Notes from the field

Thanksgiving

I find myself looking up a lot in these past weeks – walking in to the building where I teach, my gaze lifts to the branches of tulip poplar and oak, the stones and bricks of the rooflines, the copper flashing, the chimneys, the sky and the morning light or the evening light, crows and blackbirds, a crescent moon, clouds, the last few leaves of November. This is the ground of my teaching practice, the world that surrounds our inquiry and our dialogue, the vast space of all that is, that which is possible, that which always has been just as it is. Whatever we take up in our thinking in the teaching space, it is already out there in its fullness: the forces that act on us in the universe, the relatedness and interdependence among living organisms, the energy conversions that take place in every interaction. There is a great abundance of form and intricacy and beauty in every element of the whole. I love sharing in the exploration of all the details, working with what it means to become intimate, fully in contact with the depth of knowing and seeing everything as it is. Language, gravity, sound, story, music, taste, culture, currents – these are the ten thousand doors into the space of intimate awareness. In my botany class, we are enjoying the phyletic feast this week, a celebration of the diversity of plant food. We have enjoyed sweet potato noodles, guacamoles, falafel, cucumber mint soup, rice pudding, gazpacho, mango salsa, mushroom stuffing, apple-squash soup. We enjoy every moment of every flavor. I am filled with profound gratitude for the thoughtful, generous, curious students who share the space with me. Every week, I am touched by what they bring in their energy, their insights, their vitality. I hope to give to them some small part of the joy and awe I experience in looking out into the world and seeing the infinite reflections of possibility, and the clear and absolute ground of emptiness. My gift is the opportunity to be present for whatever arises. Nothing is left out.

Timelessness

I am just back from the most glorious, deep and inspiring gathering of integral educators on Whidbey Island in Washington. Beneath the cedars and a bright moon, we explored many facets of what it means to bring an integral vision forward into the work of teaching and learning. There were exquisite moments, and so much energy and talent and wisdom present in a group that came from all across the continent and around the world. There was stillness and laughter and poetry and a deepening of the calling we all feel. There was stretching and conversation and dancing, listening and sharing and inquiring into the mystery. It’s such a magnificent presence that I don’t want it to end, and of course it never does – I find such reassurance in the knowledge that the space that was created there remains just as it is always, shining forth from right there through all time. What was created and begun offers not only the new connections and friends and possibilities and openings to what is to come, it also continues to simply be right there in time and space holding all the depth and connection and presence that came through in that gathering.


I hold that same sense in my teaching: every day, every class, each conversation that is shared remains in its time and place and continues to reach out both forwards and backwards in time. We should not underestimate the reach and influence of every interaction, the ever present and subtle ways that they continue to be present always. We might experience these moments unfolding as ephemeral, arising and then disappearing in passing time. But from another perspective, they simply remain as a lasting part of a never ending present. From this view, we are all, in the words of Maurice Nicoll, always laboring in the field of Now. In this light, we are every moment working at the edge of creation, and laying down the tracks and building the foundation for that which simply is.


So, when each moment is an eternity, nothing is ever lost. At the same time, every moment is charged with a potential and possibility waiting to be realized, a potential so far reaching that it surely asks us to wake up, to bring as much awareness as possible to how we are creating this eternal presence. That recognition changes my sense of my teaching practice with the constant reminder that everything is important and priceless and also ordinary and full of simple suchness.

reflecting presence

It was the reality of existing things,
It was the consciousness of all that lived
And felt and saw; it was Timelessness and Time,
It was the Bliss of formlessness and form.
It was all Love and the one Beloved’s arms,
It was sight and thought in one all-seeing Mind.

Sri Aurobindo, Savitri; The Book of Yoga; Canto VII The Cosmic Spirit and Cosmic Consciousness

The Reality of Existing Things
There are moments where I sit most fully in the realization and recognition that all of reality is possible in this moment, all of Reality is present in this moment. Right where we are, exactly what we are doing, just as we are, exactly as we are being, Everything is present. It is always fascinating to me when the fullness of this realization opens up the most clearly for me – it is very natural and also still surprises me with its simple clarity. I am coaching third base in a little league game and thin silver clouds swirl in a vast blue ceiling overhead, hundreds of tiny white locust blossoms suddenly fall like light snow over the green grass, and the scents of new roses and honeysuckle drift through the air, and suddenly, there it All is. First graders gather on our school stage to stand before the Upper School students and speak about Hindu gods and goddesses while brightly colored drawings they have created are projected on the screen behind them – they invoke the names of Ganesha, Indra and Sarasvati and speak with such poise and stature, then dance together to the enthusiastic appreciation of the audience, and all time and age disappears, nothing is separate. Or watching the students I have taught in their instrumental concert performance: flutes, cellos, drums, trumpet, I find myself so totally fallen into the sparkling, glowing, crashing waves of just this – the simple spring music of awakening again and again to that which is Real and True and ever present, incomparable, ineffable and unsurpassable, shining blindingly bright and unseeable in finer colors than any mind’s eye could ever conceive, every light, darkness, joy, sorrow, elated broken heart sewn up in a pinecone and dropped into the sun, and then It is everywhere, all over again of course, vibrating on every string, breathed in with every essence, reflected off every surface ringing out and striking the very core so that nothing remains, absolutely nothing but everything that ever was, is, or shall be. So let there be no doubt that we can teach from that place, where inspiration and insight are the other side of discipline and dedication.

What does it look like when we are teaching from this place of one all-seeing Mind? What is the history of one all-seeing Mind, the language of one all-seeing Mind, the literature of one all-seeing Mind, the genetics of one all-seeing Mind? Yesterday, I was enjoying one of my last classes of the year with a group of ninth grade students I have been with since September. We were exploring the inheritance of blood types and colorblindness as examples of sex-linked traits and multiple alleles. And right there in the room with us was every class we had ever had together, every conversation that had taken place between us, all the possibility and all that was to be. I paused for a moment and told them how much I appreciated the work we have done together this year and the ways we have been present for each other. Every teacher on the planet is inhabiting this most precious of roles in the human family, the chance to be with others in the shared space of sight and thought. May we all continue to take up this role with realization and gratitude.

What is this…
Considering all of the gifts of this being human, we might hold for a moment the exquisite creativity, the breathtaking compassion, or the intricate intellect that arises alongside and within human consciousness. Yet beneath it all, there is this simple and always present gift of attention, of where we are putting our awareness. In this very moment, our experience of what is present is the direct result of how we are paying attention, what we are seeing, what we are holding in our hearts and our minds. As integral educators, the first question we might ask about our role as teachers is this – what do we notice? What do we observe in this space opening up in which learning can happen? What is present ? When we start by asking the question ‘What is this?’ we may become more fully aware of the range of elements and possibilities that create the fabric of teaching and learning. We begin by seeing what is. When we are truly seeing what is with openness and humility and full awareness, we might realize first that the space where we are working is filled with beauty just as it is. Our students, our colleagues, the spaces where we are living, the light and sounds in the room or outside the window or along the path become illuminated by this awareness, by this fullness of presence. We might also feel into places where we recognize something that we can do, something we can give our energy and attention to right before us. We become more fully present to things as they are, and also to our place in relationship to what we can offer. In my own teaching practice, I find that when I bring this question forward, when I can pause and ask ‘What is this?’ in a way that lets me bring my attention fully to all that is before me, many things come to light in a way that I might otherwise miss. In the school where I teach, students are very familiar with the opportunity to begin a class, an assembly or a meeting by beginning with a moment of silence. Friends work with silence as a place to seek a centering, a reconnection with spirit, a quieting into stillness out of which a greater clearness can arise. This past Friday, at the end of a very busy day, I had just one class left to teach, a science class with a group of students I had been with for just one week while a colleague was out of town. As everyone came into the room and took seats and shared conversation, I felt a tremendous sense of appreciation for what we had done together over the span of five days and for the community we had created. We began our class with a moment of silence, settling into a quiet place where there was a subtle but very noticeable shift in energy as our attention returned to a centering presence. For me, even these few short moments offered an opportunity to see what was before me, to feel into what would best serve the time and place that was before us, and also to experience a deep sense of gratitude for the relationships we had created together. Today, Saturday, I was back out in the world and welcoming the sweet small signs of Spring just ahead, everything awakening in the lengthening light of March: the appearance of lilac and saffron crocuses, the swelling of magnolia buds, the quickening and brightening of stream flows, the movement of ducks and geese. All of these held my attention on this sparkling day here in Pennsylvania.

In my integrated science class this week we are thinking together about waves. As a physical science topic, waves are always a rich and rewarding area of exploration – we work with water waves, including surf and tsunamis, seismic waves, sound waves, and of course all the electromagnetic waves of light in its many various flavors and versions. Among the deeper inquiries I love in this endeavor is the overall concept of energy moving through matter. When ripples move across the pond, energy is carried across the surface of the water. While the individual water particles don’t really go anywhere with any meaningful velocity (they simply rise and fall) the unmistakable pattern of wave motion reveals one of the beautiful and essential physical properties of the universe – the simple transmission of energy. As we move into electromagnetic waves of color, the energy no longer needs a medium, it travels at light speed through a vacuum as a vibrational force field, electric fields producing magnetic fields in a continuous self-propagating transmission. Part of our work in this exploration together is making the invisible visible, bringing to light dimensions of our being that we cannot immediately perceive, and finding ways to make them both meaningful and inspiring as we appreciate the sacred nature of the seemingly mundane. For those who are most fully awake to the possibilities in these discussions, there is much to consider in the ways that energy moves through us as well, how we work with energy, how we reflect, absorb and refract the energy that moves to us or through us. Our explorations are also solidly quantitative, so we are able to take up relationships of velocity, wavelength and frequency, and make specific numerical calculations of wave energy for infrared light or x-rays. All of which allows us not only to remember to apply our sunscreen, but also to play, especially with sound. In the extraordinary vibrations of the air around us that provide us with aural perception, there exists an infinite range of possible frequencies of vibration, only some subset of which we can ourselves detect. One of our most enjoyed activities in the review of waves and energy is the day when we generate a full range of different tones, in the classroom, listening to notes and moving gradually up in frequency until we reach the limits of human perception. Of particular interest to many of my students is that frontier where individual students fall out of perceptive ability – at some point, when we play a tone and some students reveal an obvious and distinct expression of recognition and hearing, while others are still expectantly waiting to hear something, there is a realization of all those pieces that surround us of which we are not fully aware. We may be walking through music that is unhearable, and yet there it is, washing over us, in frequencies we are not equipped to detect. If we have met the moment, all of us will go forward from these reflections with a new understanding of what surrounds, especially that which we may not be seeing or hearing.

After our midweek snowstorm, when the temperature suddenly rose to springlike warmth, the birds began singing loudly in the morning light as the snow melted away and the green and brown tops of the grasses reappeared.