I am impatient.

[aibidil]

Being Taken for Granite

I’m reading Ursula Le Guin and everything I read of hers is just so good I want to share every sentence, every page, with the world. Check out this little essay. I’ve read it three times in the past twelve hours and I think I’ll read it another ten.

“Sometimes I am taken for granite. Everybody is taken for granite sometimes but I am not in a mood for being fair to everybody. I am in a mood for being fair to me. I am taken for granite quite often, and this troubles and distresses me, because I am not granite. I am not sure what I am but I know it isn’t granite. I have known some granite types, we all do: characters of stone, upright, immovable, unchangeable, opinions the general size shape and pliability of the Rocky Mountains, you have to quarry five years to chip out one little stony smile. That’s fine, that’s admirable, but it has nothing to do with me. Upright is fine, but downright is where I am, or downwrong.

“I am not granite and should not be taken for it. I am not flint or diamond or any of that great hard stuff. If I am stone, I am some kind of shoddy crumbly stuff like sandstone or serpentine, or maybe schist. Or not even stone but clay, or not even clay but mud. And I wish that those who take me for granite would once in awhile treat me like mud.

“Being mud is really different from being granite and should be treated differently. Mud lies around being wet and heavy and oozy and generative. Mud is underfoot. People make footprints in mud. As mud I accept feet. I accept weight. I try to be supportive, I like to be obliging. Those who take me for granite say this is not so but they haven’t been looking where they put their feet. That’s why the house is all dirty and tracked up. 

“Granite does not accept footprints. It refuses them. Granite makes pinnacles, and then people rope themselves together and put pins on their shoes and climb the pinnacles at great trouble, expense, and risk, and maybe they experience a great thrill, but the granite does not. Nothing whatever results and nothing whatever is changed.

“Huge heavy things come and stand on granite and the granite just stays there and doesn’t react and doesn’t give way and doesn’t adapt and doesn’t oblige and when the huge heavy things walk away the granite is there just the same as it was before, just exactly the same, admirably. To change granite you have to blow it up.

“But when people walk on me you can see exactly where they put their feet, and when huge heavy things come and stand on me I yield and react and respond and give way and adapt and accept. No explosives are called for. No admiration is called for. I have my own nature and am true to it just as much as granite or even diamond is, but it is not a hard nature, or upstanding, or gemlike. You can’t chip it. It’s deeply impressionable. It’s squashy.

“Maybe the people who rope themselves together and the huge heavy things resent such adaptable and uncertain footing because it makes them feel insecure. Maybe they fear they might be sucked in and swallowed. But I am not interested in sucking and am not hungry. I am just mud. I yield. I do try to oblige. And so when the people and the huge heavy things walk away they are not changed, except their feet are muddy, but I am changed. I am still here and still mud, but all full of footprints and deep, deep holes and tracks and traces and changes. I have been changed. You change me. Do not take me for granite.”

[iamhungryallthetime]

I am impatient. turned 12 today!

[altstudio]

[scab2]

[nubbsgalore]

photos by gerry ellis from the david sheldrick wildlife trust, a nursery and orphanage for elephants in kenya’s tsavo east national park. here, fifty five keepers are charged with being around the clock parents to an elephant. the elephants, however, are the ones who chose their caretakers; it is the keepers who must ingratiate themselves to the elephants and earn their trust.

when elephants first arrive at the orphanage they are often traumatized from having witnessed the slaughter of their mothers and family by poachers. grieving can last several months, and they often lose the will to live. but as dame daphne sheldrick, founder of the orphanage, explains, a caretaker is charged with “persuading an elephant to live when it wants to die.”

approximately 35,000 elephants are killed by humans every year. with an estimated 350,000 elephants left in the whole continent of africa, they will be gone in the wild within ten years.

cbc’s the nature of things did a program on the elephants and their caretakers. you can foster an elephant with the david sheldrick wildlife trust online here. for more on the emotional lives of elephants, as well as the david sheldrick wildlife trust and other human efforts to save the animals, check out these posts

[canyoudigit69]

[whentherewerebicycles]

some true (?) things about mentoring:

positive reinforcement always, but not just generic praise: you have to be super specific about naming the things they are doing well and pointing to the places where you see real growth. positive reinforcement isn’t about basking in the feel-good glow of giving or receiving praise but about helping people identify the strengths they can build on or the small positive steps they’re taking that can lead them in the right direction.

but also for the love of god don’t be stingy with words of affirmation or with demonstrating warm & unwavering confidence in people. remember that affirmation doesn’t always have to be “you did a great job achieving XYZ this week”—it can also be affirming that someone is having a rough week or facing some big setbacks or grappling with some complicated challenges, and that the emotions & anxieties they’re feeling around those things are real. in fact I think that is very important too: consistently showing students that you won’t shame them or be disappointed in them when they fail or struggle—instead you will work with them to get a better sense of what’s going on and to figure out what needs to be adjusted (or just when someone needs to rest!).

part of your job is to hold the long-range picture in mind—not just helping people move towards longer term goals but also helping them synthesize big and small experiences, challenges, and victories so that together you can construct a narrative about growth & learning over time. I guess another way to put this is not always looking ahead to the next thing but helping people take stock of how far they’ve come, how much they’ve learned, and how much more confident they’ve become over a period of weeks, months, and years.

honor the choices people make about their own goals/priorities & accept that their goals might not be the ones you would choose for yourself or for them. but also: be attuned to the fact that sometimes abandoning a goal or a project is because people are uncertain about how to get from here to there, or because they feel doubt about their own ability to do something that is just beyond what they know how to do. I think I am getting better this year at helping people first map out different possible plans and talk through their long-term priorities before making decisions about changing course or abandoning a project.

all the praise and affirmation and warm support in the world gets people nowhere if you are not also helping them develop well-organized and realistic plans for achieving their goals—plus institutional know-how, time management strategies, practical study/research skills, etc. make a plan!! make a plan and work closely & diligently with people over time to assess progress and adjust the plan as their circumstances inevitably change.

[blackbirdcall7]

[whentherewerebicycles]

“Educators need to know what happens in the world of the children with whom they work. They need to know the universe of their dreams, the language with which they skillfully defend themselves from the aggressiveness of their world, what they know independently of the school, and how they know it.”

– Paulo Freire, Teachers as Cultural Workers

[allofthemwitches-deactivated202]

wow I love

[whentherewerebicycles]

“Yes, citizenship – above all in a society like ours, of such authoritarian and racially, sexually, and class-based discriminatory traditions – is really an invention, a political production. In this sense, one who suffers any of the discriminations, or all of them at once, does not enjoy the full exercise of citizenship as a peaceful and recognized right. On the contrary, it is a right to be reached and whose conquest makes democracy grow substantively. Citizenship implies freedom: to work, to eat, to dress, to wear shoes, to sleep in a house, to support oneself and one’s family, to love, to be angry, to protest, to support, to move, to participate in this or that religion, this or that party, to educate oneself and one’s family, to swim regardless in what ocean of one’s country.

Citizenship is not obtained by chance: It is a construction that, never finished, demands we fight for it. It demands commitment, political clarity, coherence, decision. For this reason a democratic education cannot be realized apart from an education of and for citizenship.”

– Paulo Freire, Teachers as Cultural Workers

[grandrieux]

Le Bonheur, Agnès Varda, 1965

[the-spaztic-fantastic]

This legitimately needs to be in future literature textbooks to capture the Covid-19 Pandemic.

[boykeats]

what is poetry?

you know how, when you’re a young kid, your parents take you to visit a lake, and you’re doing all that fun young kid stuff like cannonballs off the dock, digging your toes into the mud, pretending to be a mermaid or a manatee or submarine captain? when suddenly the clouds that had covered the sun move aside, and the surface of the lake is touched everywhere with bright gold flecks of light, and you stop what you’re doing to stare in awe at something you’d never realized before was so heart-wrenchingly beautiful? and the moment is gone as quick as it came, you’re right back to splashing water at one of your siblings, but that night, after showers and dinner and climbing into bed, just before you fall asleep, the image of the sun-kissed lake returns to you, hazy with your almost-dreaming but still so warm and striking? poetry is the written act of recognizing the way the light touches the water and the way that you looking at this changes you

[mr-entj]

A student once asked anthropologist Margaret Mead, “What is the earliest sign of civilization?” The student expected her to say a clay pot, a grinding stone, or maybe a weapon. Margaret Mead thought for a moment, then she said, “A healed femur.” A femur is the longest bone in the body, linking hip to knee. In societies without the benefits of modern medicine, it takes about six weeks of rest for a fractured femur to heal. A healed femur shows that someone cared for the injured person, did their hunting and gathering, stayed with them, and offered physical protection and human companionship until the injury could mend. Mead explained that where the law of the jungle—the survival of the fittest—rules, no healed femurs are found. The first sign of civilization is compassion, seen in a healed femur.

— Ira Byock, The Best Care Possible: A Physician’s Quest to Transform Care Through the End of Life (x)

[unkindness313]

Dylan Moran on days.

[biorante]

daigoro vs. goliath (1971)