Cairns

Cairns #41

Beginning of the Long Days, 2005

The mission of H.O.P.E. is to turn the prow of our entropyship, the Earth, back upstream

so that Earth’s evolving consciousness may explore the headwaters of the Universe for

billions of years to come. The work of H.O.P.E. is to make visible the larger relationships

we live within - relationships that inspire visions of wonder and works of hope.

The last month has been rainy. The Central Valley usually dries and browns in early May but the world is soggy and green. My streambed, usually rocky and dry and seedy by now, is flowing and green. In fact, my whole world feels overflowing right now in ways that I will describe in the articles below. The other day I was amazed to discover that the deadline for this Cairns had passed and I hadn’t even thought about it. Wasn’t sure what to write about until I thought about it a few days and realized I have tons to write about. It’s just a question of making time and typing fast.

Spirited Teaching (continuing)

Last issue I described my exploration of “spirited teaching” from a somewhat academic perspective. But to tell you where I am with spirited teaching now, a few weeks before this class graduates, I have to switch from an academic perspective to a personal perspective. My students have opened my heart and soul; tears of joy well up surprisingly often. I have given my heart to them and in return I have received thirteen hearts in various stages of opening up to love for the wonder of being alive. I no longer think of them as kids. They are fellow travelers, soulmates. I bring wisdom, stories from experience, ideas how to extend ourselves into new territories. What they bring is a trust, a willingness to fling themselves over the edge with a thirteen year old energy that astounds me. It is a wonderful partnership. When they open to one another, when they share from their center, they are incredibly deep. Our conversations are more profound than most conversations I have with adults. I think that is why I have stopped thinking of them as kids. I think our culture’s image of teenagers is not a reflection of teenagers but rather a reflection of the spirit-soddening environments they get trapped within. I could go off on a tangent about schools, TV, consumerism and malls, etc. but I am not interested in that direction. I’m too busy soaring in the other direction.

Last week I had a most wonderful day of teaching. I offered a special Saturday trip to Hat Creek rim for a long quiet sit. Seven of the thirteen kids came. Because Plato’s Allegory of the Cave was a special starting place for the class, I decided to include Subway Cave as part of the day. Subway Cave is a lava tube that gets pitch black in the middle portion. You’re supposed to take a flashlight but I’ve gone through without light, feeling my way along the walls and ceiling. So I took the kids into the cave without lights, into the absolute darkness. The kids found something in the darkness I had not anticipated. They found it easier to be themselves. One example was how the echoey sound led us to sing. Afterwards, we went up onto Hat Creek Rim for the quiet sit. I warned the kids about three dangers. Ticks, rattlesnakes, and... and I told them the story at the end of Seeing Nature--the story of how a small bird hopped off a ledge in a way that moved something in my belly and changed my life. I warned them that the world possessed the unpredictable power to move you in life-changing ways.

After the quiet sit, we gathered for a discussion which turned deeply to their experience in the cave. Then I brought out a celebratory spring poem by e e cummings, “When Faces Called Flowers Float Up from the Ground.” We read that as a storm cloud, raining on a mountain across the valley slowly approached, heightening the energy as we exulted in the poem and danced. Afterwards, as we hiked back to the cars, I caught up with two of the girls. They were crying. They don’t want this class to end. I embraced them and, from the perspective of their teacher, said words to honor their tears.

Because the kids wanted to capture the spirit of this class for future inspiration, I had videotaped portions of this wonderful day. Coming home energized, I worked until two in the morning editing the footage into something that could express the magic of the day. The next morning, I woke up and simply watched the movie. I burst into tears. Sobs of bittersweet joy. The day before, I had allowed my position of teacher to keep me from the level where those girls were. But that morning I cried at the same level. I’m going to miss this class. And unexpectedly again, something moved in my belly.

Later I walked down by my streambed, green with water flowing in my lovely contouring diversion channels and alive with birds singing and again I cried with the poignant joy of being alive. I love being alive so much. So many blessings have come into my life. How blessed is the opportunity to dance with the world and lift one another higher!

Chrysalis’s Future

The energy of spirited teaching spills into my administrative work. Virginia, my administrative partner, and I share a deep commitment to Chrysalis because of the difference we see it making in people’s lives. Together, over the year, we have grown more articulate in the spiritual foundation of Chrysalis. Virginia, on her own, was moved to create a banner that she hung over her desk. “Chrysalis - a community of kindness, respect and love of learning that makes the light within each student shine brighter.”

I love that banner. It captures the essence that has been so hard for me to describe about Chrysalis. I can get lost in lists of its wonderful characteristics: Nature education. Intentionally small school. Kids being kind to one another. Teaching for understanding rather than covering content. Systems thinking. Mathematics taught extensively with manipulatives. Small classes. Strong emphasis on hands-on investigative science. Welcoming of parents within the school. Community service. Museum school. Kids being with teachers for many years. These characteristics are so abundant that they tend to blur out of focus. Or worse, they jockey for the position of defining Chrysalis. But “making the light within each student shine brighter” expresses the deep intent that gives rise to every one of those characteristics. That intent is why Chrysalis is the way it is.

And the light within each student-- you can feel it. You can feel it growing from a flicker to a flame in some kids. You feel radiant excitement from the kids when your teaching grows strong. You can also feel when the light dims, when it is afraid to shine. The light is palpable, especially if you structure your school to be responsive to it.

Watching my students’ light blaze this year has been very important to me because, as I wrote in the last issue, Chrysalis faces a loss of facilities in two years and we somehow have to raise money if we want to securely found Chrysalis so that it can become the powerful influence we know it can be. I have not yet felt comfortable asking for money because my heart said we weren’t ready yet. But Virginia’s banner has expressed the core from which all else flows. I begin seeing our work as extending beyond a building to a mission that goes beyond our immediate students.

A very important characteristic of Chrysalis is being a small school, around 100 students, kindergarten through eighth coupled with a class structure that gives students many years contact with many teachers which they get to know well in small classes of five to twelve kids. We are committed to this model because we see kids thriving within it. But salaries are modest and economics of scale keep whispering to increase school and class sizes. That is why most elementary schools are many hundreds of kids. We don’t want to become that. In our resoluteness and the experience that derives from that, I start sensing opportunities for us to pioneer, demonstrate, and assist others who have the same commitment to small, child-centered schools.

Unfortunately, Chrysalis is at an economic disadvantage; we are ineligible for any facility funding. Almost ten percent of the money that should go to education has to be diverted to rent. But if we can raise the money for a facility, then we can demonstrate on a level playing field the power and economic viability of an intentionally small school and we can shift from wondering whether our school will go out of existence and instead start the work of helping other small schools come into existence.

I have an idea about one way our non-profit can raise the money. There was a series of famous experiments thirty years ago. A professor wanted to investigate the connections which join different parts of our culture together. So he sent packets to a great variety of people. The cover letter explained what he was trying to do and then asked for the person to help in the following way. There was a target person: say Richard Brown who was a male, black, Protestant teacher, 47 years old, middle income, living in Galveston, Texas. Address was not given. The task of the person receiving the letter was to mail the packet (which included more of the cover letters and stamped envelopes) to someone they knew personally who they thought could help move the letter closer to the target person. The professor was interested in investigating how the letters would cross racial, religious, income lines. An unexpected finding (for which the experiment is now remembered) was that it only took, on average, six people to get from the beginning to the target person. We are more closely connected than we realize.

What I want to do is capture the spirit of Chrysalis on video and create a DVD that also contains an explanation of the facility challenge we face. There is a power within Chrysalis that I think I can capture in images that sing louder than words, sing louder than jaded doubts, that will uplift people, will have them saying “this is what education, what our next generation should be looking like.” Then I will ask our families to repeat the experiment by sending the DVD out with a personal letter in search of the target person who is one of those unknown people who will care enough about the work and promise our school represents that they will give to our school - will give at the very least the time to mindfully send the DVD on with a personal letter to others who they think will also give.

Would you like to be part of this experiment? Would you like to receive a DVD (probably in early July) that shows some of the things I’ve been describing in these Cairns? If so, email me your mailing address and how many DVD’s you would like to receive. Help us build a school that will help change education so more and more students’ light shines brighter.

The Second Solution There are certain topics I circle around and around in fascination. Each different angle brings out a new perspective that amplifies the topic’s dimensionality, making it more real, more palpable within my mind. But for some of you, it might feel like I’m writing the same basic essay over and over again. I lose track. Anyway, once again I want to write about the Second Law of Thermodynamics and what I have started calling the Second Solution – the Second Solution to the question of “How is life, with its ability to decrease entropy (disorder), possible within a universe shaped by the Second Law of Thermodynamics?”

The Second Law is basically a mathematical capturing of how energy flows; it flows in a direction that physicists would call towards greater entropy. However, flow (including the Second Law) is not simplistic. The First Solution depends (as will the Second Solution) on some of these subtleties. If you have ever floated down a river, you probably encountered upwellings and eddies. Though the overall flow of the river is downsteam, there are places and times where some of this downward momentum spins off and pushes some of the water upstream. In an eddy, the water will carry you back upstream for some distance. This water moving upstream does not violate the Second Law. The Second Law allows parts of an overall system to move towards less entropy as long as the summation of the whole system is towards greater entropy.

Life capitalizes on this allowance by creating membranes that allow harvesting. This part of the system moves towards less entropy by harvesting the energy from another part of the system, sending that part even faster towards greater entropy. This strategy underlies the biological hierarchy of organelles, cells, organs, bodies, and populations as well as the ecological patterns of food chains and food pyramids.

This first solution is our classic textbook answer to the Question which gives it an intellectual momentum that allows it to be the template for much in our history and culture. Humans have created non-biological equivalents of membranes (such as boundaries and slavery) that maintain harvestable distinctions between “us” and “them”. The membrane lies at the heart of the economic mantra: externalize costs, internalize profits. Unfortunately, the First Solution can spiral culturally down into an Enron darkness where a few executive officers draw the membrane around just themselves and thus see their employees and their pensions as outside their membrane and harvestable.

Whereas the First Solution tends to create divisions, the Second Solution tends to create resonance. The Second Solution depends on another subtlety of the Second Law. Technically, the Second Solution does not say a system must spontaneously flow towards greater entropy. It says that the system can not spontaneously flow towards less entropy. The important consequence is that there is nothing in the Second Law that stipulates how quickly a system must flow towards greater entropy. Dead and down wood, for example, can rot slowly over years or burn in a few minutes. What life tends to do collectively is create ways to slow down the rate at which parts of the system flow towards greater entropy. If such rates can be made slower than the rate at which energy flows into the system from the sun, then flows will “back up”, energy levels will “rise”, and some aspects of the world will exhibit the “magical” qualities of seeming to move away from increasing entropy.

The Second Solution does not replace the First Solution. Instead, it asks the questions “now that you got some energy from harvesting some other part of the world, what are you going to do with it?” Those species that use this energy to slow flows so that flows back up will tend to experience a more favorable environment. Those species that only harvest the system without doing any stewarding work will tend to run their environment down and encounter increasing resistance to their presence.

One of the lessons my erosion work teaches me is “offer a new path before opposing the current path.” The Second Solution offers such a path. The first solution is not the only model for our actions. Awareness of this second strategy can help diverge some of our life energy, helping more of our power soak in to nourish good work rather than run off to erode the body politic.

Gluing Rocks

Last year I experimented with putting Gorilla Glue between the large rocks with which I built wing dams across currents. High water completely covers these structures and often pushes rocks downstream. Since I have a limited amount of large rocks, I thought glue might hold the rollable rocks together into a more massive structure that will not roll. Now that I am at the end of the next rainy season, I can report that the glue worked somewhat. The bond was not as strong as I hoped and some rocks broke free. However, most of the rocks were round with only small points of contact with other rocks so their was little contact of surfaces. Despite that, the general line of rocks held together better than it had before.

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