from the encyclopedia of things lost and found

 Taki was beautiful.

She was beautiful on the outside, with black hair, brown eyes, and dark skin against the white snow.

She was beautiful on the inside, with a warm heart beating against the Arctic cold.

She was kindly beautiful, beautifully kind.

When she was born, her aaka swaddled her in a blanket her aakaaluk sewed for her.

The blanket was red, the color of the sky over Point Hope at dusk, just before the night sky blanketed the people in frozen darkness.

Across the blanket, stitched with bright yellow thread, were the three Arctic whales - the beluga, the narwhal and the bowhead.

“With the beluga whale, I hope curiosity and music into the life of the baby,” she whispered, “For the beluga look quizzically at you and sing songs that cause us to call them the canaries of the sea.

With the narwhal whale, I hope compassion and empathy into the life of the baby, for the narwhal will place the tip of it’s own hornlike tooth into the broken tooth of another narwhal to ease it’s suffering and pain.”

And with the bowhead whale, I hope mystery and endurance into the life of the baby, for the bowhead’s scientific name is Balaena mysticetus and that best describes it’s wonderful, mysterious ways. It lives longer than any creature on Earth, for it’s heart beats slow and strong in the cold, cold waters.

Taki's aakaaluk was an artist with needle and thread.

There were two narwhal whales.

The long tooth of one of the narwhal's, the one that extended out from it’s upper lip, the one that makes all narwhals look like unicorns of the sea, was broken.

She sewed the hurt and despair of the wounded whale into it's face so you could feel it's pain just by looking at it.

In the face of the other whale she sewed compassion and hope that you could also feel as it placed it's own tooth into the hole of the broken tooth to assuage the pain of her friend.

Taki’s aaka and aapa planned to name her after her aakaaluk, whose name was Asiavik.

Asiavik is the Iñupiat word for the Alpine blueberry.

It’s a berry that grows over the Arctic tundra.

It provides food for the smallest mouse to the largest person in the time of it’s harvest til the deep winter.

It can be frozen and preserved for good use.

Asiavik was beautiful, helpful and always there when you needed her, like the berry for which she was named.

The week before Taki was born, Asiavik died.

A strong, healthy heart has two billion heartbeats to give to the world.

Asiavik’s heartbeats made the world a more beautiful, ingenious, wonderful, courageous place.

In the Iñupiat way, when people die, their names are given to the next babies born into their families.

In this way, the loved ones can live again among the people.

Their beauty, ingenuity, wonder and courage can grow in the new person.

Yes, Taki was to be named Asiavik.

Her parents changed their minds, however, when she whistled the song of the bowhead whale from her aapa's memory.

“Her name is Taklaingiq,” they announced as they introduced her to Point Hope.

“What!?” asked the people as they whispered among themselves.

“How could they not name her after her aakaaluk?

Why would they not welcome Asiavik back among the people?”

No one asked these questions out loud, though.

The Iñupiat people are polite and thoughtful and do not question the motives of others.

They wondered silently.

What might become of the baby?

Would she be broken because her parents broke the old ways of the Iñupiat?

Her parents never answered the unspoken questions or addressed the concerns of the people.

They simply let her name stand as it was.

Taklaingiq.

In the ancient, sacred language of the Iñupiat people, it meant “one who must not be mentioned.”

In the ancient, sacred language, it was the word for the bowhead whale.

That is what she would become.

Like the bowhead whale.

Life for the people.

Life for the world.

They would call her Taklaingiq.

Taklaingiq the courageous.

Taklaingiq the wonderful.

Taklaingiq the genius.

Taklaingiq the beautiful.

Taki.

from the encyclopedia of things lost and found

My name is Brendan.

 

Some call me Saint Brendan.

 

Saint, not because I'm perfect.

No.

I most certainly am not perfect.

 

Saint maybe because I'm imperfect.

“To thy own self be true,” wrote the poet.

Nosce te ipsum.

Know thyself.

I am.

I do.

I’m Kind of an anti-saint, really, who, like an anti-hero, am not what people expect.

A saint who is perfectly imperfect.

 

The patron saint of imperfection.

 

I'm named after Brendan the Navigator.

 

In the sixth century, he set sail in a small boat from his home in Ireland.

He made it all the way to the New World and discovered it wasn’t so new.

There were already people there, beautiful in their humanness, human in their beauty.

I travel over the waters, too.

 

I don't sail, though.

 

I swim.

 

I'm a blue whale.

 

Do you know very much about blue whales?

 

We have ears the size of a pencil point.

 

But we can hear over thousands of miles.

 

And we have the biggest hearts to have ever beaten on Earth.

We listen carefully.

 

With the ears of our hearts.

 

We're migrants, too.

 

We swim 4,000 miles a year.

 

We start in the icy waters of the Arctic Ocean, move to warmer waters in the southern Pacific Ocean around the equator, and back to the Arctic Ocean again.

And, can you believe it?

We sing.

 

We sing while we're swimming.

 

We sing while we're resting.

 

We sing wandering, wondering songs.

 

But here's the thing

 

I sing at a decibel no other blue whale can hear.

 

I can hear their songs.

 

But they can't hear mine.

 

Marine biologists named me 52 blue, because I sing at 52 MHz, a different frequency than other blue whales can hear.

 

Ah, the patron saint of silence.

 

The patron saint of songs of the heart.

 

I sing a story in my song.

 

It's a story about a ten-year-old Iñuit girl in Point Hope Alaska and a ten-year old migrant boy from El Salvador.

 

Northern Ocean.

 

Southern Ocean.

 

Longing to hear.

 

Longing to be heard.

Journeying.

Migrating.

 

Can you hear my story?

 

They did.

 

And it was a beautiful, ingenious, wonderful, courageous thing indeed.

from the encyclopedia of things lost and found

"Po lidda fella," said the old, weathered woman with skin as dark and wrinkled as the bark and arms as thin and knobby as the branches on the farthest reaches of the ancient Angel Oak on Johns Island.

She lived in a holey floored, crack walled, Duck taped shotgun shack left over from the days of slavery and Jim Crow.

She fished the inlet and the shoreline each morning, trying to catch red fish, sea trout and flounder to go with the fruits and vegetables from her garden.

She wove sweet grass into baskets from late morning to late afternoon.

"Jus sits dere," she continued, "Eva monin' as de sun rises ova de ocean and sits on de horizon like a ripe tomata.

Neva says a word. Jus' sits dere a'watchin de wata and a'list'nin to de waves."

One day she walked over and stood beside him.

Her shadow shaded him from the bright sunlight.

"Wha's yo name?" she asked kindly.

"My name's Mattie. Would you tell me yo name?"

He turned his earthy brown eyes to her.

He didn't say a thing.

She figured he didn't understand her.

His mamí and abuelo were migrant workers, picking peaches and tomatoes in the lowcountry summers until moving down the coasts of Georgia and Florida with the Southern winter winds.

"Ma'be he only speaks Spanish," she thought, for his family had come to the United States from the farms and fields of El Salvador.

Suddenly, he whistled.

She was astonished.

She almost fell over into the sand.

The sound was unlike any whistle she'd ever heard in her life.

A usual whistle has two notes and a high pitch.

This whistle, however, was an unusual one.

It had all kinds of notes in it.

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," she explained, "It was like he was a'tryin to say somepin to me in a be-yoo-tee-ful way, but I din' hab no ideé what it was."

He looked back over the water and at the sky again.

He was very still and very quiet.

She felt a deep compassion for him in her heart.

She put her hand on his shoulder as the tide rolled in and out.

"I be here," she whispered.

"I be here."

from the encyclopedia of things lost and found

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.

The crystals that come together to 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 off the coast of Point Hope can change them into something new.

So Taki's aaka and aapa knew from the beginning that she was unique, that when she was born into the world something new was happening.

This is how they knew.

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

She whistled the most beautiful notes they had ever heard in their life together.

They reminded them of the hope they felt as children standing in the snow with their families in their village on the coast of the Chukchi Sea.

At the same time, they reminded them of the suffering they felt trying to make a life in the land in the Arctic Circle.

The music brought a stillness and a quietness to the room.

When he was a boy, her aapa roamed 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 the surface to breathe out it's old, salty breath and breathe in the cold, crisp air of the far north.

The agviq, the bowhead whale, was life for the Iñuit people.

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 aanaluk.

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 aapa stood at the edge of the ice and looked into the eyes of the bowhead whale, the whale willingly gave up it's life for him and for his village.

"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 at work in the world again?"

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

small, quiet things

from Trevor’s Encyclopedia of lost and found things

There were deep wrinkles in the corners of her eyes and across her forehead. 

They didn't seem to be wrinkles of worry that he'd seen form on his mamí’s and papí’s faces as they worked the fields and lived among strangers in small Southern towns. 

No, they seemed to be wrinkles of kindness that might have come from years and years of loving and hoping, 

the kind of wrinkles you get when you cradle a baby in your arms and rock it deep into the night, 

the kind that come when you study the small, quiet things in the world 

and wonder why so few people 

see or hear their beauty.

from trevor’s encyclopedia of lost and found things

When he was two, his mamí talked with him in the language of poetry as she walked him tied to her back down the long rows of peach trees in the South Carolina sun. 

She reached up into a tree, took a peach in her calloused hand, and rubbed it’s fuzzy skin against his soft cheek. 

She whispered,

Amo el trozo de tierra que tú eres

porque de las praderas planetarias

otra estrella no tengo. Tú repites

la multiplicación del universo.

I love the handful of 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 did.

She waited for him to talk back to her with toddling talk, to say to her with wondering words “mamí”and “amo” and “tú,” but he didn't say a thing. 

He only looked at her with wide, unblinking, brown eyes, the color of the deep parts of the earth, and jutted out his little, bottom lip as if to say, "There’s much I could say, but I can't.”

Now, people ask him, "What's your name?" or "How old are you?" or "How are you?" and he answers them with whistles instead of with words. 

They ask his abuelo, "What's wrong with him?" and the old man simply sighs the sigh of one who carries heavy loads on his back and in his heart.

“Dios sabe,” he answers. “God knows." 

words to art

from trevor’s encyclopedia of lost and found things

The world was his palette, words his colors, and a pen his brush.

He painted human faces.

“See with the eyes of your heart, hear with the ears of your heart, understand with the heart of your heart,” an old priest had told him once.

He painted Gabby.

Her brown eyes brimmed with kindness.

Her dark hair around her shoulders.

Her hands and feet cracked and calloused.

Her sonrisa a light for the world.

Her nakedness imperfectly perfect, perfectly imperfect, beautiful like the good earth.

He painted the old priest.

His clothes tattered and torn from much giving.

His cross tarnished, the first gift given to him at his ordination and a reminder that God is in each and every person each and every day.

His shoulders hunched from much praying.

His face full of love.

He painted the kind doctor. 

Her dark eyes sparkling like the night sky.

Her forehead wrinkled with deep concentration.

Her healing hands.

He turned to Gabby in the early morning light.

He held her close and felt her heartbeat.

He knew beauty.

He knew love.

Christmas Day 2021

Christmas Day 2021

Merry Christmas!

Thank you for walking along with me through this Advent season.

¡Amistad!

Friendship!

T

It was early morning. 

The African sun had yet to rise above the mountains, and the sky was the soft yellow of newly shucked corn.

“Beep, beep,” sounded the horn from the old truck as it rumbled to a stop in front of my house. 

My best friends – Momadu, Madu, and Balamusa – greeted me with smiles, waves, and morning blessings.

We were on our way from Kenieba, a small town in western Mali, to Sitaxoto, a large village about two hours away over a broken dirt road.

A church was there, a little group of people who met each week outside under a big baobab tree to pray, share stories and ask, “How do we follow Jesus together?”

On that day, we were going to share communion with that church.

Before we left town, we stopped at the home of a baker with a stone oven to buy the bread that would become a symbol of Jesus’ body.

We bought dried leaves to make the red tea that would become a symbol of Jesus’ blood.

“Beep, beep!” 

With waves and departing blessings, we were off.

We arrived at Sitaxoto and found people sitting in a circle in the shade of the great tree. 

We spoke to each other and blessed each other in the humanizing way of the Malinke people.

“How are you ... How is your family ... How are your children ... May God send rain to your field ... May God give you enough food to eat ... May God give you healthy children.”

Their arms hugged me and their words did, too.

As we began the communion liturgy, Momadu whispered to me, “Will you say the words? It would mean a lot to our friends.”

“Yes,” I answered in my elementary Malinke. “That would mean a lot to me.”

I held the bread tenderly in my hands, gave thanks, broke it apart and gave it away saying: “This is Jesus’ body, which is given for you. Take it and eat it in remembrance of Jesus.”

Everyone ate the bread except one woman across from me in our circle.

“Why didn’t she eat the bread?” I whispered to Momadu.  “Do you think she understood my Malinke?”

“It’s OK,” he answered. “I’ll tell you later.”

After the sacrament, Momadu placed his arm around my shoulder. 

“Look closely,” he said, “At our friend.”

I looked at her.

And I saw what I had not seen before.

There was a child in her lap laying against her body.

A child as thin and frail as one of the furthest reaches of the baobab tree.

“Her daughter has been sick for some time,” said Momadu. “Bread is expensive for her to buy. She was saving the bread for her daughter.”

I was speechless. 

Here, I had come to bring God to my African friends. 

Instead, God came to me in this African woman and her child.

And that, I believe, is Christmas.

God comes to us in ‘upside down’ ways.

Or, as one of my heroes and role models, Albert Schweitzer, wrote -

Jesus comes to us as One unknown, without a name, as of old, by the lakeside, He came to those who knew Him not. He speaks to us the same words: "Follow thou me!" and sets us to the tasks which He has to fulfill for our time. He commands. And to those who obey Him, whether they be wise or simple, He will reveal himself in the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings which they shall pass through in His fellowship, and, as an ineffable mystery, they shall learn in their own experience Who He is.

God comes to us.

- Trevor Scott Barton, Advent Notebook, 2021

Advent 2021 Day 26

“Listening is an act of love.”

So says Dave Isay, the founder of StoryCorps.

StoryCorps is a project that provides space for people to listen to each other.

The project travels around the country in an Airstream with recording equipment so people can sit face to face (ear to ear, really) and ask each other questions and listen to each other’s  stories.

The recordings are moving, sometimes so much so that I have to pull my car over to the side of the road to cry the deep, deep tears of the heart.

I think about Isay’s precept every day at school.

How can I be a good listener to my students?

It’s tough, sometimes.

I have a student who barely talks at all.

She never raises her hand during classroom discussions.

She never speaks unless spoken to (and doesn’t speak more than a sentence or above a whisper, even then).

She always finds her way to the end of our line, whether we’re going to related arts, lunch, recess, or the bus.

She is a quiet kid.

Since I haven’t been able to listen much to her yet (I believe my Trevor magic will get through to her by Christmas ), I listened to her last year’s teacher to learn a little bit more about her.

“I did a project where I asked my students, ‘If you had a million dollars, what would you do with it?’ She wrote, ‘I would help my dad come to me from Mexico.’”

There it is.

Now I know why she is a person of long and deep silences.

She loves someone and there is a wall, figuratively and perhaps soon literally, between them.

Though she is the quiet kid, and though she is carrying this heavy load in her heart, I wish you could spend the day with her as a teacher as I do.

Her deep brown eyes are full of curiosity, the kind of thinking that pushes and pulls the world forward and makes it a better place for everyone.

Everyone.

She works so hard to be the best person she can be and do the best work she can do.

Her words are few, but she has listening ears and a listening heart.

I hope we do, too.

- trevor scott barton, Advent Notebook, 2021

einstein’s compass

trembling with excitement,

   sparking genius,

creating a universe of thought,

   a compass and

a small book of Euclidian Geometry

   led to seeking the miraculous 

outside the clarity and certainty

   of Newton’s gravitational pull

ρ(v, T) = 8πhv³/c³ 1/exp(hv/kT) – 1

E = hv – P

Cv = 3R ( hv ) ²/kT exp (hv/kT)/[exp (hv/kT) – 1]²

Rydberg's Constant = 2π²e⁴m/h³c

you landed in the uncertainty of chaos,

   wandering and wondering 

in the quantum universe

   hearing symphonies on strings

- trevor scott barton, what goes down probably went up, 2021

Advent 2021 Day 25

from Trevor’s encyclopedia of lost things

For around 40 minutes each day, we have a writer’s workshop in my classroom.

If you know me well, you know this is my favorite time of the school day.

One of the main reasons I love to write is because writing helps me understand the world around me.

And one of the main reasons I love to teach my students to write is because their writing helps me understand them.

We are working on “small moments,” writing as clearly and detailed as we can about something that happened in our lives that we will never forget.

We will move on from the small moment to longer narrative pieces about our lives in the coming weeks.

Twelve of the twenty students in my home room are from Mexico, Central America and South America.

Though they are nine and ten year olds, they are aware (painfully so, I might add) of the anti-immigrant rhetoric and action in the United States over the past years.

They look to me as their teacher for comfort, courage and creativity to help them live life in Greenville, South Carolina, the South, the U.S., and the world in these times.

I am here for them.

“Some of you were born and lived in other countries before you came to the United States.

Some of you were born in the United States, but your parents immigrated to the United States and talk with you about the country from which they came,” I began the writing workshop today. “I would love for you to write about what you remember or your parents remember about your home country. I want to hear those stories. I want to read those stories.”

“Immigrants have done so much to help make America a great country,” I exclaimed.

Then I wrote an opening paragraph about my own experience as an immigrant to Mali in west Africa and what it was like to move back to the United States after living there for 3 years.

“Can you believe,” I asked, “That when I lived in Mali there was only one brand of soap I could buy in the market near my village? I loved it! It was so, so difficult to come back to the United States, go to a grocery store, walk down an aisle, and see that there were 10 or 20 different brands of soap. How was I supposed to know which one to buy?!”

They laughed at my dilemma.

Then they began to write.

One of my students is from Peru.

He has been in the United Stated for a little over a year.

How can I describe him?

He has a bowl haircut, and his bangs zig zag across his forehead in an endearing kind of way.

His eyes are the brown of the dirt paths that led up the mountain to his highland village home. They are deep and kind.

His smile is like the sunshine and his laugh is like a cool, refreshing breeze.

I just chose him as a Terrific Kid from my classroom, an award that I’m sure will bring out that smile and laughter for an entire day.

Everyone who meets him knows he is a special kid, one of those people who are born into the world to make it a better place.

I asked him to tell me his story so I could help him write it down.

“When I lived in Peru, I lived in a mountain village,” he said. “The ground was very rocky. We were all very poor.”

“It is good for us to live in America, because my papí and mamí can make a little money,” he continued.

“One time, my mamí went for a job and someone said, ‘No, we don’t want you here,’ and she came home and cried.”

“But I’m glad you want me here, Mr. Barton.”

My heart soared into the sky like a kite and sank off the ground like a lead balloon at the same time.

Has that ever happened to you?

It happens to me often as I read the lives of the students I teach and travel the road of life with them.

- Trevor Scott Barton, Advent Notebook, 2021