the pleasant, and the smart

Harvey

I love to be there for upper school theater,

I particularly savor performances of young adults

whom I’ve known in early versions of themselves as actor,

and now tonight coming even more fully into their power,

I also savor actors whose past was elsewhere

and who bring their present fully, masterfully, here,

the vehicle? Harvey,

a tight flame of hope amidst the darkness

with which the tyranny of the materially real

works to supplant the flame of the imaginatively real,

as we grow up we are empowered by the tools of doing,

by the adult breadth of knowing,

and we can too easily forget the child’s tools of being,

the depth that a moment of the seemingly commonplace can have,

Harvey reminds us to hold on to the best 

that the childlike can perceive and act upon,

how to be “so pleasant” and not just “so smart.”

by Henry H. Walker

May 4, '16

a deficit disorder

reordered by nature

sometimes when I’ve found the way

to work myself up into unbridled nature,

I’ve brought within me concerns

that pull my attention away

from the spirited cacophony

of mazing forest and fluidly live stream,

that bridle me as some worldly anxiousness rides me,

I remember well a gorgeously wintry snowfall up here 

when I could only think of needing a car

and figuring what monthly payments we might manage,

visions of figures dancing in my head

when a wonderland presented itself before my eyes,

today I wrench myself away from all the “doing”

that defines me and gives me self-worth,

all the connections I work so hard to build and maintain:

students, colleagues, wife, the needs of household and garden,

all those important ties that help tell me

who I am and that give me worth,

as I drive across North Carolina by myself,

I find myself alone and scared,

I question who I am and who I could be

without the ever-present definition

of me in connection to the other,

I love other people,

I see them, feel the effort of their being,

and applaud every step forward each can make,

yet I also get tired,

most important to me? my wife,

together we make a one,

even there, though, I need an absence

so that I can reboot

and find myself more present to each moment,

on the drive I feel lost for a time

until my systems start waking up anew

and I find wildflowers on mountain top and within the valley,

until I follow through on logistics

for bringing my students up into the mountains

from whence can cometh their own rebooting,

all of us can be disordered

when we suffer from the absence of nature,

as I start to write this poem,

five kids start up the creek:

exploring, yelling, discovering, rebooting their own selves,

now I need more to hear the silence of the woods

and the self-contained murmuring of the stream

than the exuberance of kids, now healing in nature,

so I wander up into the woods, deeper than usual,

and I almost realize the center before me,

the grounding I need,

until a multitude of bugs 

distracts me into annoyance.

by Henry H. Walker

April 29, ’16

the queen of wildflowers

lady slippers

today, my feet return me

to where I hoped to find

lady-slippers, a gorgeous pink wildflower,

so exuberant and perfect in its beauty

it is as an indulged queen to other flowers,

I come around a bend in the trail,

and there it is!

I am touched,

and my camera touches it,

and then its sisters, again and again,

so that I can remember this moment of glory,

high up on the mountain earlier today,

I found “sarvis” a-bloom:
a tree exuberant,

one who rushes to be and flower

when winter slips away enough to allow it,

two days pass, and in another part of the forest,

I reprise discovery with two perfect yellow lady slippers,

who have even ruled human feet

to make a side trail to find them,

if a flower blooms in the forest,

and someone is there to see it, and appreciate it,

we are richer. . .

is it? 

by Henry H. Walker

April 29, ’16

to newly envisage one's self

Mike’s Gifts

a gift of Mike’s

is complete absorption in the world of another,

in those intense minutes together

the universe centers

and all else circles distantly

away from those grounded connected souls,

another gift of Mike’s

is a vision of how that multitude of centers

can connect and circle together

toward a rightness that needs to be,

each of us circling that of God

with love, like gravity,

holding us together with each other,

I feel the price inherent in such connection,

Gandhi’s favorite Hindu passage warned

that real lovers of God “feel others’ sorrows as their own,”

and Mike’s years of leaning into the pain

former students felt from great mistakes in the past

must have wounded him,

his empathy and action healing them

while the hurt lingers in him,

how wonderful that one can still go West, 

into the frontier

and newly envisage one’s self,

San Francisco, no longer the physical frontier,

lives the cultural frontier

where the grandness of a welcoming America

can return us to our best.

with love, from Henry H. Walker

April 24, ‘16

teacher and student, a team?

choosing more or less

what can make a good teacher?

right now, I’m feeling myself

to be a much better teacher

if my students work with me,

if they partner,

I feel myself to be so much lesser

when a student chooses to follow

each impulse into the chasm of self-indulgence,

our school is built upon belief in the child’s ability

to make the most of each opportunity,

how sad it is when a student gives in to the lesser.

by Henry H. Walker

April 23, ‘16

reality, experience, memory, picture, and word

how hard even the approximate

a picture worth a thousand words? 

maybe. . . but right now

I’m feeling a quantum loss

with either picture or words

when compared to the actual experience,

there’s transformation potential in every moment,

and in some moments wonder can burst forth

as if to make us anew,

as if to let us glimpse the glory

that spirit wants us to know and feel,

we experience, and we can be transformed,

how sad it can be

to share the words

to share the pictures

and then to feel how inadequate

the tools of tongue and camera

and even of memory,

are to experience,

I share slides and words of our Hawaii/New Zealand trip,

and I feel the inadequacy of my tools, of my memory,

of even my experience to even approximate

the revelations inherent in each time and place

we can only start to know.

by Henry H. Walker

April 23, ‘16

taught by the subconscious

truth from dream

last night my subconscious shook me awake about 4:00 a.m.,

my dream full of righteous anger and implausible story,

I thought and thought, and felt,

and suddenly my dullness sharpened,

and cut into my ignorance,

an “aha!” moment

when I realized who the driver was

of an anxiousness that can live in me,

my rational self does process cleanly, surely,

but it takes a submerged self

to slip me truth in the dead of the night,

truth I need to face

and cannot without the help of nightmare,

or even just a dream

that in itself seems of minimal power,

but that, to me, slaps me with a truth

I’d rather not appreciate.

by Henry H. Walker

April 19, ‘16