Notes from public school - day 50

I see sacrificial love in my Title I elementary school every day.

Our teachers, admin and staff pour out their hearts for our students every day.

We wake up in the middle of the night wondering how we can make the world a better place for them, wondering how we can help them make the world a better place for all of us.

Our students pour out their hearts for us, too.

They work hard from 7:45 AM to 2:30 PM learning how to do things like write small moments about their lived, how to solve a multiplication problem using the area model, and how to create an experiment to investigate the properties of sound.

I’m so proud of them.

And our students pour out their hearts for each other.

Just today, one of my little students was crying in the lunch line and two of her friends had their arms around her, catching her tears on their shoulders, holding her hurt in their hearts.

Ah, empathy.

In a novel I’m working on, I write about this sacrificial love, this pouring out of the heart.

I call it ancient wisdom at work in the world.

It gives me hope.

Here is a part of that story I’m writing - 

In a place that hadn't been seen by many people, she hadn't been seen by many people, either. 

The Iñuit people know that every snowflake that falls from the sky is different from all the other snowflakes that fall from the sky. No two snowflakes are alike. No two snowflakes have ever been alike. No two snowflakes will ever be alike.

I’m dropping some Iñuit wisdom for you.

The crystals that come together and build the beautiful snowflake are so sensitive to the conditions around them, a wind blowing across the ice or a cloud moving between the sun and the earth or the heartbeat of a whale surfacing in the waters of the Arctic Ocean can change them into something new. 

So Taki's mother and father knew in the beginning that she was unique, that when she was born something new was happening in the world.

This is how they knew.

On the first day of her life, as her mother bundled her in warm blankets in her arms, she made a sound her father had heard only once in his life. 

When he was a boy, her father was roaming across the ice near the edge of the sea, hunting whales with the elders of his village. There, silently by the sea, a bowhead whale rose to breathe out his old, salty breath and breathe in the cold, crisp, clean air of the far north. 

The balaena mysticetus, the bowhead whale, was the subsistence and a symbol for the Iñuit people. Whenever they say it’s name, they whisper it with reverence and awe.

He raised the harpoon to strike the whale, and prayed an ancient prayer taught to him by an old woman...

I think over again my small 

adventures

My fears, those small ones 

that seemed so big

For all the vital things I had 

to get and reach

And yet there is only one great 

thing, the only thing 

To live to see the great day 

that dawns

And the light that fills the 

world

Then he plunged the harpoon into the whale.

Normally, when a bowhead whale is struck by a harpoon, it dives to the depths of the icy water and tries to flea across the sea. It hopes with all it's life to live. 

This whale, though, was not a normal whale. 

As he stood at the edge of the ice and looked into the eyes of the bowhead whale, the whale willingly gave up it's life.

“Did my prayer reach the small, powerful ears of the giant, kind whale?” he wondered. “Is ancient wisdom working in the world again?”

The sound that Taki made on that first day of her life was the same sound the bowhead whale had made as her father looked into it's eyes.