The Write Gift

I received former student Lindsey's holiday card in the mail yesterday.  Along with being a gifted poet and person, Lindsey creates and sells handmade paper products.  Her card was hand-stamped (read her process here) and included a postage-stamped postcard to tear off and send someone (Lindsey, by the way, was the inspiration behind my post about postcards earlier this year).  How wonderful is a gift which comes with a gift you can turn and send someone?  Pretty niftily wonderful, I should say.

So I thought about gifts of writing and their value.  And about how low cost they are but also how difficult they can be to produce.  Which, nevertheless, should not deter you (despite the fact that I haven't been able to write here on this blog for the past week and a half, due in part to my obsession with Friday Night Lights, and to various and sundry life events alternately inspiring stress, relief, and mental zombiehood).  Creativity often requires a nudge, a nugget.  Thus I am offering you an idea for writing to and for someone you love. 

Personally, I feel a personal letter written on weighty, significant, or beautiful paper with a pen you love, and stamped and sent, is a simple, lovely, and all-too-rare gift. 

Poems win, though.  And one of my favorites to use as a template for writing a tribute to someone is Sandra Cisneros's "Abuelito Who."  I once posted my own version about Big Sis on her birthday, and here is an example I wrote about a former student:

Jared

Jared who is a silent redwood in a willow forest
And asks who is a true friend
Who is songs and docks
Who is camp and a green jacket
Whose smile is genuine
Is writing a story
Who tells us to listen
Who tells us be gentle
Whose eyes are pleading
Is making friends
Remembers summers and boats
Is hopeful
Is a cathedral of joyful voices
Is sad give him a hug
Has moved one time too many
Who hears chords in his head
Is adjectives and verses and tenors
Who soothes and serves and serves and soothes
Is the teaching tree in the listening forest
Asking who is a true friend
Who is a true friend who?

Try it.  I know I'd much rather have a poem (like my husband's wedding vows to me, which are framed and memorialized) than a new water heater.

Lanyard Love

Big Sis went to summer camp and came home full of camp cliches--three-legged races, corny and nonsensical (still trying to solve the mystery of Princess Pat and her "ricka bamboo") songs, and lanyards.  Oh, the lanyards!  We invested in some plastic lanyard cord and metal clips for endless braiding and looping and weaving.  We have lanyards as "flair" on backpacks, in the hair-tie basket, and under the couch.  Alas, Little Sis's fine-motor skill development to date prevented her from much success with sophisticated lanyard-weaving. 

Enter the Creative Weavers' Guild.  We encountered them at a weekend art walk, where they were weaving as well as giving away kits for making cool yarn lanyard-y thingies.  The handy little craft was ingeniously simple and somewhat addicting:  my daughters and their friend spent the rest of the day weaving away.  To fashion the kits, a guild member cut a hole in the center of a foam square, and knotted seven strings of yarn and fed them up through the middle with the knot underneath.  Two slits were cut in each side of the foam square, and one string of yarn pulled through each notch, leaving one empty.  To weave the lanyard, one simply counts to the third string to the right (or left--it's only important to remain consistent with direction) of the empty slit, pull that third string out, and pop it back into the empty notch, leaving a new slit vacant.  And over and over again (it's important to run one's fingers through the strings on occasion to keep them from tangling).  A neato braid appears below the square.  We finished the yarn weavings and then made a few out of plastic cord, too.  I imagine these braids could be made from more than seven strands, too, by just cutting more slits in the square.  It's a perfect activity for long car or plane rides...a birthday party or holiday craft...add beads or bells...

Keeping Them Busy, One Braid at a Time

And what do you know?  I even stumbled upon a lovely poem, "The Lanyard," by one of my favorite poets, Billy Collins.  Enjoy. 

Trolls Under Every Bridge

I once wrote about street artists on this blog, and about a former student who was inspired by them.  And then this fall, Shepard Fairey participated in the "Viva la Revolucion" show at the Museum of Contemporary Art, and painted an incredible mural in the neighborhood adjacent to ours.  (Read here about one of Fairey's San Diego murals which was vandalized during the exhibit). 

So I was excited to see this article about another former student in today's paper.  Kyle has transformed himself from an angry, disconnected, and illegal tagger, and he is channeling his talent productively.  While his tagging didn't appear to have had political messages or the aim of raising social awareness, there's something fascinating about the public attention-getting that inspired it.  Certainly taggers and "legitimate" street artists have that in common. 

What I was not excited to see were the comments left by readers after the article, many of them mean and dismissive.  Most of them don't know this young man and his journey, struggles, and true character.  The commenters who know him signed under screen names.  I am more and more dismayed by the audacity of readers operating behind the mask of anonymity, or the likelihood of never seeing their target again. 

At least the Westboro Baptist Church stands behind its vitriol. 

Goodness, people, have your opinions!  Please, have your opinions; the world is richer with opinionated people.  But consider the vehicle you put them in and how you drive it.  It's okay to leave that Hummer in the garage sometimes. 

Speaking of driving, yesterday I made a rather bold left turn into parking lot traffic at Ikea, inspiring a man to snarl, "Nice driving!" at me as he passed my minivan.  I had to explain to my daughters that it wasn't my smartest nor safest move (although, in my defense I'd say it's a stretch to suggest I cut anyone off or caused more than a tap of brakes).  Honestly, that guy kind of bummed me out; I'm not so good at shrugging off negative commentary.  It's not that I don't have my own internal growling at fellow drivers running in my head.  I just think in your head is a good place to keep it.  I'm guessing the woman who gestured angrily at me in an intersection several years ago wishes she had kept her frustration to herself--after she realized I was her daughter's teacher.

I once left a comment about my experience with professional development after an article about the International Baccalaureate Program in our local paper.  When someone personally attacked me and my benign response, I identified that "someone" as a woman from another state with a website and mission to "reveal the true facts" about IB.  Though I happen to be a fan of the IB curriculum, I am interested in hearing why others are not.  But when "dialogue" opens with a detractor making broad assumptions about me and my livelihood and motives, I quickly lose interest in discourse.  Even being defensive isn't fun when you're caught in an endless loop of reprisals; I just pack up my bat and ball and go home.   It isn't even ironic that the anti-IB website has a page dedicated to bemoaning the hateful responses in defense of IB that the site has inspired. 

The Internet has provided us with an immediate outlet for our strong opinions and proclivities for spiteful backlash.  We no longer have to type, print, lick and affix stamp (steps which provide opportunity for reconsidering one's thoughts), mail our commentary, and wait to see if it's published.  We can watch the drama unfold minute by minute as we react and our responses spawn retorts.  I try to imagine the "trolls," the anonymous and often irrational Internet instigators, in their homes, at their computers.  Who are these people?  Do I work with them?  What would they say to my face?  Collectively, I suppose they represent the pettiest, meanest, nit-pickiest, and most biased and judgmental parts of ourselves. 

I have to wonder what happened to wondering.  To inquiry.  To thoughtful probing, followed by listening.   Reasonable and respectful expression of thoughts and opinions ought to beget similarly rational responses.

Let's go back to acknowledging no one is right all of the time, that being right doesn't matter all of the time, that we're all busy trying to figure it all out, anyway.  Muddling through. 

As my grandfather loved to quote, "I never make mistakes.  I thought I did once, but I was wrong." 

A little humility, I think, is what we need.

Feel free to disagree.

Best Gift

Two weeks ago Big Sis was working on something in her office, something she'd scramble to hide when I approached.  She rolled it up, wrapped it, labeled it from her to me, and placed it beneath the tree.

I opened her present this morning:  a kaleidoscope drawing of some of the special things we experienced together this year. 

She included representations of her soccer team that I "coached," the fairies we attracted to our backyard, the Jolly Rancher ornaments we made over Thanksgiving, and her second grade field trip to the pumpkin patch I chaperoned. 

Ultimately, time is what we crave most, despite all the items money can buy.  I remain convinced that the most valuable gifts we bestow upon one another are time and attention. 

My daughter's little present tells me she too recognizes and cherishes our time.  And she's wise enough to know that acknowledging and honoring our time together would be a most precious gift. 

If they weren't clear already, priorities for 2011 are even more obvious now. 

Dwarfish Dwellings

Good morning! I'm over at Gearhead Mom today, building fairy houses!

Take a peek.

Happiness

I can't get enough of this:

or these:




and finally, this:



Little Sis and her happy little world.

Something Incredible is Waiting to Be Known

Over the course of a year, our students, visual arts staff, and a talented alumna mosaicist have been working on a large-scale mosaic installation on the quad of our high school campus. I have watched this work evolve from its conceptual stages to the tedium of the daily placing of tiny tiles, hour after hour.

A few weeks ago a friend of mine was telling me about her daughter’s elementary school in Los Angeles. She explained that it was old, a special place with lots of history. Around the drinking fountains, for example, are remarkable mosaics that were installed by the Works Project Administration.

The Works Project Administration was established to provide jobs and infrastructure in the wake of the Depression. Bas reliefs on the outside of one of our high school buildings are examples of the public art people were paid to complete during the 40s. When we renovated our campus five years ago, we carefully protected those works, which are spaces of beauty on our functional buildings for everyone to enjoy.

Nowadays, such ambitious projects, meant purely to decorate, delight, and inspire, are rare. We live in a time of impermanence, when our treasured objects—computers and such—are replaceable and disposable. Architectural and decorative details are expensive and time consuming, while money and time are hard to find.

Therefore, the planets need to truly align for a gift of the magnitude and consequence of this modern-day mosaic project to materialize. There need to be people with vision. People who say “yes.” An artist who makes these projects her career—an artist who gives freely of her time and patience. There need to be teachers who invest in and inspire their students to such work as well as dedicate their own weekends and weeknights.

There need to be students who delay gratification. Who seek no individual recognition. Students who desire to be the parts whose sum is in fact greater than the whole.

We couldn't afford to pay the hands and hearts for their labor on this endeavor, which is only one reason it is priceless.

This art is, in my estimation, the work of cathedrals and pyramids: a gift to ourselves and our community and a lasting impression for generations. The students and staff who dedicated time, blood, and fingernails to 'The Cosmos' have more than its product to take away: they carry with them the experience of working together and the relationships and stories which unfolded under and above the archway to our school.

The rest of us, and those incredible students waiting to be known, will forever find a piece of ourselves in their universe.