushchev says. Thompson refuses the perspective of his President: “I don’t agree.” Here we are on ground we think we can’t give up, here we are, angry, and pulling toward anger. It feels like there’s nothing else to do. But there is.
                I wonder why it’s so hard to stop arguing, stop sharing those little flames that heat the pot toward a moment when it really will be too late to take things back. Is it because I’m attached to being right? Is it because I want to feel respected, and I don’t? Is it because I’ve imagined the situation as a contest in which someone will win and someone will lose? Am I scared that, unless we both stop pulling in our tug o’ war, a pause from me will just mean I get pulled off my feet? Is it just because I’m afraid, and letting my fear lead?
                All of those, I suppose, in different amounts, and probably with some other ingredients thrown in for good measure. Whatever the reason, I definitely tie knots. I definitely keep pulling on them, not because I want to, not because I hope for or intend the future that this knot ties me to, but because I don’t see how to stop, how to turn toward something new. But I can stop. Perhaps Khrushchev and Thompson say that stopping, that choosing a new path, often starts by not doing.
                We are ready for this, writes Khrushchev at the end of his letter. Ready to relax the forces pulling on our rope, and then, after a breath, in a calmer moment, ready to untie the knot.

“This the room he painted to cradle the boy he was.
The painter’s step, the sleepers think, is the floor settling.
His breath against their skin, they think a draft or the night’s cold.”
                -Janice Harrington, “Topoanalysis,” in response to Horace Pippin’s painting Asleep

                Sometimes I think we’re all still children. And toddlers, and infants, I suppose, and adults; we’re cooks and gardeners, writers and window washers. Part of me is still knee deep in a pond in the early 90s, watching the pollywogs wiggle, swept up in the fullness of life that isn’t mine, and part of me is the child a week later, bored by the polliwogs my parents let me catch. Part of me is the child kneeling by the glass weeks after that, wondering how I missed the change, the moment when they grew legs and grew up and became something new. Those are just a few of the spaces in my mind.
                In “Topoanalysis,” Janice Harrington shows us a painter, Horace Pippin, as he goes back through two world wars (one of which he fought in) and five decades to the room where he was a boy. She lets the painter walk through that room, step on that floor, see that child. She watches Horace Pippin paint a room “to cradle the boy he was.”
                I think we’re all still children: kids with skinned knees who feel like they have no one to talk to, or kids who feel smothered, or kids who learned too early that hugging isn’t cool. And we’re supported, loved children, too: children snuggled up to hear stories, children exploring the creek, children gathering magic stones. Harrington suggests that these moments don’t need to stay locked in the past. We can go back to them, like her painter. We can cradle the children we were. I wonder what rooms I still live in, asking something, needing something; what did I need to hear? I wonder what rooms you still live in. And if you can find your way back there, if you can paint that room with color or words or sounds, can you recreate your perspective? Can you paint the scene with open blinds, so you can see the trees outside your moment of hurt, the trees you climbed in later that same day? Can you cradle this child so it can sleep, deeply and safely, and wake up rested?
                Reading Harrington, I think you can. I think I can. I want to keep thinking about this. I want to find the rooms I live in, and paint them to cradle the children I am.

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

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

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

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

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