Learning, Healing, and Change

 I wrote this further reflection on the thirst for slowing down a couple of months into shelter in place:      While I was working on the final revision of this book in the spring of 2020, the Coronavirus pandemic put a sudden end to routines as we knew them. Our first year in a wonderful new school community ended abruptly, along with my first year subbing around the city.  When the school closures were announced in early March, we had just celebrated Maddie’s birthday a week early in order to accommodate the beginning of what was going to be an extremely busy first soccer season for both girls, and for us as well. Several weeks later, we are still struggling with our need for structure and routine on the one hand, and on the other, simply having too much to manage. With so much incomprehensible suffering going on, we know we are incredibly fortunate to be safe and healthy, and to have been spared many catastrophes.   As other disasters have done, the pandemic has magnified e

  A chapter from my book:       The terminology of warfare is all around us. (The San Francisco Chronicle front-page headline on the day of this writing, for example, reads, “Battle looms over high court choice.” 1 ) The metaphor of war—one nation’s army of uniformed soldiers facing off against another’s on the battlefield—seems to apply to any and every struggle. But it is a strange kind of metaphor, considering the hazy lines containing modern warfare. Many wars are undeclared: they are covert or referred to as “military actions.” Nowadays the battlefield is everywhere, and civilians seem more often than not to be the targets. The definition of war seems to vary from person to person, some people sticking to officially declared wars and others including occupations and other acts of aggression. Gang warfare is a fairly obvious example of something happening on our own soil which is experienced as a kind of war. So are many attacks on the working class and poor. Anything fro

This is what I'm saying in my book too.  You could almost change the word "poetry" to "learning."  The power of an embodied, engaged approach to free us--as opposed to a literal one of "correct" techniques or formulas. Well worth a few minutes' read.  An excerpt from Adrienne Rich's Poetry and Commitment (2007): "Critical discourse about poetry has said little about the daily conditions of our material existence, past and present: how they imprint the life of the feelings, of involuntary human responses--how we glimpse a blur of smoke in the air, look at a pair of shoes in a shop window, at a woman asleep in her car or a group of men on a street corner, how we hear the whir of a helicopter or rain on the roof or music on the radio upstairs, how we meet or avoid the eyes of a neighbor or a stranger.  That pressure bends our angle of vision whether we recognize it or not.  A great many well-wrought, banal poems, like a great many essays o

An excerpt from the Introduction: As a teacher in the public school system, I developed a fascination with the many ways in which we tend to stifle communication and understanding by mistaking words for indelible truth—or even for the exact thoughts of the speaker. We treat sloppy and slippery words like precise and matter-of-fact things, and complex and layered meanings like hammers driven into nails with force. We also treat words as political tools, designed more to help one group or another get its way than to help illuminate meaning. We do not require much substantiation for words. What the President says, for example, is given more weight than what he does.  (Meanwhile, the spirit of play is irreverent towards the sanctity of words.  We often mark what we say as being playful by being tongue in cheek, saying what we do not mean.  Adults might scold children in a mock over-serious tone not to laugh.  Or we might explain to our dog that the rawhide does not belong to

Learning is also a natural wonder, one that we possess in our being but do not have full mental possession of... There is something in nature's magnificence that inspires awe in us: a blazing sunset, star-studded sky, or giant redwood grove. Our body is also part of this natural world. It has evolved so wondrously in balance with its environment, and developed powerful abilities to heal and self-regulate. Our own human nature—as physical as it is mental, emotional, social, spiritual, and creative—is part of the natural world as well. Yet our rational human mind seems to seek less awe than a complacent sense of mastery over any field we explore. We want to say smugly, “Oh yes, I know all about that galaxy—I took an astronomy class in college.” In many ways, the body's intelligence is far greater than that of the cerebral mind, which can so easily become small or even delusional, congratulating itself on its own greatness. My mother's nursing friend long ago tol

  An excerpt from the Introduction: The subject of education is ghettoized. People are unaware not only of the substance of what is happening in the schools but of relevance to trends elsewhere in society. For example, we do not talk about how the expectations of the federal educational reforms are right in line with our failing economic model of continuous growth in the face of depleting reserves. In the case of education, it is the test scores which are expected to grow continuously, and it is the teachers' energy and resilience, along with the resilience of children and families, which is being depleted. The narrowing down of things like ownership of news media (and of news coverage, which tends to leave out history and context) is mirrored by a narrowing focus in the educational field. It makes sense that the same government which has succumbed to corporate rule would manage the schools in a way that supported the status quo. Manipulative, incompetent leadership is p