individuality within community

 

to work as a team

1st, a teacher receives classroom, students, and subject area,

and then crafts approach and activity

to meet the students where they are,

charged with helping empower them 

to venture as far as they can go,

taking who they are

toward mastery of the skills they need

to make sense of the world around them,

to learn how the world can be changed,

and how each can work to effect change 

that will benefit themselves and the world,

2nd, each teacher can be empowered to realize

that a school is a village,

that others also share the vision, and the effort,

the top of the mountain is much the same,

but the way up to the top has many paths,

the top might be a validation of the value of who one is,

and that validation can come from self

as reader, as artist, as writer, as dancer,

within a project, within a discussion,

within service to another,

within service to the environment,

within countless ways,

3rd, a school is challenged to embrace

how another's work with students and their disparate callings

actually makes one's personal efforts

stronger, more effective, more long-term,

Carolina Friends School has generated and evolved committees

so that staff can center efforts on the collective,

staff and student alike can progress so much further

because others also see the mountain

and work had to find their ways up it,

at a recent meeting of clerks of CFS committees,

a point was raised that the value of committees,

and attending the meetings,

was not readily apparent to many staff,

so folks revert to what they can control,

what happens in their own classrooms,

and easily can miss the larger picture,

our challenge as a whole staff is to understand and act 

upon how much we are a village,

and that others' efforts actually enhance our own efforts,

we are not alone in finding the way forward, and up!

the team is how the collective

somehow both enhances the individual

and also allows community to be, and thrive,

and validate us all.

by Henry H. Walker

March  5, ‘25

talismans

 holding memories

what can reach across the long years

and hold a memory of what a day really held

that mattered enough to transcend the clearing restart of the next day?

what a moment felt like when the mundane glimmered bright,

as if the sun just cleared a mountain above

and showed us a moment that really mattered,

my wife is working on a project

of artifacts, of talismans, which, somehow,

in the essence of their physicality,

serve as nucleus around which emotions circle,

images appear within that circling mist

that would not endure without having the central crystal

through which to shimmer back into reality,

for oh so brief, but oh so real, transcendence,

near two months have worked upon this mountain place

since I was last here,

a place that has long served as a nucleus for my life,

a constant, a place that stays much the same,

and allows my heart to circle round it,

I remember the time I toddled in the creek

mesmerized by water and sand,

by their dance down the mountain,

and my clumsy attempts to dance with them with boats and dams,

creations in the sand, ephemeral as sand castles at the beach,

I've returned here through all the constancies and upheavals 

of family celebrating hellos, and wrenched by good-byes far too often,

we'd always like for more to have held constant,

I mourn the people who can no longer sit around our tables,

I treasure pictures we took and saved of circles of hearts bound together

which call up the gain while also murmuring of what is now the loss,

today I mourn a great oak tree,

damaged by the Great Fire about 8 years ago,

a tree that we had to have cut and removed

for the safety of the next circles to come here,

we'll have its base there for decades

to hold memory within its table-like surface,

where each ring can murmur loudly to whoever visits

of each year it thrived across the last century,

we have a split-rail fence in the yard,

cobbled together from a few old chestnut rails from a hundred years ago,

from yellow locust rails I split myself 60 years ago,

and cedar rails a new neighbor shared with us,

the present structure ordered, and perfect,

yet it, too, will not last,

I have long been drawn to cross-sections of tree,

within which the growing and fallow parts of the year

make their mark and hold time in their totality,

as if time could be held,

I got a few sections of the red oak's lowest trunk saved for me,

they stink, though, where they're stored in the basement,

an aspect of the type of oak they are,

some talismans are challenging

in the visceral reality that circles around them.

by Henry H. Walker

February  25, ‘25

on the edge: what's below?

 

emotional hijacking

a gift of intellect

is like being given innumerable keys

that can often unlock ways of understanding,

doors into moving forward,

a gift of emotionality,

which I have received, increasingly so,

it is not so much keys

as revved-up reactions,

though even that has important revelations,

I describe myself as on edge,

already at the brink of chasms of feeling:

a moment of fear,

a moment of empathic leap,

and I am hijacked,

I am so tender to touch on the heart

that the slightest prick

and I bleed fearful tears.

by Henry H. Walker

February  26, ‘25