On Questions and Contradictions

I read a poem by Czeslaw Milosz today called “One More Contradiction,” which began with this line:

Did I fulfill what I had to do, here, on earth?

And that brought me to this piece of writing, this prose poem based on a video I watched today, and my experiences of the past week.  It brought up lots of questions. And it also brought me back to a book I had read many years ago called Living with Contradiction by Esther de Waal.  It is a book about Benedictine spirituality and includes this gem:

Life does not add up: the longer I live the more that is brought home to me…It is curiously liberating to realize that I shall go on until the day of my death trying to hold differing things together and that the task (for which I need all the help I can get) must be to do it creatively, so that the tensions may become life-giving.

I had a note next to this that I highlighted it on August 5, 2007.  I am still learning. 

Here is my response to all of this – the poem, the video, the tensions.

I.

This morning I watched a video on sunflowers – some students who used sunflowers as the basis of their school year study – to observe, classify, paint, write about, and eventually make a video.

And I cringed and writhed inside.

My students are taking each others’ things, calling each other names, erasing each others’ work, and in general causing chaos.

I’m sick and tired of it.

Mostly sick.

I’m at that place again, that stop in the road where I say

I HAVE TO DO BETTER.

THEY HAVE TO DO BETTER.

II.

Mary Oliver says to ask the questions of the sunflower.  Allen Ginsberg wrote “Sunflower Sutra” which was a dialogue with a sunflower long past its prime, standing gray and forlorn in an abandoned train yard.  He famously asks these two questions:

Poor dead flower?  When did you forget you were a sunflower?

I have some sunflower questions of my own.

III.

1.     How did I get through to my students?

2.     Can I get through to them?

3.     Why do I keep doing what isn’t working?

4.     Why do I go through this every year?

5.     Why aren’t I listening better?

6.     Why am I rushing?

7.     Why can’t I be you, Sunflower?

8.     What will make real change?

9.     When will my kids say: We are observers. We are storytellers. We are artists?

10. How can I help this happen?

IV.

I finished with a strong feeling of calm.  There are contradictions and tensions in the every day learning environment that I just need to deal with.  As de Waal says, holding these differing things together is the forever work.

But there is a life-giving way…and it is through creativity.  This is the place I must go back to again and again.

V.

In Milosz's poem he concludes saying that we cannot fulfill our destiny, our reason for being here, unless we venture away from that reason.  So I suppose that is why I find myself here time after time.  It's kind of inevitable, I guess.

Call it contradiction. Call it duality. Call it life. This is a dream worth pursuing. The dream signified in the video, which of course was edited for perfection. I know that.

But it doesn't take away the fact that there is much to observe, there are many stories yet to be told, there is much art to be made.

Without the tensions, there is nothing to observe, nothing to say, nothing to express.

It is time I find that place. It is time to bring my students there.

And it begins in the depths of our own sunflower hearts.