Cairns #43

Beginning of the Long Nights, 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.

I was awakened throughout the night by flocks of geese flying overhead. We live about 50 miles north of the Central Valley wildlife refuges that are the southernmost point for many migrating waterfowl. The geese coming overhead feel like a great body nearing the end of a longm exhalation, pausing before the next inhalation.

Ever-widening circles
This week my eighth grade literature class worked with two Rilke poems: The Panther and The Tower. I like doing the two poems together because the first is about a caged animal’s spirit/will that is circling inwardly down while the second is about the poet’s spirit/lifepath circling outwards. This second poem has the line, “I live my life in
ever-widening circles.” My eighth graders had a hard time understanding what that line might mean because they are only a little ways into life.

During our outdoor discussion, someone noticed a cluster of escaped helium balloons floating upwards into a blue high sky. Kids could relate to the balloons so I had the balloons be the topic for the day’s “quick write” which eventually led to one of the students’ doing a mime of the balloons being released and floating upwards. He did a great job which inspired other kids to try which led them to asking me to do it.

Now, one of the characteristics of “spirited teaching” I’ve written about is the willingness of the teacher to model what we want to have emerge in our students. So when my students ask me to do something, I try to do it with full immersion, no holding back. So I became a balloon, bobbing and swaying and twisting the way balloons on strings
do and then being released, finally floating out of the room, bobbing down the hall and out the door - much to the delight of the class. After class, Mercedes came up to me with a big grin on her face and asked how I could do that with a straight face. Her question caught me by surprise. It had never even entered my mind to laugh because I had
been the balloon who was floating away. There was lots of wonder and delight and apprehension but nothing funny - from my point of view as a balloon.

But then her question took me back to my high school days and the really great tympanist in the Portland Symphony Orchestra. He had an aura of total presence when he played that would just keep drawing my attention back over and over though out a performance. I learned that he had a national reputation; he did solo and small group performances throughout the nation. I attended one of these performances. At the end of one piece, he started moving crazily throughout the room percussioning on every available surface in the most slapstick humor
manner. We in the audience were laughing uncontrollably but that did not break him out of the frenetic intensity of his increasing craziness. Afterwards I went up, a wondering high school boy, and asked him how he could keep a straight face through that performance. He answered “because that was how the music was written to be played.” That answer was beyond my comprehension until he said it. He brought that ability, that perspective into my consciousness.

Now Mercedes’ similar question brought me full circle but it was a widening circle because the first time I had been the child asking an adult who was capable of something I hadn’t imagined and now I am the adult capable of giving that answer to a child. I live my life in ever-widening circles.

I shared this essay with the class. It led into a wonderful discussion of what can lead our lives to circle wider or not and what the kids would like their life path to look like. Their writing assignment became -  describe an encounter you’ve had with an adult that opened you to new possibilities.

Chrysalis and my DVD, The Upward Spiral
I was hoping that this issue of Cairns would be a DVD of my movie, The Upward Spiral. However, Chrysalis is consuming most of my energy this year. We need to find a new site for the school by the end of this  school year. This requires fund-raising, which is a whole new realm. Plus our charter is up for renewal which is creating an important opportunity to stand back from the day to day workings and look at Chrysalis within a bigger context and refine aspects that can make the school stronger.

This bigger context view is exciting. We are making some important changes in the school structure that I believe will make the school much stronger. We are exploring the option of seeking sponsorship from the county which would then make us a countywide school of science and nature. I’m working on better defining our nonprofit status so that when our waiting list grows long enough, we can create a second small school and hopefully others after that. Growth through the creation of other small schools will require developing administrative infrastructure and developing a pool of teachers who teach in a Chrysalis style.

But before all this can happen, we need to find a site for next year. We are hindered by the unequal funding charter schools receive. We receive no facilities funding so we are currently spending 11% of the funding that is supposed to go into our educational program on acquiring facilities instead. Money is tight.

Congress has created a small window of opportunity that might help us with facilities. Concerned that Hurricane Katrina relief would absorb so much of the charitable giving that all the other non-profits would be left high and dry this year, Congress passed H.B. 1378 which was signed into law on September 23rd. It creates an enormous tax advantage for individuals donating cash before the end of the year. If you itemize deductions, check with your accountant about the provisions of the Hurricane Katrina relief bill. You might find that you could donate to our school’s 501(c)3, Chrysalis’s nonprofit organization, and help us achieve our mission while also helping with your taxes. Send checks made out to Chrysalis Schools Nonprofit to 1155 Mistletoe Lane, Redding, CA 96002 and we’ll send you a thank you letter that documents, your charitable giving - along with heartfelt thanks from me - the one who is carrying the main responsibility for making sure Chrysalis successfully makes the facilities transition.

Since this advantageous opportunity for donations expires at the end of December, I ask for donations this one last time. My intention for Cairns has always been that it is a gift from me to whoever shares parts of the visions that lead me on my life path. I never intended it to include fund-raising requests. I hope you all understand how
important Chrysalis is in my work and how this facilities issue dominates all else right now. I hope my requests have not diminished your enjoyment of Cairns. All help is most appreciated.

Let me know if you would like to receive a copy of the 17 minute DVD I made about Chrysalis.

Katrina
In case you didn’t read about it, the Hurricane Katrina story contained an example of the Gaian principle of “It’s easy to see what the wind is doing to the tree. It’s harder to see what the tree is doing to the wind.” Historically, any storm surge in the Delta region has to push through miles of marshland which both absorbs and slows much of the
surging energy. In one estimate I read, every three miles of marshland the storm surge must push through reduces the storm surge by one foot. Human alteration of the Delta eliminated much of this energy-absorbing marshland and so more of the surge reached New Orleans. We keep assuming the environment is a given, not realizing that life alters the environment. Our “given” environment was created by and is sustained by life.

The Realness of the Upward Spiral
We’ve had our first two rains, about a week apart with very warm weather in between. Went on my first rain walk of the rainy season on the day after Thanksgiving. All the seeds have sprouted and are growing taller and taller. All the gully bottoms will be well grassed by the time the first gully washer happens. It’s raining again as I write this.

When I go walking in the rain, the world of upward spirals is so real. The shape of the land, the way gopher mounds work, the feel of the softening earth, the smells... It is all so real. I’m aware that the way I place my feet on the slopes of the earth can influence how runoff flows. Every aspect of my living is influencing the world. The visions
I pursue are not theoretical, abstract, or idealistic. It’s the way the world is. And how much fun it is to play in the fields! When an area shifts from a downward spiral to an upward spiral, when a bare dirt gully bottom grows full of nitrogen-fixing legumes... Ah, what opportunities for majestic magic we are given with our gift of life. 

And now, a few days later, the first large winter rain came in today and I spent all day walking in the fields. This storm fell hard enough to get the drainages beginning to flow. One of the main drainages received just enough runoff to Start flowing. I capitalized start to emphasize start. I could follow the “foot” of the stream as it flowed down the gravelly streambed about one foot per minute. Ten yards upstream, the stream is two feet wide and flowing like a regular stream but at the advancing edge, so much of the flowing water is sinking in to saturate the gravels that progress is slow.

This advancing stream came past the junction with a major side drainage I’ve been working within. Previously this side drainage came out of its final gully, flowed across a ten yard long alluvial fan and over the terrace’s cut bank to drop into the stream. But not today. I’ve turned the foot of this side drainage so that it now flows along the terrace parallel to the stream for a hundred yards before flowing into the stream. That hundred yards absorbed all of today’s runoff - and probably 80% of runoff from the big storms’ still to come. All that rain is now held on the terrace. Without my work, the runoff would have been both eroding the cut bank and helping swell the stream more quickly and pushing more water further downstream faster. I am changing the shape of the land so that more of the water is held higher in the watershed. I like to think that I am helping (along with the grasses and leaves and gophers) the land evolve a more intelligent shape. It’s a dance between the winter rains, the soil, the shape of the land, and life.

Seeing
Have you experienced the psychology mindbender that presents the names of various colors in different colors? The word RED, however, will be spelled with blue letters and the word GREEN will be spelled with yellow letters and so on. The challenge of this Stroop test is to go quickly through the list and correctly name the color of the letters. So if the word RED is done with blue letters, the correct response is “blue.” For most of us, the brain jumps to the symbolic meaning of a word so automatically that holding back that response and focusing on actual color requires great effort.

An interesting experiment was done using hypnosis. The experimenter hypnotized subjects and gave them the posthypnotic suggestion that when they would take the Stroop test, they would see the individual letters as designs that carried no meaning. Those subjects who were responsive to hypnosis could go through the list easily because they experienced no cognitive conflict.

The eyes and brain are massively connected. As signals travel from the retina into the brain, the signals get processed through many dimensions of content/meaning. It is not a simple transmission of an image of a flower straight into the brain. It is much more complex, much more creative than that. Interestingly, people studying this
process and the involved circuits have found that the majority of the processing and circuitry is not in the direction of eye to brain but is, instead, in the feedback direction of brain to eye. Output from the brain is constantly monitoring, overriding and altering the input coming from the eyes. The experimenter hypothesized that it was this ability of the brain to override input that permitted the hypnotic suggestion to work

My intuition whispers that these processes underlie the expression “the eyes are the window into the soul.” As a teacher, I know that eyes are very important. So much communication can happen through the eyes that strangers often won’t make eye contact. I’m hypothesizing that the circuits these experiments are examining will contribute to our understanding that vision is as much active transmission as reception. I hypothesize that this feedback of the brain is causing subtle shifts in where the eyes focus, in tensing or relaxing of eye muscles and tear ducts, and that these subtle shifts are information-rich communicators of who the person is in this exact moment.
 

Copyright 2005 by Paul Krafel

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