Notes from public school - day 102

It snowed this morning!

Our whole school went outside and played in it.

No two snowflakes have ever been alike, are ever alike, or ever will be alike. 

The crystals that form and make the snowflake are so sensitive to the conditions around them that a breeze blowing over the ice, a cloud passing between the sun and the earth, or the vibrations from the heartbeat of a whale surfacing on the waters of the Arctic Ocean can change them into something new.

Wow.

I Be Here

I Be Here
by Trevor Scott Barton
Ordinary Time 2020

Scene 1

“Po lidda fella,” said the old, weathered woman with skin as dark and wrinkled as bark and arms as thin and knobby as the farthest reaches of the branches of the island’s ancient oak trees. She spoke with the flavor of her Gullah ancestors, who had created a new language in the lowcountry of South Carolina by mixing the west African words they happily learned while they sat on their mothers knees with the English words they were forced to learn when they were stolen away from their own people and lands and brought here to America.

She lived a holey floored, crack walled, Duck taped windowed shotgun style shack on John’s Island left over from the days of slavery and the Jim Crow laws. She fished along the inlet and the shoreline each morning trying to catch red fish, sea trout and flounder to go with the fruits and vegetables that grew out of her garden. She wove sweet grass into baskets from the late mornings to the early evenings.

“Jus sits dere,” she continued, “Eva monin’ as de sun rises ova de ocean an sits on de wada like a ripe tomata. Neva says one word. Jus sits dere a’watchin de wada and a’list’nin to de waves.”

One day she walked over to him and stood beside him. The sun cast her shadow over him as to protect him from the brightness of the new day.

“Wha’s yo name?” she asked kindly. “My name’s Mattie. Could you tell me yo name?”

He turned his earthy brown eyes to her. He didn’t say one thing. She figured he didn’t understand her. His Mami and Abuelo were migrant workers picking peaches and tomatoes in the lowcountry summer until they were ready to move down the coasts of Georgia and Florida with the fall and winter. She thought maybe he only spoke Spanish, since his family had made it to the United States from the farms and fields of El Salvador in Central America.

Suddenly, he whistled. It astonished her, and she almost fell over into the sand. The sound was unlike any whistle she had ever heard before. A usual whistle has two notes and a high pitch, but this was an unusual whistle. It’s sound had all kinds of notes in it, and the pitch went high and low, low and high and all kinds of places in between. It was as if the great composers had written his whistle at the height of their compositional powers.

“Ya know, it was like he was a’tryin to say somepin to me in a be-yoo-tee-ful way,” she explained, “But I din’ hab no idée whad id was.”

He looked back over the water and at the sky again, and was very still and quiet. She felt a wide compassion for him in the deepest part of her heart.

Scene 2

“Poor baby,” said the labor and delivery nurse as she held the new baby in her soft, supple hands at Mercy Hospital in Miami, Florida.

“Born at a time like this. And his family has no papers. Who’ll take care of him and his family? Who’ll work to heal their wounds?”

His name was Hilcias. His Mami and Abuelo had just crossed over into the United States. They had ridden a train ominously named The Beast all the way from the scorched earth of El Salvador to the border of Mexico and what the weary, broken migrants called the promised land.

His Mami was pregnant with him and the time had come for her to deliver him. A car had stopped in front of St. Mary’s Church in the middle of Miami. The silent driver made the sign of the cross over her and his Abuelo and put them out on the street with nothing but the tattered clothes on their backs. The old man shoes were as battered and wrinkled as his skin. Her sandals had fallen apart many miles ago so she had no shoes at all.

His Abuelo lifted the iron knocker on the stained oak church door and let it fall back onto it’s tarnished iron plate. He did this again and again until a nun cracked open the door to the night.

The nun had worked in the inner city for many years and had seen many things. But never had she seen the suffering and beauty she saw in the faces of Maria and Josef at the church door that night.

Their eyes were alight with beauty – the beauty of being in a new land without war, without violence – the beauty of bringing a new life into the world.

Their bodies were heavy with suffering. They were covered with the dirt and sweat and blood of thousands of miles of migration along the migratory road.

Their shoulders sagged under the weight of months of homelessness. The only homes they had found during the journey were the small spaces of simple kindness that people had shown them along the way.

They were very still and very quiet.

They didn’t make a sound.

The old nun wrapped her arms around Maria and Josef.

“I’m here,” she whispered.

“I’m here.”

Scene 3

The old Gullah woman wrapped her arm around Hilcias as the tide rolled in and out in the dawn. She placed her warm, calloused hand on his cheek.

“I be here,” she whispered.

“I be here.”

Notes from public school - day 101

Notes from public school - day 101


Every day I wear an Embracelet to school.

It was made by refugees living in Minnesota, USA.

It was made out of recycled life vests that were worn by refugees during their dangerous journey across the Mediterranean Sea from North Africa to Greece.

50% of the profit from my purchase provides of it provides job opportunities for refugees who are living in the United States.

“Building Humanity” is engraved on the inside.

As I open my eyes to each new day, I think about the person who was wearing the life vest from which my Embracelet was made.

Was it a father trying to find a better life for his family?

Was it a mother holding her baby in her arms?

Was it a child like the children I teach at my elementary school?

I don’t know.

I do know this, though.

My students are interested in the things I do. (Probably more so than the things I say.)

“Why’re you wearing that bracelet, Mr. B?”

I tell them the story, because I’m a storytelling teacher at heart.

“Wow,” they say, “I wonder what it’s like...?”

And that’s exactly what I want them to do.

I want them to wonder what it’s like to be in someone else’s shoes.

Or life vests.

Some of my students don’t have to wonder, for they made their own dangerous journeys with their families across the US border from Mexico, Central America and South America.

Some of my students know what it’s like to be a refugee, trying to live each day in the middle of  adverse experiences.

I want them to know I care about them.

I want them to know I care about the world.

I want them to know I care.

That’s why I wear my Embracelet to school.

Here is a Fibonacci poem I wrote titled ‘Immigrant Hearts.’

My
Heart
Loves home
Winter snow
Spring mountain flowers
Summer salt in the deep, wide sea
Fall leaves on the colorful trees are art for my heart

With tears in eyes, my heart pulls on its brown tattered coat, black holey shoes and red wool scarf

My heart is so tired, poor, huddled, wretched, homeless and tempest-tost. It loves its memories, family, home but it is time for it to go

Too many cold, deserted eyes at checkpoints in lonely streets pointed guns at my heart; too many clouds in rainy seasons empty of rain brought pain to my heart; too many coughs from my children's chests late into night broke my heart

My heart picks up its battered suitcase, with tape all around its ends, lest it break open and spill out my father's favorite shirt, a love letter, a picture of my beautiful children, all I have in the world, onto the ground

Deep in the hull of a ship tossing on stormy seas; high on the roof of a train winding down a long, steep hill; barefoot on a dusty road

Silent, back to back, knee to knee, with poor women and little children…immigrant hearts

With each step along the way our hearts whisper, "Thank you"
With each mile we long for, "I care"
We hope for kindness
Immigrants
Moving
Our
Hearts

Notes from public school - day 100

Today is the 100th day of school!

Here are some interesting facts about the number 100:

In the year 100, the wheelbarrow made it’s first appearance in the world in China 

100 is the sum of the first ten odd numbers

100 is the minimum number of yards for a Par 3 hole in golf

The number 1 followed by 100 zeros is a “Googol”

The very first #1 song on the Billboard Hot 100 was “Poor Little Fool” by Ricky Nelson on August 4, 1958

75% of Canadians live within 100 miles of the US border

100 years ago (in 1920) women received the right to vote with the ratification of the 19th amendment; Robert and Mary were the most popular names; Band-Aids were invented; and a stamp cost 2 cents

I have had 100 mornings of pulling on my shoes, pouring my coffee, and puttering down Pete Hollis Boulevard toward the life of my school and the lives of my students.

I have given 2000 hugs, handshakes, high-fives and fist bumps at my classroom door at 7:45 a.m.

I have smiled 100 smiles at the genius in the simple, beauty in the plain and wonder in the ordinary that I see every day.

I have cried 100 tears because of the ‘heart’ work that teaching asks of us.

I have written 100 “Notes from public school.”

There are 80 more school days til summer, y’all!

Hilcias and the Sea

"I am life which wills to live, and I exist in the midst of life which wills to live." - Albert Schweitzer 

Hilcias loved whales. 

He would walk beside his abuelo down rows of tomato plants and peach trees, shielded from the sun by his trusty cap with a whale on the front of it, and think, "A blue whales heart is the size of a Volkswagen Beetle. A beluga whale is called the canary of the sea because it sings so much. A fin whale can make a sound on our side of the Atlantic Ocean and another fin whale on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean can hear it."

As he sat beside the ocean in the early morning light, a tooth washed up on the shore. He knew immediately it was a sperm whale's tooth. Of all the kinds of whales in the world, the sperm whale was his favorite. The first picture he had ever drawn of a whale, before he had visited the public library and checked out every book he could find about whales, before he had memorized the field guide to whales, he had drawn a picture of how he thought a whale should look, and this picture was a picture of a sperm whale.

He picked up the gigantic tooth. It was a foot long, shaped like a cone, and made of ivory. "This came from the lower jaw of a sperm whale," he thought, "Because they don't have any teeth in their upper jaws." He knew that if he could slice the tooth in half, it would show the age of the whale like the rings of a trunk shows the age of a tree. 

He couldn't believe his eyes or his luck.

He gently laid the whale tooth beside him in the sand.

He picked up the conch shell with both of his hands. "What a wonderful shell," he thought. He was amazed by the shape and color of the remarkable looking shell.

It’s shape, he knew, was a common shape in nature. It was formed by graphing the numbers 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13..., the Fibonacci numbers, a shape that appears many times in geometry, art and architecture. 

By nature it was a mysterious, wonderful shell.

It's color, he knew, was a common color in nature, too. It was three shades of yellow. It's spine was the bright yellow of the sun that very morning. It's siphonal canal was the quiet yellow of the corn he and his abuelo shucked in August. It's aperture was the deep yellow of sunflowers in a field.

He raised the shell to his tiny, listening ear. 

Someone told him once that if you hold a conch shell to your ear then you can hear the ocean. 

"I wonder if it's true," he thought. "I can take it home to our bus and listen tonight and see if I can bring the ocean with me wherever I go. If I can, then, in a small way, I can bring whales with me, too."

Notes from public school - day 99

Notes from public school - day 99


There is a wonderful scene in Harper Lee's novel To Kill A Mockingbird (which, by the way, is in Trevor’s top 10 favorite books of all time list) where the all-white jury has returned an unjust verdict against Tom Robinson. Atticus begins to wearily walk out of the courthouse. Jem and Scout are in the balcony with the black folks of the county. They all rise as Atticus walks out—except the children—so the Rev. Sykes says to Scout, “Miss Jean Louise, stand up. Your father’s passin’.”

Maria sat down and looked across at me with earthy brown eyes. She is one of the many English Speakers of Other Languages at my school. Her parents speak only Spanish in the home. Carola and Marcelo Suarez-Orozco have written brilliantly and eloquently about children like her in their book Learning A New Land: Immigrant Students in American Society. They remind us how valuable and vulnerable our immigrant students are in the first years they are in America.

Maria is learning a new land.

"Maria, do you speak Spanish at home? Do your mamí and papí speak Spanish at home?” I asked.

"Yes,” she answered.

"And you speak English at school."

"Yes, I'm bilingual!"

"You are bilingual. You have to be so smart to be able to speak two languages and to help your mamí and papí understand your teachers. You’re my hero.”

You do have to be so smart to live in one language and learn another.

After Maria finished her benchmark test, after she translated my English into Spanish and her Spanish back into English for me, she stood up and walked with me down the hall.

I felt like saying, "Teachers and administrators, stand up. Maria’s passin'."

Ways

The teacher looked into the eyes of the little girl. 

They were brown, the color of the soil of the countryside around the city, the color of the weathered bark of the guava trees in the courtyards around the capital building. 

"Ah, these eyes could grow the humble, helpful beans that fill plates and bodies and help us live," she thought to herself. 

"These eyes could produce the beautiful, bountiful guavas that hang from the trees like tiny gifts from the servants who planted them." 

Yet she saw in those eyes a hurt and hopelessness that came from the underside of the great city, the place where the owner of a sugar plantation drove around the streets in a sparkling, new Chevrolet from el Norte and a worker on that plantation walked around on those same streets in broken sandals made from used tires from a broken down, old Chevrolet...at the same time, together...but as far apart as one world from another.

She listened to the stomach of the little girl. 

It was empty, the emptiness of the poverty of a family with seven children and low wages, the emptiness of one meal a day for days, weeks, months, years, a lifetime. 

"Ah, this grumbling stomach could be filled with beans and guava," she thought again to herself. 

"It could be filled with food and hope if only she had a chance to become a person instead of a thing, to become the owner of a small piece of land instead of the servant of a large landowner, to become all that she could become instead of all that could be used for by another...to become, to become."

She welcomed the child, kissed her softly and tenderly on one cheek and then another, and sent her into the classroom with 50 other children with the same eyes and the same stomachs.

She became a friend of the revolution on that day she looked into the eyes and listened to the stomachs of her students. 

She closed the door to her classroom in the late afternoon and walked the miles to her own apartment and her own family. 

Her children, eight-year-old Luis and four-year-old Ashley grabbed her legs and pressed their kisses into the flowers on her dress. 

Her Mother and Abuela greeted her from the kitchen, where they were cooking the beans and rice that would be their evening meal.

"Hola, mi corazons," she said. "How were your days?"

"Bueno, mamí! Bueno!" they answered.

"I made this picture at school," said Luis. 

He held up a picture of a lopsided cello with seven strings, drawn with a pencil and colored with bark from a tree outside of his classroom. Underneath the picture were the words - "I want to make an instrument. I need wood and wire to make an instrument like a cello. It might be small and broken looking but it would make beautiful music. I would play it for my friends. I would play it for my mamí."

She kissed Luis on top of the head.

"It is so beautiful, my hijo. The picture and the words are so beautiful. One day, I hope to buy a cello for you so you can play music as beautiful as your picture and your words."

"Look mamí! I made a picture, too!"

Ashley held up her picture. 

There was a trace of her little hand in the middle of the page. It was painted in blues and greens like the land and oceans on a map. Her name was written in large, leaning letters beneath her hand.

"Oh, mi Amor, it is marvelous...as marvelous as you. Perhaps one day you can take me by my hand and show me the wonderful world.”

She dragged her children into the kitchen, each wrapped around a leg and standing on a foot.

"Hola," said her mother and her abuela in harmony. 

"How was school today?"

"Honestly," answered Maria, "It was a sad day for me."

She told them about the eyes and the stomach of the little girl and they lamented that there was so little for so many yet so much for so few.

"Here," spoke the abuela. "Let me tell you a story."

When I was a little girl, a flower grew in the countryside. We called it the flor hermosa y humilde,  the beautiful, humble flower. It was beautiful in it's brilliance and smallness,

and humble in the way it appeared in one place for a while and then another place for a while,

almost dancing around to share it's beauty with many people in many places

instead of with a few people in one place.

Now, it grows no more. It's beauty and humility is gone from the earth, for it grew only in here. "Why is such a flower gone from the earth?" you might ask.

Seeds came down from el Norte. These seeds grew a flower we named flor destructiva y arrogante, the destructive, arrogant flower. It was destructive in it's opaqueness and bigness,

and arrogant in the way it appeared in all places at all times, almost marching around to take the nutrients of the land from the beautiful, humble flower and the beauty of the land from the people.

"Yes," said Maria. "What can we do for the beautiful, humble flower?"

"There are two minds," answered the abuela. "Some of the people are of the mind to use fire, to burn the destructive, arrogant flowers into ash and use the ash to fertilize the land for the beautiful, humble flower again. Some of the people saved the seeds from the beautiful, humble flower, you know. And some of the people are of the mind to use hoes, to dig up the destructive, arrogant flowers and let them decompose until there is room to replant the seeds of the beautiful, humble flowers."

"Can there be three minds?" wondered Maria. "Is there another way?"

She looked down at the newspaper on the table that the older women had retrieved from a trash pile as they were meandering around the market bartering for the beans and rice they were cooking for the evening meal. 

There, on an open page of the newspaper, was an advertisement by Simmons International Ltd., the sellers from el Norte of the Beautyrest mattress. The advertisement displayed a large drawing of José Martí, the great writer and icon of Cuban freedom. He was in a serious pose with a quill behind him and a book in front. Below the picture was the quote - "What is important is not that our cause should triumph, but rather that our motherland should be happy."

She sat in silence.

Happiness was an expensive mattress? An expensive mattress was the purpose of life, when her own family slept on corn stalk mats on the floor and her students ate one meal a day?

Later that night, as she woke and thought about the question she asked to her abuela, she remembered her husband Josef.

He was a person who could see clearly and feel deeply. That clear sight and deep feeling led him to join the Revolution, to leave his work as a teacher, to leave the city...to make his way to the mountains to join the peoples army and become a part of the vanguard that would give the land back to the people again.

Gone five months, she had not heard from him. This was the time she missed him most, the times she woke in the middle of the night with a question or a feeling to work out in her mind and heart.

She closed her eyes and remembered the night before he left for the mountains. She laid naked on her back and he laid between her knees. He kissed her softly on her thighs, his lips and breath brushing against her skin. With the kisses he recited a poem from Pablo Neruda. 

Amo el trozo de tierra que tú eres,

porque de las praderas planetarias

otro estrella no tengo tú repites

la multíplicación del universo.

I love the handful of the earth you are.

Because of it's meadows, vast as a planet,

I have no other star. You are my replica

of the multiplying universe.

She opened her eyes again and stared into the darkness and felt the emptiness around her. 

"Can there be three minds...is there another way?"

Notes from public school - day 98

The Rodriguez family walks down the hall and turns the corner to my classroom.

"Buenos Dias, Mrs. Rodriguez. Buenos Dias, niños! ¿Como esta ustedes? Welcome to my classroom," I greet them.

We sit down in a circle of chairs and smile at each other.

The Parent Involvement Coordinator sits with us to be our translator.

I’m learning Spanish and Mrs. Rodriguez is learning English but we need help expressing the deeper parts of each language, especially when we’re talking about education and life.

In the beginning, I do most of the talking. 

I describe her child's progress in math and ask, "Do you have any questions or comments?" She looks at me with a silent, shy smile. 

I move on to reading and writing, asking again for questions and receiving the same smile.

At the end, she does most of the talking. 

"Our life is hard. My husband works out of town, wherever he can find work,” she said. “I clean houses. I work many hours. Our house is small and we are many. I want my children to learn so they can have a better life. Please tell me how to help my children learn."

We sit down with each other. 

We talk with each other.

We listen to each other.

The sitting, talking and listening are the sunlight, water and soil that help our hearts grow.

Thelonius the Monk

Thelonius was an improvisation. 

On the night of his tenth birthday, he dreamed a dream. In that dream he was laying on a woven mat made of millet stalks. He was looking up into a moonless, starlit night. He was listening to the sounds of other children playing in the fields around him.

Suddenly, clouds began to gather and swirl. They swirled until one cloud came to earth and touched the ground beside him. He lay there without moving, without making a sound. He watched the cloud and wondered, “Why has it come? What will it do?”

The children ran to the cloud. “Don’t touch it!” they yelled. “Aagh! It’s going to land on Thelonius!”

Land on Thelonius it did. It touched him on top of his head. It brushed against his forehead. He felt as if his grandma were kissing him with a light, sweet kiss. He was terrified and comforted at the same time.

He saw up into the swirling cloud and looked at an old wooden loft that was there. The loft was glowing with soft yellow light and reminded him of the light in the first moments of sunrise and the last moments of sunset. That soft yellow light was coming from stacks and stacks of freshly picked corn, stacks wrapped in summer green husks pulled halfway down the ears revealing whole, full kernels of corn.

A ladder was unfolding with a clickity, clackity, clunk to the foot of his mat. He wanted to climb the ladder, but he didn’t want to climb the ladder. All he could do was look through the swirling cloud up the ladder into the loft at the corn and feel a feeling that was a mixture of genius, beauty, wonder and joy.

An old black woman with hair as white as the inside of a baobab fruit and eyes as brown as the skin of a peanut descended the ladder and sat down at Thelonius’ left side. She leaned over him and placed her hand on his head, a hand that looked as worn and broken as a sandal that had walked over ragged rocky roads. She whispered in his ear with a voice that was quiet and kind.

“Thelonius, I’m giving you a gift. Contemplate the gift. Use the gift. Be the gift.”

She turned to climb the ladder.

“Who are you?” he asked. “Where are you going? Where did you come from? What gift did you give me? Why did you give it to me?”

She ascended the ladder and disappeared into the stalks of corn. 

The ladder folded with a clickity, clackity, clunk to the top of the loft. A strong wind blew against Thelonius’ face, blew so hard he closed his eyes tightly to keep the dust from blinding him. 

When he opened his eyes he saw his own room in his own hut in his own village. The cloud, the loft, the corn, the ladder and the woman were gone. The mysterious gift and unanswered questions remained. 

A kernel of corn and part of a husk lay on the wooden floor beside him.

the humble shell

I love seashells, looking for them along the edge of the ocean and the sand, watching the tide bring them in and take them out again, finding the one with beautiful color or unique shape. Sometimes, as I am drifting off to sleep, I close my eyes and picture myself as a little boy at Ocean Isle Beach in North Carolina, searching for seashells as the sun rises up onto the horizon, feeling the ocean breeze across my body, smiling a happy smile. 

Life is beautiful.

If you look closely at the shell on the left, it is spiraled in a shape that is common in nature and architecture. This shape is made by graphing the Fibonacci numbers - 1,1,2,3,5,8,13,22...(can you see the pattern?) Some say it is the structure Thelonius Monk and Claude Debussy used to write their music and that Vincent Van Gogh used to create his art, and I like to think that is true. Some say it is the structure God used to build things, and I like to think that way. I try to use it to write poetry, and have had three poems published on the Fib Review, a journal for Fibonacci poems. It is a beautiful, wonderful, ingenious way to create and build.

Look at the smallest shell. Have you seen such a beautiful color? I have - in the sky sometimes at dawn and dusk. I always marvel at that color. Only God can make it, I think. And God used it in this smallest of my shells.

God seems to be like that.

Look at the shell on the right. Even though it is beautifully colored and wonderfully made, I almost didn’t pick it up and bring it back to my room because it is chipped.

As I looked at it, though, I thought I heard the voice of God say, “It’s chip makes it beautiful.”

This is true. Brokenness reminds us that we are all made of dust, but that we are made. It reminds us that God created and built us. It reminds us to be humble. It reminds us to care...for each other and for the world.

I love the humble shell.

Thelonius the Monk

Thelonius the monk lived in the hollow of an old, giant baobab tree. He tended bees, ate baobab leaves, prayed the canonical hours, and healed people.

He dressed in his only frock, a yellow one, because yellow was his favorite color, the color of the early morning sun, and wore his only pair of sandals, simple rubber ones made of recycled tires, to keep his feet from being scorched and broken on the scalding, rocky ground.

He wrote at night by the fire beside his tree. It was a good time and place to write. It helped him  remember that writing can be a light against the darkness, a way to help people listen and understand.

He was alone but he wasn’t lonely. The loneliness birds had yet to come and lay their stone eggs in his heart. He was friends with the trees, friends with the bees, friends with the people, friends with himself, and friends with God. 

When he was looking for a tree in which to make his home, he saw some beautiful trees. They seemed as if they had been tended in a garden. But he chose a very ugly tree, an old, misshapen, broken one that was dying away. He hollowed out the trunk of that tree and made his home in the heart of it. 

A miracle happened there. In his first year of living in the tree, it sprouted more leaves than any other tree in the land, so many leaves that it looked as if it were a brush stroke of the greenest of greens on an artist’s palate. It produced an unending source of baobab fruit for everyone near and far.

He tended the bees that lived in his tree, and the bees tended him, too. The bees made honey in the branches of the tree. Another miracle happened. He would climb the tree and take the honey out of the holes with his bare hands and never receive a single sting. It was as if the bees were making the honey just for him. He could stand in front of his tree and raise his left hand and the bees would come down from their work, light on his face and frock, and buzz a hymn to God.

He ate the leaves and fruit from his baobab tree and this, along with the honey, was the whole of his diet. Each morning he scraped the fuzz off the shell of the fruit, cracked the shell with a stone, pulled out the white, sweet and sour fruit, placed it in his iron pot of water over the fire, boiled it until the fruit separated from it’s marble sized seeds, removed the seeds with a small cotton net, and dipped out the drink with a clay mug. Each afternoon, just before prayers, he crushed leaves from the branches of the tree in his mortar with his pestle and after his prayers he would eat the baobab salad until he was full. Each evening he added a cup of honey as a dressing to the salad and ended the day with a sweet taste on his tongue. Because of the vitamin A in the young baobab leaves, he could see amazingly well.

He prayed for people. This was his vocation, he thought, the why of why he was there. For him, prayer was holding people in his heart, much like the tree held him in it’s heart. He brought the people into himself and let them stay there for awhile, offering them a place to be heard. Together they would find God in the stillness of the tree and the silence of the heart. He prayed this way for each of the seven canonical hours of the day, for people who would come to the tree, and even for people who would never come to the tree.

He healed people. 

His heart went out to them. 

One morning, he heard a meek voice at the door of his tree.

- Please, help me.

He sat on the boulders in the courtyard around his tree and listened as she told him of her painful journey over rocky roads and high hills. He understood her when he saw her grotesquely shaped left foot, large and layered, like the foot of a full grown elephant. He watched a tear roll off her cheek and splash onto her elephant’s foot, baptizing it in sadness. He took some of the baobab fruit, crushed it in his mortar, splashed three drops of water on it, and anointed her foot in faith, hope and love. He wept. As she lumbered away, she knew she had been healed even though he elephantine foot remained the same.

He only had one frock and one pair of sandals because he learned from the one who had no place to lay his head. The less he had, the less he needed. He washed his clothes before he laid down to sleep and donned them when he rose to begin his new day. During tierce, the 3 a.m. prayers, he wore nothing at all. He sat in nakedness and remembered that God always saw him just as he was.

He writes by a fire beside his tree tonight. 

As the smoke rises up and loses itself in the blackness and brilliance of the starry night, he hopes his words settle down on the whiteness and emptiness of the page and lose themselves in stories for others.

Notes from public school - day 97

I am humbled and honored to be a teacher.

Here are three simple, complex haiku poems I wrote about being a teacher and about teaching.

In many ways, I am the little bonsai tree in haiku #3.

haiku #1

immigrant children

walk into the classroom and

sit down quietly

haiku #2

at the school window,

a child stands alone outside

under a shade tree

haiku #3

little bonsai tree,

growing slowly, unnoticed

in the morning sun

Notes from public school - day 96

I got a new t-shirt.

It says ‘be kind’ on the front of it.

That’s one of the themes every year in my teaching at school.

It’s one of the themes in my writing, too.

What does it mean to be kind?

What is kindness?

I saw it this morning in my classroom.

One of my students trudged into the room with the hood of his hoodie covering his head. There were tear stains on his cheeks.

Usually, he greets me at the door with a fist bump, a hug, a smile and a, “What’s up Mr. B.”

Today, not so much.

“Are you okay?” I asked. “Do you need to talk? Is there anything I can do to help you?”

He shook his head and sat down to his morning work in quiet solitude and sad silence.

Many things can lay heavy on the heart of a child. (I would learn later ithat he broke his glasses before school.)

One of my favorite novels is The Power of One by a South African writer named Bryce Courtenay.

(The movie based on the book is good, too. Morgan Freeman stars in it. Robin and I saw it on our first movie date. It helped us learn that both of us wanted to live in Africa.)

The main character is P.K. and the story follows his life as a person who believes in racial equality in Apartheid era South Africa.

Because of this belief, there are many tough times for P.K.

The metaphor he uses for those tough times is a loneliness bird and giant stone eggs.

“The loneliness birds came and laid giant stone eggs in my heart,” he’ll say, and readers can feel them as if they’re their own.

My student had those giant stone eggs from the loneliness birds in his heart.

As I pondered these things, I noticed that students were walking over to the table of their friend and patting him on the shoulder and wrapping him in hugs.

“What’s the matter?” they asked over and over again.

What they were saying was, “I’m here for you.”

They were being kind.

They were living kindness.

That kind of kindness is gentle enough to wipe away the tears of the heart and strong enough to move the giant stone eggs of the loneliness birds.

All in a day in public school.