Still Sundays

August 21, 2011.

Normal is another world phenomenon; Helping the exceptions stand out for all of us in ANY form is art; From the memory box: desert sky and Wilma Rudolph. The foremost task of education.

Stillness is a flower that doesn’t always have a fragrance. Or perhaps the perfume is sans alcohol so one has to be really sober to take it all in.  Similar to a real yoga practice, what comes forth is not always bliss but gunk. But if you allow some space and don’t hold on, the gunk slides away, and real bliss doesn’t always feel like happiness but it surely feels like freedom.

Today’s Sunday is some shy rapture. It’s raining everywhere it seems, including here in New York City. Flush away all that is gone.

It feels humid inside my place although I can sense there is a breeze outside by the way the curtains are flying away from the windows.

I bought a basil plant that doesn’t seem to like me very much. I am not offended, I am just curious. People talk to plants to help them grow. What do plants want to hear? Plants, pets: we project our feelings onto them without listening to them.

Plants don’t need us as much as we need them, although scientifically speaking there is a co-dependence. They too need our exhales but we don’t know how to expire.

I knew a woman who treated her dog with more attention than her young son. No the son didn’t take guns to school but neither did he care for much else as he grew up, including her. Now she has an even trendier doggie, bow-tie and all. Literally. The son is tall and wishes he could untie himself from indifference.

Animals take better care of their children than humans. We take better care of our pets than our children. Children ask questions—can’t put a muzzle on the silent questions that bark persistently.

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We don’t have real opinions anymore but, in the words of James Allen from a different context, merely “sensational fluctuations.” “I hate this restaurant!”…“I love that group!”…“I love this art!”…“I love that school!”…“I love that book!”…“I too like that author!”… “How lovely!”… “How nice!”… “Lovely!”… “Lovely!”… “I love this…”…

Am I repeating myself? I apologize.

When I was re-reading James Allen this week, I mis-read fluctuations as flatulence. I giggled then. Today’s Stillness illuminates that word works too.

Like has become stronger than love because people don’t know what they like.  We don’t know what we will or will not stand for. We are afraid to be alone so we will like anything and anyone. Please, just hear me, “I love it!” which must mean I love you so you can love me back too! Yes, yes, more, more, there it is, right there, a quick release away from the reality that is my life. I can now be for a few minutes without another fix of “I love this!” so you can love me.

Fart sensations stinking up the corridor of real feelings.  Isn’t it constipating to crave attention and approval? Stop eating fake beans so you can stop stinking of emptiness. The real expunging of toxins feels great. Try it.

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Wisdom is a psychic power. Clairvoyance is not always clear. Normal is another world phenomenon.

Normal response should be an outrage at the company who decided to create sexy lingerie for 4 to 12 year old girls. Normal response is a long walk by yourself for feeling helpless given there are photographers who just took money from parents of four year olds who posed in lingerie to advertise for that company.

Yet not even an outcry by most. How’s the stock market?

Our future is at stake, where is the stock?

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No one that knows of my writings solely from this website believes me when I persistently repeat that I wrote on Sunday mornings before I had this online space.

September 23^rd, 2004:

The literacy coach told me that I have a gift to work with the most challenging students, the students who are “maybe intelligent but simply reluctant learners,” the students who have fallen “through the cracks” of the system. I listened to her as a reluctant believer. My students are reluctant because I too would yell “screw it” to a system that has continued to fail me. How can you ask Miguel why he is not curious about the chemistry lab and the wonders under a microscope when you are not willing to listen when he tells you that he may not be able to finish the month long chemistry project because he may be moving again, the third time in six months, because his mother keeps going relationship to relationship for some support and she is not desperate for attention but really has no other form of support but for one that she thinks only a man can provide.

 Gifts are a curse. Where do I return mine?

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I met a former student of mine last night for dinner. She is now 21. I had her in my English class when she was 12. She is a very gifted, hardworking, and successful track athlete and is graduating from college a semester early. She has very cool plans for her future that may even involve the Olympics. We spoke as women last night but I did recall some of the ‘extraneous’ stories I used to share in class.

When I was eight years old my father told me the story about Wilma Rudolph.

It was a typical night, sitting on a roof under stars that belonged to a desert sky, listening to another story from my father, another story that we couldn’t tell if it was real or made-up until he would tell us at the end, “Now that one was a real story.”

“It was?”

“Yes.”

Perhaps that is why as adults what is and isn’t really possible has always been up to us to believe. I didn’t realize I told my students similar stories when I was teaching them.

My father told me the story about Wilma Rudolph, the fastest woman in the world in the 1960s. He said the 1960’s were long ago but not that long ago. I can still remember that my then eight years old self saw the fastest as flying! At that age I still hadn’t been introduced to Superman, only Spiderman, given it was upto the Saudi religious police to allow what kind of cartoons came on the local networks.  Perhaps that is why I am most drawn to Spiderman to this day. Anyway, given I didn’t know one needed a cape to fly, I assumed Wilma Rudolph could fly without one!  Then to my delight my father confirmed she didn’t even need wings to fly! She was an Olympic gold medalist and a sensational runner.

He told me to pay close attention as he was now getting to the most important part of the story: Wilma Rudolph was born prematurely at 4.5 lbs. (“this means she was born too soon,” he explained), had 21 brothers and sisters (21?! This story had to be make-belief!), and had infantile paralysis caused by the polio-virus as a very young child. Although she recovered, she wore a brace on her left leg and foot which had become twisted as a result.

Many years later, in 1994, in Shawnee, Kansas, when my father handed me a newspaper clipping that Wilma Rudolph had died, I would learn that her family drove her regularly from Clarksville, Tennessee to Nashville, Tennessee for treatments to straighten her twisted leg. “Do you remember I told you a story?” That’s all my father said when he gave me the newspaper clipping. I remembered that I had forgotten to remember because remembering what I wore yesterday was more important at that age. And that I didn’t know Wilma Rudolph was “black.” My father had never mentioned her skin color. When my father originally told me the story I was eight years old, in the isolated desert town in Saudi Arabia, where I had no idea where Tennessee was located except it may have been an area that once had ten seas.

That eight-year old night, under the desert sky full of sparkling wishes, before I fell asleep imagining a woman who could run so fast that she could fly, my father said, “The point of the story is anything is possible. Never forget that. If you want it bad enough, you can make anything happen. Never give up.”

“Is she real?”

“Yes. Very much so.”

“Okay.”

Next morning I woke up, without a care whether Wilma Rudolph was real or not, to practice running with my brother Zain. We were going to learn how to fly.

The following quote on a poster served for a sore-spot for administrators who walked in my classroom and wanted to discuss test scores.

 I regard it as the foremost task of education to ensure survival of these qualities: an enterprising curiosity, an undefeatable spirit, tenacity in pursuit, readiness for sensible self-denial and above all compassion. ~ Kurt Hahn

I did everything I could so my students in middle and high school took the aforementioned away from our time together regardless if they took anything else or performed a particular score on standardized tests.

Last night I saw what the above quote looks like embodied in the form of a young woman who plans on changing the world as a runner.

She tells me somehow I had something to do with it. I don’t believe her. I think she did it all. In the end, actions and choices are up to us, although living in a fantasy without doing anything is the easiest route, and many feed our fantasies of ‘anything is possible’ along the way.

I worked equally hard for all of them.

She is 1 out of 30 in that one class. 1 out of 120 in the four different 7th grade classes I taught that year in 2002.

The human race is dependent on exceptions. Those who can really teach through any medium, reach one or many, as a parent, educator, or artist, including homeless angels, are guardians of the exceptions.

Helping the exceptions stand out for all of us in ANY form is art.

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Still Sundays: Shakti and Ibn Sina to really understand is divine Still Sundays