Hello darkness, my old friend
I’ve come to talk with you again
Because a vision softly creeping
Left its seeds while I was sleeping
And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains
Within the sound of silence                                                                                                     Paul Simon, The Sounds of Silence (1964)

Since adolescence, I have been a fan of Simon and Garfunkel. Sitting in my basement, the family record player my only companion, I sang with teenage gusto, belting out Cecilia, I am a Rock, Scarborough Fair, Bridge Over Troubled Water, and–of course–The Sound of Silence.

At 13, what did I know about darkness or the sound of silence? Nada. My life was filled with the near constant chatter of other teenage girls–and occasionally, blessedly, teenage boys–the family dinner table talk, the top 40 from the local radio station, and tunes from the few albums my sisters and I bought with our collective allowances. I knew nothing of the darkness of silence in Paul Simon’s lyrics; yet as I sang, his words committed to memory, I came to believe that I did.

At 61, I can honestly say that I can sing Simon’s words with more genuine understanding. Like most, I can say hello darkness, my old friend and mean it. Like most, I can speak personally of the moments, the days, the months that I have lived within and through the sound of silence. 

About a quarter mile down the old highway this morning, I realized that the summer songs of the cardinals, the buntings, the finches and orioles were missing. In their place, crickets–and a far-off raw cry from a crow. Against this background of white noise, I found myself turning inward when–in weeks past–I looked outward and upward, searching the ditches, the cottonwoods, and the sky for songbirds. With no flashes of color or sweet melodies to pull me outward, I turned in. Soon, I realized that I had walked a mile, lost in thought and crickets, and had not seen a thing.

In the sanctuary of silence, there is often that inward pull, that dive into the subterranean nether world of self. Robert Frost writes of this in his poem, “Desert Places”:

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars – on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.  

The first real time that I experienced my own desert places was during the summer of my freshman year of college when I was cleaning motel rooms for summer employment. At first, I reveled in the silence of my days. (Remember, this was before walkmans, iPods, smart phones–before Pandora, for heaven’s sake!) Armed with Lime Away and Comet, I scrubbed showers and sinks, losing myself in visions of future love and life. With each new room, I rewound the vision and began again, with new and better love and life. Who pays people for reveries like this? I marveled.

Until the day I stooped to pick up a mound of damp towels and was surprised by silence. Momentarily dizzy and disoriented, I felt myself slipping into a kind of cognitive quicksand that engulfed me, stretching endlessly into shadow. As I threw back the shower curtain to clean, I shook my head, hoping that this simple physical act would return me to solid ground.

And then I understood: for weeks I had been cocooned in daydreams, each more sparkling than the last, each packed with brilliant possibilities, but no longer. That day, I entered my own desert places. The daydreams gone, day-terrors rushed in. Armed with guilt and worry, I began to scour the dark corners of my soul.  I could not stop thinking, worrying, sinking.   Hello darkness, my old friend. 

Years later when I had accepted a new college teaching position, I moved during the summer, believing that I would be able to organize my new office and make some faculty connections before the fall semester. I quickly realized, however, that this was not going to happen until much later in the summer. So, I was stuck in my apartment, in a new town, with literally no one I knew except for those who had interviewed me. For three weeks, I did not speak to a soul face-to-face. Given my limited budget (and before cell phones), I made one phone call a week to my parents, and then I lived in silence.

Until the day when, girded with resolve and sickened by my own thoughts, I set out on a walk, determined to speak with someone, anyone who appeared at least half-way approachable. In these days, this was completely out of character for me and took me far beyond the boundaries of my comfort zone. Still, I found a college student walking along the same path and spoke to him. Three weeks of silence ended with that simple hello. We walked and talked, ultimately becoming friends.

In my youth, I was naive to think that silence would always present pleasant places for visions and revisions. It was inevitable that, one day, I would find my own desert places in silence. Through age and maturity, I have come to regard silence as much more of a sanctuary than a desert place. With soulful conditioning, I have trained myself to steer clear of the quicksands of all-consuming guilt and worry. Most days, that is. I would be lying if I claimed total absolution from darkness.

Still, as I walked this morning, I found words flooding the void that songbirds had recently filled. I wrote as I walked, I shaped–and reshaped–new ideas. I recalled the words my granddaughter had spoken to me last night. I mentally sang the lyrics of a new song I have come to love. Hello silence, my new friend. 

It goes without saying that the sanctuary of silence takes conditioning. You have to build up to it, giving yourself permission to retreat to the safety of sound when you find yourself without a lifeline. There are no purple hearts in the sanctuary of silence, but I think there should be.

When I see someone sitting in a waiting room or airport terminal sans ear buds or smart phone, someone just sitting and looking on at the life around them, I want to approach them with a medal of commendation and welcome them, brothers and sisters alike, into the sanctuary of silence.

Girl in Bambur

Even at 10 years of age,                                                                                                           she wears her perseverance                                                                                                   like a woman:                                                                                                                           jaw set,                                                                                                                                           bare-shouldered,                                                                                                                       arms akimbo.    

If she were older,                                                                                                                         an ebony man–                                                                                                                   caught in the fine fire of her eyes–                                                                                         might love her.    

But she would neither see nor hear him.                                                                         Fixed in the foothills of Bambur,                                                                                                 her heart has already moved beyond                                                                                  the Benue River to cities                                                                                                   below.       

There, young women with smooth hands                                                                   carry books and ride on the backs of motorbikes.   

There, streets fill with roasting chickens                                                                                 and conversation.              

 And there, sheathed in that                                                                                                 rare purple cloth of opportunity,                                                                                           she might begin again,                                                                                                         wearing her perseverance                                                                                                           into new life.

Shannon Vesely

In the sanctuary of perseverance, card-carrying members begin again. And again and again. They prefer the word grit. Sharper and more guttural, it packs a true punch to the gut. Determination, in contrast, often rolls too easily off the tongue, dissolving into the air of good intention.

Since the beginning of time, people have persevered, buckling on the breastplate of grit and taking on the world, one act, one choice at a time. History is peopled with perseverants of all sizes, shapes, nationalities, and faiths. More recently, however, psychologist Angela Duckworth has made grit the centerpiece of her research and subsequent books. In profiling her work, New York Times contributing opinion writer Judith Shulevith writes:

Grit. The word has mouth feel. It sounds like something John Wayne would chaw on. Who wouldn’t want grit? Wusses. Forget ’em.

Who wouldn’t want grit? Only the wusses and the too-delicate among us? Perhaps. From her research, Duckworth argues that grit more reliably predicts success than either talent or I.Q. and that any individual–regardless of his or her current perseverance quotient–can learn to live and act with grit. Duckworth’s claims fly in the face of other prevailing arguments like you are either born with talent or you are not and success is largely a matter of luck. 

I recall an anecdote from one of Duckworth’s books I read a few years ago in which she described how high school seniors identified as at-risk were taught practical ways to be gritty as they began their college careers. Their high school teachers counseled them to sit in the front row on the first day–and every day–of class, to introduce themselves to the professor before they left the first day, to actively take notes, and to ask one relevant question, daily, throughout the remainder of the semester. Duckworth writes that, as she and her research assistants tracked these students, they discovered that they had been overwhelmingly successful: in course completion, in passing grades (and in many cases, better-than-passing grades), and in overall collegiate success.

Having read much of Duckworth’s research, I found it to be compelling enough to bring to my high school staff through professional development. As you can imagine, when I presented her research in front of a group of 90 teachers, it was much like preaching to the choir. In genuine John Wayne fashion, teachers insisted that students today are soft; they just don’t have any grit and our students don’t look at failure as an opportunity to improve but rather an easy excuse to quit. Truthfully, from my vantage point as a 40 year educator, I could only nod knowingly. It was far too easy for me to lapse into sentimentality, ruing the loss of grittier times and students.

In his 2008 book Outliers, author Malcolm Gladwell describes what he has termed the 10,000- Hours Rule:

The 10,000-Hours Rule says that if you look at any kind of cognitively complex field, from playing chess to being a neurosurgeon, we see this incredibly consistent pattern that you cannot be good at that unless you practice for 10,000 hours, which is roughly ten years, if you think about four hours a day. 

In the sanctuary of perseverance, the hardy wholeheartedly embrace the 10,000-Hours Rule. You stick to it, you buckle down, you fail and then you learn from your failures. Arms akimbo, you square your shoulders to the world and growl: Bring it on. Make my day. 

And all this conjures up images of tough guys and gals, hardier and grittier than us common folk who, on even our best days, find it truly tough to persevere in the face of disappointment, obstacles, and outright failure. Our spirits may be willing, but, too often, our flesh is weak. We retreat to less challenging realms.

Still, I think it all too stereotypic to hold fast to such images of gritty machismo. Consider Mother Teresa, the Saint of the Gutters, frail and aging, persisting in the slums of Calcutta. And if this is not enough, consider the painful reality that her secret letters have revealed: she spent almost fifty years without sensing the presence of God in her life. Fifty years of persisting, of living as though she would, someday, sense God’s presence. Fifty years of serving the world as God’s hands, feet, and heart. Now that’s grit of a spiritual magnitude that I cannot begin to comprehend.

In a letter to the Rev. Michael Van Der Peet, September, 1979, Mother Teresa wrote:

Jesus has a very special love for you. [But] as for me–The silence and the emptiness is so great–that I look and do not see,–Listen and do not hear.

Decades–not days–of silence and great emptiness. The persistent urge to listen in hopes of hearing. Mother Teresa could teach Angela Duckworth a thing or two about grit.

Today, perseverance seems to be an intellectual, emotional, and spiritual habit to which the world pays loads of lip-service, but to which it frequently falls tragically short. I’ve taken Duckworth’s grit survey, which gives you a type of personal grit quotient based on your responses. Like most, I am painfully aware of my own grittiness–and lack thereof.

But there is good news: in the sanctuary of perseverance, there are always do-overs if you can muster the grit to begin again. Throughout my life, I have witnessed the power of perseverance in the most likely and unlikely places, through the most likely and unlikely people. These people and places have inspired me to imagine myself as a Dust Bowl mother, cloaking my children in love to keep out the dirt and want; as a young Jewish woman in Auschwitz, sleeping on a hard wooden bunk with five others, pulling myself into and out of dreams of one-day love and life in the Polish countryside beside my husband, my soul-mate; as a young Civil Rights’ activist in Natchez, Mississippi, pushing the cause forward by day, hiding in seclusion at night, and holding fast to the belief of a new day and age; as Nigerian girl living her days with her baby brother tied to her back, envying other girls who spend their days with books and prospects of life beyond the village; and as a young writer, holed up in a forgotten corner of a college library, struggling to eke out those words that might take her to places she had never imagined.

In Daniel James Browns’ best-selling book, The Boys in the Boat, he chronicles nine American rowers’ quest for Olympic gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Writing largely through the perspective of one rower, Joe Rantz, Brown helps us understand his lowly beginnings. Having lost his mother to throat cancer in 1918 and his father to grief and to the wilds of Canada, Joe, age 5, was sent from Washington to Pennsylvania to live with a relative, and then retrieved when his father returned home and remarried. Although for a time, Joe’s life with his new mother and father was pleasant enough for a child who had suffered such trauma, it did not remain so for long. His stepmother could not bear Joe, and with her husband’s consent, banished him.

At age ten, Joe was left to fend for himself, to live in the schoolhouse, to work at the mining camp for food, to persist with any and everything that would sustain his life. Brown writes that Joe’s  world had grown dark, narrow, and lonely. When his teacher taught a science lesson in which she revealed that the cauliflower mushroom, Sparassis radicata, was not only edible, but delicious when stewed slowly, Joe realized that if you simply kept your eyes open, it seemed, you just might find something valuable in the most unlikely of places The trick was to recognize a good thing when you saw it no matter how odd or worthless it might at first appear, no matter who else might just walk away and leave it behind. 

As I read The Boys in the Boat, I could not help but marvel at Joe Rantz’s persistence in the face of Depression-era poverty, loneliness, and abandonment. How could one so young and so alone take up the mantle of such grit? And yet, he did. Determined to live another day, he scavenged for food, for work, and for self-worth. When, years later, he took up collegiate rowing, this same grit ultimately shaped him into a world class athlete and a genuinely fine human being. Brown’s passages which describe the rowing practices through wind and sleet on Washington lakes are, undeniably, some of the most beautiful and painful prose passages I have ever read.

I suppose in the politically correct world of safe spaces and protections of all sorts, promoting the sanctuary of perseverance is dicey. Someone might be offended by the mere claim that one could improve his or her lot through hours of practice, prayer, and effort. Hours, you say, during which there is no one to applaud you, to comfort you, to sustain you? Hours, you say, during which there are no trophies or awards given to those who participate? Hours, you say, during which there may be blood, sweat, and–gasp–tears? 

No, I’m guessing the PC world will pass on perseverance. But, in the spirit of Joe Rantz, Mother Teresa, and countless other gritty individuals, I am going to press on in the hopes that I will significantly raise my grit quotient and face my world, arms akimbo.

for Quinn

There is something in us that both fears and laments change. We prefer familiar flannel, pulling worn bedclothes snuggly around us and settling into broken-inness. The familiar beckons us with come in, stay for awhile. But such comfort may also become a siren’s song, drawing us into stay forever.

C. S. Lewis writes:

It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad. 

We must be hatched or go bad. These words ring particularly true for me these days. I am watching my son hatch, for he has refused to go bad. Quinn inherited genes from his birth parents that have blessed him with incredible athleticism. Although most football parents live in constant fear of the next hit, they also live for those glorious moments of the blitz gone well, the perfect block, and the break-away run. Quinn has given us many of those moments in the past ten years.

Quite simply, Quinn was meant to be a football player. Every fiber in his being yearns for the gridiron. When he was recruited to play Division II football, he was eager for the opportunity to better himself on the college stage. Only that opportunity never materialized, for coaches in three different college programs refused to see him. You cannot prove yourself if you will not be seen.

In each program, Quinn was told that he was an incredible athlete, a hard worker, a coachable player, and a responsible student athlete. We had agonizing conversations during which Quinn would say, I don’t know what else to do or to try, and I would bite my tongue to keep the platitudes I’d used before from spilling out. After year-round conditioning and practicing, I knew that my son could no longer stomach You can only do your best. He had been doing his best, giving his all for years, and this had produced a mere one minute and 37 seconds of varsity football play. It had relegated him to limited junior varsity play (because in spite of your age, talent, and experience, you are new to our program, because you need to pay your dues, because, because, because. . .) and hours of sideline anticipation that melted in nothing but spectatorship.

Quinn’s collegiate football career was a bust. If you measured it by time spent on the varsity field, that is. I used to lie awake at night wondering how someone so deserving–athletically and personally–could go unseen over and over again. Many nights, I worked myself into an angry lather, drafting and delivering righteous speeches of condemnation to coaching staffs in three universities.

Football, for Quinn, was familiar. Among his fellow teammates, in weight rooms, and on football fields, he could be an ordinary, decent egg. After five years of futility, however, Quinn decided to hatch, for he understood–all too well–that to remain an egg was to go bad. With three weeks to go in his fifth year of college football, he finally quit.

And then his hatching began in earnest. He set his sites on shaping the familiar football self into a teacher and coach, into an adult whose painful past experiences would whet his resolve for change.

To say that I admire Quinn is most certainly an understatement. I have seen, firsthand, what the past five years have cost him–physically and emotionally. And yet, his story is our story. Most of us have clung to the familiar until we simply could not. Then it was hatch or go bad. Change or stagnate into sweet and suffocating decay.

Viktor E. Frankl writes that when we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves. As one who survived three years in Auschwitz and several other concentration camps, Frankl was painfully aware that he could not change his situation. He believed, however, that people are primarily driven by striving to find meaning in one’s life.  This meaning, he argued, was the reason that many were able to overcome their circumstances, even those as horrific as those in ghettos and concentration camps.

The challenge to change ourselves is a call for risk-taking and egg-hatching. It is, ultimately, a call for the growth born from striving to find meaning in one’s life.

When I see my son standing alongside the other coaches on the sidelines at the high school football game, I see the tangible, positive proof of change. And just as his father and I lived through those glorious moments of tackles and touchdowns, we will live though even more glorious moments of watching him pass on his knowledge and indomitable spirit to others.

What Cannot Be Named

There is a name                                                                                                 for the color of fish that swim                                                                         on the baked enamel pots                                                                                 of the women in the village of Bambur:                                                         persimmon.

There is a name                                                                                                   for the sweet weight of water                                                                       that moves assuredly from the well                                                                 up the path, to home:                                                                                   life.

And there are names                                                                                           for young girls who carry                                                                         infant brothers and sisters on their backs,                                                       while mothers with small wooden hoes                                                     work  the fields of African maize:                                                                     Mercy, Comfort, and Rejoice.

But I cannot find a name                                                                               for what is truly here:                                                                                   one smile,                                                                                                           two bright eyes against dust and grass,                                                       and a single hand to her face–                                                                     an exclamation of?

You might name it joy,                                                                                       but it would not be enough.

Shannon Vesely

Happiness is the paler, conditional cousin to joy. Although the world professes to love happiness, to argue that “you deserve it”, and to peddle it shamelessly in every market place, its idiot claims are full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. 

Several years ago while on a mission trip to Nigeria, I witnessed many women with baked enamel pots on their heads, carrying water from the local well (if they were lucky) or the water hole, miles away (if they were less lucky). Some sang, some spoke as they passed us, and all smiled. As I look back on this photo, I realize that it would be impossible to name the expression that this woman wore. It might be joy, but even this seems wholly insufficient.

Clearly, the circumstances of these Nigerian women–like those of their men and children–are those you might expect in a third world country: poverty, pain, and suffering. Unemployment is rampant, particularly among the young. The Nigerian woman who cooked for us was the only working person in her family of seven, including her husband and five adult children. Young boys with small plastic pails stood on pavement which had broken or washed out into deep crevices. Their job? To warn motorists of the danger ahead. Their wage? Whatever naira a generous motorist might offer. And mothers took to the fields, leaving their babies to the care of their older babies. For an American, these circumstances left much to be desired. Certainly, there appeared to be little that would elicit joy here.

But joy abounded in each place we visited. Joy in the conversation with family and friends, joy in the moments of laughter and rest, joy in the promise of a meal and of shelter. In spite of their circumstances, most Nigerians found genuine joy, the kind that passes all understanding.

I often shared family stories with my students, and one day, as I was recalling a particular incident with my son, a student exclaimed, “Mrs. Vesely, you have the most exciting life ever!” To which I responded, “Well actually, Tom, I don’t. I just choose to live as though I do!”

Perhaps the most valuable thing I inherited from my parents was the will to choose joy in all circumstances. Sometime in my late twenties, I awakened to the fact that I had grown up in the lower middle class. I was stunned with this realization, for I could only recall the joy my family had chosen in our ordinary days: Sunday drives in the country, looking for abandoned farmhouses that might–just might–still have some glass or vintage doorknobs; afternoons in Harmon Park’s rock garden, creating an entire world among the trees and waterfalls; neighborhood games of kick the can and hide and seek that ran long into the evening until someone’s mom called her players in; Friday night suppers of hamburgers in front of the television; and snow forts and snow creatures that stopped passerbys with unexpected color (my mom let us use food coloring to tint the snow!) As a child, I only saw and felt the richness of our existence.

In spite of our economic circumstances, we found joy in the world around us. Now I realize that this was an act of will, of conscious daily choice. At the time, however, it seemed entirely natural and good. The painful reality that others had not, and would not, experience this joy never occurred to me. I was immersed in an ordinary life of extraordinary joy.

I do recall one morning when I was working for the public park and recreation department. It had rained the night before, and the preschoolers I was working with were not allowed to take out the balls and other equipment they usually played with because it was so muddy. The only piece of park equipment that wasn’t surrounded by a moat of mud was the merry-go-round, which–blessedly–had been mounted on a slab of cement. Cheerfully, I said, “Why don’t you pretend like the merry-go-round is your space ship?” And then I stood back, waiting for the joy of play to begin. Only, it didn’t. Twelve preschoolers looked at me with incredulity. They just stood there until I offered, “I’ll play with you. Jump on because we’re about to take off!”

On this day, I jump-started joy. It didn’t take long until we were deep in the throes of an outerspace story of epic proportions. The muddy circumstances faded into the background, and the joy of our newfound adventure overwhelmed the foreground. In the end, we all chose joy, and a morning that appeared doomed shone brightly.

Today as I think of the Syrian people, I admit that I wouldn’t blame them for succumbing to the despair that their circumstances have delivered. Still, I’m guessing that there are those in the refugee camps who, like the Nigerians I met, are choosing the joy of relationships and small moments. Some may argue that this is not enough and that these people deserve better and more. And they would be right. Yet in this world, there will be trouble. This trouble, tragically, often seems more than we can bear. To choose joy in the midst of these trials is, perhaps, one of the most courageous and faithful acts I can imagine.

One of my persistent prayers is that I may also pass on the will to choose joy to my children and grandchildren. In truth, I can think of no greater gift.

Let me hear joy and gladness; let the bones you have crushed rejoice.                         Psalm 51:8

Hebrews 12:1

Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles. And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us.

Where two or more are gathered, you are in the sanctuary of witnesses. For the past three months, my family and I have been blessed to have lived in this sanctuary with a host of witnesses who have laughed and cried with us, encouraged us, prayed with us, and returned again and again.

Last weekend at my father’s memorial service, I looked out upon this cloud of witnesses: family, colleagues, fellow poets, pigeon racers, friends and students. As we shared words and song, this collective tribute of honor and love was more than we could have imagined. But such is the power in a cloud of witnesses: together we are stronger, together we are better.

There is a solitary nature to dying and grieving. Even when others are physically present–perhaps sitting by your side–you are pulled inward. And once there, you often find yourself in the cellar of all that you have known. Mason jars of past life line the walls, stretching upward in infinite gray rows. Too many to count, too many to open. As your eyes and heart move up, row to row, gray unfolding to more gray, infinity suffocates you.

Until it does not. Because a voice or hand pulls you back, and you are breathing, once more, in the sanctuary of witnesses. When the hospice workers came to provide bathing, nursing, and ministering care for my father, it became immediately obvious that they came for us as much as for him. I would call these individuals angels of mercy, but this phrase does not begin to do them justice. Often, they were only with us for 15-20 minutes. These minutes, however, sustained us throughout long days. For in these minutes, we felt the genuine presence of witnesses to our love and grief. These were minutes of grace that went far beyond the physical acts each hospice representative performed.

There were other voices and hands that pulled us from the cellars of our souls. Daily visitors–friends, students, neighbors, and colleagues–sat by my father, bedside, but spent precious minutes with each of us in our family kitchen or on our front porch. Here, away from my dad, they heard our prayers and fears, embraced us in hugs, silently wept with us, and simply held our hands. In the sanctuary of witnesses, it takes all kinds–and my family and I were blessed to have all kinds of individuals and responses. Each was unique and just right for the day and the moment.

And there were witnesses that testified to their love and prayers for my father and for us through the written word. Cards and letters arrived daily, each a sliver of light in the gray cellars of our grief. Even the mail carrier became a witness as she brought healing words in the late afternoon when the day moved much too slowly, refusing to surrender to night and a few hours of sleep, that sweet relief from thinking, remembering, and imagining a life without the one we love.

The truth is that, in the sanctuary of witnesses, you can find hope. When a memory or feeling takes you by the hand and leads you deeper into the cellar, you go–sometimes reluctantly and other times willingly. In the dark, you remember and grieve. And then a witness arrives, and you take his or her hand and climb those same stairs to join the living again. Once again bright-eyed, giving yourself to joy, a momentary stay against grief.

Let it be said that I, for one, am a big fan of the sanctuary of witnesses. I plan to be a lifetime member and run with perseverance the race marked out for us.

For all those who find sanctuary in their classrooms

For the first time in almost 40 years, I will not return to a classroom this fall. This reality is, indeed, bittersweet. Many of the best moments of my life have been spent in classrooms across Nebraska, Wisconsin, and Iowa. Within their walls, I have found sanctuary.

I suppose I should just confront the elephant in the room before I proceed. There have been moments, days, regrettably even weeks, in which I would have been hard-pressed to regard my classroom as a sanctuary. In these times, my best efforts have been met with stone walls of silence, at best, and outright rejection, at worst.  In spite of advice from veteran teachers and mentors, I have had a laser focus for those few students who refuse to engage, often overlooking those that do. I have left my classrooms carrying those blank and angry faces. For these times, I have questioned myself, doubted myself, even retreated to my office or home to button up my hair shirt and scourge myself into a penance with which I thought could live. In short, my classrooms have not always been the sanctuaries I hoped to build.

Still. There have been moments, days,  weeks during which my students and I crafted our thoughts and words into something grand and, often, wholly unexpected. In the sanctuary of the classroom, this is the holy grail. Cliched as it may be, the words from Field of Dreams resonate authentically in these times: If you build it, they will come. Having built a framework for learning, I never tired of seeing my students give themselves to it. When they came, I always believed it would be most fitting for marching bands to appear, playing their strongest, their best John Philip Sousa. In the sanctuary of the classroom, there should be celebration with drums and brass instruments.

Still. These moments, days, and weeks do not magically appear; they are born from the teacher’s careful reading, clear thinking, and keen sense of audience. The best teachers know that power comes with responsibility, and they approach their classrooms with a reverence for learning and for those who will learn. Teaching is not for the faint of heart. Oh that those in teacher preparation programs would understand that loving children or loving a discipline do not always make for the best–or even adequate–teachers! No, becoming the best teacher has much more to do with losing oneself to the greater cause of real education. It has much more to do with learning to say I don’t know, but I will find out and I thought this was a good idea, but I see that we are lost. And then it becomes a matter of digging in and forging on into new places and ideas. The best teachers know that if they are not willing to take on the mantle of Lewis and Clark, they will never lose themselves to the greater cause. They will remain fat and sassy on the eastern banks of the Mississippi, looking westward but content to live out their days in mediocrity.

As I write, there are those who have just returned or are preparing to return to their classrooms. The best of these can barely contain their joy at a new semester of possibilities. And though some students in these classrooms will outwardly resist, retreat, text, and/or sleep, others will bring their best heads and notebooks with clean sheets that will hold their best thinking. For these students and for these opportunities, teachers will rejoice.

In the sanctuary of the classroom, it is never too late to begin anew. For those good teachers and students who are beginning again, I offer my sincere thanks and respect. May your classrooms be the sanctuaries you have imagined and have yet to imagine.

Line from S. E. Hinton’s The Outsiders

In our village, folks say God crumbles up the old moon into stars. [Alexander Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich]

At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. [Willa Cather, My Antonia]

If equal affection cannot be, let the more loving one be me. [W. H. Auden, “The More Loving One”]

She was lost in her longing to understand. [Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera]

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. [F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby]

I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded; not with the fanfare of epiphany, but the pain gathering its things, packing up, and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night. [Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner]

He was unheeded, happy, and near to the wild heart of life. [James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man]

Maybe life doesn’t get any better than this, or any worse, and what we get is what we’re willing to find: small wonders where they grow. [Barbara Kingsolver, Small Wonder]

There are days we live as if death were nowhere in the background; from joy to joy to joy, from wing to wing, from blossom to blossom to impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom. [Li-Young Lee, From Blossoms]

Memes, tweets, hashtags–they are but pond scum, written waste, in the sanctuary of great literary lines. The exquisite beauty of a single, well-crafted line! The adrenaline shot that overtakes you when you finally reach the end mark of punctuation, breathless and sorely amazed! And the moment when you unconsciously, selflessly voice the words that give testimony–yet again–to the magnificence of the line: Oh, that I had written this! 

In a small blue notebook my father carried in his pocket while he alternately walked and wrote, I found these words:

My work consisted of my playing with the best writers. Ones who spoke beauties, truths, goodness, who persistently used their best hearts and heads. How those books taught me. How I was fortunate enough to subordinate myself to wise men. And would that I could do it again.

Great lines have the power to command subordination. Written from another’s best heart and head, they say: Read slowly. Read carefully. Here is beauty, truth and goodness. If you let them, these words will carry you from innocence and ignorance to wisdom. My father has it so right here. If we are fortunate and willing enough to subordinate ourselves to these great lines, we will want for little more.

In my life as a teacher and reader, I have read so many great lines. And like my father and others whose work has consisted of playing with the best writers, I discovered early that subordinating myself to these men and women would be my real education. It has been–and continues to be.

In the sanctuary of great lines, it is one thing to take pleasure in a particularly perfect line, but it is quite another to share it with one who intuitively finds the same perfection. When two or more subordinate to such a line, you are walking on holy ground.

For as James Joyce and Gabriel Garcia Marquez write, in the sanctuary of great lines, we may live and move unheeded, happy, and near to the wild heart of life and lost in our longing to understand.  And what could be better than this?

How do you like to go up in a swing,                                                                                     Up in the air so blue?                                                                                                                     Oh, I do think it the pleasantest thing                                                                                     Ever a child can do!

from “The Swing” by Robert Louis Stevenson

I remember pouring over my hardback copy of Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses,  memorizing “The Swing” so I could recite it when I was walking to school or swinging in Harmon Park. In fourth grade, I wrote and illustrated my first book of poetry. And around my family’s supper table, poetry was served up nightly.

I grew up in a sanctuary of poetry. My father, a poet and teacher of poetry, claimed that everyone has a poem in his hidden head. It was his life’s mission to tease those poems out of budding poets’ hidden heads.

Doug H. was a hulking, second-year high school senior. When my dad visited his school for a poetry residency, his teacher took him aside to prepare him for Doug. He won’t do anything, she said, but if you leave him alone, he will just sit quietly in the back. True to form, Doug’s sullen shape cast a foreboding silhouette in the corner of the classroom. He was a presence.

As students bent over their desks, writing themselves out of their hidden heads, Doug alternately looked on and slept. On the final day of the residency, my dad asked students to think of a person who had made a mark on their lives, a person whose life and work deeply mattered to them. Then, he instructed, think of that one object that most represents that person. For my father, it would be his duck decoys, he said, and for my father-in-law, his tackle box. Write about that object. 

In a cinematic moment made for Lifetime television, Doug raised his head from the desk, searched his pocket for a pencil, removed a single sheet of notebook paper, and began to write. My dad recalls that he walked about the room watching students write, but he stayed clear of Doug, not wanting to spook him. At the end of the session, students passed their poems to the front, and my dad quickly read through them, selecting a few to be read aloud.

When my dad came to Doug’s poem, “Grandpa,” he understood, once more, the power of the hidden head.

Grandpa

He was six foot three                                                                                                              with old age                                                                                                                          carved on his face.            

He usually sat                                                                                                                                in a rocker                                                                                                                                       whittling a stick                                                                                                                               and humming                                                                                                                                 a certain song.

He was rocking                                                                                                                                 one day                                                                                                                until he rocked                                                                                                                                 no more.

Eyes and mouth                                                                                                                                I shut,                                                                                                                                         stick and knife                                                                                                   on the floor.                         

Doug H.

As my dad read Doug’s poem aloud, anonymously, a pall fell upon the room until one student exclaimed, Who wrote that? As was my dad’s practice, he let the poet claim his own work–or not. From the corner of the room, Doug said, I did. Although no one in the room spoke, it was evident that something sacred had happened, something that all would remember as an authentic testament to the power of poetry.

This would be a great story for the sanctuary of poetry if it ended right there. But it does not. Several years later when my dad was traveling through that town en route to another residency, he stopped at a local gas station. Just as he was about to fill his car, he heard a voice: Hey, do you remember me? It was a grown-up Doug, now working at the local gas station. I do, my dad said. Doug smiled, patted his back pocket and announced, I’ve got my poem with me still. Right here. 

In the sanctuary of poetry, we all would do well to carry our best poems–or someone’s best poem–in our pockets. Daily. For the words of these poems, the poems that come dearly from the hidden head, are the words of life, the words of beauty and truth, the words of pain and wisdom. They are the words that anchor us to all that matters.

In the introduction to the anthology, Few Shape Absence Into Memorable Air, my dad writes: A very few of these poems occurred as gifts. More, like diamonds, were given worth by force. All are crystallizations of solitudes now past. 

In the sanctuary of poetry, there are those rare poems that burst from the hidden head as gifts. Almost perfect in their imagery and prosody. On that day in that Nebraska classroom, Doug’s poem was a genuine gift–to the sanctuary of poetry, but most importantly, to him.

But most, as my dad writes, take their worth by force. In reading through my dad’s notebooks, I am profoundly moved by the force through which his poetry was crafted. Sometimes a line is changed, sometimes a single word. Sometimes a stanza is removed, sometimes a single line retained. Yet in the end, the poem, the crystallization of solitudes now past, remains. What has been taken by force for the writer becomes a gift for the reader.

If I were to carry a single poem in my pocket, I would find it unbearingly difficult to choose a single Don Welch poem. In the sanctuary of poetry, however, it is also permissible to carry poems in the pockets of our hearts and souls. And these pockets are deep enough to house as many poems as we want to store there.

I do know the first poem I will place into my heart’s pocket, though. Taken by force through countless revisions, this poem is one that has certainly won the Doug-stamp-of-approval.

LINES FOR MY FATHER

I love you, old man, in our time.                                                                                         The shotgun cradled in your arm,                                                                                       the marbled wood,                                                                                                                    the varnished sky.

The milo’s cut.                                                                                                                          The fence holds leaves.                                                                                                          The thicket has its quail                                                                                                        and  final green.

We walk.                                                                                                                                       We clot in time.                                                                                                The fence sings birdless                                                                                                            in the wind.

Don Welch

I’m  fool for a good story. Years ago when I drove five hours for meetings at Buena Vista University and then five hours back on the same day, I survived the hours in the car by listening to books on tape. As much as I wanted to get out of the car and fall into my own bed at home, if the story was good–and much to my family’s dismay–I would often sit in the driveway or circle the block to hear the end. Yes, I am a fool for a good story.

Good is clearly in the eye of the reader, though. You might enter into a story–much like you board a cruise ship–for sheer escape. Only a few pages in, and you are comfortably stretched out on your deck chair, a cold beverage with complimentary paper umbrella by your side. For the remains of the cruise, you leave the mundane, the local, and the inevitable behind you. When the cruise ends, reluctantly, you return to your life–your real life–but momentarily happier for living in a fictional world with neat and easy resolutions.

Cruise ship stories flourish in airports, waiting rooms, and break rooms. Easy in, easy out. I have bought many of these page-turners in my life and found them good for the times and in the circumstances I read them.

But the good stories, the stories that I return to time after time, are not cruise ship adventures. These stories, like naval destroyers, shove their keels through ice and waves, wholly committed to their routes. They do not invite lounging or escaping, but rather pull their readers–sometimes violently–towards their resolutions. And there is nothing neat or easy about these resolutions.

Southern gothic writer, Flannery O’Connor, writes good stories. O’Connor once received a letter from a reader who complained that one of her stories had left a bad taste in her mouth. To which O’Connor replied, “You weren’t supposed to eat it.” Touche. Still, there is something deeply and personally unnerving about a Flannery O’Connor story. She draws you in and lulls you into empathizing with a character you believe is moral and good, a character you believe is much like you. Until, like the destroyer, she pushes through to the character’s core, which is not moral and not good. She strips you of your pretenses and leaves you humbly begging for mercy. These are good stories. The best stories.

At the end of one of her most widely anthologized stories, “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” O’Connor ends with a poignant scene in which the Misfit, a criminal and murderer, confronts the Grandmother, a nice Christian lady. The Misfit and his men have come upon the family’s car by the side of the road and have systematically killed the Grandmother’s son, daughter-in-law, and grandchildren. Only the Grandmother remains, begging for her life.

O’Connor helps us to see the Grandmother’s weak claim to Christianity and her tenuous faith. Even the Misfit sees through her religious veneer and reminds her that she has nothing to fear if she really believes what she says she does. Moments before he shoots her, the Grandmother finally falls to her knees, reaches out to touch the Misfit, and cries, “Why you’re one of my babies. You’re one of my own children!” Here, she sees what she has been unable and unwilling to see her entire life: the Misfit, too, is a child of God.

After shooting her, the Misfit turns to his partner in crime, Bobby Lee, and says, She would’ve been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life. Now this is a line to end a good story, a line to live by! Wouldn’t we all be good people if there was somebody there to shoot us every minute of our lives? I have carried this line with me for years, using it as a litmus test before committing myself to crucial words and deeds. If a gun was to my head, what would I say? What would I do? 

A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is, O’Connor wrote. In the sanctuary of good stories, readers lose themselves to words and find themselves in transformative meaning.

O’Connor understood that the type of mind that can understand good fiction is not necessarily the educated mind, but it is at all times the kind of mind that is willing to have its sense of mystery deepened by contact with reality, and its sense of reality deepened by contact with mystery [Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose]. There are few writers today who would ever consciously link reality with mystery.  And yet this is precisely what makes O’Connor’s stories good: she looks, unblinkingly, into the face of reality with all of its ugliness, evil, and despair, while holding fast to, and offering up the mystery of grace and goodness.

If a writer is any good, what he makes will have its source in a realm much larger than that which his conscious mind can encompass and will always be a greater surprise to him than it can ever be to his reader [Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose]. In the sanctuary of a good O’Connor story, readers will find its source in a realm much larger than that which his conscious mind can encompass. This realm will neither transport him to the deck chair or soothe him with neat endings. In truth, this realm will ask a reader for much but will also deliver much in return.

Stories of all kinds have sustained me through my life as a student, teacher, and reader. The  really good stories, however, have surprised me with insights into myself and my world that I could never have imagined. I would be lying if I told you that these surprises were generally pleasant ones; most have rocked me to my very core, revealing darkness and decay.

But when, in the sanctuary of a good story,  I find myself confronted with such “surprises”,  I hold fast to the words of Flannery O’Connor: The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it. 

Complement: a thing that completes or brings to perfection

As my father was teaching in a classroom or writing in his office on the campus of the University of Nebraska Kearney, three blocks away in my family home, my mother, his complement, was faithfully, humbly holding down the fort. Literally. With a teaching husband, five children, and a backyard full of homing pigeons, our fort desperately needed holding down.

My mother has always been my father’s first, best reader. Even in the early years, when she knew little about poetry, she read, she listened, and she encouraged. Through time, she became an accomplished and critical reader whose discerning eye and ear rivaled those with formal credentials. As I was reading through a notebook of my dad’s unpublished poetry, I found–handwritten–Marcia at the bottom of many pages. These were the poems that passed the test. The keepers, according to my father’s complement.

Whereas my father’s words sustained me throughout my adolescence, my mother’s physical presence sustained me. Before I left for school, when I returned from school or school activities, at bedtime when others were sleeping and I could never find sleep, my mother was there. When I competed in high school track, my mother was one of few hometown spectators in the stands of outstate Nebraska tracks. Braving all sorts of inclement weather, my mother would wear garbage bags to protect herself and the whole team’s stash of Hersey bars, crackers, and cookies. A green plastic visor kept rain from her eyes as she cheered us on and, later when the bus would return us to Kearney, she would rub the cold from our bones.

In the sanctuary of complements, there is the one to complete you and bring you to perfection. The one may live primarily in the foreground or in the background. It’s the coupling, the sublime matching of one soul to another that, in the end, matters.

For every “great” idea that my dad had–making snow ice cream and using yellow food coloring to make it more festive (really, dad???), doctoring up his homemade fudge with a variety of added ingredients, like red hots (really, dad???), facilitating our pre-bedtime jumping from my sister’s twin bed to mine, jumping that resulted in breaking several slats from both beds (really, dad???)–my mother complemented him with even better ideas: why not use blue or red food coloring to make the snow ice cream NOT appear like you scooped the snow up from under the pigeon loft? (yes, mom!!!); have you considered using walnuts in your fudge instead of red hots (yes, mom!!!); and how about a great bedtime story in lieu of bed-jumping (probably a better idea, mom).

As my dad was meeting with and mentoring students, my mom was meeting with and mentoring neighbors, advocating for those less able and fortunate in our community, and opening her home to any and everyone who needed a home-cooked meal and a temporary refuge from the cares of the world. My son, Quinn, and his UNK football friends still rave about my mom’s spreads and my dad’s football talk. In the sanctuary of complements, you really do get the best of both worlds.

Just last night as I was lying in bed, an image of my dad (circa 1975) came to me. He entered my English 100 class, having dressed himself and escaped from home before my mom could give him the “look over.” Imagine this: my dad decked out in maroon polyester flared pants (well, it was the 70s), a red, button-down shirt (he claimed that it, too, was maroon and therefore, “matched”), and the piece de resistance? An olive green cardigan sweater. A friend and fellow classmate turned to me and gasped, “Has your mom seen him?” After class, I ran back to my dorm room to make the emergency call to my mom who, over lunch, remade my father and sent him back to class looking more like himself and less like a color-challenged Mr. Rogers. This is why we all need a complement. To look us over, check us out, remake what needs remade, and send us happily and completely on our way.

So here’s to complements! May you ever rejoice in your perfect pairing, your yin to another’s yang, your foreground to another’s background, your red hots to another’s walnuts!

And here’s to my mother, Marcia Welch. In the sanctuary of complements–and in the spirit of the Olympic Games–she is the gold medalist, indeed.