The Voice replied: “Remember why thou cam’st:
Find out thy soul, recover thy hid self,
In silence seek God’s meaning in thy depths,
Then mortal nature change to the divine.”
Sri Aurobindo, Savitri; The Book of Yoga; The Parable of the Search for the Soul
Ever Changing
Our teaching ultimately is a direct reflection of our presence, our awareness, our state of mind. I’ve been watching how that changes from moment to moment in these last two weeks, how each day, even each class at different times of the same day comes out as a unique expression of that particular moment. The learning space is an amalgam of all the different energies brought forward weaving together each one of us gathered in a class, the questions we have before us, and the ways we are awake or tired, interested or distracted, relaxed or anxious, engaged or withdrawn.
Daido Roshi writes that in the end teachers have nothing to offer, and yet they are utterly indispensable. One of the skills we develop with experience and insight is the ability to read the moment, to sense the energy and state of the gathered students, and to offer just the right question or action or activity to nudge things forward, to open a door. I’ve often told new teachers how important it is to have a clear plan and vision for how one wants to engage a group or a class, and how important it is to be ready at any moment to completely drop that plan and move into what has opened, move into what we know is right for the moment, what we sense will actually serve learning and growth in the particular situation we find before us.
Some days, my work is asking and listening, some days it is explaining and inventing analogies, some days it is encouraging and reflecting back. What I see after these many years of teaching is that what we do each day is in fact always new, never quite the same. I’m sure this grows at least in part (perhaps entirely) from the observation that I am never the same, that insofar as what I experience in my teaching is a reflection on my own presence, it will be constantly changing, always a part of my own movement. This also leads me to thoughts about working with states and state experiences in our teaching. I will think about something to bring forward related to a few observations and experiences I’ve had in recent years in that area. Others may want to share their own reflections or ideas on the same.
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.
