“Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.” – Rumi
Almost a quarter century ago, I chose teaching because of its layers and layers of beauty and my faith in that beauty to transform a world that is often ugly.
Less than a week out from the first workshop day of the school year, I’m trying to remember the beauty in what I do. If an essential aspect of the experience of beauty is that state of hyper-awareness when one is in the grip of something that is beautiful and powerful emotions course through one’s body as a channel of that awareness, then what am I experiencing? It is overwhelming, but there is little transcendent joy. Is it still beauty? The “beauty” I am experiencing is a “beauty” that my body can’t seem to handle. As I struggle to push my shoulders down from my ears, plow through final curriculum projects, and ignore the anxiety that accompanies each school-related communication, I wonder if I am on the brink of a deep re-engagement with beauty — a terrifying beauty? A traumatizing beauty? W.B. Yeats’s “terrible beauty”? Or is this just the deep grief that accompanies ghosts-memories-of-past-beauty like a frigid draft?
In the 20+ years that I’ve been teaching, I’ve kept a few teaching blogs or blogs that included thoughts on my teaching life. I took my last blog down after my state passed legislation that gives disgruntled parents (and their political allies or puppet-masters) a way to go after the licensure of teachers who make their children think too hard.
I’m still unsure of what this blog is. I’m sure that it will include some discussion of teaching. However, it may be about the hundreds of others ways that I would kneel and kiss the ground if I were not completely exhausted on every level by my job.
I am this peacock. Aggressive. Territorial. Hoping you notice my beauty and not the cage. Just trying to prevent the destruction of the nest where new life is nurtured. Just trying not to have my feathers pulled out and put into flashy hats to go on the heads of central office administrators, politicians, and brainwashed citizens who don’t have a lot of thinking going on beneath the stolen iridescent feathers.
I am delighted by your writing and simultaneously saddened by how stressful teaching has become. I’m glad you are doing this. ?
Wow, your thoughts capture a lot about how this school year has started for me. I’m at the point that I’m unable to remind myself why I do this and have to compel other people to remind me.
A few colleagues were sitting around in the hallway outside my office this week talking about how important hobbies are for teachers. Lots of them garden, bake, etc. because it allows them to put in work and make some beauty tangible. It’s too easy to go a week of teaching and feel like you accomplished nothing, have no beauty to show for it.