Music and dancing

A lesson I keep relearning: Say yes to hospitality. Say yes to offering hospitality; say yes to accepting hospitality.

I don't really have trouble with the second part. If someone invites our family over to dinner, we are usually happy to show up ready to eat and enjoy. Party? We'll be there. Meet for coffee? Sure thing! Unless we really have a conflict, we rarely say no to an invite - especially if it means no dishes...  And I think most people feel the same way. People love a personal invitation.

The exceptions are the invites from an organization, or a fundraiser, or someone we don't really know. But even then, if we have time to go to the meet and greet for the Boy Scouts, or the fundraiser for the school arts program, we usually attend. I like going to hear speakers at church or getting dressed up for a good cause or going to events in the community, like the recent book festival. I went by myself, selfishly, so I could hear the speakers and linger at booths thinking about buying books and adding to my TBR lists.* (book post to come) Sometimes I am hesitant to go along to events for my husband's work where I may not know anyone, but at the last few events (where I dragged my feet out to the car because I was expecting to have to work hard to make small talk) I've found kindred spirits with whom to talk books or gardening or education. The end of the party came too soon.

Harder than just showing up at something is hosting.  We love having company, and living in a tourist mecca just 15 minutes from the airport means we get to see lots of farflung family and friends who come to town for vacations and conferences and sometimes just to see us. But I do worry about entertaining, having enough to eat and drink, keeping all the guests happy, scrubbing mold from my shower, and swabbing the window sills. Then people arrive, and I remember that none of that really matters. People just want to hang out and be a part of the crowd.

Two weeks ago we had friends call up from our old community to let us know they would be in town and would be happy to do a house concert for us. This family has a gift for music. They play multiple instruments, can play folk music and 70s guitar rock by ear, and write their own songs based on medieval lyrics or Robert Frost poems, etc.  In the three years since we moved, their boys have developed their talents even more. I knew they were talented, but we procrastinated briefly before saying yes for a couple reasons. 1. We were thinking about going to the Matt Maher concert after the Padres baseball game (for which I hadn't bought tickets) and 2. I didn't want to clean house.  And really, I was kind of afraid of what if other people didn't like their music as much as I did. Nonetheless, we love this family, and they have been so generous to our family, so we sent out an email to invite some other friends.

Here's where the other part of the lesson takes place: I hesitated about inviting too many people, so my initial email list was just my book club. But many of those families already had plans for the evening, so I sent another invite out to more people, and then a few more. What I realized is that it doesn't hurt to invite more people than you think you can manage. It all works out. People brought snacks and beers. Some other old friends came whom we hadn't seen in three years. Other friends brought their friends who were wonderful people.  Not everyone brought their kids, but the ones who came played nicely together and got the adults to dance.  It ended up being one of those evenings where everything went well, and everyone went away happy, grateful for the fellowship and the food and the music.  And the music was so, so good.  It made me wish we had more opportunities to do things like house concerts or poetry readings or impromptu happy hours on the front porch.

So, note to self: Say yes to hosting and to being hosted. Let the people come. Give thanks for easy snacks, decent wine, good beer, and bad lighting that doesn't show the dust. Don't let a little bit of work or fear of awkwardness prevent the event.

(Moment of truth: the poetry reading only happened because my husband has a co-worker who has a lot of exuberance for performing. Sadly, he is now at another command and a difficult family situation has dampened his spirit, so we'll probably never have a reprisal of that event.)

And then some

Every Monday and Wednesday night for the past six weeks I have been up past midnight, sometimes past one, occasionally past 2 am.  The fear of failure - and the stimulation of a glowing screen - have my eyelids peeled back; my heart rate is a bit accelerated with adrenalin and caffeine. Every night, I think I'm going to do this earlier next week! I'm going to prepare ahead of time. The devil of procrastination plus the inspiration of a deadline equals late nights.

I have been laboring over mini-dissertations on nature writers, ecoliterature, ecocritism, ecotheology, ecocentrism, lococentrism, anthropocentrism, the Anthropocene era, regionalism, bioregionalism, shamanism, pantheism, ethnobotany, etc.

I search websites and databases, get bogged down in reading interesting biographical facts about authors, unusual habits and habitats, critical dissent, pertinent data on consumption, water rights, logging and other environmental issues, and details about context, timelines, settings, and references.

I prepare powerpoint slides of flowers and natural parks and kinds of trees and rates of carbon consumption; make lists of links, copy and paste interesting facts and really good quotes onto word documents; then pick up the anthology of readings and think why am I doing all this research and not focusing on the text?!?

So next I make lists of page numbers to reference, bend corners of the textbook pages, note pertinent details, and finally go to bed.

In the morning, I can't remember anything until I open the book again. For instance, this morning I knew I had just read all these reviews and criticism of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, but I couldn't remember what essay I assigned my students by Annie Dillard.  Open Norton Anthology of Nature Writing to p 880: it was "Total Eclipse," a hyperbolic account of the 1979 total solar eclipse she experienced in Washington state. She talks about being in a suspended state of reality as the eclipse is occurring, like a time warp tunnel, a conflation of time and eternity. This is in between accounts of reading about miners, reflecting on a scary clown picture in the hotel room, followed by memories of a trip to a diner after the eclipse. The intentional juxtaposition of mundane and sublime is supposed to reflect the process of remembering and storytelling, I suppose.  I didn't assign it because I thought it was such a wonderful essay, but because it was short, self-contained, and related to the recent solar eclipse last August. My students could relate to Dillard's experience in a way they can't relate to Muir's swinging through pine trees during a hurricane just to be close to Nature. And, you know, being relatable is key to these kids.

I am afraid I am not relatable. Or maybe they are not relatable. I say something about Emerson or ask who wrote Moby Dick, and they can't respond.  They weren't sure about Robert Frost. Even Huck Finn is confused with Tom Sawyer. I thought they would get who the Beat poets were when I brought up Gary Snyder because they are from California - the land of pot and road trips and performance art. But no. One student did know that the Beat poets had something to do with some kind of music.

They do relate to the story of Sharman Apt Russell's toddler melting down in a tantrum in the Gila Wilderness because she cannot ride in the front on the saddle horse. They like Thoreau's comments on getting rid of clothing. They mourn Aldo Leopold's dying green-eyed wolf. They appreciate Rachel Carson's fear of a silent spring even if they didn't read the prologue, which is all I asked them to read. They can imagine seeing Eiseley's raven eating a dead baby bird and the mourning cries of the songbirds arising as it gulps the young thing down. They can share their own stories of encounters with black widows when we talk about confronting mortality and give detailed memories of grandfathers and grandmothers when we talk about the wisdom of the elders in conjunction with Snyder's eulogy to the old growth forests of the Pacific Northwest.

So I am taking notes about how to back off about 50 degrees from what I'm trying to cover. I keep cutting essays, even though I have a hard time not adding reading assignments because there are so many good, good writers, and so many essays about Important Things.  I want my students to hunger for these essays. I want them to be curious and enthused about the authors and the movements and the context. I want them to speak up about issues and observations they have made or heard in the news. Ask questions, make connections.

I do have a few students who read and think and realize it really isn't that hard to make a connection with these texts, even if it's "I just don't get why she brought up the scary clown." Excellent! Let's make some educated guesses!  And I do have a few students who will extemporize about "How then shall we live?" or "What value do we give to people and old growth forests?" "How do we balance the needs of the human community, the need for more space, fewer insects, more food, with limited, fragile, natural resources?"  These questions and ruminations don't need the support of the text to get the conversation going, which is better than no comment at all.

By 1 pm on Tuesday and Thursday, I am wiped out.  I question my existence, my choice to do this. Maybe I'm not a very good teacher after all. My teaching method is to throw a bunch of information out and hope some of it sticks. It is a "filling the pail, not lighting a fire" approach, although maybe some detail, some phrase will light a fire? I wonder if maybe I will not teach next year. I will stay home and homeschool the youngest. We will spend lots of time together in nature instead of reading about it.  We will simplify, simplify, simplify, and march to the beat of a different drummer. I won't be beholden to a boss, to a class of sleepy eyes. 

But then 10 pm Monday night rolls around again. I am balancing the text on my lap, peering through my reading glasses at the screen, thirty tabs open, a word document minimized, and a sheet of paper with scribbled thoughts on the desk in front of the keyboard.  I fold down the corner of a page, search for an image of the brush box tree. And I think, I love this...and this... and this...