The Family of Things | reinventingryan

I want to talk about something other than teaching. Yes, you read that correctly. I want to talk about something other than teaching.

If you're like many of my teacher friends and me, this is difficult. When you spend over 50 hours a week with kids you love and with work that's meaningful, sometimes it's strenuous to dig inside yourself for something different, something more.

While I feel this is true for many, I will speak for myself. I have placed noticably more emphasis on my "teacher self" than on my "whole self." Palmer writes about identity and integrity and their effect on a sense of wholeness. He writes, "Identity lies in the intersection of the diverse forces that make up my life, and integrity lies in relating to those forces in ways that bring me wholeness and life rather than fragmentation and death."

As much fun as "fragmentation and death" sound, I wonder about ways to bring my life new forces that will provide me with "wholeness and life." As I think about this moment, this summer, next year, five years from now, my lifetime, I wonder what it is I plan to do with my "one wild and precious life" that will help me connect myself to myself and others.

I have made attempts to re-balance the scales, to place more emphasis on my non-teacher-self. I have made attempts to create new aspects of my life and merge them together so I don't feel as "cut off" from myself and the world.

I have bought some tools and crafted my first project: A poorly constructed (albeit functional) beer caddy.

I have started to trade stocks (what's up, supplemental income?). I have started to listen to and read more books, articles, poems, quotations.

As I write, I wonder if instead of making myself more whole, I'm simply making myself busier, if I'm filling time.

I don't know.

There's obviously this internal struggle going on inside me in regards to a call to wholeness. I'm focusing on that first because, as Parker writes, "only as we are in communion with ourselves can we find community with others. Community is an outward and visible sign of an inward and invisible grace, the flowing of personal identity and integrity into the world of relationships."

I'm struggling with the world of relationships, too, though.

Vonnegut writes, "What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured."

I think about stable communities, both my own and yours, too. Are we creating spaces to know and be known? When I say known, I mean really known and accepted for all of who we are. Are we making that happen?

My answer is no. I think that's a problem. Boyle writes, "We seek to create loving communities of kinship precisely to counteract mounting lovelessness, racism, and the cultural disparagement that keeps us apart."

We need to create more opportunities to tell each other "our despairs," our dreams, and more. We need to ask better questions that help develop intimacy among us. We need to remember, as Mother Theresa tells us, "that we belong to each other."

While writing this, I'm keenly aware of how much larger the world is than myself. I think about the grasshopper, intensified sky, wild geese. I think about counting to twelve in a field, knowing in my bones how full the world is, trying to find my place "in the family of things." This. This soothes me.

"The Summer Day"

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

- Mary Oliver

Quarter-Life-Crisis, or A Call to Wholeness, or The Family of Things

"Ah, not to be cut off"

Ah, not to be cut off,
not through the slightest partition
shut out from the law of the stars.
The inner—what is it?
if not intensified sky,
hurled through with birds and deep
with the winds of homecoming.

- Rainer Maria Rilke

"Keeping Quiet"

Now we will count to twelve

and we will all keep still.

This one time upon the earth,

let's not speak any language,

let's stop for one second,

and not move our arms so much.

It would be a delicious moment,

without hurry, without locomotives,

all of us would be together

in a sudden uneasiness.

The fishermen in the cold sea

would do no harm to the whales

and the peasant gathering salt

would look at his torn hands.

Those who prepare green wars,

wars of gas, wars of fire,

victories without survivors,

would put on clean clothing

and would walk alongside their brothers

in the shade, without doing a thing.

What I want shouldn't be confused

with final inactivity:

life alone is what matters,

I want nothing to do with death.

If we weren't unanimous

about keeping our lives so much in motion,

if we could do nothing for once,

perhaps a great silence would

interrupt this sadness,

this never understanding ourselves

and threatening ourselves with death,

perhaps the earth is teaching us

when everything seems to be dead

and then everything is alive.

Now I will count to twelve

and you keep quiet and I'll go.

- Pablo Neruda

"Wild Geese"

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

- Mary Oliver

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.

- Rumi