Thistle Seed
 
Off the corner of the cabin,
a large stand of thistle has gone
to seed
 
and when the wind blows,
downy heads explode
in an exclamation of joy.
Oh, what can they say to a world
that browns a bit more each day?
 
And how will they pray?
Will their gossamer souls sing in first light,
their praise growing lighter and lighter
as filaments come together
into a single cloud of witnesses who cry
Now, Lord!

Could I join them?
My bones catching the wind
like silken threads,
like hundreds of hollow reeds thrust
into the updraft.
Would I find the air a kinder home,
the yoke of all my earthly expectations
released?
 
All summer long,
the happy flowers have opened themselves
to birds and bees, but today
they are colorless corpses.
 
I reach for a thistle seed,
but it will not be held.
Moment by moment, the dead rise
from the ash heap.

photo by Collyn Ware

I think, at a child’s birth, if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift, that gift would be curiosity.
― Eleanor Roosevelt

“Did you know that the Titanic had a sister ship?” my grandson, Griffin, asked. “Did you know that lots of the dads and grandfathers died because they let the moms and kids get on the lifeboats first? And did you know that there’s a Titanic museum in Branson?” He looked up at me in earnest, waiting for my response, eager to tell me all he’d learned about the Titanic. His curiosity about all-things-Titanic was simply too much for the confines of his morning of online schooling. It was foaming over the top of our prescribed daily lessons as if it were a carbonated beverage shaken up and finally upcapped. There was no stopping it.

But truthfully, who would want to stop the ardent curiosity of a 7-year-old? As Eleanor Roosevelt wrote, this raw curiosity is a most useful gift. From my experience as both student and teacher, it is certainly the foundation of most genuine learning. Philo of Alexandria, a Jewish philosopher wrote:

Learning is by nature curiosity… prying into everything, reluctant to leave anything, material or immaterial, unexplained.

I hated to tell Griffin that we had to turn our attention towards his online social studies lesson about maps because it was all too clear that he wasn’t at all interested in maps right now. Today, he could barely contain his insatiable curiosity about the Titanic. If I could have loaded him up in my car and driven him 6 hours south to Branson, Missouri, I would have earned the title of Best, Most Amazing Grandma in the World. I would have been golden and could have rested on these laurels for weeks–maybe years–after our visit to the Titanic museum. If I could have harnessed his curiosity towards learning, the world may have tilted on its axis! At the very least, the morning would have flown by.

Working with Griffin has made me painfully aware of how traditional schooling has failed students like him. In traditional schools, we are required to teach language arts, math, social studies, science, physical education, art, and music to 2nd grade students. As such, we could never afford to spend an entire morning studying the Titanic. No time for such single-subject luxuries! And we could never afford to spend too many days studying the Titanic. Too much to cover in a year!

For 40 years, I was a public school teacher. I understand–all too well–the curricular and instructional expectations and requirements of any given day of school. If your curiosity and interest is peaked by something, you probably have, at best, 40 minutes to satisfy it. Then the bell will ring, and you’ll be off to the next class. I understand the challenges of letting every student pursue those things about which he or she is most curious. That would mean, of course, that each of your 25 students could conceivably study something different. Juggling this many instructional balls would require more courage and stamina than I ever had. And so, I did the best I could to make a one-sized-fits-all curriculum as palatable and relevant as I could. As do many teachers.

Still, working with Griffin has made me really think about many things–things I’ve known for a long time and things I’m just beginning to understand. I’ve known that the vast majority of my high school and college students had lost most, if not all, of their passionate curiosity years before I ever had them as students. Most were compliant enough, anxious to know just what they had to do to pass. Some wanted better grades, but few were actually willing to do much thinking or investigating on their own. Their curiosity had died roughly about the same time they stopped playing on the playground equipment at recess. From this point on, their educational lives were more about figuring out what the teacher wants than passionately pursuing any natural course for their curiosity.

In Walden Two, psychologist B. F. Skinner writes:

No one asks how to motivate a baby. A baby naturally explores everything it can get at, unless restraining forces have already been at work. And this tendency doesn’t die out, it’s wiped out.

This tendency to explore, to take curiosity’s route to its glorious destination, is wiped out. Sadly, we are the restraining forces, those who wipe out the kind of curiosity that fuels Griffin’s days. We do it in the name of educational efficiency. We do it in the name of tradition and, paradoxically, in the name of progress. Perhaps most tragically, we do it because we can’t see any other way. Having lost our own curiosity, we can’t imagine educating our youth and young adults in new and different ways.

Polish-born American writer and social scientist, Leo Rosen, claims that while many people use the term idle curiosity, [t]he one thing that curiosity cannot be is idle. Being curious is an active and interactive venture. There is a real sense of urgency about it, a compulsion to learn more, to solve problems, to discover how and why things work as they do or why things happened as they did. It requires that individuals invest themselves in the study of something, and that as they do, they shape and use the information they find to answer questions and draw conclusions. Curiosity requires this kind of give-and-take, which makes it utterly impossible to remain idle. For this reason alone, we should pay it more heed. Most of our students have grown flabby with mental inactivity. They have been idling too long.

Currently, Griffin’s synapses are firing wildly, ignited by curiosity. If he follows suit, in a few years these synapses will have burned out. I’d like to arrest time, to stoke the synaptic fires as long as possible, prolonging the innate curiosity that drives him and other children. I’d like us to find ways to ensure that our schools are not restraining forces that wipe out curiosity. I’d like us to imagine a society of more curious individuals, those who aren’t satisfied to idle through their lives, consuming only what they need to pass, to make it through each day.

If we are to do this and if we truly value the kind of thought and innovation that comes from this type of curiosity, then we are going to have to do better. I don’t have all the answers, but I can imagine a world in which there are more educational choices and more incentives to embrace curiosity in all areas of life. The very thought of a world like this is just about as exciting as it gets.

Somewhere over the rainbow, blue birds fly
Birds fly over the rainbow
Oh why, oh why can't I? 
--Harold Arlen, E. Y. Harburg

Over the rainbow, into the glorious field of sunflowers–somewhere, anywhere beyond. This is our collective dream: to leave the current fear and pain of Covid19, racial and economic struggle, violence, wild fires, hurricanes, and derecho winds, public and private shaming of all sorts from any and all sources. To transport ourselves to the Great Beyond, to the sunnier days of life after the virus, after the protests, after the destruction of lives, livelihoods, reputations, and after the horrors of natural disasters. Somewhere beyond all of this there must be something better. Right?

Franklin Delano Roosevelt wrote that [w]e have always held to the hope, the belief, the conviction that there is a better life, a better world, beyond the horizon. Like many, I remember thinking that beyond the challenges and sleepless nights of adolescence, I would finally reach adulthood, that shining city on the hill of life, that splendid destination that made all the angst and acne worth it. As a teacher, I remember clinging to the promise of summer, of days beyond school bells, beyond 20-minute lunches and piles of student papers that covered my desk and grew exponentially, eager to consume every inch and minute of my life. If I could just make it until Memorial Day, then I could sleep and read any book I wanted to read. Then I could bury my watch in the bottom of a drawer and take a 2-hour lunch–in a quiet place that serves adult food–with a good friend. The lure of beyond is the proverbial carrot in the great race of life. It’s just in front of you. It tempts you with rewards that have eluded you. It’s out there somewhere.

I’ve heard and read inspirational words that are intended to sustain us and pull us through these trials. This, too, shall pass. This can’t last forever, so keep your eyes on the prize. After we have a vaccine for this virus, everyone can return to work, to school, to life as we’ve known it. When we elect new leaders, they will solve all our problems. After we destroy the terrible systems of our past and establish better systems, the current pain and strife will disappear. These are battle cries of sorts, words of those like Scottish warrior William Wallace as he led his countrymen and women to rebel against the tyrannous King Edward I. Or the words of Winston Churchill who rallied the Brits to defend their country, to never, never surrender.

After reading a recent biography of Churchill, it struck me that Churchill’s voice, like Wallace’s, was largely a single, unifying voice. Times were desperate, and yet one rallying cry lifted the British people from devastating nightly bomb raids and paralyzing fear of burgeoning Nazi forces. Carried into homes through radio waves, one voice rallied the country to stay the course because the very future of what could–and must–lie beyond this horror was at stake.

I’ve thought a lot about the power of this kind of unifying voice. Churchill was brutally honest. He didn’t offer platitudes or sugar-coat the dire reality of Nazi power. He spoke to the British people as adults capable of hearing of the truth and then he asked them to think and act beyond what they believed they were capable of. He warned, he cajoled, he encouraged and inspired. In the end after much great sacrifice, Churchill’s vision and voice helped moved Britain–and the world–beyond the death and destruction of WWII.

Today, however, our nation has no Churchill or Wallace, no single unifying voice to lead us through the wilderness. In truth, we have many voices, and the chasm between these voices and visions of how to make our nation better is growing just as quickly and awfully as my piles of student essays to be graded. It’s a Grand Canyon division. With each passing day, it becomes more and more impossible to see the other side or to even begin to imagine a Great Beyond.

People are hunkering down and digging in. They may have once believed that a visionary warrior would ride his horse up and down the batttle lines, unifying our nation to responsible and right action. They may have hoped beyond hope that one such figure would emerge and that, one day, we’d all hold hands and sing Kum-Bah-Ya. They may have risen each day with the hope that life would return to normal as their mantra. But not so much these days. These days, more and more people find themselves in survival mode driven solely by what they need to do to get through this day. Their dreams may be smaller: eating indoors in a favorite restaurant or going to work or school in person, maskless. When you’re in survival mode, you drool over small pleasures and normalcies. When we get beyond the threat of the coronavirus, I’ll order the largest plate of appetizers at Applebees and eat them all with my best friend as we sit in a corner booth for hours and visit.

And all this begs the question of what life beyond our current pain and challenges offers. There are many who argue that there will be a new normal, one that is, at least, different than the old normal and at best, much better. They maintain that what lies beyond all of this is not a comfortable return to life-as-we-knew-it, but nonetheless, they offer hope for the Great Beyond. There are others who believe that what lies beyond is forbidding. The Great Beyond, they warn, will be a darker age. Systems will necessarily crash and burn, and we will muck around in the rubble for a long time.

I don’t want to be one who sticks her head in the sand or one who unnecessarily borrows trouble. I would be lying if I said that I don’t lie in bed at night and worry about what lies beyond. At times, I distract myself with over-the-rainbow fantasies. I imagine myself standing in a field of sunflowers, my face to the sun, the day stretching gloriously before me. At other times, I imagine myself in some kind of dystopian world, hoarding toilet paper and fearful to say or write anything that may get me canceled for good, the remants of my life being literally flushed away.

I realize the urgency of addressing those things that threaten to undo us–personally, nationally, and globally. If our Great Beyond is to be a place of health, unity, and general well-being, I understand that this will not come without a cost. The greatest leaders have always understood that the world is–and would always be–a troubled place in which all people would struggle in one way or another. Churchill knew and refused to ignore this. As their cities were nightly bombed, the British held fast to the knowledge that their leader truly saw their sacrifice and pain and that their fellow countrymen and women were also sacrificing and suffering. They were not alone.

More and more, I’ve realized that I, too, rest in the comfort and promise that I’m never alone and that, in the midst of trouble, I can find peace and joy. Jesus told his followers:

I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world. John 16:33.

The chasm between our current selves and our best selves may be great. Our troubles may seem insurmountable and our pain too chronic. We may not have a political or military leader whose voice can successfully rally and unify the people. Ultimately, though, a better beyond begins when, amidst all the trouble, those who’ve found genuine peace and joy reach across the chasm and work relentlessly to bring everyone to the table. And then, even if the food intolerable or the place settings mismatched, all will leave knowing that the fellowship was good, that the fellowship was everything, and that beyond this meal, an endless number of invitations and opportunities lies before them.