“Now hollow fires burn out to black
And lights are guttering low:
Square your shoulders, lift your pack,
And leave your friends and go.

Oh never fear, man, nought’s to dread,
Look not left nor right:
In all the endless road you tread
There’s nothing but the night.”
                -A. E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad

                I love how Housman tells us not to be afraid of walking out into the black, not because we’ll find a light, but because “in all the endless road you tread / There’s nothing but the night.” Well, isn’t that what we were afraid of? Aren’t we afraid of wandering our whole lives through an empty landscape, alone, beneath the distant stars? Yes, I suppose we are–but Housman says we don’t need to be. The very things we’re afraid of, the things we fear–we can turn and step into them. We can realize that those things are here.
                As a child I was terrified of the dark. Sometimes I would pull my blanket up over my face, hiding from the monsters I made up. Then I would imagine a face (it was usually something like Ridley Scott’s alien; I hadn’t seen the movie, so maybe Scott had seen my fears?) staring back at me, just on the other side of the blanket. My fear would build and build and build. I would feel like I just couldn’t pull the blanket down and look. And when, finally, I did, the fear would stop washing over me and become something I could handle. And more: my monster came from my imagination. In the years since then, my imagination has helped me learn and connect, laugh and discover. The fear I felt (and feel) may not be pleasant, it might not be fun, but it is important. When I open the door to allow it in, it’s not as bad as it was behind the blanket. I find that it hurts, but it also helps.
                When I stop running and start walking, and the night’s a kind enough place to be.

                “Fairies are more in the magic than in the world, and people are more in the world than in the magic…And God? God is in everything, moving through everything, is the pattern that everything makes, moving. That’s why messing with magic so often becomes evil, because it’s going against that pattern. I could almost see the pattern as the sun and clouds succeeded each other over the hills and I held the pain a little bit away, where it didn’t hurt me.” –Among Others, Jo Walton

                Among Others is a love song to libraries and friends, a conversation between hundreds of different science fiction books, and a lost girl finding that she isn’t lost at all. (I’ve just finished reading it, including a little nap before the last ten pages. Honestly, I think the nap was as much a part of reading it–pouring my mind through it, and learning from the flow–as anything else). At the heart of it is a way of being in the world. Maybe that’s at the heart of most things.
                Nietzche talks about “will to power” as the fundamental human experience: he sees ambition, the effort to reach a higher position. A lot of us live like that. Jo Walton talks about a pattern: a pattern that is inside all things and between all things, a pattern we’re a part of. In a way, those are both foundational psychologies; in another way, those are different approaches to the idea of living.
                It reminds me of an old Jewish story: young Abraham comes out from a cave (funny, the connections you see–Buddha, Plato). The sun shines above him, and he falls to his knees, saying, ‘Surely you must be the Most Powerful, bright eye of the sky, and I will worship you.’ So he worships the sun for a little while–until sunset, actually, when the sun sets and the moon rises.
                After thinking it over, he drops to his knees in front of the moon, saying, “You must be the Most Powerful, white eye of darkness, and I will worship you.” So he kneels again, and prays, and prays–and clouds cover the moon. So he worships the clouds, until the sun comes up and the clouds go away, and then he thinks, “You must be the…Wait.” So he thinks, and he thinks, and he thinks that things come and go in their own cycles. He decides there must be a power above them all, a power arranging them. He decides to worship that power, and calls it God. That’s one idea: a hierarchy, a creator and creations.
                Walton’s God isn’t above, but within. Her character’s goal isn’t to master patterns, and control them, but rather to fit inside them. To be part of them. To let things be what they are, and be herself what she is, and feel the connections. In the end, that makes sense for a character who loves libraries so much–it’s the life equivalent of reading a book, and making sure it ends up back on the shelf, unbroken, so someone else can come along and find it. I’d like to live that way.

                “Irreverence is a way of playing hooky and remaining present at the same time.” -Mary Ruefle

                Today, while playing my Storytelling game with some students, one of my students started teasing me. I responded by getting more serious about the story we were telling. He responded by teasing me more. We both ended up a little hurt and a lot confused about how things had gone. We’re good friends, so after all of that we spent a bit of time alone to think things over, and then we came together to talk things through.
                He started by apologizing. I responded by apologizing. After that we could get down to work. Had he been finding my weak places, and pushing them? (Why do people like pushing exactly where someone is vulnerable?) Had I been taking myself too seriously? I’ve been told that before–once, notably, by a young woman who went by the name Goose, because of the helmet she liked to wear. (It was covered in feathers).
                We talked around it, over it, and through it, and came up with an idea. Reverence means “respect, awe;” in the end it comes from the Proto-Indo European wer- “to become aware of, perceive, watch out for.” I was being reverent–I was insisting that the choices we make, even the choices in telling a story, matter. They carry weight. They’re something we should watch out for. I think reverence is important–there is a lot in the world that we should respect.
                Etymologically, irreverence should be the opposite of reverence–but I’m not sure that’s true. The opposite of reverence is not perceiving, not watching out, not being aware. Irreverence, as Ruefle reminds us, often works by being aware of something else. It works by questioning, by challenging why we give weight to the things we do. After all, we’ve respected a whole lot of silly things over the years. Sometimes we need to play hooky from our “responsibilities” in order to notice the things that actually require more of a response from us. Sometimes an afternoon in the river (or a conversation with a friend) has more to offer than a worksheet on a desk.
                For what it’s worth, I think the balance lies, not in melding these two together, but in remembering that they work together. It’s easy for reverent people to get insulted by irreverent people, and it’s easy for irreverent people to think reverent people are sticks in the mud. Still, a carpenter who doesn’t respect the hammer is going to end up with lots of hurt fingers, and a carpenter who doesn’t question things is never going to build a better house. Those things that actually deserve respect can probably stand up to a little teasing, and the best teasing usually includes a little respect.

                “Start With Why.” -Simon Sinek

                “Merchants, thieves, assassins, wizards–all competed energetically in the race without really realising that it needn’t be a race at all, and certainly not trusting one another enough to stop and wonder who had marked out the course and was holding the starting flag.
                The Patrician disliked the word ‘dictator.’ It affronted him.”
                -Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!

                Because you are alive, you will spend the energy of your life working toward something. You might work towards keeping up with Game of Thrones and Orange is the New Black.  You might work towards programming streetlights, or growing tomatoes, or designing efficient batteries. There are all sorts of jobs, all sorts of movements, all sorts of goals. What’s your “Why”?
                Sinek starts by imagining three levels: what we do, how we do it, and why we do it. Most people, he says, communicate (think, and look at the world) in that order–but you can turn the order around. You can start with why you want to do something, think through how you’re going pursue what matters to you, and then decide what you’ll do.
                I think the danger comes when we forget that we pick our “why,” and focus on following a path without knowing whether it’s a path worth walking, or, worse, without realizing that it’s only one path. I have a friend who’s working for a company that does something cool and techie–we’ll call it designing bopalops. If there’s something my friend can do over the weekend to help with the bopalops, he’ll do it. In fact, he does, weekend after weekend. That extra work helps with the bopalops’ design; it also stresses him out, and disconnects him from himself and his loved ones. As we talked, he asked: “What’s my goal in working every weekend? What would happen if I didn’t?” He’s paid to design bopalops, but he doesn’t think bopalops are going to make the world better. It’s in his nature to work hard when he picks up a task, and there’s something beautiful in that–but in designing bopalops on Saturdays he’s not allowing himself that time to work on something else. What’s his why?
                Later that day I talked to someone else I love. His goal is to support his family. That’s wonderful. And if that’s his “why”–“for my daughter, for my wife”–then he has a good yardstick by which to measure what he does. If the path he’s running (habits, work, goals) doesn’t lead in that direction, he doesn’t need to be running it.
                Pratchett imagines a Patrician who set “our” finish line and waved “our” starting flag, and who doesn’t need to “control” us: he just watches as we force ourselves along the course he chose, yelling about how we’re free (or even winning!). As we run, we do the work he wants. (There could be such patricians: perhaps real power, these days, is less about what we do and more about what we think). At the same time, often enough, I think it’s our own pride, our own competitive spirit, our own thoughtlessness that arranges the race. I’m told of better, and I want to be better. I’m told of win, and I want to win. It’s hard for me to stop running long enough to see the fields that stretch beyond my little race track.
                 Everything that matters to me–friendship, compassion, love, art, science, knowledge, community, safety, justice–is not a race. It’s a world we amble into, a world that we change and that changes us.  Each of us will spend the work of our lives–however deep and however wide that is–in supporting the tasks we choose.
                What do I choose?

                “Travelers return from the city of Zirma with distinct memories: a blind black man shouting in the crowd, a lunatic teetering on a skyscraper’s cornice, a girl walking with a puma on a leash. Actually many of the blind men who tap their canes on Zirma’s cobblestones are black; in every skyscraper there is someone going mad; all lunatics spend hours on cornices; there is no puma that some girl does not raise, as a whim. The city is redundant: it repeats itself so that something will stick in the mind.
                I too am returning from Zirma: my memory includes dirigibles flying in all directions, at window level; streets of shops where tattoos are drawn on sailors’ skin; underground trains crammed with obese women suffering from the humidity. My traveling companions, on the other hand, swear they saw only one dirigible hovering among the city’s spires, only one tattoo artist arranging needles and inks and pierced patterns on his bench, only one fat woman fanning herself on a train’s platform. Memory is redundant: it repeats signs so that the city can begin to exist.”
                -Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

                Last night my friend and I started talking about memory, and because he’s him and I’m me, that led to a long midnight conversation. He thinks he has a bad memory: when his wife asked him, “Tell me one thing that happened before you were ten,” he didn’t know what to say. Then again, he’s told her about events from before he was ten, when they came up within the course of a thought. Memory’s a tricky thing. It’s that trickiness I want to talk about.
                When I start looking for experiences from before I’m ten, my first experience is that I can remember LOTS of things. I can remember going to the park to catch polliwogs, I can remember playing with legos, I can remember backpacking. My next experience is, wait: none of those are instances. They are activities that I often did. My memory of them is general, not specific. My mind, in Calvino’s words, is repeating the signs.
                When I started looking for something specific, I found an image of standing at the sliding glass door into our house, looking out at my surprise birthday present: a trampoline. That moment happened when I was fix or six. The thing is, in this “memory,” I’m looking at myself–I don’t remember it from my eyes, I remember it like a picture I’ve seen. I’ve heard that whenever we remember something, we don’t remember the original experience: we remember the last time we remembered it. That means we can come to forget details, or add details in. As far as I can tell, my “memory” of the trampoline is a mental reconstruction. Either I was told about the moment, or I’ve thought about it so many times since it happened that I’ve redrawn the picture.
                I think remembering is an act, a tool we use to drive, cook, do taxes more efficiently, build connections with those we love, and get less lost at the grocery store. (Seriously, where’s salsa?). It is one of the tools we use to make sense of a world that has a functionally infinite number of details, connections, and possibilities. Calvino says this tool groups things together, it repeats “signs,” so that we can have a general sense of the city or our childhood. It gives us a map–but a map is not the same as a landscape.
                Once a year, as part of a retreat I help lead in Colorado, I’m asked to tell my life as a story. Last year, for the first time, I realized I was telling the same thing I told the year before–same big moments, the same hurts, almost the same jokes. That makes the “story” easier to tell, easier to understand, but it also restricts my awareness of myself. It brings me back into the same struggles and the same goals that I said I was having last year. Sitting by a campfire in the mountains, I tried to refuse the familiar story and pierce through to experience. From a rational point of view, that seems obviously impossible–any input I have from back then has been stored in memory. But from an experiential point of view it felt a lot different. It was surprising. It was exciting. It hurt more. It opened new possibilities beyond the narrative I had put together to mean me. Doing this felt like going through a forest I had been in many times before, but deciding, for the first time in years, to step off the path I’d worn and duck beneath the branches.

                “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.