“If the Angel deigns to come, it will be because you have convinced her, not by your tears, but by your humble resolve to be always beginning: to be a beginner.”
        -Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

    Rilke’s letters are well worth reading: I’d share a link, but you should probably buy the thin little book. Links can be informative, they’re picks to gather some information from the internet, but it’s hard for me to make links into friends; books cross rivers with you, they wait patiently by your beside, they serve humbly as coasters and boldly as weapons against rabid squirrels, they whisper back as you rustle their pages, and they speak. I like ‘em.
        So: Rilke. We often use “beginner” to mean someone who hasn’t learned too much yet, as opposed to an expert, who knows what’s what and how not to blow the laboratory sky high. A beginner’s a noob. You don’t want to be a noob. On the other hand, what are you good at? Really, really good at? Whenever I talk to anyone who actually has practiced something, they’ll say they still have a lot to learn. They do still have a lot to learn, because there is more in any discipline to learn than any of us will ever know. Perhaps, in reading Rilke, we can start reclaiming the word “beginner:” the truth is, that’s a pretty wonderful thing to be. When you’re a noob, a newbie, the world’s new, and when the world’s new there is still so much to explore and discover. So let’s be noobs together.
        Of course, a “beginner” could also be “one who begins.” It would be wonderful to be that. You know how you’ve been wanting to learn to draw better? Begin. You know how you’ve always wanted to sing? Begin. You know how you’ve wondered if you and this person could be friends? Be a beginner. Start something with the world. (When life goes all Taxi Driver on you, and says, “You talking to me?” say, “Yeah!”).
        A few days ago, a student came to me after completing an interesting short movie for our class. He’d done a great job: he has lots of talent, he was trying to use techniques he’d learned from Hitchcock and Iñárritu, and he was a beginner. He got a high grade, but not as high as he expects from himself, so he came to ask me, respectfully, how he’d lost points. I tried to tell him not to look at it that way. I tried to say that he was playing with interesting ideas, interesting techniques, but he was still starting. If I gave him a bow, he wouldn’t handle it very well the first time. That’s just how bows are. That’s just how skills are. And that’s not a bad thing. In fact, it would be sad if this movie (his fourth ever, completed when he was sixteen) contained his full understanding of movie making: that would mean either that cinematography is a shallow art, where there isn’t much to learn, or that he just isn’t capable of exploring the art’s nuances. And neither of those are true. I want to see more of the movies this beginner makes as he begins.
        Perhaps it’s silly to expect to be a master at the start. Perhaps wisdom is to learn, to grow, to fumble, to act with love and attention and dedication–to be always beginning.

        “Our roots are in the dark; the earth is our country. Why did we look up for blessing — instead of around, and down? What hope we have lies there. Not in the sky full of orbiting spy-eyes and weaponry, but in the earth we have looked down upon. Not from above, but from below. Not in the light that blinds, but in the dark that nourishes, where human beings grow human souls.”
        -Ursula K. Le Guin, “A Left Handed Commencement Address”

        Le Guin’s two page speech might be my favorite speech ever, and look, here’s a link right to it. You should probably read it, especially if you’ve ever wondered about courage and kindness, women and men, soldiers and healers.
        I like being happy. I like the moments when laughter takes hold and runs, like water downstream, sparkling and spinning, and any movement, any word, is enough to set it sparkling and spinning again. But I don’t only like being happy. I like being thoughtful, too. I like being curious. I like being confused, because that’s the door where questions come in. I like being exhausted after I’ve worked hard. I like being sad, when that sadness is part of the connection I share with others. My sorrow for the friends who’ve died is part of my love for them, and I wouldn’t give it up. I like being cold, when I’ve forgotten winter, and I walk outside during the first freeze to feel endless snows whispering past my skin.
        “Why did we look up for blessings, instead of around, and down?” The sky is beautiful–I’ve been seeing a lot of it lately, on my way into school–but the earth is beautiful, too. A few years ago, I watched a baby playing in the dust and dirt. He watched an ant go back and forth. He watched the dirt just as much, I think, and finger painted with it, and nose painted, which is when you paint on the ground with your nose (and shouldn’t be confused with painting your nose in dust. Although he did that, too). I think he was finding secrets. Maybe the secret is, from the earth we grow. The secret is, all we need is beneath us. The secret is, all things have roots. The secret is, here.
        We aren’t winning or losing, succeeding or failing. Why do we want those victories? Why do we value those coins? Gold and silver are only pieces mined from the earth beneath us, they’re little fragments, cooked and frozen, and we have the whole planet against our skin whenever we step outside. We are growing, this way or that way, struggling or laughing. Like Tolkien’s tree, we can “Eat earth, dig deep. Drink water, go to sleep.” There are days, too, and there are nights, and here, just here, we are growing. We have roots: to the community, to ourselves, and to the earth itself. We reach out with uncertain fingers and confused minds and gentle voices. We find earth and water, thought and connection, the rustling wind and an unending song.

        “Whether this is my end or a new beginning I have no way of knowing: I have given myself over into the hands of strangers, because it can’t be helped.
        And so I step up, into the darkness within; or else the light.”
        -Margaret Atwood

        Spoiler Alert: I’m going to talk about the end of The Handmaid’s Tale, a wonderful book that you should probably read.

        When we finished The Handmaid’s Tale, I asked my students, “When was the last time you put your life in someone else’s hands?” “Never,” was the first answer. “Always,” another answered a little while later. We talked about airplane pilots and the people driving the other way on the road. We talked about the chef who prepared our chicken, the contractors who finished the building we’re in, and the people all around us, whose chance remarks can mean so much to our social, emotional lives. “Unless you went off into the mountains,” one student said, “And tried to live truly alone, it’s always.”
        By the end of The Handmaid’s Tale, we’ve come to care for Offred. And we’ve seen her hurt: so hurt, so many times and by so many people. As a heroine she doesn’t do much: towards the end she even says that she wishes her story had more action in it, and more beauty.
        All that is an aside. I want to talk about the end. Throughout the book, we’ve followed Offred, a natural, struggling human, as she tries to keep hold of her own human heart amid the insanity of a cruelly twisted, twisting world. We’ve seen her hurt by people who don’t care about her, by people who are too scared to help her, by people who don’t even realize they’re hurting her, because they’re too thoughtless or too cruel or too far gone. Then, at the end, a van comes to pick her up. It’s either the secret police, who will take her away and kill her; or it’s the uncertain resistance, the citizens who are fighting back and trying to rebuild a better, kinder world. She doesn’t know which. We don’t know which. But we know who we want it to be, and she chooses to trust them. She steps up into their hands.
        But whose hands are these? Whose hands are helping her into the van? All we know is that they’re strangers. The book ends without telling us, and that’s a bit frustrating. We want to know. We want Atwood to tell us.
        But whose hands are these? All we know is that they belong to some of the other people in the world: the unknown others, fumbling through their own lives, stumbling into hers. There could be books about their lives, though there aren’t.
        But whose hands are these? They’re ours. Atwood doesn’t tell us how the story ends. I don’t think she knows how the story ends. That’s why she wrote the book. Offred is standing there right now, climbing into the van, and our hands are helping her. Who are we? What will we choose? Are we too wrapped in our own hurt to help, or try to help? Are we so scared that we’re cruel? Have we accepted that the world’s ills are too large for our hands to help with? Or do we, here, now, hold out our hands in courage and in kindness?
        Whose hands are these?

        “They also serve who only stand and wait.” -John Milton, “On His Blindness”
        “I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted, and behold, service was joy.” -Rabindranath Tagore

        The play Cyrano de Bergerac (which is awesome. Especially the version translated by Hooker, or, I suppose, the French version, but I’m not cool enough to know about that one) opens in a playhouse. The actors onstage are themselves going to the theater, but these are not polite, careful, here’s-my-ticket-sir, I’d-better-unwrap-my-hard-candies-now theater goers. First there are two musketeers who practice their fencing, then some young gamblers, some lovers (a different kind of gambling?), a few people trying to make a buck, some thieves trying to steal others’ bucks, and children who go up into the rafters to “fish for wigs.” (The play takes place when wigs were fashionable: and this is the best use for fishing hooks I’ve ever heard of). I used to wonder why the author, Edmond Rostand, gave so much time to this initial scene. It’s pages. Then I noticed something: it’s fun. It’s full. It’s laughter and sparkle and variety and life and pizzazz. It’s pizza with everything on it.
        I’ve always wanted to get “pizzazz” and “pizza” that close together.
        My class just read Huxley’s Brave New World, in which a brilliant few have worked hard to make everyone steady and the same. It’s nice to step into Rostand’s world, which celebrates the variety with what feels like a you-bring-a-guitar I’ll-bring-a-harmonica let’s-find-a-tune camp out. Everybody sings. Are we in tune? Not really! Hip hip? HURRAH!
        In “On His Blindness,” Milton (the poet who went blind, and so had trouble writing) talks about losing the opportunity to share his one true talent with the world. I see him folding his arms near the wall, noble and stoic and alone, to Witness as best he can with his blind eyes. Tagore, I think, comes along and takes Milton’s hands, pulling him into the dancing. What if we need the jokesters and songsters, hucksters and pranksters, dancers and madmen–and okay, the poets, too? What if everything vivacious, compassionate, open hearted or aware is part of our service to the world?
        Are we in tune? Not really! Are we singing? HURRAH!

        “You see things; and you say ‘Why?’ But I dream things that never were; and I say ‘Why not?’”
                        -George Bernard Shaw
        “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing
        There is a field. I’ll meet you there.” -Rumi

        In my classes, I notice I ask a lot of “What do you think of that?” questions, a lot of “Do you think that’s right?” questions. And those are good questions. Huxley wants us to ask them while we’re reading Brave New World, and Atwood wants us to ask them in The Handmaid’s Tale. We are making a world. What will we make? We are living a life. How will we live it? Sometimes these questions are hard: we make so much that is harmful, so much that is hurtful. (I find myself asking, “What pushes us to be cruel, and thoughtless, and apathetic? What could lead us toward something else?”). Some of these questions are gentle. There is so much that we’ve never imagined, so much that we’ve never tried: look, there are rivers here, and open meadows, and oceans rocking us to sleep. Where shall we go?
        At the same time, these are all questions, aren’t they? Questions with sides, with arguments. Perhaps we could try to leave questions behind. What if we said, “Yes, sorrow,” and “Yes, joy,” and “Yes, the winter snows”? What if we didn’t need to say anything at all? I am sorry that you hurt: I want to help you. But isn’t there also something worthwhile in just sitting here, in holding you, and being held, and being held by all this?
        I think there must be a balance. Today, in my class, we talked about the difference between what we “want to want” and what we “want.” I want french fries; I want to want healthier foods. I might want to want to be an athlete, because all of my family plays baseball, but I don’t want to play baseball. A student asked, “What happens when the two levels contradict each other?” I don’t know. Then there’s tension. I think you can settle it either way. You can try to pull your wants inline with your want-to-wants: you can try to train your desire. I want the last cookie, but I want to want to share, and I’ll practice that. That’s like Shaw, and we’re shaping a different world–perhaps a better world. I can also trust my wants, instead; maybe this desire in me, that I thought was wrong, that I wanted to get rid of, is only misunderstood. Maybe it has something to share. The danger of insisting on my wants, perhaps, is that I could end up an unthinking servant to my desires. Perhaps the danger of insisting on my want-to-wants is that my idealized “self” encourages self-loathing, and might cut me off from the beauty of what’s really here.
         Maybe Rumi is calling us one step further. Look: a night sky, a suburban street. A wall that’s a squall of electrons. My ankle that, even if it’s sprained, is wondrous and complex. Why “go”? Why not wander? Why not sit? Forget the wanting, or the wants toward wanting. Remember the field. It’s a metaphor, yes; but what if it’s also a place, grass and sky, where time eddies and flows like water? What if it’s someplace we can walk to?
        “I’ll meet you there.”

“Happiness is never grand.”
        -Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

         I hear the word “happy” bounced around a lot these days. The majority of my students think “being happy” is the primary goal in life, and most of the rest think it’s one of the main goals. The internet has a lot of articles and pretty pictures and recommendations about “Doing what makes you happy” or “10 Things To Do Right Now That Will Make You Happy.” Harrumph, say I. Look at the etymology (back to etymonline.com, and down the rabbit hole we go!): from “hap,” “chance,” like haphazard or perhaps (“through chance”) or happen or mishap. To be happy is just to be lucky: it’s what you feel when you drop your phone but the screen doesn’t crack, or you hit all the green lights, or you wake up at midnight realizing you left the stove on, but the power’s gone out, too, so your house isn’t on fire. And that’s nice, but can’t we do better?
         I like “joy.” It comes from a long line of words that all mean “joy” or “to rejoice,” but might, according to my source, be related to the Old Irish guaire. Guaire means “noble.” Couldn’t we have a kind of joy like that? A joy that isn’t the result of things having happened in our favor, but that comes from something inside, something we’ve practiced, something we are? Something in the way we go into life? Disce guadere, says Seneca. Practice joy.
         That reminds me of something from the Dalai Lama. Way back when, we started out as hunter-gatherers: we went out to find what could keep us alive, and stripped its fruit or dug its roots or stuck it with a spear, and brought it home. Later we became farmers: we stayed in one place, we thought about seasons and water and soil. We grew what we needed. The Dalai Lama says that, when it comes to happiness, most of us are still hunter gatherers. We look for the girlfriend or the position or the degree or the acknowledgement that will make us happy. That kind of game is zero sum: when Natalie Portman’s with me, she’s not with you. (Natalie, if you’re reading this, Oh. My. God). But there’s another option. We could be farmers. We could plant kindness, equanimity, awareness, connection, and watch it grow into joy.
         I wonder if we latch onto happiness as a kind of last resort: when we’re not sure what to believe in, we tell ourselves we can believe in this. Whatever we think of our place in the galaxy, or of a God’s specific doctrinal love for a certain sect, Stephen Hawking says the “human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate sized planet, orbiting around a very average star in the outer suburb of one among a hundred billion galaxies.” Faced with that, what else can we believe in? Well, let’s think a minute. I say kindness. I say compassion. I say connection, purpose, giggling, helping (even though it won’t help forever), striving, reaching, hurting, hoping, loving. I say now.
         Maybe even joy isn’t as high as we could reach. Maybe none of the things I just said stick for you, but could you plant some seeds, and see what grows? And see what it takes to nourish them?

         “Wednesday” comes from the Old English “wodnesdæg,” or “Woden’s day.” Woden is an older name for Odin. My source is etymonline.com, which is a wonderful resource and a rabbit hole I rather frequently go tumbling down to lands rich in silliness, surprise, and adventure.

         In Norse mythology, we’re all supported by Yggdrasil, the World Tree. At a root of the World Tree rests the Well of Wisdom, also called Mimir’s Well, as Mimir is the guardian of its waters. Odin All-Father once found his way to that well. He’d searched for a long time, for drinking its water gives knowledge of things that were, that are, and that must be. (Some things are fated, some things are for us to choose; the well only gives knowledge of what’s fated). When Odin told Mimir, the guardian, that he would drink, Mimir told him that he could. The price was his right eye. The myth doesn’t say how long Odin stood, wondering about the choice before him; but it does say that he reached up and plucked out his eye, and offered it to the water as his sacrifice, his pledge. Then he drank.
         Odin was not blind after that: he saw more than he ever had. He saw some of the patterns in living and dying, he saw something through the mists of time; he saw something of others’ hearts and minds. When he was Chieftain in Asgaard, two ravens, Huginn and Muninn, would fly out through the worlds, and return to perch on Odin’s shoulders and whisper what they’d seen. The price for seeing more was his right eye.
         I love the metaphor. In order to see more deeply, more clearly–to see something of what’s coming, to see from other’s sight; to see beyond what’s visible from our own perspective–we must be willing to give up part of our own vision. We have to stop insisting that our perspective is the only one, or the most important. We can keep our hearts, our minds; we can open them by seeing what others have seen, and learning from it. The price is simple. The price, the pledge, is one of our two eyes; the gift is a drink from the water we all share, the water that nourishes the very Tree that grows at the heart of all our worlds.
         Odin’s name means “to blow, inspire, spiritually awaken.” He was the one who blew spiritual, intellectual life into humans. Perhaps that spark, that first breath of humanity, is being willing to keep your one eye open and your mind awake while also seeing from others’ eyes.

         “Young people, who are still uncertain of their identity, often try on a succession of masks in the hope of finding the one which suits them — the one, in fact, which is not a mask.” -W. H. Auden, poet

         Are we supposed to grow out of this? Because I’m not sure I have.
         I wonder if identity is never as stable as we pretend. I am lots of things: but I can’t think of anything that I finally, completely am. A teacher? Well, sure–but sometimes I have nothing to teach. A learner? I often manage it, but sometimes I don’t, and sometimes I don’t want to try. (When the spring grass is too funny between my toes, or I’m busy going down a slide). A brother, a son? Yes: but I’m far away from my family. These are centers, but they are not static. We say the moon goes around the earth, but it goes around the sun, too, and the sun goes around someplace, too. Why do we need a central point to enjoy our running?
         Perhaps we are always a flowing and a changing: more the phenomenon of the wave in the river, stable and still in its movement, than any particular particle. We are wolves hunting in the forest, and rabbits with our ears pricked up. We are rocks in the river, quiet and sure, and the water that flows easily around them, and the trees on the shore, growing toward the sky. We are teacher and learners, fathers and sons; lost and found, helping and falling, broken and whole.
         Perhaps I don’t need to only wear one mask. Perhaps that goes for you, too: we say, “I never really knew him,” or “I know the real him now,” as though there were an answer. More often I see in you so many things: a wild, endless landscape, a world I’ll never fully see, but still can listen to. I like the idea of masquerade parties: you might be this tonight. I listen, trying to hear something of who you are in your laugh. I listen, laughing with you.

“Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.” -Robert Frost
“The body is prevented from turning what it eats into a source of usable energy.”
        -a description of swainsonine poisoning in Jon Krakauer’s Into The Wild

         Into the Wild tells the story of Chris McCandless, a questing young man who set out to find the wilderness, himself, and a more real way of living. His journey ended in Alaska in 1992. He starved to death, but Krakauer argues that Chris didn’t run out of food: he was poisoned by a rare mold growing on the seeds he ate. The mold stopped his metabolism from processing glycoproteins. He starved while eating.
         Some months ago, I talked about Chris’s story with a friend who is a doctor. “What a powerful metaphor,” he said. “Maybe all the illnesses I’ve seen were in part an inability to process certain nutrients.” We are hungry for so much: friendship nourishes us, as does good, hard work, and hope, and passion. But sometimes we cannot seem to eat the “food” in our community: that’s why Chris left his affluent home, and set his face to the wild.
         “Drink and be whole again beyond confusion,” says Frost. He doesn’t say the confusions will be solved: we’ll slip beyond them, because there is so much of the world to drink in. Like Chris, I sometimes struggle to find nutrition I need in the food, in the world, that is real before me. (I think it can be important to move, to find another place where you are fed; it can also be important to recognize that there’s food all around you). Like Chris I sometimes find energy in the mountains and the skies.
         Chris wrote a last entry in his journal. He must have known then that he was about to die. It’s only two words: “BEAUTIFUL BLUEBERRIES.” He can’t have thought that the blueberries would be enough to save him. He knew about calories, and besides, that’s not what beautiful means. Beautiful just means beautiful. Whatever else was coming, he saw that. Eating he starved, but perhaps, starving, he was brilliant enough to still be fed by the gleam and the burst and the beauty of the blueberries.
         We will all die. We will all be hungry, for food or for love. And yet I know where there are creeks flowing not far away from my house.
         Drink, and be whole again. Beyond confusion.

         “Learning how to be strong, to feel her own emotions and not another’s, had been hard; but once you learned the trick, you did not forget.” -Neil Gaiman

         The lines comes from Neil Gaiman’s wonderful, very small book, The Sleeper and the Spindle, which re-envisions Snow White while diving headfirst into fear and uncertainty, and turning classic gender norms upside down. Gaiman’s wonderful frolics often have a dark, haunting mood beneath (or maybe it’s above, and the joy of adventure is the foundation?), and that’s what I see in this line.
         I asked my students to try this today, to try feeling their own emotions, and after a minute of silence, most of them said it was hard. It was hard to just feel what they were feeling. Sitting here now, I realize that I didn’t do the exercise with them: I was teaching, I was leading. I told myself that was okay, but it’s hard for me, too. I spend a lot of time working. I don’t spend a lot of time just feeling, which is strange, because my heart, my me, is the foundation from which I can offer anything.
         So I’m going to try it again: a minute, or more than a minute, of just trying to feel what I feel. And I have a guide. After the exercise one of my students, a young woman whose courage and honesty frequently inspires me, said: “I feel broken. Not bad, I don’t mean bad, but–well, broken.” If my mother didn’t visit her garden for a little while, there would be a lot of brown leaves, a lot of struggling plants. Perhaps our hearts are the same way, and if we don’t go out and tend to them, there are tangles of vines and roots wanting water. Perhaps part of my heart really is just aware of broken pieces, and perhaps there’s nothing wrong with that.
         We spend a lot of time holding ourselves together. No, I won’t hide behind “we:” I spend a lot of time holding myself together. And that can be good, because while being poised I get things done–but beneath the poised there are tides and volcanoes, and if I never dare go down to them, I might forget that I have magma in my heart, and all its heat to play with. There is something in us that is hotter than lies, stronger than illusions: our foundations are solid rock made molten, and while they’re strong, they need not always be stationary. Sometimes the power comes from movement and eruption; but how would we know, if we never go and see?