TEACHING

"My name is diane and I am so frustrated burt belive good things can halppen if we just do stuff..."

Recently, while using the Open Door Habilitation blog to introduce a potential volunteer to the "bells and whistles" of creating posts, I quickly typed a title for the post ("Teaching") and then, without worrying about typos or what to say, quickly wrote the above sentence to show how fun and easy it was to do these things. Which was both The Truth and A Lie.

Posting, when filled with inspiration and time to focus (as well as decent internet connection!), is truly wonderful...amazingly joyfull, overflowing with great personal satisfaction.  But it is not always easy.

One Candle Schoolhouse was like that.  It was one of the greatest joys of my life, right up there with Bill and I building PILAR and sharing our life together over thirty-four richly rewarding years. 

"Change is the only constant," I've heard said, and it is true.  To this blog I've tried to remain dogged if not constant to updating all that happened in OCS, to all the amazing friends who supported the school and the projects they made possible for the children, but I've finally had to acknowledge to myself--now to this blog and those who may still check in for updates--that things have changed so much that I cannot make full and complete the summation I'd hoped for.

While reading FALLING THROUGH SPACE, The Journals of Ellen Gilchrist, the following passage resonated so deeply with my state of change since Bill died that, though she is speaking for writers, her words easily apply to a wider audience:

"...in order to be a writer you must experience and learn to recognize and cope with periods of what Freeman Dyson calls stuckness.  In order to do creative work in any of the arts or sciences you must go through long or short spells of not knowing what is going on, of being irritated, and not being able to find the cause, of being willing to work as hard as you can and what happens isn't valuable enough, isn't good enough, isn't what you meant to do, what you meant to say.  Then you have to keep on working.  Then, if you can bear it, if you don't quit and move to Canada or call up Joe and go hiking for two weeks or quit your job or get a divorce or do anything else to relieve the pain, and it is pain, its really irritating, it puts you in a bad mood, you are irritable to children and can't focus on anything and keep changing your mind, if you can put up with it and just go right on sitting down at that desk every day no matter how much it seems to be an absurd and useless and boring thing to do, the good stuff will suddenly happen.  It may be twelve o'clock at night when you are doing something else or are in the bathtub.  It will be when you have given up and least expect it.  There it will be, the radium, the formula, the good short story, the real poem..."  

...or it may be helping a former student help Special students, or it may be planning a voyage to Baja, or Australia or Malysia...or building a houseboat studio if enough like-minded people can't be found to build a Creative Cultural Community...all 'good stuff' that "can halppen if we just do stuff..."