Longing for Neverland

I came to a realization recently, a rather startling and perhaps belated realization for a teacher: I like playing with kids more than I like teaching them. I am also a nicer person when I am not exiled out in the portable, cramped by the inadequate blocks of time, and weighted down with the responsibility of producing quantifiable results called "progress" and "education." Some of the teachers have expressed amazement at my patience in certain situations; I am working to be more firm when necessary, but whenever I raise my voice or speak without compassion to a kid, I regret it for days. There are certainly times when discipline is needed, but I sure don't like doling it out.
On the flip-side there are the occasions when I am having such a good time, singing and joking with my little choir or playing a singing game with second-graders, that I feel almost guilty for wishing that more of our learning time was like this: not a tug-of-war with the teacher forcing students (or trying to convince them that it is worthwhile) to participate, behave, and get something out of the experience, but rather a cooperative effort to discover something fun, beautiful, and worthwhile together.
All that being said, I am not giving up teaching yet. It does make me wonder though, how much my preference for being less of an authority figure and more of a peer mentor (or playmate?) is influenced by my own childhood experiences and whether this will change. I have always disliked conflict, been somewhat shy, and liked sharing my opinions as a follower rather than a leader. But in some ways, this lends me a special sympathy for the underdog, an eye for the shy kid, an understanding of the socially inept, and a kindred spirit with the creative thinkers and self-motivators.
Perhaps someday I'll start an arts camp: I'll put other people in charge of running it and directing the exploratory classes, so that I get to be immersed in the middle of it all with the kids.
Maybe I'm just some kind of modern-day Peter Pan who has grown up and longs for the irretrieveable joys and freedoms of Neverland...

Solitary musings

Today I stayed home, enjoying a day that I was not required to be anywhere. I celebrated by staying up late last night to finish one book, and spent the majority of today re-reading another. The laundry isn't done yet, nor the lesson plans, but my imagination has been revived.
It is a luxury I know, to get to choose what I want to do with a day like this and not be interrupted.
It was pleasant. It was solitary. It bordered on lonely.
I noticed that some swallows now had some noisy offspring nested in the roof of my carport, and Mr. and Mrs. Bird were repeatedly flying past my windows on their mission to feed the little tykes. I also heard a game of hide-and-seek going on next door; it must have been grandkids of the elderly couple who live there.
After finishing the book, I decided to take a walk to straighten my body from the immobile, seated position I had been molded into by the couch. It was a bit past nine at night, but I confess I enjoy taking walks at times of day when most folks are either working, eating dinner, watching tv, or doing family stuff.
Several stars were just becoming visible, and the slice of moon accompanied by Venus was already high in the sky. I was shadowed by the two neighbor cats for a block, but they disappeared back into the shadows as I walked the short loop back to my house.
I don't mind walking in silence, it allows me to observe, to think. I don't even mind walking alone. However, to walk with someone is preferable, just as it is nicer to share a mealtime, whether with conversation or companionable silence.
Aloneness is not the same as loneliness. Loneliness is when the solitude hurts, when the absence of someone is negative rather than positive. Aloneness, or solitude, is having the bed to myself and enjoying it. Loneliness is having the bed to myself and wishing it were otherwise. Solitude is a quiet house when I need the quiet; loneliness is when a quiet house reminds me that no-one is there to notice when I come and go.
Companionship -the antidote to loneliness- is the presence of someone else making coffee in the morning, having someone to wake you up when you sleep through the alarm, someone to help get things off a high shelf or lift something that takes two to lift, a person to make you laugh or to let you rant, someone you wait for or who waits for you to come home, a source of a welcome hug when you need it most. Simple things, really, but things that I notice more now that I no longer live with a roommate or parents. Especially the hugs. There are a lot of things I can do for myself, but that is not one of them.
From my observations of others my age, it seems that many are so constantly with someone, that they do not know what it is like to be without someone. To be without someone for a time, I think, helps a person to know themself better and to value togetherness more. The value not only of the sweet and tender romantic kind of togetherness, but also the household- and garden-variety of togetherness that can demand a person let go of selfishness and petty preferences and enjoy the benefits of a shared life.

Human Cocoons

I’ve tried to take a photo of the sky on several occasions, to catch a beautiful sunset or rainbow in digital immortality. But, more often than not, the expanse is marred by the web of power lines stretching every which way alongside the roads and over hills. Out in the more rural areas they are less rampant of course, but on the average suburban street, one cannot see the sky without also seeing the lines bringing electrical life to our dwellings. Telephone, cable, internet, and electricity; whether buried or strung up above, we depend on these connections for our daily living and with them cocoon ourselves in strands of modernity. Like lifelines to our IV drips, the power lines feed us our high-speed diets of communication, entertainment, and electronic living, and we gobble it like hungry caterpillars.
Above us, the power lines; beneath our feet, concrete and asphalt. Spread over the earth like frosting hardening into a shell, an exoskeleton of humankind, the paving of our streets, sidewalks, parking lots, shopping centers and freeways bring us in touch with each other and more distant from the natural beauty being pushed back, subdued, and slaughtered around us.
Life is easy, convenient, and fast inside this cocoon. I am not saying that it is wrong to be so. I am simply observing the state of things, and cannot help wondering whether we have become so used to being caterpillars that we forget there is a world beyond the cocoon, waiting to welcome butterflies. As we continue to wire and pave our world, we lose touch with its beauty, grow increasingly numb to its absence, and finally, become content with a man-made environment that knows no Creator but us. This is why I grow weary in the city, weary with longing for natural aesthetics.
I am thankful I live where I can still walk among trees.

Belief -an analogy

It struck me recently that, culturally, many Americans don’t believe in God, the spiritual realm, or the importance of faith, because they believe only in themselves: the reasoning powers of the human mind, the scientific method, and proof that requires no risk to believe in, no act of faith. Believing in something as timeless as God is considered by some to be old-fashioned –a throw-back to something people used to explain the forces of nature before there was science, to lean on as a crutch for their weaknesses before there was democracy and moral relativism, or even as just the leftovers of the social/political structure of the Church. For others belief in the Holy Spirit may be dismissed as just another spiritual option on the menu of the New Age pantheon of enlightenment, and Jesus as one of the great teachers alongside Buddha, Mohammed, and others.
So, to the enlightened, free-thinking, scientific modernist, I pose this question wrapped in analogy: Do you believe in the internet?
Bear with me for a minute here. One interacts with the internet via screen, keypad, and whatever other high-tech gizmos enhance the experience. Physically, the internet exists only in the hard drives of some computers –servers- and is accessed by other computers via the hookups necessary (modem, wireless, cable, etc.) to tap into the network of sharing known as the World Wide Web. If you took apart one of those servers, put one of its microchips under a microscope, and looked really hard…would you be able to see all the letters and numbers of code that are the guts projecting the mirage of the internet? I’m no tech-whiz, maybe if you viewed a microchip at some astronomical magnification, you’d see something. The point is, the thing you hold in your hands is only the shell, the body if you will, that the internet resides in; it is not the internet itself. Not to mention, the internet is too big (and getting bigger every time someone generates an e-mail, company website, or a blog post…but that’s another topic) too fit in one computer; it is in many computers around the world.
So it is also with the spiritual life: it is housed in bodies everywhere, accessed daily, yet cannot be seen, touched, or dissected out of us. The spirit of each person has a “webmaster,” and it is either God or some power other than God (Satan, sin, or the natural self/human nature). When we surf the web, we choose where we want to go, what we want to see/hear/find/buy/generate/communicate by interacting with it. When we live, we determine where our spirit goes –and who its webmaster is- by the choices we make.
The analogy starts to fall apart here. C.S. Lewis stated it better (in Mere Christianity), by describing life as the process by which a person’s spirit is shaped and made more perfect in preparation for living forever, if one is a Christian (this is a very basic summary). Back to my analogy, if a person is his or her own god, then that might look something like a website (the spirit) that anyone can post anything on, can be edited at will, has no privacy or legal protection, and the purpose of which is vague and uncertain. The webmaster Self has to determine what stays and what goes, how to react to spam and viruses and hackers and such, without any guarantee that the site will stay afloat or receive any help from someone who knows what’s going on. If the webmaster is God, then a person has 24-hour tech support, a legal defender, a content editor, a framework supervisor, antivirus protection, password encryption, etc. all wrapped into one, overseeing the website of one’s physical and spiritual life. This is starting to get corny, but I think the metaphor can have one other twist as well.
If a person is blindfolded, and has no way to see the internet –much less touch, smell, hear, or get any sense of the context of it- that person might say “I don’t think there is such a thing as the internet. I have no proof of its substance, no way of documenting that such a thing exists. I only have your word for it.” However, that claim by one who cannot see or access the internet does not negate the fact that it does indeed exist, and many are participating in its existence. In this spin on the analogy, the internet represents not just the spiritual life but more specifically a spiritual connection with God via Jesus. The blind person could access the internet simply by choosing to trust that it does exist, resolving to give up past unbelief, and by entering the password. Choice: faith in God. Password: Jesus. Result: unlimited access to God via the Holy Spirit, and thus a changed destiny and a life under constant upgrade toward a new standard. If you are searching, there is no Google here, but there is prayer. And a whole lot more.
So, do you believe in the internet?
Do you believe that the blindfold can be removed?
Or are you vainly searching through physical hardware for proof that God does or does not exist?

Life in the 4th dimension

We are all familiar with our world of three dimensions –height, width, and depth, those realities that can be measured, quantified, and physically proven to exist. Recently, however, there has been a phenomenon developing on earth: an additional dimension in which people function, find identity, and experience an additional form of existence. This additional, or fourth, dimension is one that is like a pop-up book, all of it flat but popping out with imitations of reality that invite us to linger and satisfy our curiosity at least.
Do you know what I am talking about? You are experiencing the 4th dimension right now. You are on THE INTERNET, or to be more precise, the World-Wide-Web.
In some ways, the internet is a parallel existence, an existence streaming from our consciousness and out into the realms of cyberspace. There we may shop without walking aisles, be bombarded with advertisements without opening a newspaper, catch up on breaking news without the commercials, check the mail (5 times a day if so inclined) without walking to the box or waiting for the postal worker to deliver it, and research anything from the price of rice in Tibet (if you can read the language) to the details of your next vacation getaway. You can even get sick, if you don’t stay immunized against those nasty viruses, or get lost in an “unsavory part of town” if you follow the litter trails of money-launderers and perverts. More importantly though, in this 4th dimension, communication over long distances is made possible like never before, because in this dimension space is relative. Distance is only the time it takes you to follow a link from one page to another, to search for the person’s MySpace page that you want to find, or to sign in to your email or instant messenger. Here, we can be next door neighbors with friends one hundred miles away, family in the next town or state over, and strangers across the world in other countries; we can also talk silently to the person sitting across the room from us, who is also engaging in cyber telepathy! In this 4th dimension, we often meet the insides of people before the outside; there is safe anonymity in walking around without being seen, talking without being heard, and leaving artifacts behind for someone else to find. However, this facelessness is like holding hands in the dark, like playing with paper dolls instead of real playmates, and like seeing music notes in front of you but never hearing the music out loud -you must form its true substance in your mind. Facial expressions, tone of voice, gesture, location, smells, and shared experience are the human depth missing from the 4th dimension, the door between neighbors is shut. So perhaps it really is a two-dimensional experience after all, but interactive –like those “choose your own adventure” books.
The Internet is an amazing thing, full of possibilities. The world is getting smaller, and we are getting closer to virtual reality all the time. But if that time arrives when people can fully immerse themselves in a world that exists beyond the physical, who will choose to live the majority of their life in their mind, in that 4th dimension, and who will draw the line and say “That was fun, but who and where am I really? I think I’d better go for a walk on real ground, go see some friends in the flesh, enjoy their presence in quantifiable proximity, and go home and play the piano!”