Tuesday, March 22, 2011

Teachers or Brainwashers



“You teach best what you need to learn.” – Richard Bach
I recently presented a short program to a local service club on the disconnection that our society has from its food. I try to outline some of the reasons that I feel have led to the misinformation that is contributing to a certain amount of fear about food. The three major reasons I touch on are: the migration away from the farm by our country's citizens; the phenomenal speed that information travels to people via the internet; and the growth of forums like Facebook and You Tube that are not necessarily reliable or factual sources, but are regardless believed.

After the presentation as I was tearing down my Power Point equipment, a young man of middle school age came up to me and explained that he enjoyed hearing how the majority of Michigan’s farmers are environmentally conscious. He then went on to explain that he had a teacher that was espousing the opposite viewpoint. The teacher told of how modern farm practices were destroying the land and fouling the waters surrounding them.

Now this young man came from a farming background and was at this meeting with his uncle, a farmer. I could only imagine what he must have felt like in that classroom, hearing a teacher accuse him and his relatives of atrocities he knew were untrue. Untrue because he knew what went on at his family farm. What a difficult position to be in as a student. How could he speak up and try to dispel what he must have known was not true and risk the wrath of the teacher, the person who holds his grades and academic advancement in the palm of his obviously biased hands? The teachers hands may have held books on the subjects he taught, and his brain may absorb the words of those books, but could they understand the hands and knowledge of a farmer? Or worse yet, would this young man be painted as a villain to the environment to classmates that bought into the teachers viewpoint? Talk about a uncomfortable position to put a teen in.

I could only assure him that friends of farmers were working very diligently to try to get a true and factual representation out to the public about what it means to have a job with a responsibility to feed an ever-increasingly hungry world.

And I grumbled to myself, remembering that some teachers are out there educating by telling students what to think, rather than helping them develop the power to think and form ideas with their own mind.

If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea. –Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Sunday, March 13, 2011

The Poet

"A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness." -- Robert Frost




I realize that poets write poetry for other poets. Those readers of poems may not know that they are poets. They know they like the verse, the play of words, the startles of the wordplay. I have written poems and shared them with my wife. mostly poems of love. I think she likes them. I wonder how good they really are. I think that she is a poet at heart as well, so she has an understanding of the emotional passage that is the poem. I believe people with the heart of a poet can see past bad verse, much the way I admire Bob Dylan's singing even though he often doesn't carry a very good tune. The lyrics, or musical poems, are terrific.

Poetry--written, read or listened to--is a sensory experience. People look for sensory experience to enhance their lives, whether we watch movies, bungee jump or set on a rock and watch the waves come into the shore on a beach. I like the freedom that it gives me to just try to paint emotions with a brush where the paint is words. Splashing them around in non-traditional ways. Ways that can make the leap from the reality that we live in to the eternal questions that we ask ourselves.

Sometimes my poems are a question that I have answered and I write it down just to remember that point of my life. Other times I don't know the answer and the poem is a therapeutic effort to figure out what I seek.

I have a book where I have written a bunch of poems from different times in my life. It is a mad scrambled up mess that sort of represents the conflicts and challenges that I have encountered along the way in this life. I have not shared the words with anyone. I often wonder if I should destroy it like I have heard some people do to their journals. Maybe a note to burn it when I die, send the words up in smoke chasing my spirit through the stars.

After all is said and done, I would rather be known as a poet of living life than a bad poet of words.

Sunday, March 6, 2011

The Pond




“Many drops make a bucket, many buckets make a pond, many ponds make a lake, and many lakes make an ocean.”
-- Percy Ross

There are times that I feel completely clogged up. Where my brains and my emotions feel like a sinus infection of the worst kind. Most times ideas, thoughts, and feelings are running around in my head, bouncing off each other, jumping up and down or just doing all kinds of active, metaphysical calisthenics.  But that is when the sheer volume of them is at the noise volume level of a pop song. Not the speed metal that it sounds like lately.

Compare my normal mind as existing in a gaseous state, lots of room between thoughts, and light and mostly transparent. But things change as those gases start to liquefy with too much sensory input until this thickening turns my thinking into a solid, immobile mass of worthlessness. All those electrons slowing down and molecules contracting, growing closer together and the space between them growing crowded until my thought process starts to turn into a substance similar to cold lard.

The only thing to do at this point is to bucket out the pond. And there are a lot of things to bucket out dwelling in the murky waters of the pond that is my brain. It seems no matter how many things get crossed off my list (unwritten down, of course), more things stand up and shout out to be added. I realize there are always unexpected things that will rise up to be dealt with but how can I add them to my life without disrupting the gentle flowing pace I wish to exist in?

I commented to my wife that I was beginning to understand why people went and lived in monasteries. How the would choose to get rid of everything and throw on the hair shirt, grab the Rosary Beads and turn their back on the rat race of human existence. On the other hand, I don't want to leave everything about my life behind even if I could take my wife to the monastery. Especially after she told me that they let you walk in the woods around the monastery. At least that was her experience at the retreat she returned from last month.

I like that.

But I also love the wind when I ride my Triumph motorcycle, the river banks slipping by while I am in my kayak, old car grease on my hands as I work, and meeting the wide array of people while I travel for my job around the countryside.

So I will have to look in every pail full of pond water as I bail, making sure of what it contains. Make sure that the evil, anger, fear, doubts, and negativity are in there. And making sure that the joy and the wind and the sunshine don't get tossed on the banks with them. The process may leave a few bad things swimming around in there but at least there will be some room for both the good and the bad to recognize each other and give the space needed to do the right thing without paralyzing all the pond life.

"The frog does not drink up the pond in which he lives." --Unknown