looks like they inspired?

There should be a phrase for the opposite of that's just like, of it reminds me of. Language keeps me from easily reversing the subject.

When Kerry was sledding down the hill on his stomach, Aunt Nancy said he looks just like the penguins on the Wii, I thought: no, the penguins look just like Kerry. But, in pointing out the things we see, we are failing to reverse our order. Could we evolve to say Kerry! Look at how he slides on the snow! The Penguins on the wii look just like him! Or, Kerry looks like what the penguins on the Wii are imitating!

What is happening to us, now that the real sensations of the world remind us of our own simulations of it? Who has wrested control of our capacity to be inspired?

new school

On my first day I got a list of forty names.

To pick up from their classrooms.

To do this job right I'd need hours, or days, but I have 10 minutes.

There is no time to make this a safe transition.

Clutching little tentative hands, holding little weeping shoulders.

wanting to make it okay, its okay, little strangers.

I don't know anything about you to know why you're reacting so intensely.

I know I'm another strange adult telling you where to go,

after a long day of strange adults telling you where to go.

How do I tell you I'm different, and am I?

I'm going to trust you, so we're going to like each other. But now there's no time.

firmly grasping their tiny hands, pushing the undersides of their backpacks down the hall

all I have to offer is an empathetic smile, crouched down to their eye level.

Its like herding cats down the hallway

these two swinging their clasped hands

this one dragging his backpack, that one dropping her coat.

one grabs each of my hands, one runs out front, one speeds back in the opposite direction.

There are other lines of children, and teenagers, and parents, and teachers.

They are looking at me and they are moving faster and quieter and in straighter lines.

I am so frustrated! My little masses breed anonymity.

I think or maybe yell at them: what is so difficult about being quiet and staying in line?!

Quickly I learn: there is always a reason

that catatonic little body in room 214 is afraid of the bathroom, so hasn't peed all day.

one's streaming tears are for his father, who some days gets off work in time

to pick him up early from after school to play chess, but not today.

She runs back down the hall because she forgot the leather jacket her mother just bought her

He drags his backpack because he was teased all day, he is weary and ashamed.

This one punches all the little Russian girls and wanders,

That one speaks openly of violence and greed- he's 5.

I don't know the reasons yet, but someone will.

Children aren't ghosts, they're full people.

What if all the teachers knew that its the system that's flawed, and the kids aren't to blame?

As weeks go by I often think: kindergarden is torture

yesterday they were all rain-drenched from a field trip with a backpack full of fresh picked apples and a pumpkins bigger than their head- they lug and skid them in my direction, this self-sufficiency is beyond them. Would it really be so hard for the parents to be allowed back up in to the classroom at the end of each day, so they didn't have to move their things up and down stairs?

When I share stories of tantrums and meanness the parents say

it's just that by the afternoon, they're so tired. she hasn't figured out how to eat lunch in 20 minutes yet, up until he went to kindergarden he always took a nap.

I assure them that their child isn't the only one.

Where is the optimism in this? Why have two months go by and I don't dread my job?

Because I know being an administrator means trouble-shooting: I spend much more time fixing the few problems than witnessing the many small joys.

Because a good education, or a good life, is not one where a person is always happy. That my children cry and scream and punch and crumble does not mean the school is bad, it means they feel comfortable expressing their feelings.

Because I am strongest in the face of some perceived injustice, and increasingly I see schooling this way.

Because children are beautiful, trusting and resilient. They smile and they crawl in my lap and clutch my arm, and let me hold their heads and waists and shoulders when they are serious or sad.

Because I am learning to do hard things that are useful, and which I will do better for the rest of my life for having done this job this year.

Because I believe that I am good at this work, and that there is such a thing as a transcendent educator, and that learning to be this is the same as learning to be the best version of myself.

Preparations for Departure

Last month I went to Philadelphia to see my old friend Dan's show in the Philly Fringe Festival. It was called Preparations for Departure and was created and performed by Colin Aarons, Jessie Bear, Emma Furguson, Daniel Perelstein, Sasha Shahidi and Jackie Vitale. I am writing a review for them, to use my small piece of public space to amplify the huge feat of their production. I'm sorry its taken me so long, Dan, its been a busy month.

Six friends play house in an old factory basement on the fringe of philadelphia. I wander the space with the rest of the audience and smile at how clearly it spells out this process: All the old furniture they could find, and their hand written letters arranged carefully in the nooks of this raw cement room. I melt watching Dan playing the youngest brother. The way these friends relish their scripted, imagined domestic life together makes obvious how intimately they know and love each other.

Collaboration is hard. As I watch the show I am astonished that these friends conceived this play from nothing in two months, and that they lived together while they did this. When they unravel their family, half-way through the show, it goes from slightly saccharine to ballsy: they stop time, rewind, slow it down, speed it up, fragments of the story bounce around the space and you know the chaos is entirely intentional. They are in perfect sync with each other. I make up stories that they did not intend me to see, and I gasp and cry. This is what intimacy is for, their show is an almost too explicit example. It confirms my conviction that big acts of sharing with other people are the most worthwhile kind of difficult.

Dan comments on the size of the audience: small. and lots of cast member's family. He scans the web for reviews that night, nervously. Where is the public? Where is the praise? They have worked so hard. I want for him the validation he craves because his show is beautiful, but feel saddened by the external craning towards success. I want it too. It is painful that the audience never gets out even a fraction of what you put in. How else could we frame our success?

There are Really No Experts Up There

I return to this city, I have never thought much of as an adult.
Only the passing: I live here
or, I will never live here
or, It makes me miserable even to visit.

and here I am, worrying for my feet in their hemp slippers as I walk again on concrete.
Sitting on the subway, for hours, like everyone else.
Reading new books from the book store I stumbled in to, eating the plastic-wrapped sandwich from the nice bakery when I don't make time to pack lunch.
With gentleness, I try to shrug off the compromises of transition.
Settling takes a long time, or maybe all the time I have.

Perhaps I do not know that things will ever feel out of limbo,
but I do know I am definitely still in it until I find an apartment.
the process has been and continues to be messy.
Four of us debating, fighting, frustrating, falling apart at one another.
Where should four young white kids live? And for how much money? And in how much space? And with what sense of urgency? And under what terms?


And in what literal space?

Shut up with the discussion, lets stand in a place and say yes or no.
When shit gets messy, we all talk about it and then I feel really good.
And then it gets bad again.
How much togetherness? How much patience? How much compromise? How much self-interest?
Stretching my infinite gullies of empathy, or artificially narrowing my options?
There are definitely no experts up there to tell me how to do this.

And so, there is no reason to navel-gaze.
Rachel, You have already made this decision.
The willingness- from my gut and not my brain- feels really good, and correct.
Trusting that I only have partial control over this situation.
Entering in to our second month of hunting, I feel much more calm.
There are many more decisions left to make.

An anecdote of hesitancy for our growing esteem for convenience

A few months ago, my parents got iphones. Equal parts pleased and horrified, I watched them integrate this new technology; fumbling with the tiny keyboards, googling things that excite them in the car, downloading music identification programs and dumb gimmicks and laughing riotously at the sound bites included in their new ifart application. seriously.

Since we switched our family cellphone carrier so that they could upgrade to these smart phones, William and were invited along- he said yes, and unsurprisingly, I said no. Insisted that my old phone was fine and refused to switch plans myself....until the universe intervenes and my phone of course broke that week. of course. Practicality won out over what-might-have-been-morality-or-maybe-just-greenwashed-naivete, and I chose not to switch to a mediocre "green" cell phone carrier, but to get a new phone on our new family plan. I painted her with the junky nail polish I hoard exactly for this purpose, and programmed her name, Patience, in to the top screen, an unintentionally centering reminder every time I look nervously at my phone.

This weekend my family of four piled in to the car with our three smart phones and one dumb phone for a weekend on the beach. Honestly, I can't remember the last time we got along so well on vacation- not that everything went perfectly, but none of us got arbitrarily worked up in the unique ways my brother and I have inherited from our parent's dispositions.

Were we really all so much more mature than before? Everything just seemed to go so smoothly. When we got lost, someone would query our location on satellite and look up directions. When we didn't know where to eat, someone would google a good place go to. When we wandered off from each other, we'd just text each other to figure out where to meet up again. When conversation got stale or tense, Will or Dad would call up the Youtube video that I'm embarrassingly obsessed with right now (no seriously, its deeply wonderful: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ms2klX-puUU), and we'd sing along.

So this is great, right? This little device just smoothed out all the ripples, took care of the mechanics, the logistics, the dumb stuff that gets in the way of appreciating that we are a family of smart and healthy people, who might differ and argue, but who ultimately are blessed for our circumstances and for loving each other and getting along.

But I find this so disturbing, that we are trusting this technology to intervene frequently in our family, and trusting it to assume so many of the little responsibilities that stem from the circumstances of every day life. I worry society is loosing these skills- to navigate, to make plans, to trust other people to take responsibility for their own whereabouts and safety, to think ahead about objects or knowledge we'll need later on, to ask other people for help or recommendations, to be content with not always knowing what the best option is, to let some things be mysteries, to negotiate daily tensions with the people who are most important to us.

This is the change that is happening in the world around me. I have no control over our decision to embrace an expanding variety of mobile technology. I go on this tirade a lot, lately, and I've been forcing myself to find some lightness in the situation. I shrug and smile and say: I don't know, I guess I'm just a late adapter. I didn't get a cell phone until it felt like everyone I knew had one and payphones started disappearing. I'm sure I'll come around. This casualness puts whoever I'm with at ease.

This change in technology makes me feel angry and scared. Indignant, like why the fuck do people want to do this to their lives, and how come I don't get a say, and why does everyone find it so rude when I want to talk about it?

On family vacation, though, what I mostly felt was sad. Every smart phone intervention made me want to make some snarky comment. When I did, my brother and parents laughed and rolled their eyes at me in that loving way they often do. When I kept my mouth shut, I'd spend the time articulating some more forceful anti-technology rant that I sometimes couldn't hold back from espousing a day or an hour later. Either way, I know I'm enhancing my family's view of me as an anachronistic curmudgeon who takes herself and the world too seriously.

And this makes me feel so distant, just like I did when I was 10, but didn't have any beliefs to back it up back then, and so I wonder whether its just my contrarian disposition that makes me feel this way about smart phones- or about anything else, or whether I was a crazy intuitive child who had none of the words to describe why the world made me upset. There is no way of knowing, ever, whether my beliefs determine my disposition or the other way around.

And so here I am writing against technology on my blog, on the internet, not claiming to be a purist but wondering if some day will come when I will want to be and will be brave or sad enough to try.

Talking Towards Clarity: a vocab list for the summer

Here are the important words for the summer: the words I tried out to express what was going on as it happened, the words that allowed me to reach for something newly true.

Struggle
Endlessly useful since I stumbled on to it at Arvo's House this spring, with two basic uses: articulating internal struggle, and respectfully, positively discussing "negative" feelings about other people's choices and creative endeavors. I am trying the experiment of replacing "dislike" with "struggle with" as often as possible, though a good deal of the time I find the resulting statements very scary, and can't say that they're true. This seems to reveal what about myself and the world I'm unwilling to look at, unwilling to change.

Agency
generally used in discussion of adulthood. I started thinking about this at Buck's Rock, trying to describe the look of panic in the teenager's eyes as they left camp, and the immense sense of relief it brought on in me, to no longer be at their moment in life. A useful term for describing the exciting and terrifying possibilities of being an adult (see below). Also seems to be useful in articulating parts of the creative process. Still looking for a good definition of the term, though. I feel like I'm wielding it around experimentally.

Transcendent
Almost by definition, there's no way to pin down how I've been trying to use this word. It emerged first in the phrase transcendent friendship, something I came to while grappling for language to describe the experience of being with Zander and Jonah this summer. Entirely unique but not catagorically different: the intensity of my two months of sharing with them allowed me to articulate the catagory of relationships that become their own internal world, and that yeilds some something that feels huge. The idea of transcendence is not entirely secular, but somehow I'm sensing that the word itself is farmiliar enough that I can get away with using it in a secular context, or at least that it doesn't feel too far out of my realm of experience to use it to authentically describe my own experiences.

Adult
This is a messy one. At 23, I feel bashful about speaking of myself as an adult, but also it feels true. I might be a new adult, a young one, but what I and all my peers are really doing right now is definitely getting a handle on adulthood. Priorities, careers, ambitions, money, bodies, families, relationships: these are the things we stumble in to discussing and then look wide-eyed in fear at each other (not unlike the look of teenagers getting their agency taken away: the "oh shit, this is real" look) I am struggling a lot with the relationship between partnership and adulthood. I feel that the realities and challenges of being partnered with Kerry are helping me grow up: be a better listener, more open minded (okay, just slightly....), more patient, more giving. I know I am tapping in to this ability in how I deal with other people, but Kerry is really the site of this slow learning. I balk at myself, attempting to define the process of maturing through such a conventional standard. And I reassure myself: this is by no means the only way to adulthood, or the only path in my life that is growing me up. But real, committed acts of sharing between people- labels aside- is a positive avenue of growing. As I feel myself becoming both more willing and more able to enact sharing, I find myself thinking that I am becoming more adult.

Start Where I am Comfortable, Move to Where I struggle

after all of those fliers for healing circles around Portland, I can't use the word 'healing' without grimacing, and so instead I say about my summer, that it undid, unravelled, reset, restarted. As I left, the thoughts lingering were: gratitude, comfort, ease, transcendence, readiness and and fulfillment of ideals.

Buck's Rock is a city of tiny wooden cabins, hundreds of them, probably, 500 or so people bustling through their days, Working in small nooks, living in tiny enclaves. The young people, or rather their caretakers, pay a tremendous amount of money to be there, and the slightly-less young, the anyone-over-roughly-17, are themselves paid-if very little- to be the surrogate caretakers. Their jobs are very specific. They live with the young people, or they cook their food, they direct their plays, or sew their costumes, or instruct them in painting or video editing or sports. My job was to teach yarn crafts to whoever wandered up the hill to the weaving studio wanting to know. Some days I taught 15 crochet lessons, some days I waited and made hats for my friends.

This is by no means some Ultimate place, but like any other small and isolated community it takes on an other worldliness that makes it so important for those who stumble in to it and for whom it resonates. Returning to work there was accepting, if sheepishly, all the privilege that allowed me to be one of those people- my parents attentiveness and affluence that bought me a place of belonging in my 6 summers there.

If not healed than reset, restarted: my two month's returning did so much to make me feel composed and okay.

Some of this was no surprise: At Buck's Rock I felt like a good teacher. Because I was teaching skills I am well versed in, my days were filled with small revelations in how to teach better. Because of the ease with which I could navigate this strange institution, the ways rules and routines resurfaced from embedded teenage memory, I had strong opinions and the comfort to articulate them. Because many people already knew my name, it didn't take long for them to stop and wish to talk with me. I felt again like the world was interested in what I have to say.

Some ways I could not have anticipated, or two of them. Or one of them. I am filled with so much gratitude for the company of two new and old good friends. Zander, who came back to camp with me, and who I knew I was setting off to recharge a friendship with, and Jonah, who I had not even seen in 6 years, maybe, but who I knew immediately. within 12 hours. would be important to the journey I was about to go on for the summer. When people ask about my summer, there is no language that feels serious and real enough to explain how important they were to me. Maybe this will come to me with time. It doesn't feel sufficient to say that they were just really good friends.

And a million little ways: Thin walls that let the rain and wind through, so you are never quite inside. Grass and trees everywhere, sunshine for picnics for lunch. Endless arrangements of hundreds of colors of yarn, access to clay and glass and sewing machines and a million other arts I didn't have time to try. People to cook for me and do my laundry, so much free time and safety. Kind of being a kid again, but now I yearned for purpose and not for freedom, could fill my time with purpose because I'm some adult now, freedom is a given. I felt affirmed that I am not a child any longer.

Start where I am comfortable.
Move to where I struggle.

Two months was a luxurious chunk of time to revel, to accept all the affirmations available at buck's rock and to store it up, holes of doubt filled with resevoirs of confidence for the future when it will not be so easy.

I am moving to new york city, the week after next. I will run an after school art program at a magnet school on the lower east side. I am filled with doubt about these choices, but choosing to see them as imperfect and correct. What isn't easy also isn't wrong. Moving to the place I struggle wth most, moving towards actions and ideas that challenge me, making space for the friendships there with all of their non-idealness, incompletion, moving forward together with kerry committed to the space between him as a person and the unattainable ideal partnership, moving closer to my family and all the discomfort and challenge the details of each other brings up, moving towards art-making because ultimately there is no other option.

I couldn't stay at Buck's Rock forever, even if I wanted to, and yet/but also I happy that it is time to move on. There is no time I'll be more ready.