Friday English class: Reaction to Rebecca Solnit's "Art of Not Knowing Where You Are", especially this paragraph:

"A labyrinth is an ancient device that compresses a journey into a small space, winds up a path like thread on a spool. It contains beginning, confusion, perseverance, arrival, and return. There at last the metaphysical journey of your life and your actual movements are one and the same. You may wander, may learn that in order to get to your destination you must turn away from it, become lost, spin about, and then only after the way has become overwhelming and absorbing, arrive, having gone the great journey without having gone far on the ground."

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This sounds like Joseph Campbell's monomyth to me or the story of so many epics or novels.  

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Solnit talks about how dark is just as necessary as light, how being in a labyrinth is being lost, and how this being lost is necessary for us.  As one of the kids just said, It's like the article from earlier in the week, the one that says that traveling is not necessarily for finding yourself but for losing yourself, or losing the parts of you that you don't need.  One student says she's emerging now; another says that she's feeling like she's in the labyrinth now, in the dark.

I did a labyrinth once, in Colorado, at a conference.  It was outlined in rocks, and we did it in silence, and I remember the darkness for me.  I was with a bunch of people I didn't know, I couldn't hit the right path to move back out of the labyrinth, so I just kept going and going, walking in circles, until almost everyone was gone.  A colleague from home and our team leader were waiting (making me more self-conscious and impatient with myself), and eventually our team leader showed me that what looked like a stop in the labyrinth was actually a mound built by ants, but I could actually walk through that way; in fact, I was supposed to walk through that way if I ever wanted to emerge from the labyrinth.

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Solnit says we need the dark for creation and love and discovering ourselves.  I wonder most how our kids are discovering themselves, whether they are discovering themselves.  We'd all -- students, our kids, Daniel and I -- be learning if we stayed at home this year, too, maybe learning different, sure, but still learning.  It feels too much, my asking the students to reflect on what they're going through right now when really, it's likely much later that they'll find out later what they learned about themselves here.  Ah, well, I'm still asking.  Life here makes them reflective of life back in the States a good bit, so maybe it's okay to have some forced reflection on life here now, some recognizing of places or feelings or daily life here.

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I need breaks from regular life, chances to stretch and be lost and be uncomfortable.  I get antsy even though I consider myself a homebody, and I need to go for a bit.  The darkness can be welcoming.

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After two years at Belmont Hill I thought, I could teach here forever.  This is fun and interesting and rewarding.  And I'm twenty-four-years-old.  I can't stay here forever.  So I moved to San Francisco and had a really tough fall of a temp job (answering switchboard in basement of a hotel in 9 hour blocks) and then a commute and job I thought I would like, but found immensely difficult and depressing for me: life coach for developmentally disabled adults in low-income housing.  It was hard to go into people's homes and check on whether they were making meals, eating right, budgeting well, treating a child well.  After two weeks, I dreaded going and thought about quitting every day as I drove from apartment in San Francisco to Belmont, CA (strange irony that I was again working in a town of Belmont, by choice, now at a job I really, really didn't like).  In January, I started a new job as a job coach for developmentally disabled adults in San Francisco (this job was much better for me), and in my second week of that job, I drove to Marin to sign a contract to start teaching at another private school for the following year.

One might wonder why I bothered moving and trying these other jobs just to end up teaching at another private school.  I needed the change, the struggles, the dreaded jobs in some way.  I needed to figure out and feel for myself that the path I had planned for myself -- move to CA, establish residency, go to CA school for masters in social work, be social worker -- would work, or wouldn't work, as it turned out.  I had a plan, a good, solid plan.  But it didn't end up working for me.  I missed teaching and being around kids and teaching folks.

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When I spent junior fall in Italy, I discovered that my lifelong dream of doing the Peace Corps in Africa was actually not going to happen: four months away from home was just enough for me at the time, and any more than that was too much.  Peace Corps is a two year commitment: too long for me to be away from my family and home.  I let the dream go.  Sometimes I regret not having pursued it and feel envious of those who can do it, but I had to be honest with myself that I didn't think I could do it.

That I realized by November of that junior fall in Italy.

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It was only later that I realized that the four months in Italy would stay in me and make me want to see more places later.  It was my first time out of the country and away from my family (how do these high school juniors/seniors do this entire SYA year?).

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Almost time to check the student blogs for the week.  Yeah, it's hard to do reflecting on the current moment for myself.  I could reflect on my kids and on my students, but on my own experience -- that's a little tougher.  

Solnit connects the necessity of darkness to the term labyrinth as a part of the ear to hearing to listening to others.  She even gets all the way to empathy, and how empathy means "that you travel out of yourself a little or expand."  She says, "Recognizing the reality of another's existence is the imaginative leap that is the birth of empathy."  She says that "in the dark we find ourselves and each other, if we reach out, if we keep going, if we listen, if we go deeper."

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How does she do that?

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11am: time to check all students' blogs from this week.

I read one of a student's entries this morning and noticed how she imitated de Botton's style so much better than I did this week in describing her Where's and Why's.  This student has learning challenges, works hard, wants to do well, sticks with the struggles and gets through them.  This entry of hers was excellent, moving, lovely.