Dear Friends, Family, Neighbors, and Those of You I Don’t Yet Know —
Welcome to this Lunar New Year’s edition of Odd Company. You might well ask, what’s Lunar New Year? It’s the beginning of a new year, based on the lunar calendar (as opposed to the Gregorian calendar, which is the one most folks in the Western Hemisphere use). The Lunar New Year festival begins on the first new moon of the lunar calendar, which happened on February 10th this year. It’s followed by 15 days of celebrations. Now *that’s* the way to party! Most celebrations of the Lunar New Year are closely tied to the Chinese zodiac calendar, which has a 12-year repeating cycle, with a different animal name for each of the 12 years. This year is the Year of the Wood Dragon. (John and I were both born in a Year of the Dragon. I suppose that bit of information could be used to calculate our age…but only if you are pretty obsessive and already know roughly how old we are anyway.)
Meanwhile, I’m paying more attention to getting my seeds organized and ready to plant. Some of them have just arrived from my favorite seed companies; others, saved after last year’s harvest, have been sitting in envelopes on a shelf in the garage since last fall. It’s time to sketch out a plan for the garden. We live in a place where all danger of frost is over and the ground is warm enough for planting by April 1. Which means that, in addition to sketching things out, it’s time right now to get my tomatoes and peppers started indoors. I’ve had all these months to prepare, but of course, I didn’t because life is such a banquet, and here we are. Almost Valentine’s Day. Time to do it!
What have I been up to for the past couple of weeks? Thank goodness there haven’t been any medical emergencies. We are almost at the one-year anniversary of John’s lung transplant, and the doctors have hinted that things start to get easier after the first year. We can only be certain that things will change, in a good way, we hope. Up till now, the new lung has been a lot like a new baby in some respects. It has required a tremendous amount of time and attention, a lot of patience, and a lot of love.
Love, as it happens, is the topic of tonight’s Odd Company. Which I will get to in my usual convoluted manner, I’m afraid.
As usual, I’ve been on a reading odyssey. Several weeks ago, I came across a brief but intriguing reference to the Space Trilogy by C.S. Lewis (probably best known for his Narnia books). I had never read it before, and it sounded pretty interesting. Wait…wait! Before you skip the rest of the paragraph because science fiction is not your cup of tea, remember that C.S. Lewis was, among other things, an Anglican theologian. Everything he wrote had moral, philosophical, and religious underpinnings. This is not mere space opera. The first book in the series, Out of the Silent Planet (the only one I’ve read so far), imagines a society composed of many different species of sentient beings, all living in harmony. This seems like a tall order, given that we humans can’t even get along with ourselves, on a planet where (maybe) there’s only one sentient species. I don’t know if any serious thinker could make this idea work except by resorting to some great, good, supernatural being with the power and wisdom to knit everything up again when world affairs start to unravel, which is what Lewis did. Keep in mind that Lewis wrote these books in England between 1938 and 1945, while Hitler was busy in Germany and J.R.R. Tolkien (a great friend of his and probably the model for the protagonist of the Space Trilogy) was — not coincidentally — inventing Sauron.1
Then a weird coincidence *did* happen. But not to Tolkien. To me. For about the last twelve or thirteen years, off and on, mostly off, I’ve been working on a non-fiction book for young adults…about money.2 Yup, I know, a non-fiction YA book about money probably doesn’t seem like my type of thing, and maybe it’s not, because…you know…I haven’t been able to finish it. However, I’ve always been that strange ranger who finds balancing a checkbook soothing, and in my checkered career, I’ve served lengthy terms as treasurer of a couple of different writers’ organizations. (They’re always looking for treasurers, because most writers turn pale and run screaming when “bookkeeping” is mentioned. Which is why we have agents.) So, though it sounds weird, it’s not really. A YA book about money — what is it, why do we need it, how do we get it, and what are the pros and cons. It sounds simple enough, but believe me, it’s not. I got stuck on the part about education and why it’s important. First I made the mistake of asking myself whether it’s worth it to go into debt for it. And then I made an even worse mistake. I started thinking I’d better define “education.”
Well, it turns out that’s quite a snake nest. Mind you, my definition of education is not the same as most people’s. My son received his K-8 education at a “school” that stopped me in my tracks the moment I set foot on the grounds…which were incredibly muddy and full of dangerous objects such as tree houses, rope swings tied to the branches of ancient oak trees, an old wrecking ball, a set of rusty wheels from a disassembled railway car, vegetable gardens, metal monkey bars, and much, much more. The classrooms, which were largely cared for by the kids themselves, had a certain patina of grime and contained even more dangerous objects such as stoves, power tools, potter’s wheels, candles, and hammers. Students learned naval history and basic principles of hydrology while playing in the aforementioned mud. They learned math while weaving textiles and baskets. They built crazy stuff, like soapbox derby racers and mobile couches. Students of different ages mingled freely. There was no homework. There were no grades. There were camping trips that lasted days at a time and required students to spend nights in the dark woods without their parents (not by themselves, but — you know — without Mom and Dad).
In short, my son was educated in an incredibly rich environment that required a lot of active engagement on his part. In the process, he got to know and understand his classmates as if they were members of an extended family. He learned how to work with others to achieve common goals; how to deal with disagreements; how to form consensus in a group; how to communicate his thoughts and concerns clearly; how to design things and make things with his hands. He was encouraged to think for himself and to appreciate and enjoy solitude. He had a considerable amount of control over how he spent his school day.
Perhaps because education has been on my mind, or perhaps because some cosmic hand was at work, I started reading a Substack newsletter called School of the Unconformed (which is a wonderful publication, by the way; I highly recommend it). Which led me to this little gem: “Why Schools Don’t Educate,” by John Taylor Gatto. Gatto was named New York City Teacher of the Year in 1989, 1990, and 1991, and New York State Teacher of the Year in 1991. In this article, which is actually the text of his award acceptance speech in 1990, Gatto lays out very clearly and concisely what’s gone wrong in our system of public education and how to fix it. When you look at it, you’ll see the education my son got was pretty much the opposite of what kids get in our public schools, and you’ll begin to understand why we have epidemics of depression and fentanyl abuse among our young. His frustrations with our poorly designed education system are palpable. They fit neatly with Seeing Like a State, by James C. Scott, whose main observation is that most of our schemes for very large-scale projects (like centrally controlled education systems) fail because…well…we don’t have enough brainpower to consider all the unintended consequences, and we don’t have enough humility to understand how limited our brainpower is.
Now we reach one of my patented apparent non-sequiturs that isn’t really. :-) At just the same time, I happened across True Love: A Practice for Awakening the Heart, by the Buddhist monk, poet, and teacher Thich Nhat Hanh. Thich writes on this topic with the kind of clarity that only comes after decades of study and experience. He’s a wonder. Buddhists believe there are four necessary elements for true love.
The first is loving-kindness, which is not just the desire, but the *ability* to bring joy and happiness to the person you love. This requires understanding the person, because if you don’t understand the person you love, you might accidentally cause him or her to suffer.
The second element of true love is compassion. Again, this is not just the desire to ease someone’s pain and suffering. It’s the *ability* to ease the pain and suffering, which — once again — requires a deep understanding of the person and the nature of his or her suffering.
The third element of true love is joy. As Thich says, “If there is no joy in your love, you can be sure that it is not true love.”
The fourth element is freedom. When we love truly, we bring freedom to the person we love. The person we love must feel free, “…not only outside, but inside.” Thich suggests asking this question: “Dear one, do you have enough space in your heart and all around you?” The person you love must not feel that they have to please you or sacrifice for you in order to have your love. Which I think might mean, among other things, that true love is unconditional.
There are some additional things to remember here, and one of them is that before you can understand someone else, you have to know and understand yourself. In today’s world, that can be a pretty hard thing to do. We are bombarded with messages about who we ought to imitate, what we should like and dislike, even what we’re supposed to need. Imagine being a young person trying to figure yourself out in the midst of all this craziness. What’s required is time to think, which means peace and solitude. Now think about what Gotto says is missing from the lives of our children. We have cleverly left out of the curriculum time for our kids to really get to know and understand themselves and others. We haven’t left time for them to love themselves, or others, or the world, with any success at all. No wonder things are such a mess.
I would say I’ve gone on long enough for one night! I’m going to close with a song I’ve heard probably a thousand times in my life, maybe more. It’s an old favorite, by an artist who’s only a teeny bit older than I am — though he was not born in a Year of the Dragon. The British singer/songwriter Cat Stevens (also known as Yusuf) began his career as a pop star around 1970, after a bout of tuberculosis that almost killed him. That near-death experience has long given his music a spiritual bent. “How Can I Tell You” asks a question many have asked before him, and since, without receiving any very good answer. “How can I tell you that I love you?” As a writer, I know that a better question would be “How can I show you that I love you.”
The answer to that lies in the words of Thich Nhat Hanh. Be present for the one you love. Be there. Say aloud, “Dear one, I know you are here, and it makes me very happy.” Learn to see it when the one you love is suffering, and say to them in voice and action, “Dear one, I know you are suffering. That’s why I’m here for you.” If we could all do this, we wouldn’t need any wise, all-powerful rulers. What a different world it would be. Till next time, may you know peace.
Just an aside. I think this is part of the appeal of Artificial Intelligence. If only we could invent a vastly wise and compassionate being and then give it the power to stop us from doing horrible things to each other. The obvious problem is that the sorts of people who see themselves as marvelous models for this vastly wise and compassionate AI are disqualified — because they are arrogant enough to believe that they are vastly wise and compassionate. Sigh.
Working title Mom’s Little Red Book of Capitalism, or The Horror of Money. Lately, this book, as unfinished books will sometimes do, has been scrabbling around inside the trunk where I put dead manuscripts, making little moans late at night like the guy in “The Cask of Amontillado.” Figuratively speaking. Which is why it’s been on my mind. Maybe.
Nancy. Reading your blog always makes my day brighter. Thank you for that!