To Beginnings

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In the secondary world of central Wisconsin, we're cautiously measuring one semester while we renew hopes for the next. While most people do this kind of thinking two or three weeks earlier around the calendar change, teachers live in a different time.  A new semester brings new hopes, new students and new inspirations.

 Part I:

My esteemed colleague, Mr. Hansen, and I are embarking on another new course called Innovation and Creation.  Three years of hope is wrapped up in this course.  Not to say that we've got three years of preparation, but we've got three years of hope.  And while I understand the old proverb "You can hope in one hand and shit in the other and see which has more," my hopes here are different. They aren't some flaky and fleeting adolescent desire.  They aren't about what will happen to me or the class, not about what my administrators think or about any Educator Effectiveness evaluations. I think I can say with sincerity that my hopes aren't located in that part of the ego.

 Part II:

My wife isn't just beautiful, she's also an elementary principal.  And a damn good one. She recently began an after school program to provide opportunities for...well, just about everyone: student athletics, teaching English to parents, community involvement, etc.  Five of my high school students and one friend volunteered to help lead close to seventy 3rd-5th graders in yoga classes Monday nights for the next eight weeks.  We did this in seamless cooperation with our Assistant Superintendent, a yogi in her own right, our Director of Special Projects, the elementary school staff and community volunteers.  The room Monday night was bursting with the purist intentions. Ten minutes after a little boy yelled yoga was stupid and he wouldn't do it, he turned to a teacher on the mat next to him, who had kept breathing with him for the ten minutes, and said, "I like this. I feel better."

 Part III:

A student of mine thought enough about ending her own life this past weekend that she turned herself into the crisis center, knowing she was in danger.  I have talked to her in spurts the last few days. Or rather, listened. She is intelligent, fearful, inspirational, determined, anxious, symbolic, poetic, depressed and faithful. There is real need, real life, real obstacles and real growing that needs to happen. In the face of all proper public servant decorum, but knowing her Christian background, Mr. Hansen and I prayed with her.  It seemed a subversive act in all the best ways, standing up to the fabricated mechanics of high school.  We prayed right through a bell ringing over the loudspeaker, our prayer rising like a middle finger to all the anxieties we carry with us.  Even outside of the religious nature of the act, it was a moment of freedom in which three people affirmed their humanity, their liberty to choose and their commitment to others.

 So what?

My brother told me on my wedding day that "Beginnings are important." And while most of the time I think of beginnings as something that happened or will happen, maybe I should think of beginnings as always happening.  Now. In each moment. So that every breath is an opportunity to renew or revise my intention. Every experience is a new creation of which I am part creator.  Every crisis affirms how beautiful life will be when the crisis is past.
So this begins...

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