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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“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.