Mei Afeilah Le'Orah - From Darkness to Light

Lately I've been taken by the photos and questions of Carla Kimball. I am grateful that a educator with whom I have been corresponding about spiritual and emotional teaching mentioned this site. Carla posted this one without a question, so I will use it to associate freely (though I believe that associations are about as free as lunch). As I type, Keep Mediocrity at Bay is playing on my computer. Coincidence? As Descartes said, "I think not" (right before he disappeared).

I like the contrasts in this photo between dark and light and up and down. It reminds me how life and people are filled with opposing forces.

Two pieces I read recently, from which I will share excerpts, also got me thinking about disparities and distinctions, befores and afters:

"If you can't understand it without an explanation, you can't understand it with an explanation." - Haruki Murakami -Town of Cats, New Yorker 9/5/11, pg. 70

"Nothing prepared me for the loss of my mother. Even knowing that she would die did not prepare me. A mother, after all, is your entry into the world. She is the shell in which you divide and become a life. Waking up in a world without her is like waking up in a world without sky: unimaginable." - Meghan O'Rourke, The Long Goodbye, pg. 10

It's 9/11 and that's a big one in terms of befores and afters. I remember saying on the morning after that the world was coming to an end, not saying it as a simile or a meaning it as a metaphor.

What is it about even numbers that we make them matter more? Is the tenth "anniversary" of 9/11/01 more worthy of memorials than the ninth?

Speaking of befores and afters, I just started my sixteenth year of work in my school. Fifteen years feels like a milestone. I'm grateful to G-d for the opportunity to teach so many souls. On the first day of school I told a younger sister of a former student that I remembered fondly a comment that her older sister made in class 5 years ago. After class she approached me and asked me to share what that comment was, and she was appropriately impressed by her sister's wisdom. It was a nice moment of nachas. Another student was comfortable enough to tell me that she was uncomfortable being called upon (for now) in class when she hadn't volunteered on her own. I was glad she took me seriously in my offer to the class for any individual to tell me privately if they were shy about participating in class. I got the idea from a student that I am guidance counselor for. I met with him on the first day of school and he told me that in some of his classes speaking up was pressed by the teachers and he was very introverted in class and preferred for now to not be called upon when he hadn't volunteered. I asked if he'd like or not like my speaking to his teachers about this. He said he'd actually very much appreciate it and so I spoke to my colleagues who were understanding. So much has already taken place in three days of teaching, such a rich realm. Thank G-d.

Ten years ago today felt like a normal day of life as it began. I was sitting in my classroom before first period started as I trained myself to do - be there to greet the students as they walk in (that way they believe that you live and exist only for their class, in their classroom). One of my students was there early too. He was listening to the radio on headphones, to Howard Stern. The student, J.K, has since explained to me that Howard Stern has access to myriad news-sources, generally for his own purposes - but sometimes, his audiences hear a news story first. I believe that J.K. and I were the first ones in our building to hear that a plane had exploded when it slammed into the World Trade Center...

I'm writing in stints throughout the day, switching from topic to topic, keeping in mind the picture above and the topic of contrasts. I just put on the radio and an Irish version of Let It Be is playing on WFUV. The other day a colleague made my day (thank G-d my day often gets made many times a day) by telling me that he gave FUV a chance and it's now his station (when we were in his car together and I suggested it, he was turned off by it and turned it off, another switch).

Here's a Poem Billy Collins wrote a year after the attacks. He has only read it publicly twice and refuses to make a penny off it, so he's never put it in any of his books and will never do so. He was asked to write it and read it to Congress, at first he resisted, but as Poet Laureate at the time he eventually agreed:

The Names

By Billy Collins

Yesterday, I lay awake in the palm of the night.
A soft rain stole in, unhelped by any breeze,
And when I saw the silver glaze on the windows,
I started with A, with Ackerman, as it happened,
Then Baxter and Calabro,
Davis and Eberling, names falling into place
As droplets fell through the dark.
Names printed on the ceiling of the night.
Names slipping around a watery bend.
Twenty-six willows on the banks of a stream.
In the morning, I walked out barefoot
Among thousands of flowers
Heavy with dew like the eyes of tears,
And each had a name --
Fiori inscribed on a yellow petal
Then Gonzalez and Han, Ishikawa and Jenkins.
Names written in the air
And stitched into the cloth of the day.
A name under a photograph taped to a mailbox.
Monogram on a torn shirt,
I see you spelled out on storefront windows
And on the bright unfurled awnings of this city.
I say the syllables as I turn a corner --
Kelly and Lee,
Medina, Nardella, and O'Connor.
When I peer into the woods,
I see a thick tangle where letters are hidden
As in a puzzle concocted for children.
Parker and Quigley in the twigs of an ash,
Rizzo, Schubert, Torres, and Upton,
Secrets in the boughs of an ancient maple.
Names written in the pale sky.
Names rising in the updraft amid buildings.
Names silent in stone
Or cried out behind a door.
Names blown over the earth and out to sea.
In the evening -- weakening light, the last swallows.
A boy on a lake lifts his oars.
A woman by a window puts a match to a candle,
And the names are outlined on the rose clouds --
Vanacore and Wallace,
(let X stand, if it can, for the ones unfound)
Then Young and Ziminsky, the final jolt of Z.
Names etched on the head of a pin.
One name spanning a bridge, another undergoing a tunnel.
A blue name needled into the skin.
Names of citizens, workers, mothers and fathers,
The bright-eyed daughter, the quick son.
Alphabet of names in a green field.
Names in the small tracks of birds.
Names lifted from a hat
Or balanced on the tip of the tongue.
Names wheeled into the dim warehouse of memory.
So many names, there is barely room on the walls of the heart.

I was struck by this performance by Paul Simon.

A new interview with George W. Bush about 9/11 has just been released. It's taking very long to download and yet the ten minutes I've been able to download and watch so far - over about an hour - have been very moving. He speaks in a personal, vivid, confident articulate manner as the story of where he was and what he did around these attacks is told from the start.

I could keep on writing but it feels like time to post what I have here so far and then look forward. May we all be blessed with healing and peace. Perhaps the most moving line I saw or heard all day came from Marv Kaminsky, "We have a world to fix."