Lonnie Holley, “Supported by the Power,” wire, wood, found electronics, and refuse.

A few weeks ago we had a visitor, Harry Trask, a graduate student in the Divinity School at Yale University.

One of the kids asked what divinity school is. I sketched it out. Martin Luther King, Jr. went to divinity school in order to become an ordained minister. But Harry was primarily focused on Linguistics of the Old Testament and is studying biblical Hebrew and Greek.

“What is divinity?” someone asked.

“You mean, what is the definition of divinity?” I responded.

“Yeah.”

We looked it up and found the dictionary definition, which was pale, untextured, and lacked anything remotely like the miraculous presence of god. I work from an assumption that my students have ideas and thoughts of their own which will not be found in books, so we went looking elsewhere.

“What is divinity in your mind or experience? What would you say your idea of divinity is, from what you have lived?” I asked.

“Well, I don’t really know because I’m not religious,” came a reply.

“I’m not talking about divinity from a religious point of view necessarily. I mean, what have you seen or felt that is charged with something like god, or holiness, or the sacred?”

In my mind I heard echoes of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ sonnet, “God’s Grandeur.”

     The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
     It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
     It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
     Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
     Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
     And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
     And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
     Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
     And for all this, nature is never spent;
     There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
     And though the last lights off the black West went
     Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
     Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
     World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

I was trying to give them the idea that they can mine their own deep down lives. They can see, all of us can, the ways in which the world flames and shines and explodes with glorious light. They are a secular group, by and large, but they are learning to seek and sense, like all humans, glowing radiances.

When Lonnie Holley came to Middlebury, we saw a human being showing his inner light. He also showed us a piece of brick he picked up at the Lorraine Motel, where Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. Lonnie had carved a face into it, as though he was trying to repeople the shattered world. We passed it around and all of us touched it. He called himself the Golden Black Panther. He turned wire into a mother’s face. We watched him for an hour turning fragments of fabric into a colorful ring for three-year-old child, who watched him in a state of rapture. When he spoke of children, he said in the old way, “chirren,” and it was as though he loved every child he had ever seen. He seemed to have no outer shell, as if his chest cavity was split open and he’d chosen to live with his insides on the outside. He told how he grew up close to the earth, his whole life, spent wading in creeks and ditches, in the muck digging up the earth with a fork, looking for the worms, and finding the bright bits that got left behind. His radiance came from a belief, which he manifested in every utterance, that the world’s detritus is actually a kind of gold from which we might fashion versions of our godly selves. He took his pain and suffering and created an entire environment of artistic expression which says there is nothing which can not be used. Use the refuse of your life and make a golden throne of it.

Speaking of his fellow artists, Lonnie said:  “It was some of the best art that had ever come from simpleness. What I mean by simpleness is that it is something so sincere and so pure that it would almost fit into the category of that. In the Bible, it say: I’ll be coming back after that church without spot or blemish. And it may be one of the little churches that’s in the midst of you all. So these was the kinds of minds—I characterize “mind” like those small churches that will be picked up and that will be exposed in the midst of religion, in the midst of divinity, in the midst of the divine order on earth. (571)

This idea of there being a little church inside us is one we try to cultivate at NBS. Where is your inner sanctuary, the thing that must be preserved and from which you guide your life? How do we build such places? When Paul listened to Lonnie he was thinking about how music is made, what truths it tells, the value of listening to someone else’s song. Paul wrote about what Lonnie’s music made him think.

Earlier in the year, the school read Siddhartha. Lonnie’s response made me think of him. Siddhartha had learned after decades of being a Samana that the key to life was to see and be a part of everything, not to be separate. Lonnie’s music, art, and speech came from his enormous inventory of experiences, all of them entirely focused on how and what he would create.

To create the church inside of oneself, according to Paul’s idea, is to fill the self with every thing, in the same way Lonnie uses everything his hands can touch. No object is superior to another. There is no competition, no dispute, no wrong. We have our experiences and we say to each of them, “yes.” As Paul wrote on his poster at the March for Our Lives, “”To Be Aware, Not Right.”

Isa also wrote some of her reflections about seeing Lonnie.

I also cried while watching the video of him, in class. It was real crying, the type where your chest heaves without you, instead of just your eyes watering a little…After the show, I was completely silent, and it freaked my mom out. I wouldn’t talk because I knew I’d say the wrong words, and it seemed like such a waste of time to say the wrong words…. I cried after the show, when I watched Lonnie pack his things into his little black bag, because I knew he was going to die, and what good would there be in the world once he dies?

I suppose we might say the divine is the tender thing inside us that others would never want to die. The part that makes us so perfectly human that when we see it in other people, or when they reveal it to us through authentic disclosure or soul-stirring art, we are moved to tears and love. The presence of the divine can leave us loving a stranger.

We asked while reading Night: Why do I breathe? Why do I live? What are the right questions? Ben asked why he should try to live well.  “Because I am given life. I get to exist. So I must use my time to expand as far as I can.” We ask: what is love?  Isa answers: “When I realize I am thankful for another person’s existence.” We asked Harry Trask about his definition of divinity. He said it is something like when you find yourself at home in the world. He pointed us to Henry David Thoreau: “I come to my solitary woodland walk as the homesick go home. I thus dispose of the superfluous and see things as they are, grand and beautiful.” We ask again and again: What does it mean to “stay human,” as Winston in 1984 says we must: We answer that staying human must mean, among many things, the chance to dream about the golden country, leave secret love notes, have time to listen to birds, and hope that someone else in the world feels like you do.

Lonnie said to me that we are in a “threat-full space of time.” He was referring to the precariousness of our current condition, the fact that large portions of folks seem to no longer be able to understand or talk to one another. At the end of Lonnie’s performance at Middlebury College, his friend and companion, Matt, played a song Lonnie had just recently recorded. Get to the other side, it said. To the other side of the road. To the other side of the river. To the other side of pain, or the other side of our better selves. Why are all these children being gunned down in our schools, he asks at the end of the song, and then the song fades into a layer of plaintive cries—why, why, why?

Precious few, if any, administrators, principals, school boards, educational theorists, or department heads talk about love or its place in school curricula. Education debate and policy centers primarily on reform options, assessment, school funding and consolidation, testing, core standards, uniforms, resource officers, mainstreaming versus inclusion, achievement gaps, the effects of poverty on learning, safe schools and bullying, technology, age-grouping, school choice, vouchers, privatization or charter schools. Essentially the focus is on systems of delivery and containment, safety, methods of instruction, measurement of “outcomes,” and the pursuit of equality.  While at heart these issues concern the well-being of children, the process of discussing them is mechanistic, riddled with mind-numbing jargon, and certainly does not involve the students themselves.

After the massacre in Parkland, Florida, much of the talk focused on  “hardening” schools. I wonder: a hardened school might a better fortress, but would it be a better place to learn and grow? Principals all over the country are consumed with how to put their schools in lock-down or get more funding for protection and resources. And no one—parents, principals, teachers or superintendents—can come to a consensus on what hardening schools actually means. Does it mean live video feeds to police? The ability to trigger gates to shut down halls? Panic buttons? Armed teachers? Metal detectors and swipe cards? Florida added $400 million for school safety when in its recent legislative response to the Parkland shooting. That much money might make Florida school children more protected. But it bandages over larger societal ills and merely keeps fear at bay.

The North Branch School has a mantra, repeated at graduation every June. Love is what it’s all about. All of the kids—7th, 8th, and 9th graders—having read their graduation speeches, stand together in the Ripton Community House and shout those words as loud as their voices will carry.

I try to keep it simple. On the first day, and as often as I can, I look at them and I say in every way I know how: I love you. I love who you are and who you are becoming. I love your idiotic, idiosyncratic gestures and the fumbling ways you move yourself forward. I love you because you are flailing, hopeful, persistent, strange, and lovely.  I love you because of what your mind can do; because of what you accomplish or what you try to accomplish; because you are human and finding your way. I am not merely an educational technician. I am a human being, like you, filled with passion, yearning, questions, hopes, struggles, and dreams. We are in this together. Even when you are paralyzed, inert, lost, stubborn, resistant, or stagnant, I love you and will push you onward.

The real work of teaching is in how to walk the line between toughness and tenderness. I mean toughness in the sense of holding to high expectations. I mean tenderness in the sense of love and patience. No matter, we end up at the same place every day. How can we better learn what love is? How to make it, and how to preserve the world by putting love into the world.

We want our schools to be more than than fortresses. We want them to be luminous places of unvaulted striving. I think of Malcolm X, who described what learning in a prison was like, who discovered books and the power of knowledge in a constant lock-down, with real guards, iron bars, and locked cells. His own cell was close enough to a dim light on a landing that stayed on all night. This allowed him to read through the long hours of the night. He would lay on the floor with his books flat to catch enough illumination to read by. When guards approached, he dashed back to his bunk, and when the guards had passed he went back to reading by the glow of that one dim light. Malcolm read everything he could get his hands on. He discovered the history of ancient black civilizations, African colonization, Gandhi, the history or American slavery, religion, genetics, and philosophy.  He wrote that “ten guards and the warden couldn’t have torn me out of those books…I have often reflected upon the new vistas that reading opened to me. I knew right there in prison that reading had changed forever the course of my life.”

He was in love with his learning and the possibilities therein. We want for our children to feel like this when they go to school. That they feel their school is more than a place of mere instruction, That it portends possibility and mystery. That it should be more than merely hardened and safe. That it should be bathed in transformative light.

We read 1984 this winter, and discovered, along with Winston and Julia, a place called the Golden Country. Winston thinks of it by day and knows it from his dreams:

“It was an old, rabbit-bitten pasture, with a foot-track wandering across it and a molehill here and there. In the ragged hedge on the opposite side of the field the boughs of the elm trees were swaying very faintly in the breeze, their leaves just stirring in dense masses like women’s hair. Somewhere near at hand, though out of sight, there was a clear, slow-moving stream where dace were swimming in the pools under the willow trees.”

Winston’s dreams are but one gateway into the orchard of love. There we find ourselves with Winston and Julia in that world beyond, transported from the gray, concrete oppressions of IngSoc and Airstrip One. The Golden Country presents the dream of unity, wholeness, safety, and tenderness which, incidentally, are dreams that entrance my students.

Again and again we find ourselves doing things that require us to have faith in love, doing things which soften our hearts. Or we see the strange ways love manifests in our lives and in the life of the school. One example is the maple tree we planted two years ago in memory of Ana Martinez-Lage, the mother of two former NBSers, Amalia and Marina. When Marina left the school, Lena promised her friend Marina that we would go out to the tree each January to read “When Great Trees Fall” by Maya Angelou, which had been an important poem for Marina during her time at the school.

So on the anniversary of Ana’s death, we trooped out into the wind and snow and Lena read the poem. Perhaps only one or two of the kids had known Ana. A handful of them knew who Marina was. But they participated in the ritual–a ritual of love, devotion, and memory. They were wrapped up in it, even though it was distant to them. In this manner the wider world beyond them came into them, through the sound of the poem and Lena’s faltering voice, in the wind and the gray clouds, in our standing there together in a ragged circle in memory of a life they barely knew, and in the midst of the life awaiting them all.

Sometime in February, on a Sunday before the school week, Phoebe went outside on a snowy afternoon. The sun was shining, and birds were moving in the understory and at the edge of the woods. Phoebe took handfuls of birdseed and stood as still as she could, her hands outstretched, to see if she could induce the flittering black-capped chickadees to land in her palm.  She told us about it in class in morning meeting the following Monday. There’s nothing in any school curriculum that requires that students try to feed birds in mid-winter, or to speak of it in class. Yet I found myself thinking about how ridiculously beautiful and good it was. I chalked up Phoebe’s bird-feeding as a blow against the forces that have colluded to drench our nation in high-powered guns. How could you not love them when they do the things that they do? Phoebe’s act, to my mind, was in harmony with those children who recently took to the streets, conducted mass school walkouts, or headed to the state legislatures in an effort to change the violent culture in which we find ourselves enmeshed. A more loving world would have more mittened children communing with small birds.

In Night, we witness with Elie what it means to hear loving words—”the first human words”—when he and his fellow Jews arrive at Auschwitz. The prisoners are counselled: “Don’t lose heart. We shall see the day of liberation. Have faith in life. Above all else, have faith. Drive out despair, and you will keep death away from yourselves. Hell is not for eternity. And now, a prayer—or rather, a piece of advice. Let there be comradeship among you. We are all brothers and we are all suffering the same fate. The same smoke floats over our heads. Help one another. It is the only way to survive.” It is a most loving call, these words. When we read them aloud in class, it was as though they were being offered to us now, applicable to this world, today. How can we survive together, more lovingly, more as one family or world? How, against all odds, do we find comradeship among ourselves?

Later we saw that even as Elie felt his god dying inside him, his love for his father grew deeper. His prayers were no longer offered up blindly to the Master of the Universe. Rather, he prayed “to a god in whom I no  longer believed” that he be strong enough to never abandon his father. We witness the manner in which his religious devotion is pared down to inchoate rage, and yet how, miraculously, his capacity for human love endures.

Love–talking about it, thinking about it, writing about it—that’s what we do. We debate the meaning and value of telling someone “I love you,” particularly if we know that someone is at life’s end. Once, a student told us how, even as his Grandmother descended into dementia, he continually told her, “I love you.”

“But why would I do that? he asked. “She wouldn’t remember it. But I realized, I had to. It was the right thing. Even for that moment when I told her, she would feel that love. It was my responsibility to put that love into the world.”

Recently, Ethan’s story about his brother brought the idea out in a similar way. He had been missing his older brother, Wyatt, who had been a ninth grader during Ethan’s first year in the school, Now his brother was graduated. Ethan had no one to rely on, no closest companion, no best friend or soulmate, and he felt great distance from his peers, who’d fragmented into separate groups.

One day, despairing that he was alone and powerless to make new meaningful connections in his class of fellow eighth graders, he ran into the woods, where he wept fiercely, and attempted to find the source of his rage. Yes, he had been mad at his classmates for not trying, for being behind in their work, for being separated from each other. But his greatest anger came from his own inactions. If he wanted the school to have more love in it, if he wanted his school to be that loving sanctuary that he’d felt when his brother was in the school, he had be the one to make it. He had to find a way to project his own yearning into the world.  At the end of the story he had his conclusion: “The truest and only way to spread love and tell people not to hate is to love, to love with all your heart,” he wrote.

This is what we actually do at school. This is life, and it is all about love. Along the way maybe I can teach them a little more about how to express it. I can teach them to think logically, a little more systematically, on multiple levels or from perspectives that are not always their own. A school can indicate some values that are worth preserving. We can teach them to see the world scientifically, as something to be measured, observed, and understood. And we can help them use that kind of seeing as a way to think in terms of evidence and fact. We can help them read multiple meanings in a single action, symbol or syllable. We can help them learn to discern the overtones and undertones of speech or music or to see, as Wislawa Szymborska writes, “the roots beneath the oil paint.”

But in the end we want to release them into a world valuing life, loving life, and wanting to live in and create love. We want them to love the world, to do so fearlessly, to know what they have to do. We want them to love the people close to them, and to seek in others they do not know the places where they can love.

“We need more light about each other. Light creates understanding, understanding creates love, love creates patience, and patience creates unity,” wrote Malcolm X. The nirvana we seek, the holy place we touch, the pure land we sometimes come to discover  in this school has happened when they looked at each other, really listened, and saw that there are, indeed, strange and beautifully lit places where all of their hearts, overlayed and stacked like the sediments of earth, share the similar qualities and longings and vulnerabilities.  When they see this, they begin to love each other. When they see this, and feel it, it is easy to love them.

In the beginning of the North Branch School, we believed, contrary to prevailing theory and practice, that if we gave the students full responsibility and great freedom, they would make a school that was expression of their most vivid dreams and highest ideals. The central pedagogy, if there was one, was simply this: the voices, spirits, and aspirations of the students would be more than enough to create a vibrant, living school.

From the start we discarded controlling curriculums and external dictates. We asked students to build a their school around what mattered to them. We asked them become seers and seekers of beauty and truth. Truth, and the beauty of the truth, was not to be found in a textbook, on a test, or in a chapter summary. Lesson plans, final exams, Power-point presentations, the internet, even instructions from me—none of these were necessary. Truth and beauty would be found in the full amplitude of lived experience and in talking about and recording what we found. And so meanings made in the classroom came from experience as it was born from the heart and the mind, from the human relationships that bloomed and prospered.

Typically schools are thought of as places where preparation for life occurs. We conceived school as a place where life should be happening, a place of high adventure, where the experience was so deep, so affecting, that none of us knew exactly what might transpire and, given that mystery, the students would walk out of school every day thrilled with the prospects of what might be coming over them. Then they would believe: something great, something as big as their lives, was reachable. 

                                                                                    ❖

In 1965 George Dennison published his exhilaratingly powerful and hopeful The Lives of Children, a description of one year at the First Street School, which he ran on a virtual shoestring in New York’s Lower East Side. The school had no money, no campus, no equipment. They made do with what they had and the resources available from families, the city, and themselves. In the school they created there was virtually no separation between living and learning, life and school. He wrote

There is no such thing as learning except in the continuum of experience. But this continuum cannot survive in the classroom unless there is reality of encounter between the adults and the children. The teachers must be themselves, and not play roles. They must teach the children, and not teach “subjects.” The child, after all, is avid to acquire what he takes to be the necessities of life, and the teacher must not answer with mere professionalism and gimmickry…

He continues:

…The experience of learning is an experience of wholeness. The child feels the unity of his own powers and the continuum of persons. His parents, his friends, his teachers, and the vague human shapes of his future form his world for him, and he feels the adequacy and reality of his powers within this world. Anything short of this wholeness is not true learning.”

Schools, Dennison implored, should not be places where we deposit children for seven hours a day to fill them with what we deem important. “Core Standards,” external imperatives, political dictates, mandates from people who do not know our children or our communities, cooperation with an emotionally remote and ponderous educational system, even subject-centered classrooms—these could be discarded so that children might begin to discover the “experience of wholeness.”

The core that matters is the one inside the children. We believed our school’s sacred obligation was to bring that core into the light of the world. Only then would there be a “reality of encounter.” Only then would the necessities of life come to the center.  Only then would we enable individual children to freely find the reality of their powers and create the experience of wholeness. Only in the dance between self and soul would the student’s mind and heart be deepened into what we might call the “wholeness of true learning.” The teacher’s role then could be simply to encourage, call forth, support, and amplify that process.

How then do teachers move past standards-based approaches to get closer to the “wholeness of true learning.” When we began the North Branch School, we found our partial answer in the belief, enacted every day, that the whole life of the child should enter seamlessly over the threshold of the school with the child in the morning, and the life of school—actively and delightfully bubbling inside—should depart with the child in the afternoon. We believed that the full seriousness and profundity of life should be actively and experientially constructed in school, and anything that occured in school must necessarily be related to the inner emotional lives of the children in it. 

Every day at North Branch we asked essential questions: How could we deepen the experiences of the children, allow the powerful emotional and creative worlds in them to manifest in our classrooms, and so create a “reality of encounter?” How could the “necessities of life”—as defined by children, whatever their age or developmental stage, become the center of learning? How could we go beyond merely teaching “subjects” and teach children? How could we help the children find the true reality of their powers beyond simply mastering sets of skills and facts? How could we, the teachers, free ourselves to extend beyond mere professionalism to be ourselves and so authentically meet the children to create that experience of wholeness?

How, then, to transform school into a place of authenticity, of life and real conversation, where we found a reality of encounter?  How could we make school that is truly alive?

                                                                                   ❖

Over time, in a virtual one-room schoolhouse, we discovered this: school can be alive and joyful every day, and what happens there is worthy of being told again and again because it is wondrous, moving, and instructive. Our school evolved into place of unbounded, unbridled creation, a place of academic rigor, high spirits, and infinite possibility. We got there by not having a plan, by not knowing, and by trusting the process we built together. Our school became a place where children wanted to be simply because we allowed them to live out, and out of, the full spirits living in them. The measure was not, nor should ever be, a test; we asked them to set the standards—for themselves, and for the school; who they wanted to be, and how they would get there.

The work done by teachers in our nations school system is unassailably noble. But in practice, most human contact between students and teachers is, even over many years, shallow, fleeting, impersonal. In so many schools students do not truly come to know or learn about each other because they rarely talk about or engage in the process of discovering who each of them truly is, beyond groupings based on superficial differences. Teachers driven by mandates to test or teach to prescribed standards do not have the time or inclination to enter into the manifold beauty and richness of their student’s full lives. Students spend great amounts of time together to learn about concepts and things, but not about the hopes and dreams of the classmates at the next table.

In American schools students are rarely asked to delve into the topic about which they have the most interest and know most intimately—themselves. They are asked to write about great books, but they are discouraged from using a personal perspective. The lived experience, the lessons of life, are treated as alien or even disruptive to the subject at hand. Students are asked to write about Huck Finn’s journey, but their own miraculous journeys are somehow not considered valid subject matter. It transpires, incredibly, that preparation for SATs or learning how to locate the subjunctive clause is more important that an individual soul’s development.

The greatest need of any student is to be known and seen, to feel that her voice matters, that his  soul is recognized.  Yet school administrators and politicians who must prove their commitment to “excellence” become ensnared in the quest to quantify and measure student achievement, an aim often at odds with these most fundamental needs of children. Administrators are driven by standards and politics and scores and political judgment. The words “failing school” are in the lexicon, and schools, like students, are identified as “failing,” which is most insidious and negative. Value is determined by test scores, which may be an an important measure in some respects, but does not measure what students may need as growing humans. Tests certainly can not tell whether students and teachers are engaged in meaningful, inspiring relationships or whether a child’s life has been changed for the better.

The current practice to achieve “high standards” is driven by tests made at a remote distance from the children who are tested, by test-makers who have not set foot in a classroom, and by educators who have not asked the first essential question: who is this particular child before me, and what does he or she need?  Core-standards, because they must apply universally, can not take into account the infinite variety of the students who must master them.  The standards are not personal to the hearts of minds of the students. They are external, imposed from without. It follows then that the children are alienated, even insulted, sometimes enraged, when they find themselves filling in the ovals for days at a time in a silent room, answering questions that have been completely severed from human context and emotional meaning.

Meanwhile, a discussion with the children in school about what is most important to them occurs rarely, if at all.  No one asks them: how should we structure this community? What do you want to learn? What are the most fun and inspiring ways learn it?  Students enter school and are put on the pre-designed treadmill. These topics, these skills, these terms. This is what you will learn, at this pace, in this order. The system is fixed and at best students are given only token chances to participate, set the course, articulate the standards, and define aims. The children should be the mind, heart, and soul of the system—yet they are given the least power to shape it. We should not be a surprised if children appear only marginally invested in what happens in their schools.

There is another way to measure achievement: by the initiatives of the students themselves. I am not thinking of institutionalized groups like student government or volunteer activities in the school community. I am certainly not talking about standardized tests.

I am talking about a living school—where the children feel the currents of life, where true conversation and community is created—a school that is a living organism, where the richness of life is present and ever possible.

After all, shouldn’t a school be wondrous and alive, a place of infinite possibility? If we are honest, that’s the only standard worth aiming for.

Whenever someone asks about the governing “philosophy” of the North Branch School, I can only say, none. We follow what happens. We grow and learn from what appears. The lives of the students, the events we create in the school—these are the text. The collective and individual spirits of the students illumine and chart the path we follow. We stay open to those moments when the truth of  a child comes clear; when the evolution of a mind or heart is revealed in the living experience of school.

But how to create such schools? The answer is radically simple: First, keep it small. Break down and atomize the education monolith; get rid of the layers, the apparatus, the jargon, the consultants, committees, the initiatives, the isms, the technologies, the destructive obsession with standardization and uniformity, the dependence on labeling, the vast numbers of people who do not have authentic contact with children—maybe even get rid of the principals, the superintendents, and the school boards.  Reduce it to what a child can feel—something slightly larger than a family but quite smaller than a system—child-sized communities where human-to-human relationships are paramount— a few teachers, one building, and a few dozen kids which might become a laboratory for learning and life. In a smaller school, children feel important and they are important. Their actions make things happen. They can see and hear themselves. They can know each other truly and deeply, They see, to their delight, that they are the school. When they take ownership, the school comes alive with the spirit of children who are inspired, powerful, and excited.

Second: Make it personal.  Ask them how to make school real and relevant to them. It’s a new year every year. How would you like to feel, and what do you want to know? Initiate real conversations about what matters and then listen, follow, and guide. Watch their faces and motions, laugh with them, sometimes cry with them, push and cajole, be crazy, be absurd, be flexible. Do not repress them. Let them be free, allow mistakes to happen. Believe in them, then give them the autonomy to change or make their school in their image: a place where they can freely feel and move. Let their work be sculpting their school into something as gloriously and uniquely imperfect as they are.

I promise they will rise to the challenge. Because shaping the environment is far more interesting than being passively shaped by it, and what children want and need most is to discover the reality of their powers to direct and create their own lives. All we have to do is ask the kids, and they will come alive in their schools, and they will take us further than we ever dreamed.

If they know that school is to be about them, if they know that the agenda is their lives and needs, they will give devotion to their work, compassion to their classmates, and respect and love to each other and their teachers. We only need to invite them into the room, a maneuver which does not require the planning or skills and educational degrees of a twenty-year veteran. Most certainly it does not require lesson plans or syllabi or phalanxes of administrators. It only requires faith—that in the crucible of the classroom the truth and beauty of the children will emerge. If they are invited to give their minds and hearts, they will give everything.

We have been reading Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha. The story does not have much conventional drama—no cliff-hangers, violence, vampires, or orcs. However it does contain the drama of how human beings evolve from one state to the next.

It is this drama that we teachers live for, those moments where a child grows before our eyes. I am not talking about the proverbial “a-ha moment,” though that happens and it is good. I don’t simply mean those moments when, as exciting as they are, when suddenly students understand that breakfast means “to break the fast,” or see the symbolism behind the snake in “Don’t Tread on Me,” or comprehend why water expands, or are able finally, mercifully, to balance an equation.

We are talking about something much deeper, more far-reaching. We are talking about the moments when the vision of reality changes. When a student conceives of and asks a question and new vistas open up. We are talking about moments when a twelve-to-fourteen year-olds find transcendence, or are disabused of their illusions, or find a way to direct their lives in accordance with their ideals, or have their hearts broken and then mended.

Siddhartha stands for all of us who must shed our skins and become new again. He is all of us who go deeply into a new path or identity or relationship, only to find limits or stagnation. He is all of us who, having found that ostensible wall, seek further and believe there is another beyond, an ultimate reality still to be discovered. He stands for the part of us that lives beyond all “laws and preaching,” as Whitman writes, where the greater something awaits.

And as we see old orders of decorum and unity disintegrate around us, we may discover that we need to create our own structures, our own sacred realms, independent of what common culture offers. Rumi has some well-known verses (translated by Coleman Barks), about the human need to find such sacred realms.

              Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
              there is a field.  I’ll meet you there.

              When the soul lies down in that grass,
              the world is too full to talk about.
              Ideas, language, even the phrase “each other”
              doesn’t make any sense

I find that most of what I read about beyond the woods of the North Branch School lately does not make any sense. When I look off  the mountain I see currents of anger, division, and rage. I hear strident voices shouting about wrongdoing and rightdoing. So much of what passes for government, leadership, cultural norms, or policy seems to be tainted by money, self-interest, and corruption. So I turn to the sense that my students make. If I can bend my ear just right, I hear them speaking words that the world should hear. They can be a river that offers secrets. I hear them talking about purity, selflessness, and love. I see them becoming forms worthy of being memorialized in stone or bronze.

When we were in Boston, we walked past Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ relief sculpture of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, the leader of the Massachusetts 54th Regiment, the first black regiment to see action for the Union in the Civil War. Originally, though, Shaw had been unsure about leading such a regiment, dubious about their fighting capability. Over time, however, he came to love his men. When his men boycotted their pay, which was less than white soldiers, he boycotted with them and refused his own pay. In battle would not allow his soldiers to violate the rules of war, even when ordered to do so by higher-ranking officers. He treated his men with dignity, though they were considered an “unlawful” unit by the enemy, and sometimes as such even by fellow soldiers. He insisted on decorum, high standards, even treatment.  He lead them fearlessly. He learned to see his men as men. After Shaw was killed with his unit in a failed assault on Fort Wagner, the Confederate army refused to turn over his body and ordered it stripped, robbed, and dumped into an unmarked trench with the regulars as a show of contempt for his having lead black soldiers. In a letter to the regimental surgeon, Lincoln Stone, his father, Frank Shaw, wrote:

         We would not have his body removed from where it lies surrounded by his
         brave and devoted soldiers….We can imagine no holier place than that in
         which he lies, among his brave and devoted followers, nor wish for him better
         company – what a body-guard he has!    

Shaw was a man worthy of being memorialized in bronze. His heart, his actions, his willingness to find a cause and sacrifice for it made it so.  He lived on that high plane of the gods, where he gave himself over to something quite larger than himself—in this case a belief in the equality of all human beings. To get to that high plane he had to reflect, think, suffer, change course, and make decisions about how to conduct his life. He lived through his own reincarnations—from birth, to child of privilege, to student, to dutiful soldier, to leader, to martyr.

In this sense he lived as Siddhartha did, steadily evolving from the relatively contained generic place of high-born advantage to the timeless, boundless realm of the noble and heroic. And so while reading Siddhartha, I have thought of my students in such a light, relishing the moments when they have seemed to be moving from one incarnation to another, when they break from limits to limitlessness, from tentative stoicism to impassioned speech, from cold, stone-heartedness to empathic lovers of the world and each other.

In order to understand Siddhartha, we tried to live like him. We spent a week purposely living in a state of self-denial and deprivation. Each student elected to eschew some comfort or luxury. At home they slept on their floors, took cold showers, ate cold food, slept with no pillow. They wore the same set of clothes all week; chose to forgo washing hair, using make-up, or ornamenting themselves; wore logo-less clothes, or taped over clothing brand-names which, they discovered, labeled them from head to toe. They made their families turn off the lights and use candles. They tried going meatless or vegan. They  used only pencils, scrawled their school work on birch bark, left their computers at home, skipped all forms of social media. At school we unplugged the printer, microwave, and the lights. In the morning and afternoon we held mediation walks in the labyrinth, and several of the students walked barefoot on the cold, wet ground; one of them wore her “Samana sandals” she’d fashioned out of cardboard. We meditated in a dark room with a single candle until, by staring, the room went black and the only radiance emanated from that tiny, flickering flame.

By these means over five days we tried to coerce inner evolution. By choosing to endure these self-imposed rules, some of them uncomfortable, and by altering ingrained habits, we tried to change our consciousness. It wasn’t heroic by any means, and certainly we did not ascend to what Martin Luther King, Jr. called the “high plane of dignity and discipline,” or “rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force.”  But we did, however, move ourselves together to a new understanding of what we are, and what our minds and bodies are capable of, not just in the internal, mental landscape, but in physical, three-dimensional being. Our learning, for those few days, dwelled at the point where physical bodies and senses intersected with the the potential forms of growing souls.

Robert Hayden’s great sonnet “Frederick Douglass” speaks about the need for idea to become action, the way the virtues memorialized in stone can be given flesh and life by the way we conduct our lives.

      When it is finally ours, this freedom, this liberty, this beautiful
      and terrible thing, needful to man as air,
      usable as earth; when it belongs at last to all,
      when it is truly instinct, brain matter, diastole, systole,
      reflex action; when it is finally won; when it is more
      than the gaudy mumbo jumbo of politicians:
      this man, this Douglass, this former slave, this Negro
      beaten to his knees, exiled, visioning a world
      where none is lonely, none hunted, alien,
      this man, superb in love and logic, this man
      shall be remembered. Oh, not with statues’ rhetoric,
      not with legends and poems and wreaths of bronze alone,
      but with the lives grown out of his life, the lives
      fleshing his dream of the beautiful, needful thing.  

Yes, we are striving to be sculpturally and three-dimensionally significant. And I devoutly hope that that my students learn how to live lives that one day will be remembered. But first they must learn to see, and see each other, and then, at last, see themselves. To that end the kids write about their lives and each other constantly. They bring each other to life and into the room by means of character sketches, the primary aim of which is to penetrate to the invisible place beneath the physical surface. What lives under the face, the hair, the clothes, the easy smile, the annoying behavior. What powers are expressed in a single gesture, in the casual comment, in the way one leans over one’s drawing?  What great truths emerge from a close consideration of a person’s small actions over time? How is this friend, mother, sibling, or teacher a beautiful, needful, breathing figure of value? With all their expanding powers of observation and expression, their goal is simple: to the show cosmically significant truth of one another. To do it they must use the two great tools of the artist: logic, in order to show concrete reality; and love, to make it come alive.

Isa was writing her sketch on Henry Swan, a boy she has only known for three months. When she sent him what she had written, he was launched into a state of ecstatic, electrified awareness. He wrote me one night, clearly shaken. “It’s so good it’s not even funny. it made me laugh and cry and laugh again. this is some seriously holy business.”

By her artistic hand Isa had opened him up so he could see himself. She made a word picture of him that put him into the world in a way he’d never felt. Holy business! I wonder how many school principals or superintendents have ever called what happens in school a “holy business.”

So often the business of the world seems unholy. We exist mostly in the mundane, and often in the profane–obsessed as we are with menial or meaningless tasks and desires, piddling around with unworthy interests, selling little bits of our souls to the first bidder, investing in empty gestures and unneeded objects. But then there are those times when we do ascend, little moments that add up. Like when Maddy writes about Lena, because she wants Lena to be seen, and wants to know what is behind Lena’s tears and her laughter. When Lena volunteers to sing, a capella and in front of all her peers, “The Tree of Life” for Sydney’s project, even though she is not fully confident in how the melody  should sound. Or when Ben tells the class that he doesn’t like people making fun of him when allows a goal at lunch on the field, because, dammit, he volunteered to be our goalkeeper, and he may not be the best, but he’s trying. Or when Isa notices that Una’s lips look like an almost W. Or when Geeta says she will bring in a menorah to join our meditation bowl and Tree of Life, giving balance to the universe. Or when a group of boys dash into the woods at lunch to cut down a small conifer to erect in the big-room to be our non-denominational tree of life, in honor of pagan practice and Syd’s project. Or when Henry Swan realizes that empathy is more powerful than winning. Or when Henry Black writes of himself that inside his silences and his loudness is a small boy who misses his parents and just wants to be at home, in the embrace of his mother, with touch of his father’s flannel, and the musty smell of his barn.

Or maybe it happens when Joe speaks in meeting, about his old friend told who him his haircut looked “gay,” and then told Joe to “go fuck himself” after Joe told him that saying “gay” is not cool.

In a state of disbelief, I ask the class, “What do you say to that?” Celeste answers in less than a second and with absolute conviction: “You say that that person is not a very good friend.” Such moments propel all of them into an understanding of what being human is, and how life calls upon them to respond, together, with each other, and for each other.

This is how they move toward making of their lives something usable and good. They strive to see and seek the good in each other and everywhere. They make a school where no one is lonely, hunted, or alien. They try to understand, with empathy and insight, those who transgress the norms of communal or civic life. They willingly offer up their hearts, their wisdom, and their values as gifts.  In these moments Rumi is right—”even the phrase each other/ doesn’t make sense.” They live with full and evolving hearts, without walls, open to pain and joy. Then and only then does the field of existence become a perpetual unfolding.

We were starting Siddhartha, a book ostensibly remote from the concerns of 21st century adolescents. What should they care about the Brahmin’s son, a prince among Brahmins? Morning ablutions? The Rig-Vedas? Atman? Meditation under the banyan tree?

In truth, nothing could be more about them. The book asks: Which path will I take? How do I come by experience? What do I know if I only know what others teach me? When comes the time that I embark on my own quest, my own path, despite all warnings? How will I know the truth without making of my life a great experiment, and willingly opening myself to all that life can bring?

This was the iron rail I hoped to put us on on Monday morning, and I was all fired up.

But a windstorm, the trailing arm of an Atlantic hurricane, left Ripton, and much of Vermont, powerless on Sunday night. At seven-thirty Monday morning there were twelve trees down across the Lincoln Road on the way up to school. We were certain there could be no school. Pam was in Brandon, attending to her new-born granddaughter in the dark, and Tal and Rose were trying to get around the power pole lying in their driveway. Today there would be no iron rail leading to the ultimate reality.

We headed downtown to make calls to ensure that everyone knew school was off, then back up to school to gather some belongings. The road had been cleared moments before.  We turned in to the school driveway to see numerous cars and, upon entering the school, found all the kids seated around the table in the dark room, ready for school, waiting for us to arrive.

They had not gotten the message, and the storm had not frightened them. I stared into the gloom, thinking ruefully about the day that could have been, at home reading papers by candle-light, knowing now it was time to teach.

Something about them sitting there inspired me. They were like little birds, ready to learn as best they could. We made a few adjustments: there would be a candle on the table, but no one was allowed to play with the wax (experience having taught that there is nothing more magnificently enticing to young adolescents than playing with melted candle wax). No one was allowed in the basement, as this was the day before Hallowe’en. Boys could go into the woods to pee. The ninth graders were charged with getting buckets of water from the vernal pond to refill toilets. And the doors needed to stay shut at all times to preserve what heat we had.

And with that, school began. No internet, phones, lights, microwave, or running water, in violation of the entirety of Vermont state fire-code, I am sure. We had school just as school might have been in 1910.

Melville writes in Moby Dick: “Swerve me? The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run. Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains, under torrents’ beds, unerringly I rush! Naught’s an obstacle, naught’s an angle to the iron way!”

One of the most difficult arts of teaching is keeping the school and the kids aimed towards our fixed purpose—keeping momentum and a sense of excitement week after week. Keeping everyone unified and moving forward together, pursuing the whale, and the grail. When weather, sickness, or holidays intervene, all that we’ve built can seem to collapse. The wind goes out of the sails. On the years when Hallowe’en falls midweek, all seems obstacle, all seems a torrent of un-learning and distraction, all seems angles to the iron way. Skittles become infinitely more important than the Pythagorean theorem or the theme of the hero’s journey in Siddhartha. A good costume becomes the new quest, a sack of candy the grail chalice incarnate.

We desperately tried to keep the school on iron rails through the dark, through the rifled hearts of the mountains. We bundled up in our coats. Una and Isa came bounding into the science room at lunch with thyme and sage from the garden and asked if they could burn the leaves in the dark basement to “conjure spirits.” I said “No” to the basement but “Yes” to the conjuring of spirits. At lunch time, while Phoebe wandered about the soccer field cowled in Lena’s owl fleece blanket, Una and Isa kneeled in the center of the labyrinth drawing out spirits from the woods.  Henry Black repeatedly filled up water bottles and volunteered to send out homework messages to his peers from home each night, since I couldn’t. When the toilet got clogged, Oscar brandished the plunger and went to work without complaint.

On Tuesday they came to school dressed in costume: Una was Medusa, with golden snakes woven into her hair. Isa was a witch. Lena was a pumpkin. Henry W. was Robin Hood in camouflage tights. Sasha was Indiana Jones. Iris and Vivian were boys. Joe and Nate were girls. Jack was Hell’s best dad, carrying his Devil spawn, Colby, in a Baby Bjorn. Phoebe, Henry B. and Ethan were all Swiss-Austrian yodelers and goat-farmers. Henry S. was a borg, with gears and capacitors glued to his cheeks. Oscar’s hair was a squirrel’s nest, complete with four stuffed varmints and fresh straw.

Events seemed fated to swerve us from our path. At times it was difficult to take them seriously. Try teaching literature to a child who holds his Siddhartha book and looks across the table with fake blood running out of his eyes. Try pressing them close to hear Siddhartha’s searching voice when they have four golden snakes bouncing in their tangled hair. Jack stared at me with satanic eyes, like a raccoon from hell. Paul could not help getting into a fierce, all-consuming debate with Henry about the important distinction a between borg and cyborg. Pillowcases of candy sat on the big room table all day. And I was thinking about what was coming next week—our class trip on the following Monday.

Where are we going? I asked them, as we sat in the dark gloom, with our single candle guttering out on top of a pile of books.

To Boston, they said. 

But what are going to do there? See? Learn?

We’re going to a museum?

Yes. We’re going to see Gauguin’s great masterwork.  LEt’s take a look at this painting again.

I pulled out the big Gauguin in Tahiti catalogue again and opened the centerfold to  “Where do we come from? What are We? We are we going?” We’d started the year looking at that painting.  On the first day of school I had asked them in French: D’où venons-nous? Que sommes-nous? Nous allons-nous? I’d asked them because I wanted them to take the largest view possible, to consider that their lives, as wide open as the world, lay before them. We’d focused on the first question: Where do you come from? I wanted them to to embrace that question while the answers were still close.

Now we were going to see the Gauguin’s painting up close at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Now we were moving, going, doing, becoming. I told them a little about how Gauguin came to paint it, how he’d become disgusted with modern, industrialized life, and how he sought to recover a kind of lost human purity. I showed them the figures and how the painting reads from right to left, the human story compacted onto a stretch of rough burlap. I told them their responsibility in the museum was to stand in front of the painting and imagine themselves into it. To find a character in the painting whose thoughts and feelings they could imagine. To see if they could read a story there. I told them they had to come away from the painting knowing something deep about it and they would remember that far in the future.

“Where are we going?” I asked. “Write your answer. Answer any of the questions. In the beginning of the year, I asked you, Where are you from? You’ve been in school for nearly sixty days. Try answering the question again. But this time you can try answering the next question:  Where are we going?”

They set to writing as much as they could in a short amount of time. All year I have been pressuring them to write, to be ready to go into their thoughts without fear, procrastination, or rigidity. So when I said, “Go,” they did, and this time, like most times, they could not stop. And if they did, I only had to read a few sentences of someone’s attempt, and that started them again, because hearing a peer’s written words is implicit sanction to write one’s own. So they plunged into the abyss.

We are going to the end, Creed wrote. We are going to Ragnorak. We are going to not be found. We are going to mother nature’s wrath. We are going to join the Samanas. We are going to Boston. We are going to grow up. We are going to change. We are going to become ancestors. We are going to follow the cycle of life and death. We are going to change the world. We are going to not count. We are going to die young. We are going to be hot to trot. We are going to be siblings, and good ones at that. We are going to die peacefully. We are going to move. We are going to run. We are going to stand strong. We are going to be us. We are going to be history.

Phoebe kept writing hers until class ended. When it was time to go, she approached me in a state of excitement.

“Tal. I have over a hundred things on my list!” That night she emailed it to me.

We are going to Boston, to our graves, to heaven. We are going to grow up, become our own people, to carry on, to find the ultimate reality, burn an eternal flame. We are going to museums, to live on in hard times, to be remembered for who we are, to try things we thought we’d never try. We are going to face our fears, milk each opportunity, find a happy medium, make each other happy, have our hearts broken. We are going to learn love, become one body, use baby crayons and adult crayons, read banned books, hold the door open for others. We are going to make metaphors that make no sense, tuck animals into bed, hope someone finds us. We are going to ignore expiration dates, to amaze the public with our temporary sanity, throw pearls into the ocean, lose ourselves, run through thorns,  be afraid, and to hold old people’s hands.

In the museum. the docent at the MFA announced that the students had to stay with us, the chaperones, at all times. I asked her where the Gauguin painting was. She told us and then she said, “Enjoy your visit.”

As soon as she was gone, I addressed the kids, who were huddled in a corner on the marble floors. “Okay, we’re gonna let you loose. Stay with a peer, but you’re free to go anywhere. Ther are mummies and Egyptian artifacts. There are Roman statues, old furniture, Native American rooms, and an exhibit of Mark Rothko. Try to go into the Rothko. They say that people cry in front of his paintings more than any other in the world. And go to the Gauguin. Remember, it reads from right to left. It tells a story. Try to figure out the story and try to enter into a painting and leave this world for that one. You’re free to go anywhere. Be civilized, be interested. Meet back here in two hours.”

They nodded, raring to go, snatching maps of the museum out of my hand.

For the next two hours we saw them only periodically. They did not stay with us. They disappeared into the warren of rooms stretching back through time. Henry B. grabbed me to show me a sculpture of hundreds of colored threads suspended over our heads, casting mist-like shadows on the walls. “Where is the Gauguin room?” he asked. Rose and I gazed at the great white Zen paintings of Agnes Martin. In the Gauguin room Ben told me what he had discovered about Gauguin’s painting, that it began with an infant in the right corner and ended with an old woman in shadow in the left corner. At the center was a tall young man, reaching for an apple at the top edge of the painting, his muscular legs glowing with warm, goldern light.

“That’s like Siddhartha, reaching for knowledge,” Ben said. “And look over there, that’s Van Gogh.”  It was “Les Peiroulets Ravine,” a swirling, animated landscape with two tiny figures making their way along a path.

Iris and Geeta were looking at Renoir’s “Danse a Bougival.” Geeta told me she stood behind a tour group of elderly ladies and had gotten inside information on the identity of the girl in the painting.

“The girl was someone Renoir knew!” she exclaimed. “And the man with the straw hat is a country gentleman.”

Behind us, in a glass vitrine, was a bronze Degas dancer, her leg pointed delicately from her antique lace skirt. We sat on the cushioned bench in the middle of the gallery, looking into those magnificent windows.

Sam told me about being in the Rothko room. “Tal, Tal,” he said, “I saw a woman crying in front of one of the Rothko paintings, the big black ones.”

Not ten yards from those towering doorways into the abyss was a tiny Rembrandt painting on a panel of an artist, sitting in the shadows of a low-ceilinged room gazing at a canvas before him. Due to the perspective of the painting the back of the canvas is facing us—it is black and immense in comparison to the shadowed artist behind it. I read that this painting was a great influence on Rothko, as it presented the drama of the moment when the artist faces existential blankness, the nothing that proceeds creation. And this tiny painting had been a seed for Rothko’s magnificent hovering, incandescent planes.

Behind us Geeta and Maddy sat together in the dark room on bench, gazing at massive chrome sculpture, a silver boulder the size of an elephant. It could have been a meteor from another galaxy. Geeta said she sat there for twenty minutes, thinking about many things. Geeta was on her way to becoming her own Siddhartha, in the grove, deep in thought.

Paul walked through glass door not knowing where he was going and entered a room which was filled with Roman statues. He told is how he got swept away up by the large marble of Juno. ”I just walked into room, not knowing what I would see, and there was this huge thing, just there.”

At the end of our time feet were aching. But Henry Swan, Creed, and Jack were still alive and on fire. “Did you see the Picassos and the Jackson Pollock!?”  they shouted as they bounded towards us up a wide staircase. They were beside themselves with excitement. “You have to see them, you have to see them!”

“Okay,” we said. And we followed them, these eighth grade boys who’d managed to  memorize the layout of all three floors of the museum in two hours. It was hard to keep up with them, but they were, as Whitman might have described them, afoot with their vision. We bounded into the room where Pollocks and Picassos were juxtaposed side-by-side to highlight their amazing relations and affinities in color, palette, form, and composition. The boys urged us into the next room filled with paintings by Charles Sheeler, Winslow Homer, Mary Cassatt, and John Singer Sargent.

“And look at this one,” Jack said. “I really love this.” It was a synthetic cubist painting by Stuart Davis, a favorite painter of mine, and Jack was hyper-charged. “It was in the middle of the room so I figured it must be important. I looked at it for over a half hour, practically forever. I was there so long I kind of lost everyone.”

He’d found a painting that spoke to him. A vision of the New York streets, the jazz of Harlem, echoes of afro-tribal rhythms rendered in cubist vocabulary. He didn’t have to know any of this to be taken by the painting.

When we left the museum they were giddy. The sky was dark and a windy mist blew at us we made our way back to Chinatown. The kids walked together in a long, constantly reforming string, little pods of them touching shoulders, their heads inclined or shouting ahead. They moved like a giant amoeba, all adolescent protoplasm, life energy, laughter, whispering, calling out. Our boundaries shifted and changed but did not disintegrate. We walked and we held together.

That night we screened a movie. I had meant to bring “The Incredibles,” but I forgot it. A man at the front desk of the hostel handed me “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.”

“Will that be okay?” he asked.

“Okay? It’s the most perfect.”

The conceit of the movie is, of course, that there is life in the world beyond the confining walls of schools and society’s expectations, and sometimes you have slip through the cracks to go after it. The movie contrasts the strictures of rote learning, droning teachers, and the limits of institutional learning against Ferris’ zestful determination to break out and courageously create his own magical experience. He is Siddhartha, circa 1982, in suburban Chicago, setting out on a quest.  There is a scene in the movie where Ferris, Sloane and Cameron enter the Art Institute of Chicago. A long shot shows a line of small school children, perhaps in first grade, entering the museum, all linked, holding hands in an extended string, a strand of prelapsarian DNA slithering through the gallery. In the middle of the string of children Sloane, Ferris, and Cameron are enjoined, now first-graders in their big-kid bodies, passing by a background of the great works of civilization.

The film follows with shot after shot of the masterworks in the AIC. A Picasso nude. Stained-glass by Chagall in radiant azure. Cassatt’s “The Child’s Bath.” Rodin’s standing “Balzac,” and a curvaceous reclining  figure by Henry Moore.  Then we see Cameron from behind, looking at Seurat’s “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.” His eyes zero in on the small girl in a white dress with her mother at the center of the painting. The camera zooms in, shot by shot, until the images dissolves into a pointillist abstraction. We see Cameron losing himself in the painting in order to find himself. Here art does the magic which makes us see.  Structure disintegrates, order dissolves. Cameron enters into the painting, it takes a hold of him, and he lets it take hold, and he is changed. He is a child again, innocent and uncorrupted, if only for a day, before time sweeps him into the rat race and adulthood, before he crosses the threshold forever.

In these days it is often hard for me to forget what is happening out in the Big Beyond far from our little school on the mountain. I read about the mass famine descending on Yemen because rebels are starving the nation into submission. In a crossroads church in Texans a man has, only days before, shot 25 worshippers with a AR-15, and I discover, from a three minute search on the internet, that I can get my own AR-15 for $800 and no back-ground check, if I meet a guy in the TJ Maxx parking lot in Essex Junction. And if I pony up another $200 I can put a bump-stock on it and make it fully automatic. World leaders, with not a wit of understanding about the lives we all struggle through, are playing at war, like a lot of insecure, lost bullies in the halls of a middle school, threatening the planet’s existence. Damascus, where Rumi spoke his ecstatic reveries, is in ruin, and blood actually runs in the streets. Glaciers the size of Delaware are calving into the oceans, and the warm mist that’s been blowing in our faces all day in the streets of Boston is most surely a localized micro-climate which is the result of warmer and expanding seas. We know from our studies that warmer water expands. We know that the average global temperature is on a trajectory to rise well above 2 degrees celsius in the next 70 years.  The facts are inescapable and haunting. And our students are learning them. And those facts sink in, and then our students forget them, because after all, our students are still children, who are holding hands in a museum, talking about art and life.

After the trip I wrote to the parents to tell them that the trip had been successful. I told them that we had walked through the dirty puddles of Boston, that we had eaten Chinese hot pot, that we had experienced the electricity exhibit in the science museum, and that we had sat in a museum of art and seen the beautiful things humankind has made. The things worth preserving, the human essence which sometimes, these days, seems heartbreakingly close to dissolution.

I look into the window on the world and sometimes I see very little love and tenderness. No one, it seems, cares for what is most important. And then I look at the students in our school. They have days where they speak to each and every one of their classmates, and when they do that they are making strands of love, a net that holds them. I must remember two students sitting shoulder to shoulder on a bench gazing at a chrome mass that speaks to them. They listen for what it might tell. It’s a cipher, a secret message about the ultimate reality, an analogue for the soul, a doorway into the eternal. The good world seems sometimes to be such a lonely heart, beating still, yes, but in need of being held lest it be forgotten forever. So we lift the veil, there it is, and it is within our reach.

We want for our students and our children to know the beauty of the world, to believe in it. Otherwise, what is there to live and fight for?  We want for them to feel love growing among them. We want them to be charged by invisible electrical pulses emanating from a tableau of figures in a painting by Gauguin, in Monet’s shimmering haystacks. We want them to find a place under the banyan tree where they begin to comprehend Atman. We want for them to say, as Henry Wagner did when he wrote about Friday, that he was so happy and grateful. “So that’s the end of today,” he wrote to his classmates.  “Thanks, you guys, for making the day fantastic, and I love you all.”  And I am grateful for Henry. He is speaking about the wellspring grail, the iron rail, the cup that’s right before him. It is not gold-plated, armored up, marketed, or for sale. It is soft and undying and free. It fits in his hand, this devoted love for his companions, this blossoming awareness of his existence. It’s the ultimate reality, and it fits him just right. 

When a student signs up to read the daily poem, they are then faced with the prospect of hunting for one. Most of them do not yet have a favorite poet. So they ask their parents, as Vivian did last week. Her mom directed her to Pablo Neruda. If Vivian pays much attention in the coming years to the poetry of Pablo Neruda, she will have a favorite poet and a companion for life.

On Wednesday Will, at the suggestion of his father, read Robert Herrick’s, “To the Virgins, Make Much of Time,”

GATHER ye rosebuds while ye may, 
    Old time is still a-flying : 
And this same flower that smiles to-day 
    To-morrow will be dying.

The glorious lamp of heaven, the sun, 
    The higher he’s a-getting,
The sooner will his race be run, 
    And nearer he’s to setting.

That age is best which is the first, 
    When youth and blood are warmer ; 
But being spent, the worse, and worst 
    Times still succeed the former.

Then be not coy, but use your time, 
    And while ye may go marry : 
For having lost but once your prime 
    You may for ever tarry.

It occurred to me that it was fairly unlikely many middle schoolers, if any at all, were reading this particular poem on this particular morning. It was 8:47 AM and most kids in America were most likely in an Advisory, or an assembly, or maybe they were headed down the halls to their first classes of the day. I suppose we were in an “assembly” as well, since we were all gathered around the big table. But there is something distinctively cozy and a little strange about our poem ritual—we do it every morning, even if the kids usually have very little idea whose poem it is they are reading, or any formal knowledge of the particular school of poetry, prosody, meter, or cultural context from which the poem arises. And if any school really were getting into the subtext of Herrick’s poem and the Elizabethan dual meaning of “dying,” it’s likely also that some school official would become highly discomfited and banish Herrick altogether. But here, whatever it is does not matter. It is the sound and feeling we are after.

More often than not, the poem speaks to us the way that provides an analogue to our collective feeling and thought. As one takes a walk and sees in nature a reflection of one’s inner thoughts, when the trees or sky seem to have written themselves into a commentary aimed at one’s heart. As though the world were listening to our troubles and answering back from another time and dimension. This is how the poem sounds sometimes when it is read to the class.

There could not have been a poem more perfectly directed at a group of students assembled in a room. All week we have been talking about how we take care of our lives here in the school. How we should take care of the blessing we have to go to a school which is warm and full of love, which is filled with children who want to learn and are active about doing it. About how we should take care of the time we have here, because it is fleeting, and it only lasts a short while, and soon these kids will be gone, and handing the school off to other children.

The graduates of the North Branch School often write back with this kind of advice: take advantage of it while you have it. It’s not always like NBS out there in the world. It’s your school, take care of it. They have walked a little further down the road and they have seen a little more, and so can look back and assess what it was they lived through and in for three years.

When the woods are filled with dying ostrich ferns and the beech leaves are burning amber orange gold, we do feel time moving. When the afternoon breeze sifts through the bare limbs on the hill above the school and leaves scatter over the soccer field, it’s easy to feel time slipping by. The students feel time moving when they read something they wrote two years before and wonder, what was I thinking? They feel it when they observe their younger siblings, who still need help getting dressed or making a bowl of cereal. They know when they think back to the first days of the school year, when doors to the class room were open and we could hear the neighbor’s rooster crowing through the woods. Our time here is fleeting, as Dylan Thomas’ voice calls across the years to remind us that the sun that is young once only.

In the beginning all the students stand together at the starting line, and much of the early year excitement revolves around their feeling of togetherness, a sense of collective adventure. No one is ahead, no one is behind. We conjure a feeling of possibility and hope and potential. The world awaits. Your mind is infinite. This year will be like no other. You can do anything you want. They hunger to feel and believe this and they urge each other on, particularly when they write and read their speeches, which are essentially manifestos of their goals and intentions, to which they respond with wild acclaim and praise.

But then life happens. They begin to run and move forward. Some surge ahead with astoundingly beautiful writing, or an exquisitely executed drawings, or facile and wise-sounding comments in class. And some students begin to question their powers. Is my mind capable of that?  How can I make that shape, or put those words together? I’ll never do it. Some are relentlessly organized; others leave a trail of crumpled, unfinished assignments, broken pencils, dirty socks, and lunch bags behind them, only marginally aware of what is due when. They lose track of their intentions and plans. Their procedures are inconsistent or incomplete. Some fall behind, or procrastinate, or are too ambitious, spending multiple hours on one project at the expense of all else. One student will be unable to peck out a couple of paragraphs about The Pearl but is plowing through Stephen Ambrose’s History of World War II. One child forgets to bring her math homework to class for three days straight but stares fixedly at her ornate, Celtic designs she’s copied into her notebook, the vines wrapping around her name on the page, an adolescent’s 21st century illuminated manuscript.

Correspondingly some students surge ahead making friends. From the outside it appears that they are the glamorous ones, the life of the party, immersed in untold numbers of meaningful, soulful friendships. Others are slower, their social abilities take more time, they are shy, or reserved, or unsure. These others look upon the plethora of burgeoning friendships and they become scared. Will I be left behind? Is everyone else having fun, always knowing what to do? Am I not worthy? valued, loved, or seen.

As the school year proceeds, the gaps between kids become more apparent. They see their distance from each other or their goals. Their aching, torturous self-consciousness arises from seeing themselves as they imagine others must see them. And that projection of how other must see them comes directly out of their own sense of their shortcomings and failures. They find themselves feeling like they don’t measure up, that they are no good, not special. Whatever cloaks they draped over their shortcomings or the difficult aspects of their lives —their survival camouflage— this begins to fray and blow off. The truths of their lives become more exposed.

This is when friction begins, when time seems to slow down, becomes a murky, obscure slog through fogged and tangled undergrowth. This is, ultimately, when “drama” ensues. “Drama” used in a derisive sense diminishes the importance of what is happening. What some call drama I say is the field on which the compulsions, desires, dreams, and ambitions of growing souls collide. Drama is what must happen. It’s part of how the kids make themselves. It is the drama of the self becoming the self.

They are loud. They interrupt. They blame each other for who ruined a class. They feel left out or left behind. One boy worries that his two best friends no longer need him. Another feels his friends only see one dimension of him and he doesn’t know how to express anything else. One girl doesn’t know how to start conversations and to even try is painfully difficult. Another is caught between the girls, who have banded together, and his friends, who are acting younger than their ages. He’s lost between the two worlds, and all he wants is for the two worlds to merge so he can feel himself folded into both. One boy stares out the window in class, wondering why it is so difficult to write down words when his head is full of so many of them.

We try to work with it. We let it come out. We talk about it. We ask them to address it. Sometimes we let them fail miserably so that they will see the consequences of their actions or inactions. We watch them stumble and collide. Two girls are mad that their class has been loud and disrespectful to a classmate while he presented his project. They are concerned and want to discuss it. While they appear altruistic, it is also true that they both have lately failed to do their school work. Both issues are discussed in class by the class. What kinds of disrespect are we talking about? Not listening, talking over others, showing off with knowledge, being dismissive. Or are we talking about being disrespectful to the process, the opportunity, the thing happening.  Coming to class unprepared is as disrespectful as interrupting. One boy confesses that he’s been rude to everyone, and that his mother is correct, he needs to use tact and, he agrees, tact is important. Another is asked: why aren’t you doing your work? The answer is authentic and true: I don’t know. Another girl wonders aloud if her classmate is mad at her.

She’s never said hi to me.

But have you said hi to her? I ask.

No, not really. And then a fleeting, rueful smile plays across her lips. ‘

Are you feeling connected to your peers, I ask one boy.

Sure, he says.

Do you feel close to everyone yet? 

No, he says.

Are you close to Ethan? I ask. 

Well, we’ve been talking this year, so it’ s better.

What do you mean, better? Didn’t you ever talk last year?

No, we never talked to each other. At all, Ethan admits. He is smiling also.

What—You’re in the same class, for a whole year, every day together, doing a hundred projects and assignments, and you never talked?

Nope.

A year of avoidance leads to a year of silence between two boys who sit across the table from each other every day. 

Now we are to the heart of it. Kids this age feel alone all the time. They feel separate from their peers, different and surely unique, and at the same time they are separating from parents. Because they are in the midst of taking their first practice flights away from their families. Because they are anticipating their first migrations. In some deep down, sub-conscious evolutionary level they are worrying that they will be left behind to be eaten by wolves while the rest of their peers go on to make happy families and great civilizations.

There begins a feeling and hunger for solitude, but sometimes it’s more than they bargained for.  They hide in their rooms on the quest for independence. They will determinedly marinate in their private solitude, but they can only stay there for mere moments. Social media beckons. Headphones on, Google Chat up, homework out, cellphones, Instagram. The need for connection beckons, and these connections can be ungainly, inept, even erode the sense of self. They may find themselves adrift, severed from thoughts and people and interactions that once sustained them. They change their hair, their clothes, their music. A rackety noise of elemental, existential fear sets in— fear of judgment, fear of being alone, fear of not being worthy, fear of a lack of direction or purpose.  Robert Frost writes: I have it in me so much nearer home/ To scare myself with my own desert places. 

I see it as part of my work, the teacher’s essential work, to have them confront these fears, to bring them into full and honest visions of themselves. We do this by talking, writing and reading about ourselves. And we do it by learning to listen. Usually they are responding to what they hear in their heads. Mostly, in the case of young adolescents, they are hearing the echoes of those manifold fears—the hissing voices that tell them they are not good, worthy, beautiful, strong, liked, or desirable.

I want them to begin to hear other sounds. The sound, for instance, of wind, or the rain on the roof of the school. Or the sound of the classroom when they are all meditating in the early morning. Or the sound of a poem, of strange words giving voice to what lives inside. I send them out to sit in the field on sunny days. We “listen” to John Cage’s  4’33” to hear what happens when we stop shouting into the void with inane cries for attention. If we practice this long enough, they begin to hear the faint voice that is their own calling out inside of them. 

On Friday morning it was cold and clear. In morning meeting we talked about the week. Isa raised her hand.

I was just thinking about how I finally feel I am in the right place. I was doing my science cards last night and I just felt that I am doing what I was meant to be doing.

Here at the school, you mean?

Yeah.

What makes you feel that?

I don’t know. I’m safe here, I guess. It feels warm and loving.

She’d somehow navigated herself to clarity, at least in the moment. Knowing that, I told the class, meant that she would take care of her time in the school, She’d take care to make it count and give all that she had to it.

Then I told them we were going to take a walking meditation up into the woods. I gave them each a plastic trash bag to sit on once we stopped.

I’m not a Buddhist monk, I told them. But once a Buddhist monk lead our school on a silent walking meditation in sub-zero temperatures. He was wearing his brown robe and a North Face jacket. He walked slowly and we could hear every sound on the mountain. So that’s what we’re gonna do. I’ll walk, you follow. 

I didn’t know exactly where I was going. I never looked back. I assumed they were behind me, but maybe they weren’t. Maybe they just watched me walk off by myself. After all, what actually compelled them? All it was was me saying, Let’s walk in silence. I didn’t know if this was making the most of time or making nothing.

We went up an old logging trail that was layered with wet, fallen beech leaves. The sun-light filtered in in spots. Lichen-spotted boulders like the ones in Frost’s poem rose up among the leaves and the woods dripped with the previous night’s rain. I could faintly hear steps behind me. A cough far down the trail. A car in the distance. A rush of breeze. A few birds chittering and cawing. Snapping of twigs and footsteps on the earth.

I looked up hill for a path of sunlight for us to gather in. The path ended in a small grassy clearing, shrunken over time, lined with clusters of birch trees and gnarled maples. Sun warmed the place and crystalline drops of dew were clinging to the stems of grass. One by one the students emerged from the woods. Not one of them spoke. The dome of heaven was open and nothing but the morning was in it. I thought of Creed’s project on the Norse religion, and of the god Bifrost, who could hear grass growing. It was so quiet that it seemed we might be the gods who could hear these smallest of sounds.

After a long while, in which I feared breaking the silence, I asked them:

Did anyone hear anything or have any cool thoughts?

They spoke across the circle in steady succession. No one was afraid, no one fearing anything. The sound of the morning was in them.

I think of the grass and the trees, said Una, And I think how they are not pretending to be anything, or trying to look like they are special, they are just existing, And that’s all they have to do. And they are so strong, just being themselves. I want to be like that.

She finished talking. And then she raised her hand again.

I am thinking about how you could look at life and think of it as just one day. The sun rises and we have just one day. Yesterday doesn’t exist and neither does tomorrow. Even the next moment doesn’t exist. You only have this one.

I suppose this was one of those rare morning songs. We took our chance while the sun was rising. Old time is a-flying. We have to take our walk in the woods while we have it, while we have the woods and while we have time. We have to take care and listen, while youth and blood are warm.

Good teachers teach their subject as a passion and necessity and they teach it well. Great teachers will further demand that students give their lives, minds and hearts to the process.

Great teachers will also let the thoughts and feelings of their students enter into them. They will pull down the barriers between themselves and their students to be authentic humans, not merely technicians imparting a discipline. Great teachers will not just carry home papers to check at night, but will carry in them their students’ whole lives— their struggles, joys, and the glories of the kids growing up before their eyes.

And so dedicated, it happens that teachers have teaching dreams, because the lives of the students are in them, and do not leave them, even in darkness. I have the recurring dream of trying to get all my students in one room. None of them are listening. All of them are in outright rebellion at the notion of cooperation. My voice, strident and desperate, is lost in a cacophony of laughter and derision and distraction. I leave the room to corral some students who have escaped, and as I drag them in by their shirt collars, others leave out the back door. It is vexing and hellish.

There are days and weeks when teaching can feel like this. No matter how clearly we have set our course, no matter how important the material before us, we seem to drift idly.  The wide sea beckons, but we can not undo the bowline from the cleat, nor fit the oar in the oarlock. There are days in which no epiphanies occur. I hear tired phrases repeated again and again. We read a beautiful passage of The Pearl, and no student seems to care. I can not move them. They are each lost in their own worlds. They want to kick a ball in the sun. Take a walk in the woods with their friend. Their minds are preoccupied: Who will I ride with on the class trip?  How many more days until my birthday? Will I talk to my father again? Why I am the slowest one in math? They do not care, in these moments, what lurks beneath the surface of the pearl. They doodle inane sketches in their notebooks—a cartoon tank shooting at a cartoon bunny rabbit, a lollipop, which is labeled “a lollipop.”  Or they will cut a cast-off orange peel into 100 tiny squares during class, even as we are reading the impassioned writing of one of their peers. They are dissociated, unconnected, merely passing through.

When they finally empty out of the room at the end of the day, there is wreckage and the evidence that they were here, but nothing has been learned. No change effected. I have not reached them, and I see nothing of them but their half-finished assignments, their battered copies of The Pearl left behind on the table, broken pencils, a sweat-shirt crumpled on the dirty floor. I can hear them outside shouting in the afternoon sun but they have already left me, on to the rest of their days.

And I carry all that home with me that night.  On these days, in the classroom or at home thinking back over a day of listless classes, I am in darkness. I can not see what I am doing or whether what I am doing is doing anything. I feel like a painter painting on a huge canvas in the dark. I can not see the marks I am making nor the ones others are making. I am not even sure if they are in the room. And none of us can see if we are making something beautiful, coherent, or clear.

“It is all darkness—all darkness and the shape of darkness,” Kino says in The Pearl. In the case of Steinbeck’s fable, the darkness comes from losing sight of what is most essential. Kino’s Song of the Whole becomes infected. One dream replaces another. The deep love of family is replaced by overarching desire, some of it good, some of it poisonous. He dreams of education, equality, justice. But when Kino dreams of a gun and the power a gun represents, he goes a dangerous step from the self that once stared lovingly and knowingly into the light of Juana’s eyes. He goes into the darkness. The most essential vision in the world becomes occluded.

My struggle is to keep all of us focused on what is most essential. To keep our collective vision trained on a valuable quest. And to  be aware of what is most essential for each child. To have each child right at the edge of productive and creative tension, neither overwhelmed nor stagnant. My job is to keep them all on that edge where they are seeing and feeling anew, and to make school feel like it’s a new world every day.  And then  every night thinking about how to do it again the next day, to keep it intense, taut, fresh. This is the daily work..

And then there are the larger motions. We are moving them through time as they move through time. At NBS, where the students are 12, 13, 14 years old, we take them from childhood to the threshold of adulthood. When they arrive at the school in seventh grade they are still losing their baby teeth. When they leave, they have their learner’s permits.

This week I had two dreams in one night. In the first, I am helping a student dig. We are peering down into a large pit, perhaps four by four by four feet. To reach in with a pointed shovel is awkward and ungainly. There is something rich we are seeking, almost like picking through ice cream for the chocolate chunks. The chunks in the pit are black onyx and shining, luminous and damp and alive. But when my student digs she only brings up tiny bits of the dark chunks and mostly dry gravel and other contaminating matter.  I show her how to use the point of the spade to move the gravel aside and then dig under the shining chunks to lift them up. Even this proves difficult. So we kneel together at the edge of the pit and I show her how to dig in with her hands. I dig with my hands and we push the gray gravel to side and uncover a vein. We fill our hands with dark living soil and we lift it up. We have in our hands more treasure than we can hold.

When I wake up the next morning the dream is clear. It tells me something I have not articulated but I know to be true. This is the posture and motion of teaching and learning. We show them how to do a thing. We dig, together, with our students. They keep trying, getting closer to the most important matter. Every day we kneel together at the well, altar, mountain side, or pit. Our hands have to be dirty and nimble and in it all the way in order to find the motherlode.

In the second dream I am coming down a river with the all of the students in the school.  The river is very broad, alternating between a slow, deep flowing movement and an occasional line of shoals. We gather in a shallow place on one side of the river where the rocks are barely covered over. Our destination is the other side and we have paused here to assess how to get there.  The kids come drifting down the river one by one into our shelter, all of us wondering how we will get across.  I peer out out across the river and there in the middle of the shoals are many older former students, students from the early years of the school, all full grown, all hale and hearty. They are tall and bright and the sun is on them and their faces glow with pride and confidence. They move about, laughing and joking, and a few of their younger siblings sit on a fence rail, looking out in pride at their older siblings and with anticipation that they will soon be among their brothers and sisters.

I wade across to greet them all, happy to see them so content and strong and grown up. A parent among them calls out to me and tells me they are bringing firewood to the site across the river. They are readying it for us. We only have to get across. Then the older students shout up river. “Bring the boats down now! Send them down!” And the boats come floating down from around a bend, small boats, each one the exact size for each of our kids and their few things. Wading knee-deep, I gather one of the floating boats. “Go in and get your things, Vivian, and I will send you across.”

The work of teaching is not to stand above or beyond the students, but to be in and with them. We wade and dig and swim and search alongside them, and we aim to get them across to the other side. They will go alone, but we give them a destination, and we have helpers and those who went before, and so we send them along. When, in the furious pace of our days, I am unsure of what I am doing in my teaching, I remind myself that my essential work is to get them across with their things, one at a time, so that they can keep on moving into the lands beyond the river.

We had a short week last week, and much of our energy w was spent with everyone tidying up and getting all old work finished and done. By lunch, everyone had completed all their work, a great relief to the them and us. And it was a beautiful fall day, not a day to sit inside for two hours and simply listen to words. So we gathered them up and I read one brief passage from The Dhammapada, the teachings of the Buddha, which I  have been reading to them little by little over the course of the fall.

       Those who mistake the unessential to be essential and the essential to be unessential, dwelling in wrong thoughts, never arrive at the essential. (v. 11)

      Just as rain breaks through an ill-thatched house, so passion penetrates an undeveloped mind. (v. 13)

       By rousing himself, by earnestness, by restraint and control, the wise man may make for himself an island which no flood can overwhelm. (v. 26)

They listened patiently and then we headed down to the North Branch River. The kids ran out of the building gleefully roused, released, free, into the light, disburdened of responsibility. Some ran through the woods. Others walked more meditatively along the road that winds steeply down to the bridge. Once by the river we gathered on the piled rocks below the bridge. The river ran clear and cold, spilling over quartz and amber boulders into black pools teeming with gold and red leaves tumbling downstream.

“First we’re going to meditate,” I told them. “Stay on this side of the river, from here to  that big boulder there in the middle of the river. Stay close to each other. Stay in a sacred silence. We hear each other talking and talking every day. Listen to the sound of the river. It’s more interesting than anything we could ever say.”

The river was pouring and rushing behind us and I had to talk loudly over it.

“Then, when you are ready, go from your meditation to some place close by, here by the river. This bank here is our raft. Stay together on it. Build a sculpture from what you find. As you build see what others are doing around you. Then connect yours to theirs. But no talking. Connect yours to theirs using whatever you find until all 30 sculptures are connected somehow. If it’s an electrical circuit, the charge will go into anybody’s work and eventually make it to all the others. Now go.”

We scattered out along the west bank. No sound but the river, nothing but sand and leaves and damp rocks, trees and the wind and the fallen leaves, and them sitting still and silent by the river, together and apart. Then one by one we began to work, each of us making something as best we could—a cairn of rocks, spirals of ferns and pebbles on a boulder, bridges of sticks reaching across churning falls. And then paths of rocks and gold leaves extending and meandering out among us like little veins.

It wasn’t anything eternal or lasting that we made by the river. The first heavy rains would wash it all away. But on this day it felt essential and earnest. It was the work of minds who do not yet have to cross the river.  It was the work of those who are still building for the joy of it.