Haiti

The big trip is finally here.  I've been thinking about it since October, when Chris was building schools there and unknowingly became a catalyst for my journey.  I've heard many of his stories, and several others from people at Seattle First or through Companis.  Whenever a student would stand me up at the Downtown Library, I would take a few minutes to learn a new word or phrase in the Creole-English Dictionary on the 7th floor.  I've learned mostly body parts from the dictionary, and words for food from the Creole podcast I found.  When I went home a month ago, my parents bought me some good books talking about the state of Haiti before the earthquake, and one with letters written by Haitins in mostly Creole.

I don't really think any of this will prepare me for what's coming, for actually being there.  I don't think I will be able to follow or speak a word of Creole when I am immersed in it.  What I was doing while reading and looking up phrases or words was spending time being intentional about this trip, making time to let it take over my thoughts and mind for a few moments of almost every day for months.

Now that it's upon me, I'm really excited!  I'm so grateful for all the support I've had making this trip possible.  From my two church families, the Women's Mission Society at Calvary and Companis at SFBC for donating some money to Evergreen Association for the cause, and the special commission from SFBC.  Thanks to my parents for the books, and the insight that was hard to find elsewhere.  Thanks to Chris for being the catalyst.  Thanks to the Sunday brunch crew for talking over the trip with me every week.  And the biggest thanks to Ned Parker for making it all happen.

When I read back in my journals and blog to last summer, I read the thread of cravings, yearnings, desires for something amazing.  Looking back at this year, and looking ahead at the coming months, I feel satisfied.

Birding and Porchin'

New camera!

Sit Spot - April 12, 2012 8:30 a.m.

High 50s, lower 60s.  A little cloudy.  Clouds are slowly moving NW.

The heron is the first sighting of the morning.  Darker than a Great Blue, slate colored.  It's heading west, working its way to the Sound.  Jake and I spot it two evenings later, same heron, same shade, same direction, different time of day.

On this morning of April 12, a mom is packing up a stroller to wheel her kid somewhere on Stone Way, right under the heron soaring west.

Two robins make appearances.  One of them flits about the yard, gathering nest materials, and stopping for juicy worms if it is so lucky to find one.  E.J. was working in the garden the other day, and one of these robins was busy working by the side of the house, tugging and munching on good worms.

The other robin sits up top on a telephone wire and keeps an eye out for its partner.  They don't chirp at one another, they stay within eyesight.  The robin on the ground poops on the curb then hops under Madden's car as some humans walk by on the sidewalk.  It's so funny to see it walk, and hard to describe.  It moves quickly, like a run, but with the pace of a walk.  Scurrying is probably the best word.

A chickadee flies in to sit on the lower branches of the Cedar tree.  It doesn't do the call that named it (chicka dee dee dee), instead it makes some short peeps.  I never realized how high pitched Chickadees were.

Then I hear the laughing birds.  Each time I see them, I think, "Finch."  Something about the beak, or size and shape of the body.  The truth is I'm not an expert with birds, really I just feel like they are finches.

They are also in a pair, everyone seems paired up by now.  The one I've seen make the laughing sound has a red breast.  This laughing noise sounds like a child on the piano learning arpeggios.  Jumping up and down across the notes, showing off how well it can hit them.

Two smaller birds who I don't know, and don't come close enough to introduce themselves, are also paired up together in the grass.  They are about the size of chickadees, maybe even a little smaller, but they don't have any markings I can notice.  They chirp back and forth as they go about their business.

The crows are soaring about up top, they don't come down to the street on April 12.  They are acting reasonably sane.  Last Saturday, the second day of Passover, when we had our Seder, they were going crazy.  One crow would perch on a tree or roof, and call out to the murder of 7 or 8.  As if the perching crow was directing the rest of them, the murder would dance, swoop, turn, and dive together.  This was around the time of the full moon.  E.J. thought they were acting out the story of the plagues.

On April 12, runners and young professionals move by, all in a hurry.  Their ears or eyes are shut out by earplugs or a smart phone.  I do not write this to judge them.  In an hour, in the middle of my work day, I am glued to the computer screen or absorbed with texting my students.  These are just more patterns I'm noticing.

A few weeks ago, there was a Hummingbird.  I looked at a Crow sitting on top of a house up Interlake, and a hummingbird came and hovered next to it for a fleeting moment.

When I walk up to my room after my sit spot on April 12, I see the Red-Breasted Laughing Finch sitting in the tree outside my window.  I think they are building a nest over my windows.  Fine by me.  I can't think of a better bird song to wake up to on Seattle spring mornings.

You can barely see their nest above the diagonal beam

Unexpected Educators

Wikimedia Commons; Atomic Taco

"Do you go close to Olive Way?"  This, or a similar question, is a common beginning to my interaction with my bus driver, as after two years, I continue to live the lifelong learner philosophy when it comes to navigating Seattle.

Today another passenger on the 30, one of the few routes I actually know extremely well, had some difficulty figuring out where he was and where the bus was going.  As the bus driver started to paint a map of the U District, Ravenna, and Sand Point for him with her words, I thought about what amazing teachers bus drivers are.

I am one of many passengers who often asks our drivers for some help getting around the city.  As the drivers navigate turns and hills with gigantic vehicles, having to keep an eye out for the plethora of Seattle bikers, they never answer questions with a simple "yes" or "no."  They really describe where they go, how close to where you're headed, where you should walk to get to the bus you need, what route that bus will take to get you where you want to go.  One driver described to her passenger how to find the bus she needed, creatively telling her to follow the electric cables suspended over the road that run the electric buses, until she reached the stop just out of sight beyond the bridge.

This morning I rode the 31 with the driver who goes above and beyond his role as an educator.  "What does the German phrase Zebrasteifen, literally translated to 'zebra stripe', describe on the road?" he asked through his microphone.  Although this seemed like a relatively easy piece of trivia, I enjoyed even more what the driver said next, "The point is not to get the right answer, but to exercise our brains, to do a push-up with our minds, in search for the answer."  An educator attempting to make his students more self-aware of their own educations!  (The answer is a crosswalk.  He explained that in Germany, the stripes are diagonal, so that it looks like a giant white line on the road until you get close enough to see the zebra pattern.)

Once I got off of a bus, and before I could walk to the front, the driver let up on the brakes a bit.  "My bike!" I yelled.  He had already slammed on the brakes, the door was still open.  He nodded at me.  "Make sure to always tell the driver you need to get your bike."  It did feel condescending, but a lesson better learned in a patronizing way than from experience of losing my bike to the King County lost and found.

My observations about the surprising teaching qualities in Seattle bus drivers are making me curious about other unexpected educators people have noticed in the world.

A Companis Journey - Connections

My Companis journey began as a series of connections.  It started with Donna Beth Blythe, of all places.  The Sunday I became a member of Seattle First Baptist Church (which houses Companis), I read a piece I wrote about my grandmother from the pulpit.  Craig Darling, the Pastor for Call and Vocation and Executive Director of Companis, approached me after the service, and I learned that he had known my grandmother.  That spurred our conversation about Companis, and me becoming a Companis worker.

When I met with Craig and Gary, we talked about my goals as an educator.  How I had learned I needed to be somewhere where I would build long-term relationships with students, the environmental piece could be put on hold for now.  I wanted to work with older students, not elementary aged anymore.  I wanted to get back to the demographics of Fraser kids, at risk youth who need the extra level of support and guidance, because for many reasons related to systematic oppression, that support is lacking elsewhere in their lives.  I mentioned Seattle Education Access (SEA), because I had learned about it from Charlie (my friend from IW), but we weren't sure if it was the right fit yet.

When we looked into it and realized it was actually the perfect fit, Craig and Gary had me come in to SEA with them for a meeting with Anthon and Sarah.  Everyone was looking at my resume when Sarah's eye caught the educational experience section, and I learned that she was also an Earlham English major.

Family, IslandWood, Earlham; I felt there were pieces of my life nudging me along this path I was leaning into curiously.  I started to sink into that feeling of being exactly where I was supposed to be.

That was the beginning of my journey, noticing and receiving the connections.  Now I'm three months in my year of service with SEA.  In my opinion, SEA is a gracious space, a term we've been talking about from Bill Graves book, Sharing the Rock.

SEA logo www.seattleeducationaccess.org

To me, SEA is a gracious place, because it is a place where we practice saying yes.  At SEA, students hear, "Yes, you can go to school.  Here's how..."  SEA is a gracious space, because it is a place of genuine checks-in and debriefs.  I hear the honest truth about others' lives, and share how I am really feeling, through the positive, and the hardships.  SEA is a place where the powers that be spend more time figuring out how to support the people under them, than how to milk them for capital value.

SEA is a place where people see the value in things that can't be measured.  I've had conversations with my bosses and co-workers about how part of our job is to show up and be present.  This means sitting at a drop-in site for weeks before the students feel used to you and ask for help with homework, this means sitting patiently through the silence with students as they work through decisions.  These moments of building something is important work.

My time at SEA is going to be split 50/50 between admin work and tutoring.  The tutoring has been a scary and exciting experience. I've spent the last two years focusing on large group management.  The curriculum I've worked with has either been for 5th grade and younger, or has been after school workshops.  Sitting down with adult students to show them how to do algebra, geometry, calculus, or write a paper was a terrifying feeling at first.

Although I don't remember calculus yet, I really love tutoring at the middle, high school, and even college levels!  So far, my tutoring experience at SEA is helping me realize I do want to be a teacher someday, and I have what it takes to teach math, science, English, maybe even history at the adolescent age level.

Chickadees in the Trees

October 8, 2011 10:00a.m. Low 60s and partially cloudy

Last night, the cloud cover in Seattle finally parted enough that the moon shown through.  Then I woke up this morning to sunlight streaming into my room for the first time in weeks!

I made some tea, bundled up, and went outside.  The only patch of sunlight I could find was across the sidewalk, under the Cedar tree by the curb.  I heard the Black-capped Chickadees first, then saw one flitting around the front door, perhaps attracted to the bird feeder Emily Jane puts out in the tree by the porch.

Until now, I've only seen and heard the chickadees by the side of the house, further away from the road.  This was the first they've appeared during my morning front porch sit spot.  From what I could tell, there were two of them.  The first one was pretty bold.  It hung upside down on one of the lowest panels of the house.  Then it flew over to the cedar tree, and perched all over the trunk, upside down, right side up, and finally settled in a branch.  I "psh psh"ed at it and it moved a branch closer.  Its friend bounced around a little further back.  Whenever a car drove by, or someone walked by with their dog, they both flew high into the Cedar where I could barely see them.

I have noticed many naturalists and environmentalists in this area are deeply curious how people got started naturalizing and building a relationship with the environment.  Some naturalists' stories start with a place-based experience, growing up in a rural area, having woods nearby to play in as a child.  Many others stem from having mentors and teachers who were enthusiastic nature lovers.  I've been thinking about my journey as an environmentalist, and am grateful to my creepy memory for the clear moments I can hold onto from when I first naturalized.

I think the Blythe Spirit, our cabin in Colorado, had a lot to do with starting me on this path.  One of the first summers in La Veta I can remember was when I was about 7.  The family was hiking to the meadow, and one cousin wanted a break before we passed the stone wall that supports the hill next to the cabin.  I wanted to keep going, probably mostly to argue with 4-year-old Jack, so Uncle David walked with me.  We walked to the meadow without stopping once, except for a moment around the bend while Uncle David explained his different questions about how the creek had once formed the cliff we were standing on and the one across from it.  At the time I did not understand the concept of rock being shaped by water, and did not immediately absorb the idea he was presenting.

When we got to the meadow, we kept going a little way through the trees at the other end.  We looked back at one moment, and Uncle David asked if I saw a bit of color.  I got excited because I did see a bit of red, it was Aunt Gretchen's shirt and the rest of the family had made it to the meadow!  Before we started back to meet them, Uncle David pointed out the color he had been referred to, which was a butterfly he had seen instead of Aunt Gretchen.  I shrugged off that moment, because again I was eager to brag to Jack and Laura Beth about how fast I had walked.

Photo by Carol Blythe

What's interesting to me about those two moments, Uncle David pointing out the ravine and the butterfly, is that although at the time I am sure I acted disinterested, those tidbits have remained with me to this day.  I vividly held on to that hike, and my perception of natural areas has probably been formed by it.  My favorite thing to do in my free time is to sit quietly in the woods, looking for butterflies or other creatures.  When I am in the woods with other naturalists, I love to talk about how features of the land came to be the way they are.

Experiences like these give me hope as an educator.  I have probably gone for hikes with hundreds of kids, ages six to sixteen.  I have heard more than my fair share of whining, complaining, seen plenty of eye rolls, had kids anxiously ask for "lodge time," to go home, to get out of the woods, to not have to stand quietly for one minute, to not have to listen for the birds, to not have to stop hiking to learn about the plant or tree.  Maybe they will never look back on those hikes again.  But maybe they will hold the full meaning of my lessons somewhere deep inside that will guide them for years to come.  Either way, my journey as an environmentalist allows me to feel blessed to share the potential of this path with others.

Craving

Photo by Emily Jane Schankerman

Yearning.  Desire.  Want.  Thirst.  This summer, same as last summer, I have it.

I think the reason is I am so completely dissatisfied with how I've been spending my summers.

Summers shaped me, they were when I learned to fall in love with the world.  Summers were about sleeping under open sky, rushing for the moment, finding myself inside a safe space.  This is all a magical way to say summers were about camp.  Staying up past responsibility to find something big enough to hold us all (beauty art love nature).

Being done with school and trying to figure out the next steps in the five year plan has made me think back to those times when I had no cravings because I was doing exactly what I needed to be doing.

Each time I look at the dim night sky from within the city, each time I try to describe my feelings and end up discussing logistics, each time I'm riding my bike and wondering why I can't just go faster, when I'm at a restaurant and no food or drink is quite what I feel I want, I get the sense that it all leads to one big craving for something spectacular.

Photo by Sarah Eisenberg

I'm excited because I think I'm on the brink of satisfying this hunger.  When I look back to those times with no yearnings, I can pinpoint why I was so happy, and I'm beginning to find and create those conditions again.

Sitting

I've had a few Sit Spots in my life.  While studying abroad in New Zealand, I visited a sit spot twice at Quaker Acres.  As I settled down next to the Peace Pond for the first time, I woke up too late to the fact that I was sitting by stagnant water at dusk.  Despite being eaten alive by the mosquitoes, I liked that spot to sit, and its serene and calm beauty in an obvious way.

Last year at IslandWood we had to do sit spots as a year long project for our Natural History and Ecology class.  We were told to sit for at least half an hour, so that our presence would stop being a disturbance to the natural flow of the ecosystem.  We were also told to visit our spots at different times of day, to see different patterns.  Dawn and dusk were my richest experiences sitting on the decomposing log off the first turn from the Treehouse Loop by the bog.

I want to go out to my sit spot during the evenings more, because on the 20th at three points a large bird, possibly an owl, swooped from one of the trees close to my log down to a tree on the other side of the spine trail.  Unfortunately, these bird sightings happened right as dusk was approaching, probably the worst time to actually see the birds.  What amazed me was how quiet the birds were.  Each time one flew near me, I had no idea it was there until I saw it, its wings made no noise during take-off or landing, which gives me the idea that this bird was hunting. ~Natural History Journal, 9/20/2009

The majority of my IW classmates became slackers when it came to this project, and I was no exception.  In about February I became invested and did five sit spots every other day, connecting my spots to another assignment we had and writing poems about my sits.  Overall though, my sits were sparse and scattered.

To prepare for my IW sits, my summer homework was to find a sit spot and sit two or three times.  This idea seemed ludicrous while running Camp Fraser, but I managed to work in two sits and even found the inspiration for my poem "Words in the Woods."  That spot was the campfire by the Deer cabin; I had a sick camper resting in the cabin, so my main sits felt more on edge than I thought the assignment was asking for from me.

My favorite sit spot assignment was at Earlham College for my class "American Literature and Ecology," taught by Scott Hess.  Scott has worked on pieces of writing calling for a localized concept of nature and wildness, instead of traveling to the ends of the earth and spending resources to find a sublime picture of the wilderness.  Our class focused on dissecting the dichotomy between natural and cultural areas, so perhaps it was fitting that my sit spot was my favorite hill on campus, which was really a drainage ditch.

The prompts Scott gave us for our sit spots were unlike any other way I had been asked to sit in nature.  He asked us to write reflections each week on our spot, sometimes asking us to look for patterns, imagine our spot 100 years ago, bring someone to our spot and reflect on that experience, write in a character voice about our spot, make a piece of fiction set in our spot, interact with our spot in some way.  Through Scott's class, I felt moved to see myself as an active member of the habitat of my sit spot; as a part of that place.  Instead of sitting quietly for half an hour and observing everything I could, I would roll down the hill, climb the tree, walk around my spot, bring friends with me and chat with them through my sitting.  I might not have seen as many birds or mammals this way, but I noticed the blades of grass, the dragonflies, and most importantly I recognized how I felt being a part of that space.

I breathe in the night air and feel my own memories seep in through my mouth.  Memories I scatter each time I come here.  I shake off a few moments of my life, and leave them in the soil.  They nourish the grass as it grows and get eaten by the bugs and fly through the air back to me and remind me of themselves when I least expect it.

Rolling down the hill is hard tonight.  I always give myself up to the hill, let my vulnerabilities down and then the hill takes them as I roll away and I think to myself, "And what?" and listen and hear the hill is speechless so I keep rolling.  Tonight I'm holding back for no apparent reason, and when I don't let the vulnerabilities go they're still inside me as I roll and punch around me with each rotation down the hill.  

That hill remained an important spot for me at Earlham.  Almost all my friends could tell you a time when we went to roll down it together some night.  It was a rare sledding spot during the Indiana snowstorms.  Despite being nestled by two buildings and a parking lot, there were some great views of the stars from lying on one's back at the bottom of the hill after finishing a good roll.

Photo by Emily Schankerman

At my house in Seattle, I got the inspiration from my friend Lily recently to go outside first thing in the morning, instead of turning on my computer and looking at a screen immediately after waking up for the day.  I make a cup of tea, sit in the sunniest spot I can find, and spend fifteen to twenty minutes listening and observing.  I've heard a robin's song, gotten smiles from some passersby, complete avoidance of eye contact of others, said "morning" to the neighbor as she drives off to work, seen the gray squirrels that crawl all over the roof at night, and breathed fresh air.  It's not as isolated from society as my previous sit spots, but after Scott's class, I prefer it this way.  The photo is by my roommate, as an example of some of the wildness one can see from our front porch.

As a lifelong learner, I'm glad to experience the value of this activity with no grade or judgment lingering in the future.  It's my new morning ritual; a way to set the day out on my terms with the world.