Priceless Pearls

I've written to this theme before: Pearls.

But I do like to laugh over irony. Priceyness has been before my eyes lately, related to the teaching our kids via more, more, more mandates.

Pearls, oysters, and shells became a symbol for me early in my life from a sermon I lived. Forgive the preachiness; I am ever on my soapbox, and I'm climbing up here Sunday to share these thoughts.

Within a life of looking, a pearl can be found hidden in the most interesting and unexpected places. You may well be a pearl: actually, I know you are. The pearl to polish inside myself was revealed by an art teacher, Sharon Goodman. And for a few minutes I want to revisit this studio of youth--a little luster of those days.

Mom paid about 4 dollars a week for me to go to Sharon's big, old Victorian house and become a part of her family doing art projects and drawing. In terms of money, this was about $100 short of market value. Or in human terms, I just owe her my life.

We printed, drew, framed, matted, chalked, oiled, waxed and made. One project that I liked was when we took big paper milk cartons, tied the middles with string and melted crayons for color, put in a wick (tied around pencils or dowels suspended on the carton top) and layered with wax layers our molten mess (we melted them in an old frying pan). Great fun. And as I recall we kids got to do the melting and pouring with her guidance. Do you see this nowadays?

A kind of bent looking candle resulted, like a building with strange angular references. Very wonderful. Once it hardened into form we then tore away the carton. Mine was very cool. In this time I took it that the "rest of the world" was doing exactly, well sort of exactly, kind of, what I was doing. Making things, exploring, trying out projects, out and about. Summer of Love times. Maybe everyone was too high.

Taking a rock which might stand as projectile or weapon and finding a creation. We did that... then. Pet Rocks...for me, now painted rocks. In another project I remember Sharon, who as I think back occupied the faceless role I seek, had us do a process she invented. She called it Antique Crayon. She may wrote to me, upset at my sharing...because Sharon does let me know her touchstone is ever there.... First we crayoned pictures on tag. She would get paper from the printer's--so early on I was also learning the technical aspects of art buried within the life and projects of my teacher. It was not taught as "academic rigor." She would get papers and we would try and use them in our working language. Different papers for different processes, paper as a starting point for what we might do. Invent. Sharon loves paper. It speaks to her. It speaks to me. Papers are for me a kind of connection to earth and deep sensual emotion. They are felt as skin is felt. Luscious. I like to run my hands over paper and stroke. Odd perhaps to some, perfectly beautiful and a touch of what skin is for, natural caresses. Papers are calm like hugs can be and reassuring and I forget sometimes the pleasure one finds in them. Rediscover it as I go to make a drawing. Sharon had such a joyful day the day when she saved enough to buy big art drawers to hold her papers. I need to do the same. It says, I have used my resources to feed my heart.

Anyway to return to project on our tag, which was a heavier slicker paper, we would crayon "very hard" our pictures. Inevitably, without an "image" starter, I drew flowers. And then as we finished Sharon had us cover this with India Ink. Nowadays this is so expensive! For a bottle like hers I'd have to save. (And I do actually in teaching, this is what I buy.) Somewhere in the years after my youth the prices of the pleasure of making things became too prohibitive. Engagement with the arts became only possible with greater purchasing power. It became the industry of craft. Mom and Pop art stores re-framed as corporate chains. And arts and craft is the domain now of a far, far different purpose. In my days as teacher, I spent to bring bead and quill, berol and linoleum to my students. For kids. Wonderful kids. Still do, of course. Anyway there is an old news paper from Greenfield CA when I was thin and young and wearing rubber gloves--me doing this inking step as I started my teaching there in that community. I'm mostly just a smile. After smearing the work with the rich, black ink you rub it off with oil. Using of course a brush for ink, cloth for oil.

What is revealed is an image darkened, given a different relationship to you as viewer. To children this is very big.. Your idea in a different realm or construct now stares at you, of you, but different. Like my reflecting now on my writing.

What Sharon made was a visual metaphor.

Step through time with me to understand my teacher, a woman of few "words." What Sharon was doing, I see now reflecting after years of also doing this work, was framing thoughts. She is creating a vehicle with the materials and the model making, so that she could on the surface talk about light/dark, about space in the pictorial plane. What she was doing was having you take an image and "ruin it with ink" and re-find it, CHANGE IT , re-discover it anew with capacity to speak to you in a different form. She was inventing with arts a kind of material construct to speak to the way of mind. From the dark to the light.

Sharon was a parabolic. Always.

Through her examples I began to see that, as we go into the teaching world making these mats , we are forever cutting and referencing, for she was always cutting and making mats, she was making another metaphorical construct. I guarantee today she is still cutting her own mats, this was her way of saying we frame. We select how to present this work we create. We are active in this. We pick this area to highlight, this color to off-set our 'artworks' if you will based on this way that we want to look at something. We retain the rights, the beauty of the art of presenting our work. But it is seen within frames. Either of our own making as Sharon modeled or framed, or sadly as in today's canned curricular dependencies, elsewhere at often times great price. I think this is a frame I'm choosing to enact to tell my morning stories.

Freda's Bedroom

Our neighbor in Morgantown rented my father a Victorian house for about $150 dollars a month. Very cheap in 1965-70. I grew up in spaces that were fascinating, back staircases, drafts, cockroachy basement cellars, attics, woodwork, pantry cupboards. A story book house. My Mom saw leaks on the wallpaper from issues in its structures. I saw the "talking babies". (When my eyes unfocused babies talked on the walls in images made from the floral papers.) Rich old floral papers were in every room. My bed barely dented the spaces in my room. My closet was probably the size of my daughter's room now.

Freda Vandervort was the gracious, stately queen next door that rented to us. A regal, fair, good queen that I served loyally all my life. Her death after I had my son, I mourn as the passing of the ages it was. My life connected to 'another time'. She shared her home, next door, with me so that as child I knew every drawer, closet, attic item she had. Wonderful cook. Her daughter Anise, married to the basketball coach, impacted my life too as a kind of dream-mom. Freda shared her garden where she focused her life in a daily sense, her snaps we could pinch into dragon mouths, her Snow on the Mountain, she shared with me. "Have a seat," she would say, pulling out each day the red chairs made of metal to sit under the grape arbors out back. We would tumble into our afternoons, and watch bees and birds feeding in the rock spaces where she grew her Lily of the Valley, phlox, roses, clematis. My father loved plants; he and Freda had a deep bond. With her my father was a man of goodness. With her everyone was a person of goodness. They rooted rhubarbs and forsythias. They talked plants. He gave her a strawberry garden. And plant advice. He treasured her blood-red peony--it was so rare and so old. Her garden was full of ancient root stock and pieces of the past. He knew that. I listened.

We walked in her yard everyday to note changes in the kingdom and talk about what mattered. The beauty of the life there. Oh, I forgot the azaleas. But I just turned to catch them with my minds eye. Yes. They were wild, and the varieties of them rare. I see these. In my hometown some of us saved the plants from deep woods. Freda would give me her time as if I were a duchess; she poured an iced tea or had cookies made. She probably taught my brother to read when I hauled him over, in her big red chair.

Long ago, before she married Hu she was a teacher. But on marrying the older Hu S. Vandervort, she became of course the queen. I don't know how this happened exactly. I could have asked. I just didn't consider it. I spent 30 years in her life. And before she died she called me, about to have my son in CA, to tell me she was "not going to make it". In her 90's in her thoughtfulness and in her concern for me and in her awareness of our relationship and my years of loving her reign, she called me to bid me farewell. Oh Freda, no. And tears come. I was unable to escape both the way she did this and her acceptance of this. I did hear a bit of a child in her, as Merlin might foreshadow for you. We go to death as child. As I think we all approach not knowing, reaching for guidance. And so, a month later she died. And this age passed taking with it so much knowledge and wisdom that I will morn for the rest of my days. The stories of recipes, amaryllis, dresses from balls in the 20's she gave me, the memories will have to wait other telling, for Freda is helping me think this morning about priceless things. Pearls.

One of the things that was true about her, though I didn't really think about it, was that she had no income worries. Freda's husband was a community figure, dying when I was younger, a good man who owned the Sanitary Dairy, and as they say he invested well. I actually thought he was a gentle lamb, a treasure. And he was the first death I felt. She was left without money worries, really. Money. She did not buy obsessively, or even at all that I ever saw so I knew of it not as a feature of her days, other than sending down to the little pop's grocery for her supplies for the week. That went on her tab as we picked up the box of stuff. So once in a very, very great while she had the palace, her home I loved, renovated. On one occasion this was the bedroom, her bedroom. Not many ever saw it, but I certainly did. Do others venture in such a private space of a queen? And it was not my lack of boundaries either. She invited me into these spaces. We were comfortable with each other; she trusted me with knowledge of her. We were ever friends. I could and did tell her anything. I'd not hesitate today to tell her the truth of anything. And I'd never need to say anything but truth to her. So it was. She created that context for me. This is what we do. We create contexts for our interactions. To be in truth one must be able to accept the other and whatever lies within them. To Freda I shared my only tellings of darkness in my home. And never was I judged. Never. And there is something else I must add, we spent a tremendous amount of time together, I never recall a correction, angry word, conflict. I don't understand this but it was light to the dark. I knew it was my true home. It was for me, peace. My definition, she framed this in actual space.

Freda's faith lay in people, so she hired a "decorator" from a store she knew in town and favored. Once favored, a person or business did no wrong. Her loyalty was a very complete one. This meant they did no wrong, and the decorator, at least to me came in and installed a veritable Baroque Louis the 14 hilarity thing in her Victoria spaces. But she accepted this. I do not really know what else to say. It was "done" this way with her.

As a bedroom centerpiece the decorator had a very funny issue to 'manage.' I had painted for her, as a birthday present, the other side of a cereal box, cut it out and turned it over to make a painting of flowers with some junky dry temperas. This was where he was to "find" the colors, she told him. Can you imagine how he felt about that? I can still see his face. So that was placed there as her art, there was a vase with sunflowery kinds of flowers I'd junked out one morning AFTER eating my Captain Crunch and tearing apart the box to see if I could use it somehow--one of my quirks. She loved it. One wonders.

I knew it was just a kind of homemade product.

So as she took me upstairs to show me my painting, I was kind of worried. When she took me into her room to see the "results" of the renovations , and I'd waited weeks and weeks for ever for this as I thought the decorator a true peacock, it was to me a pretty good laugh. I think she had the upstairs bathroom done then too, and come to think of it maybe after Hu died she wanted the space they shared as man and wife to transform now he was gone. Anyway, there in a frame that could easily adorn Ingres, fit a wall in the Louvre, there under glass was not a pheasant caught- but my little effort of youth framed with at least a foot and a half wide frame and mats. So much gold gilt I had to blink. I saw then, knew then, understood then, the true peasant nature of my soul.

I knew then, saw then, the extent of her capacity for funding, but mostly I knew then and saw then that I would never fit in the worlds of monetary refinements and kingdoms, but into the heart of this woman my art hung on another kind of wall.

And I knew that I was going to hang there as symbol to this queen of the love she and I shared for the rest of her life. A simple valuation.

Money served Freda , she did not serve money.

Heidi's Black Pearl

I teach with a friend.

She has shared time and space with me over 14 years. She came into teaching as an accident, falling and tripping out of a time of desperation. Her job as an addiction counselor was almost crushing her, with what it asked of her psychologically. She says she was being pulled into a darkness, and that if she had not run when she did it would have sucked her to her death. I believe this.

Teaching seemed, as she says, 'easy' and it would pay benefits for her and her child. She was standing when we first met, on yard duty. I had been told that the sub (for a teacher in 6th out on a nervous breakdown, if you had seen her class you would understand); well, that her Dad had died that night. So I went out to comfort her. I believe I have been trying to comfort her the rest of these days. And like all such things there is a symbiotic relationship between need to give and need to take. As it happens that morning she was, as she likes to say of me, disassociated. I don't know these words. In fact I deliberately eschew these kinds of terms, labels, jargons. I'm a peasant, maybe. I am as I stated a picture on a cereal box sitting in the rich bedroom facade of a world gone mad.

Heidi stood as if paralyzed. As if in her inner spaces a dragon had attacked in the night and she was viewing her kingdom burned to ground. She is another queen in my life, one of a lost, burned kingdom of Long Lost/And Never Was. She often reaches for the symbol of the dragon , maybe wanted one to revenge this. Maybe not seeing that it symbolizes her battles with the ravages of traumas. Not seeing the flames of this burning her core until the fury unleashed permeated her being in its anger over the unfairness that she was never really a child.

She is presently writing her Ph.D on stages of resilience in people, as she is ever battling inner dragons to reclaim herself/that Kingdom of Never Was.

Anyway that morning her love of father, his good and his bad, for he was actually rotted wormy in core, his sudden death--she said to me then she thought of suicide--was a broken end to a polluted dream. She talked so much about the getting rid of the horses (he owned a horse ranch but was a dentist), it struck me then all the talk of horses and her close connection to animals a defining core strand. Her Dad even owned a hippo. He was in love with exotics and animals. Maybe more so than his kids. Yes, more so than kids he left hanging. The not getting his money or wanting it, these things she spoke of, I did not know what it meant but it stayed in my head as the puzzle of her as she shared. People are ever puzzles to me, riddles to "solve". But I have lived these last few years to know some of her truths. To understand this friend within the context of a place she strives to be resilient, or names resiliency while standing in the flaming breath of her inner dragon fire. Hip deep in charred burnt earth. I don't know, I always see Valhalla. Hear Wagner. The images override me.

Heidi loves the movie Heidi.

It's idyllic, a child sent to the Alps to be with grandpa. It's pure as 'snow on the mountain'. It has the freshness of mountain laurel and rhododendron I once breathed. It has the truth of love and the understanding of things that will for this beautiful child work out, must work out in 'the end'. It has a kind of fairy tale quality I suppose. My Heidi is very bold and brassy. She is contradictory. Loving the things of money. Noticing what you drive, your necklace, always seeing when your shirt is on inside out, she calculatedly attains these things she needs as her goals. It is for her, how it works. She moves you around towards her goals always. She is slumming in our hood where we work, but afraid she is the hood where we work at the same time, due to her 'fall'. . .She sees the children often times in ways I do not, pointing out a possible victim of sexual abuse or the right time for the assembly or the ways that the test is to be done. She has this as her surfaces. It's awfully easy to be caught in this mirror. Awfully easy. And as I can through empathy become others awfully easy, for me to be as her is a personal issue, if not careful.

I often am saying to her in my inner self, "Mirror Mirror on the wall' . She has expensive hair to care for and botox, she is rail thin now after a decision several year ago that this would improve male relations. She would think of men as something one carefully evaluates and selects, one entices with beauty and catches in a web. I see this way of being in most women in the areas of California I know that they are "up and coming" American Big UV Dreamers. She is always dressed in style. She is contained within the world as it is defined today. Coach pursed. And she often translates this to me. It's not that I don't see it. It's just that I see it clearly when I live with it her as her bold metaphor. For me she is the construct of our present times. She's in pain. Deeply trying to grasp what matters. And working antithetically. Choking for believing something matters. She is almost truly cynical. But she is trying to find a way out.

Because as well as this surface she has another being there this is just as is true for America and it awaits the building of circumstances I think to call it forth. She is one that was very hurt young, torn, ripped, mis-told. One who did not have Freda's and Sharon's. I know this. It hurts me for her. Would that I could give these well-springs of mine to her. She faced the brutalities of dollar realities, false gods in her family economics of mattering, vendors at doors of temples to meanings of love just bought and sold. Corporate-commodity life in familia. She is searching for resiliency as she needs the ways to survive these days going by her all so wrongly. She is facing her dragons. In her life Heidi can, if you look and listen, rapidly see to the inner truths, see contradictions. She needed this to survive the ravages of an alcoholic, cold, she says borderline mom. She kept things floating because this was required of her as she walked in flames carrying her inner child out of the burning houses. Now for her everyday is the quick trigger of knowing to flip from good to bad. Instantaneous disbelief. It is for this being I am often there. I hold her. I hold her. I hold her. It is to this child in my arrogances and my foolishness, blindness and imperfections I hold out two banged up warty hands. Ones she just gave a pedicure and manicure gift receipt to for my birthday. I see that for children I can join our classes together to do art and projects she fears. She fears creativity. Nothing speaks to me like this. She cannot trust her own creative life giving energies. And this saves us in the end.

She structures and pre-plans and controls, but she is drawn to my life in this moment. Both of us responded to early life fires in very different ways. I am often then when doing the lessons either taking over or pulled into chatting. Chatting which is too negative and too likely to draw me to mirror with sarcasm. Because I think Heidi believes that she cannot really be saved from this. Believes in hell....And I say NO, you are good. I think she is remarkable, has so much, but inside I find she's trying to keep alive an ideal she believes is dead but is so afraid to check for breath. And into our hood she drives. And into this hood I drive.

This said I return to pearls......... I bought her a symbol this Christmas and gave it to her later, but purchased it factually on December 19th. A very real day, at least for me. As I have blogged. I drove to the malls in Thousand Oaks where I just look ridiculous. I found a Tiffany's Pearl store. I forget the name but I've known it. I loved to walk in Tiffany's when I'd go to New York to look in my early 20's, as if another museum, where I was always treated with respect... oddly...so obviously broke. Another starry thought, in the 80's. Anyway I went to look for a black pearl. She says she is the Black Sheep but she is really the Black Pearl. So I went to find it. I find in my friend a kind of beauty she cannot see yet. But she battles to name it. And so I got for her something I could never get for anyone else.... In a place I can't go without feeling I'm out of my depths and I hoped for some help in the universe to get this right. I bought for $700 a pearl that was just so strikingly large and beautiful. Rich black, large on a leather strand. A pearl that was elemental in what it says. If you need to have a real statement, a symbol, if you need this as validation, they put it in a box to tell you....you are riches and treasure. And money serves me this way. But I was talking really in her language--my meanings. Buying it to say something of her values. Not so much because I believe in this but more because I wish I could buy her joy. I'd give a life for that for a friend. For one I love easily. Wouldn't you?

Societally now this was "good", it was after all buying. But this was also beautiful in and of itself. It was a symbol of the wearer's inner beauties. When she wears it, it reminds me of how I really know her to be.

A pearl consumed by the falseness of the money changing here in our society and dichotomies right now. An earthly form ripped from home and placed on pedestal and sold into a kind of slavery.

Priceless

Teaching to tests, phonics-driven, price-driven buying constructs...to the basals and the mandates, scripts and the store-bought corporate models of the present move, the move to turn our world of child into the business of child. Like moving the pearls from the beauty of the ocean and beds they grow into the cold calculated world where they are graded, framed, set and sold. Some in the process are seen priceless, others flawed, still others as worthless or deeply flawed and discarded. Such is it within money economies. Pearls not as pearls, each treasured in the joy of discovery in unexpected places, but rather as products. Displayed and used as ornament.

Many want to purchase our pearls and also to buy the "best" neck to hang them on, another feature of the times, and to polish and set them around these selves as decoration, to affix them into a here and now of monetary valuation to show legitimacy, status, rightness, our value and our place in the spaces of human community. As another kind of symbol. Many seek pricelessness.

This reminds me of what was and what is.

For me it is the Author Camelot and Merlin truths I am telling today. It is a logical extension of our codes and conducts. As my school reaches and demands the children achieve a Standard, as it takes materials that do not fit the needs of my children, as it forces drills and "kills", not my term, as Direct Instruction places words and then ideas directly into the mind of child to assure the child is properly trained in values, being "there" doing this as a teacher in an "under-performing school" I just sense or see a shop selling pearls. But in my responses to this, over which as I stated Sharon taught me my frames to look and understand are best made by myself I find myself talking happiness and my looking at my sweet little aquarium of summer. (By the way, if you are following my summer aquarium, it is clearer today, sweeter, I'm hoping it's coming into its own. My frogs look good, swimming for up to surface for me. My little fish which cleans my water world happily looking at me, he is dear. I think he is funny too as I sit watching him right now on the wall by the heater. When I realized the chemicals harmed them and the adding them as a dump was not the thing to do and started water changes with pure water things improved. Got a bit of faith and learned about what was going on chemically. I'm so attached to this project. I think I may not be able to take it to school, and need to start one there with my class in the fall....This tank is very dear.)

My fish bowl leads me into the thinking of a person "assigned" this task of teaching from purchased materials and scripts, trainings and "ways" that disguise actual shifts that are all about the values in education and what we are there to do being co-opted.

The vehicle of this NCLB stated control of the materials and practices, the calls for same pages and same days is no freedom bell tolling. Perhaps it's an invading usurper taking the engine as driver of this kind of relationship away from us. We are here to have and hold our child, now decided as necessary by another? Or outside our frame? The framer of a picture for the Louvre is now a very mercurial tasking master. Walking with that box of gilt to surround our artforms and nail it up on command. Or destroy the cereal box pictures altogether.

But I am no gilt pearl diver nor lover of frames bought in the store that has the heavy glass doors blocking my way or giving me anxieties about my rights there. Not really. I want to make my own mats and hold my pearls in the palm of my own two hands. Look, look what I found.

I placed here on the site a while ago the prices of a year in my first grade spent to book companies for our "reading program". I could talk until blue about how a library and a few sets of literature and some free technology for damn sure can do the same with some guided reading practice sets, but the fact I learned in one small reader that cost 13 dollars suffices to make the point. What is being taught, precisely in the text that you see which I call the Billion Dollar Baby Store. I have studies on this for sharing very soon. What is taught is the corporate way.

A piece of what is dolled out under the present NCLB based regime in the mandates of education of our children, and under the edicts , rules and regulations, dollar upon dollar upon dollar is going to these kinds of company supplying friendship wink-nodding enterprises that must matter very much. It must matter so much that any boundary or thought that it can't sit on the shoulders of a child's future, our world's children's future, can be overridden with platitudes about the "good" it brings. Because if money is good, more money is more really great good and think of all we can then buy the kids.

I took the girls yesterday to see the 5th Harry Potter movie. This book was one I read ill, really ill, after one operation. Hard book. I was trying to recovery from anxiety, reading sets of my daughter's books and painting to try and pull my mind together. In this particular book the Ministry of this wizard world has gone way wrong and following false notions planted by a monster that can't even be named (a genius construct, look how hard at present this government works to stop the Naming of Parts) , twisted and without truth this Ministry is intruding into the school. Not even considering another point or perspective. Teaching as if indoctrinating. Indoctrinate, someone has to. Humm.

Rowling is to be commended for her clarity.

In the form of a professor Umbridge (as in, I take "umbrage," I think), who comes to teach, a take over is staged, backed by the fear and threat of the ministry power structure. This and the hate constructs and the truths of this I know now are poisoning my teaching world to be sure. It is why I write. . .She creates edict after edict, disparages their prior teaching, assigns "proper and Ministry approved" curriculum, which means nothing. This is done to actually help you in a life she states. Utter irony. I love how she bullies the adults, causing them to fall to silences, and hurts and damages kids in literal and metaphorical ways. A case of compare the deeds, methods, their working ways to the platitudes. It would be a very damn good thing if presently we might have a few people taking this on in our Muggley world and in our schools.

Umbridge is authoritarian, rules-based, rigid, controlled. Her rules, well, rule. She is the centerpiece in this movie for a wonderful parody or perhaps parable about what has happened in our world, right now. And I think Rowling, again, very brave to take this form to make a frame, to create a piece of art so that we might in the words of a book I have respected, "know ourselves.".

In this movie I had a kind of support system response...someone knows and can use art to tell our kids they are in a bad construct...validate it for them as art can do....so I may go see it again today if the girls will indulge me. I may go alone to just feel. Validation.

But I do have lots of lessons to ready to teach next week. But may just wing them and go to see a good movie. In it the parallels to my place in space , they are there. It's something I thought about anyway. And the thing I want to look for today is how she connected love and friendship and standing for something to speak out about this process that was destroying the education of these children as what saves her main character in the end. She has the children rise up to fight it. To think for themselves. The children have to "do it for themselves", fight dark powers at work in their world. Ultimately I like art because a child has to make their own, even in the most canned and contrived projects there is a maker. And making EMPOWERS. You get personal power, same in my relationship to music and I suspect so in sport. Rowling has the ability to speak to these kids in her words. Ah......yes.....the ones NCLB is removing from our shelves. In a book outed by the Right as the craft of a witch. The story I read is the structure of Christ's work, the stories of the Bible, the Torah replaced into a child's garden, but, then who am I. Only one reader. One in love with joy.

Ah yes the literature, these little pearls I teach are not now to know or read, ah yes, in there 'best interest' we are destroying the "bacteria". After all bacteria is so very BAD. Maybe the beneficial bacterial in our homogenization, if you will let me run back to my fish tank for the comparison, serves some purpose. Maybe literature is a well with the cultural mixes of information sharing and risking we need. Maybe we can read it and decide for ourselves. Maybe we should model trust to teach with a wide variety of thought. Model creativity to teach it, model tolerance to teach it, model openness to teach it, model peace to teach this, model sharing to teach this, model compassion to teach openness and read from many views....hum, does it work?

I'm back to my fish tank for a second. In my tank so far I've learned something. Dumping in a bunch of chemicals, meaning well, kills fish. Even if your directions on the bottle of the bought stuff tells you to do it. You need the experience of a fish keeper to figure that out. I've learned that an eco-community needs time and care to balance, it can be a mess if you are not aware of the true thing you are doing. I had no idea going in, I just wanted a cool tank with beautiful floating fish and frogs, but find myself taking my class through the ways nature works, through notions of cycles of life, through the problems of this little eco-community . My tank is teaching me another thing altogether. You need bacteria to process waste. Or you choke to death on it.

And so...applying that into the Harry Potter's movie's message to me...you need the arts.. touching on the ugly truths, the demons, naming the dragons, looking at the real children,inspiring, uplifting, imaging, framing and re-framing, looking at what money buys and what it just doesn't in human spirit. You need to process our bad to know our good. You need the this and the that. Our heart and our happiness is built as a process of finding our pearls, knowing them and knowing what we are going to buy, allocate, treasure and how we are going to use our resources and TO WHAT END.

As I watch the money changing....

Gladys Pearl

Finally I knew another Pearl.

My grandmother who came from several cultures. One hidden by her family to survive at a time when her very self was a thing to be eliminated. Actually leaving Europe early in the century in their wisdom seeing the future of their survival as as she once said to me "not good". So they were Americans with family overseas that became lost. This process stole away her religion, here in her marriage she adopted a new one. She would say gained it. And not so long ago this happened, some family of mine might be here today for me to know except they were burned to toast. She trained to be a nurse in the influenza crisis of our early century in the then Jewish Hospital in Philly. She was early on to understand something of germs, life , death nursing. I believe she was to marry one of the doctors there who died from the influenza. And got rather stuck with Harry Lucas. Heart burned. She nursed many of the personnel who eventually got too sick, or were lost facing the crisis of that age. Grandma always told me that she got the influenza very late when she felt it was weaker an observation of hers that has come to be validated in a scientific way. She was a very doing daily things simply person, mostly silent in her older years.

She told me stories of her life, ones I barely hold onto which makes me mad at myself. I would go summers to visit her in her house in a deteriorating part of St. Pete. She was raised in Doylestown, PA and her family owned orange groves in Florida and stands on the Boardwalks in Wildwood and Atlantic City, NJ. Eventually she was violently mugged on her street in st. Pete and rather funnily afterwards my uncle gave her a gun for protection and she checked it and shot it through the mattress where it was hidden. She was no person to ever understand nor touch a gun. She had a kind of practical nature, A kind of abhorrence for the passions of life that my mother carried forth as guilt piece, she was often cleaning and a day in her life was a kind of wash the dishes, scrub the floors, eat the applesauces, watch one soap(go figure), scrub the floors, cook the greenbeans, a truly dullish day to some. She took me places when I visited, thought she should. At 14 going together on the bus to see a dolphin show for 5 year olds. This kind of thing. My cousin had other evening plans for the two of us to counterbalance this. We were kids.

She got terribly forgetful. It was early stages of Alzheimer's which I fear. Later my uncle to claim her home and a few thousand dumped her and two dresses and 1 pair of shoes at my house in Morgantown and a good bit of college was watching Gladys Pearl get into trouble.
She had a knack for that. She'd look at the roses and say tuna. I'd get so tired at not being able to talk or be understood always followingher as she tore up papers or threw food down the heat vent or one day plugged in the fry pan cord and watching me run drop the end in a pan of water causing me a hell of an electric shock. Or the time she poured the gallon of milk in my yarn basket as I watched again unable to cover the spaces in the time needed when dozing off meant she had time to get at something. It was very unnerving to see her do these things because above all she valued being good, fair, honest. She still read beautifully so I had her read me the Bible. Oddly my half Jewish grandmom was wedded to the Bible. New Testament. With no ability to talk sense, she always retained the ability to read. She could read anything and even read with expression. Nothing comprehended. Not a word.

Much like I think school is working for many kids today.Well certainly at the moment this summer school group I have that say sight words and some English without a clue about the meaning as they've been drilling the workbook as innane tasking.

Grandmom actually had in her home in Saint Pete her grapefruit tree. That smell of citrus always takes me there. She had her moth balls which may be be why she developed the dementia as she rolled in them to prevent mildew. She had a simple existence with little figurines of the seven dwarfs from Snow White on her little living room shelf and my great grandfathers long thin paintings of water birds on her walls, she had her church friends, her few necklaces that matched dresses she sewed herself and her good heart and her life in these minutes finding simplicity an answer.
Grand mom looked at me as rather dear, but needing pruned I'm sure. Benignly, but aware of my living out in other realms. All my grandparents respected my talents and mind and ALL at one time or another said I was 'different' and thus special and thus something that had the capacity to matter. All of them identified what worried me as my gift. All of them were wise in these ways.

When she came to stay with us finally for the three or so years before she died I stayed up with her and what struck me was how the deterioration of mind frustrated and demeaned her and brought her childlike fear and needs for reassurances and help. Sometimes, too much, grandmom was reduced to being dependent on me. Something she never had been. And I was astounded with the feel of that responsibility. in a way overwhelmed, afraid myself. I might have responded with rigidity. I might have dumped her in a home to free myself. i might have wallowed in frozen apathy or given in. Instead I used her lessons of a DAY at a Time and tried to find something pleasant in the days. Hard but also good. Life.
Such it is taking on the life of another as caretaker. She was someone I loved.

When I love someone it is felt in me daily forever.

What this Pearl taught me was the value of our loving one another. The frame I chose then was to see this change in my life as she came to live with us as something of the dark and the disaster but the way of life as it strikes into lives. And we pull together. Our love makes us reach for our real selves. And to be truthful at 19 you are struggling to understand and nothing teaches quite like taking on things, feeling unready and unable and finding you have to use your mind, heart, head, hands.

Grandmom lived on a tiny pension from her days working. It amounted to, with her social security about 480 dollars a month. She didn't even know to collect until she was 72. She owned her house. Worth about, in that neighborhood $ 17,000 today. She spent her monies as frugally as one can, but always sending me and my brother 25 dollars every birthday/Christmas/Hannukah and to my 12 other cousins the same. Or working it out now as an adult about two months of her income. I recall her saying to me that when she needed it, somehow, the money came to her to live. She had a couple small family inheritances I think she was referring to. But it flashed me to Buckminster Fuller saying when he worked for money he was always broke, but when he could do the work he valued which he thought helped mankind, then he seemed to be doing fine. My grandmom reminding me this morning that some applesauce and a nice piece of bread really was what she needed. Her funds for us in her giving loving way. Money where her mouth was..... the dollars she sent us kids which I always used to buy art supplies was for me greatly treasured.

The pricelessness of these pearls of my life have worked as my frames for actions and for seeing. From this I feel the importance of placing happiness and life in this now, in creativity, and in supporting making and doing above the falseness of 'purchasing' or of spending really to get that which isn't available in a store marked 'good instruction' or 'education" or even the how to of teaching. Teaching is a life process of trying to figure something out.. The meanings of it are in the doers and using the resources while important, is so secondary to the intents and the reasons of thesecreativities that can, can be found in teaching.

I'm just so sick of canned bought trash for kids. I'm so tired of it . It is making disconnects for me psychologically. I am not going to be "ordered" to say something like a puppet with 6 year olds and lap up my pay and "be happy". My bliss is in the love I have with discovery, thinking, my loves, my heart outstretched in a process I define as the freedom to be who we are.

Pearls of great price spring forth from our garden, it's shocking in that very good way to find them, they are not cultured and purchased. Our pearls are walking right there at our legs tumbling into us, asking for a nice oyster lap to sit upon and to read a very good story.

13:45 Again, the kingdom of heaven is like unto a merchant man, seeking goodly pearls:

13:46 Who, when he had found one pearl of great price, went and sold all that he had, and bought it.