I see sacrificial love in my Title I elementary school every day.
Our teachers, admin and staff pour out their hearts for our students.
We wake up in the middle of the night wondering how we can make the world a better place for them.
We wonder 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 7:30 AM to 2:15 PM learning how to do things like write small moments about their lives, how to solve a multiplication problem using the area model, and how to create an experiment to investigate the properties of light.
I’m so proud of them.
And our students pour out their hearts for each other.
Just today, one little student was crying in the lunch line and two of her classmates 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’m write about this sacrificial love, this pouring out of the heart.
I call it the way of the old ones 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 Chukchi Sea can change them into something new.
So Taki's mother and father knew from 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, he 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 it’s old, salty breath and breathe in the cold, clean air of the far north.
The balaena mysticetus, the bowhead whale, was sustenance for the Iñuit people.
It was a symbol, too.
Whenever the people 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 bottom of the icy water and tries to flee across the sea.
It hopes with all it's heart to live another day.
This whale, though, was not a normal whale.
As Taki’s father 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 heart of this whale?” he wondered.
“Is the way of the old ones 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.
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