Taking the Shackles Off

Went out to Red Rock Canyon this afternoon to bring in the New Year with dance and praise. Mandisa’s Shackles made a great triumph song to usher in a new season, a new day. 

What’s Wrong With This Picture?

So, I’m sitting at my desk, waiting to tuck into a steaming hot and late afternoon lunch, noticing the piles of projects absolutely everywhere, answering email, coaxing the space heater into service, yet again, and recommitting myself to a life worth living even if infrequently examined when, all of a sudden, the hilarity of it all tickles my funnybone and I start laughing out loud. Never mind there are people, academics even, outside who know A) I’m in here alone and B) I’m not on the phone. Never mind that the laughter has caused my feet to slip off the local phone book that has been pressed into service as a foot rest and the chair to back into the outlet where the temperamental space heater is tenuously connected. Only the laughter matters. It is long overdue. As I wrestle the chopsticks out of their wrapping and pry them apart, being careful to create enough friction between them to dispense with any splinters, it occurs to me that now, at the butt end of the semesters that I am taking and giving, at the end of my 78th day of fasting – but who’s counting. (Not in a row, mind you, once a week for the past year and a half or so, give or take the days I’d forgotten I was fasting and stuffed the closest thing to a food group in my gullet, or the weeks before each Thanksgiving where my entire church takes the cure). Yep, now’s the perfect time to start that book I’ve been meaning to write. You know the one: The diet for a simple idiot, a.k.a. Everything I Know About Dieting I Learned From My Chopsticks and it’s equally enlightened prequel, Chew.  Well, I thought it was the perfect time to put on what I’d been putting off but then I looked at my desk, got distracted by the noodles falling through my chopsticks and a student knocked on the door.

Pangea Day

Your film CAN change the world.
But first, you’ve got to make it.
Then, you’ve got to share it.
After all, a picture IS worth a 1000 words. With inflation, who knows!

Life is Bella

What if words are my first fruits?

They wash over and through me all through the night. They twist the sheets and rat my hair, raise and lower my temperature and insist on themselves from the time I lay down until the time I get up, each time I get up, their march and throttle threaten to keep me awake. This night, they came in the form of illuminated Bible verses. Several of my favorites, though I remember only one or two now, were confirmed.

All things work together for good to them that love God.

This one revealed parallels in my life and those in the movie Bella. I saw how God’s awesome and terrifying will keeps everything under submission, how even Manny’s anti-pathetic character could be the catalyst for or rather evidence of Immanuel, God with us.

I wondered at the pain of it all, the true and immeasurable suffering of each; Nina’s childhood and decision, José’s accident, prison term and loss, Lucchi’s death, her mother’s misery, the parents’ inability to have children at first, and the triumphant, cobbled together kind of beauty with which each lived as a result(?). Each reactive or responsive life is a prism of choices. One could sense José’s conviction that he had to go with Nina even though there would be consequences, even though he knew not why.

It was truly bella how he went only so far correcting his brother when the opportunity presented itself, and how their mother became the mask for Manny’s concerns about the brother he loved more than life itself. Though perhaps those scenes lie on the cutting room floor, even now tears spill imagining his visits to José in prison, the way his heart must speed up each time his brother seems to be riding the edge of his grief, opening arms above a precipice wanting to fly, falling deeper.

The excellent preparation and presentation of food inspired me to come home, despite the backlog of tears, and remember that beauty is also a choice. For $13 and change, I presented myself with a beautiful anti-dinner of Kalamata olives, mozzarella-sun-dried-tomato-and-salami pinwheels, baby buffalo mozzarella and grape tomatoes, sugar snap peas and farmhouse seeded flatbread – a celebration of bittersweet choices, in honor of life’s beauty. Andy declined to share it with me, preferring the hotdogs I went into Smith’s to get buns for instead. Looking up the Romans 8:28 citation at the

Writing as a Contact Sport

Tom asked me to send a few lines about my teaching, the intuitions I have about embodying the writing process for developmental writers. I told him I have the conviction and evidence for what I do but not the language. That’s why I’m back in grad school after all. But they cannot help me. As Bishop said, asking who among us is a David and reading from Samuel tonight: you must encourage yourself. So here goes. My students have taught me, against great odds and greater resistance, that writing is an abstraction. They have repeated in myriad ways that disembodied words, words that do not connect to their reality, have neither meaning nor power. This is of course obvious and as easy to say, but to understand it, to grasp it in its irreducible and inescapable entirety is another thing altogether. To then go and stand in a room, without confronting it, is like raising your paddle at an auction for the gas chamber. And so it is how I came to retire from teaching only to find myself in the classroom again once the dust and bluster of admitting abject failure the first time around had settled leaving me with something far more stinging and unshakeable; a genuine opportunity to learn – perhaps for the first time in my life. True enough I have the raw materials – an indomitable hope and enough actual or imagined people believing in me, and I in myself, to pick up the gauntlet because, as it turns out, it was tailor-made. But how I came to know that is a tale for another time. I create contrasting mental and physical activities to balance the attention. Tom suggested, and I researched, the somatic aspects of this pedagogy, and found I agreed, at least in some measure, with what I found in a brief spin in cyberspace. Dewey, Friere, Piaget all come together on the necessity of experiential learning but only art educators appear to go after it head on as central to their means and ends. Children up to a certain age, and adults of a certain disposition all practice it organically in play. When the truth of the matter is that to be creative is the hallmark of the species, part of our inherent nature as Harvey Jackins would say entirely without apology, permission or agreement from any quarter. Yoga instructors acknowledge in greeting and parting: namaste – which means something akin to I honor the divine spark in you that also lives in me. My Gentle Yoga instructor takes it a step further at the end of each class at the LVAC adding that ‘when we connect from that place within each of us there is peace.’ This is my libertory pedagogy, my writing as a contact sport, the reason we must do whatever it takes: freewrite till our hands fall off, polish the nails of senior citizens, hold up both sides of the conversation with bedridden inmates who have lost their tongues, vocal chords or minds. Because when we get to the bottom of it all, we find ourselves entirely connected to self and other. Once we’ve succeeded in sifting through the dust of millennia paraded about as much and coveted as the latest wired fashion we do find peace and pieces of ourselves in one another. The pen is then mightier than the sword. This is why I would not edit anything my Palestinian brother wrote unless it was his memoir. Politics can not save us. Economics can not save us and religion, for the very love of God, can not save us. We must get about the very dirty work and necessary of saving ourselves. I still have not said much about why and how I do what I do in the classroom. Perhaps some other time.

The Interpreter

God,
I sit in the echo of South African singing as the titles to The Interpreter roll. It is Wednesday, after Bible study at Mountaintop. The film I’d not heard of was about growing through and beyond pain – being the last one standing amidst the shards. It’s almost funny how close to my life it feels. But then you’re the one who gave me so sensitive, if not dramatic, a heart. The real miracle is that the same heart can feel such rage and yet raise no weapon but a word. Yours, if you give me the strength and clarity. Mine, if it be your will.

In lieu of anything else

Now the fact that I would rather scrub baked-on grease off a cookie sheet, clean the dryer’s dust trap, make a bed with military precision and reheat left over cabbage and onions for breakfast than read my homework says something. Exactly what it says and about whom or what I will not divulge. Suffice it to say I am blogging again! One semester has ended and another has yet to begin. Steps have been taken to acquire the software needed to proceed with my online course and sorting through files last night after Bible Study, in preparation for the arrival of new office furniture, reminded me of what I wanted to do differently ‘next time around’ with my basic writing students. Heck, perhaps I’ll even keep a running list on my Palm about those very details. I feel a new Palm coming on, and a new cell phone, new planner, new everything. And yes, even a new me! But first, I’d better plug in the old one(s) so no data is lost. TTFN.

Oxygen Mask School of Life

I sit in the office early on a Saturday, chugging through items not yet completed from the Spring Break to do list. I set a timer in 1, 5 and 15 minute increments to at least complete pieces of a few things. I reach the task for my ‘gradual’ degree marked ‘lesson plan’ and begin to unravel. In class, last weekend, I’d said my purpose was to translate the African Americn Lit class from F2F to online format. Most of this week, I’ve focused on the ENG 098 syllabus and service learning, so a lesson plan that integrates our writing objectives with service learning would be the optimal choice. Service Learning is, after all, the issue I’ve been researching for my final project. But then my thoughts begin to swim. I’ve scheduled the next few weeks for students’ teaching and second meeting days of each week for trips to the nursing home. We skip one week at Torrey Pines because a guest speaker is scheduled for April 12th. I’ve invited Shay, a kindred colleague, to observe my class and give feedback on the efficacy of my teaching and she accepted. She came over Thursday and read the draft of my teaching philosophy. But what day can she observe before the next meeting of our Argosy class if, after calling each member of the team, I still have no idea which week they are teaching! Well, I’ll invite her for this Tuesday and hope it’s not a team teaching day.

Academic Aspirin

The influence of service learning on students’ personal and social development.

Low Grade Panic

Okay, I remember to check the student email on the second day after placing it on the to-do list. I made amends with UNLV’s library on Monday and so had borrowing privileges once again but they only had one of the four texts on the shelf: Teaching college in an age of accountability. I grabbed it and another two related titles of interest. Now, I sit in my office counting down the days till my next class wondering how quickly I can get the rest of the texts and when the syllabus will arrive. At least the College Teaching journal is available online, phew! So I begin searching the latest volume, Fall 2006. in it, wonder of wonders, there’s an article on service learning. As the universe would have it, I just began service learning with my English 098 students this semester! Despite the fact that it’s midterm and I have piles of exams to grade, at-risk students to hunt down and cajole into finishing a class they have to pass to get into Comp 101, and despite the fact that my own class begins 9 days from now and I have but one of 4 books to read, I’m experiencing only low-grade panic, not the full blown variety I would have been prone to a year ago.