Monthly Archives: February 2008

Say Yes to Spirit

February 29, 2008

Today I was listening to a couple of cassette tapes on my drive home from Pine Ridge.  We’ve been sorting (and clearing) old stuff and, in the process, many fun things have bubbled to the surface.  Today, it was two tapes from The Prophet’s Conference held several years ago.  I didn’t attend but a friend of mine did and loaned me the tapes.  The first one I listened to was by a couple who wrote a book called The Digital Aboringinals.  (Philip Tarlow?)

The presentation was, oddly, about how blogging and the internet are recreating a tribal mind–something long absent in our history.  They said the connections come quickly these days and merge so fast that hardly a single person can say “I did that.”  I was thinking about how hard Milt has been working to get us more connected to others via this and other blogs and websites.  What they said made me more determined to continue posting.  I have had a few subscribers the past week and will soon send out a newsletter.  (Sometimes I suck at even letting people know what I am doing.)

More importantly, though, was the second presentation.  His name was Albuerto V. (I’ll have to see if I can read the writing on the old tape).  He was talking about shamanism and the connectedness of all things.  What struck me as I listened to him talk about the “earth peoples” (trees and rocks and rivers) and the people who still listen to these ancient voices (and some who never stopped) is that this is frequently the underlying theme of my fiction.  Suddenly I realized that there seems to be a wall between the me who is living here on earth and the characters I create who really do remember to stop and listen and be.  Then Albuerto told a funny story about how when spirit speaks we need to listen and then say “Yes” to what it tells us.  He joked about how spirit calls him and gets a message that says “Hello, you have reached the body of Albuerto but he isn’t in right now and will get back to you.”  When I respond to the call of one of these “earth people” stories, I usually respond.  It may take a few weeks or months–but I do respond.  Albert’s Manuscript I wrote in 6 days and it feels like a prophecy story.  One Drum also, and Silver–so many stories centered in the heart of earth itself–and all telling us (me?) to listen and respond.  As I listened to the tape in my car while driving the many miles of Badlands and prairie once again, I realized that I have said “Yes” to spirit but then I have clung to the work as “mine” instead of passing it around as I am sure the earth peoples intended. 

Earth People Fiction–could I create a new genre? 

So, my decision.  If you are interested in any of the Earth People stories I mentioned above, I’ll send them to you in a pdf if you request it.  I can’t post entire novels here but I will send Albert’s Manuscript, One Drum or Silver to anybody who requests it.  I’ll consider you first readers and invite comments and suggestions as they are not yet published. 

What is Spirit asking you to do?  Are you listening and saying “Yes”?

Jamie

By Jamie | Posted in About Being All You Can Be, On Writing, Uncategorized | Comments (2)

The Gardener

February 26, 2008

 I’ve been dreaming about spring and setting in blueberry plants on the land we bought that once belonged to my grandmother and grandfather.  It’s as if I can see those glossy green leaves and the pale white berries emerging from infant plants.  I’m told I have to pluck the blooms the first year to let the plants grow strong.  I’m not sure why this makes me think of education again, but I times think of the amount of empty praise that children are peppered with when they are young.  They begin to think that everything they touch is golden and, unfortunately, are not asked to reach for the learning in the same way a plant must reach for sunlight and moisture in the soil. And then later the information comes at them like a hail storm. 

This week I was beginning to think I ask too much of my developmental English students.  Everybody seemed to be struggling with the meaning of dependent and independent clause, the difference between an active verb and a verbal.  I was feeling discouraged and had the urge to “teach” more.  Instead, I did the opposite.  I backed off and asked them to please reach for the information–we have the tools right here, I said.  Work together, I said.  Help each other figure it out.  And then I left the room.  I can’t say miracles happened while I was out of the room, but when I came back in I saw students working together trying to figure out what the heck we were learning. 

At the end of class I asked them to do a “one-minute paper”.  These tiny slips of paper are always anonymous and they can questions, make comments, tell me I’m moving too fast or too slow.  They also rate their understanding of the current topic with a number from 1-6 with 1 being “still in the dark here” and 6 being “so strong now I could teach it.”  One quiet student didn’t hand me his slip of paper and I wondered about that.  Ten minutes later he caught me in the hallway and handed me his one-minute paper.  He’d written both front and back and put his name on it.  One sentence said, “I know we didn’t have to write are name but I just wanted to say that English was not my fave subject but with a teacher like you I’ve been learning a lot the past two weeks.”  (the “are” instead of “our” is his, not mine)

His little note washed away all of my discouragement.  I know that not all of my students are “college material,” but I do know that they truly were “born to learn” as my mentor Rita so believes (and I do, too).  I figure if he takes back a bit of his power as a learner, gains a bit of confidence, is able to express himself even when he lacks confidence, then I am in exactly the right place doing the right thing. 

Back to my future blueberry platch.  It seemed like a strange aside to stray into education but now I understand.  I am a gardener at heart.  I love the things that grow; vegetables, berries, trees, students, brains, human beings, spirits reaching for nourishment.  And in order to grow, we all need to reach. 

Since I began this with thinking about my grandparent’s land that is sitting under snowdrifts 12 hours away from me, months away from planting anything, I think I’ll end this with a piece I wrote about my grandmother a long, long time ago.  She used to scare me half to death but, as I grow older, I see more and more of her in me.  Here it is with a touch of today added.

Grandma Dolly

I don’t know what my Grandma and Grandpa did for a living.  Whenever we visited they were both home all the time.  Grandpa had a shop off the side building, a ramshackle old building that was half garage and housed a bright, red-orange Oldsmobile with rounded plump corners and a brightness that made the whole farm look shabby.  The shop window made the dust sparkle in the sunlight.  The door faced the south out onto a grassy field that led to the railroad tracks.  It had an edging of trees with hazelnut bushes squeezed beneath them and Grandma would make us collect the nuts and spread them out on the roof to dry in the sun.

Were they farmers?  How come I don’t know?  At the front of the shop there was a small apartment where Great-Grandpa lived until he started smearing shit on the walls and curtains and Grandma couldn’t care for him any longer.  The apartment only had one bedroom lined with bookshelves with great Grandpa’s books and a squeaky-spring bed piled up with old blankets.   Great Grandpa always had lemon drops for us kids.  He died when he was 98 year old.

Grandma Dolly grew sweetpeas on the corner by the apartment.  I loved to touch the brightly colored flowers crawling up a trellis until Grandma would scream at me to keep away.  And if we went into the house she would say, “You kids get out of doors.  Now.”  She was the only person I knew who could say that in such a menacing way that we would instantly scatter.  Her bright orange-red dyed hair, about the color of the shiny olds in the garage, was like the devil’s flame on top of her head.  I was terrified of her and used to wonder how my sweet daddy could have ever been a little boy with such a flaming, angry mother.

The garage, the house, and the woodshed formed a small triangle of space.  In the center between the buildings was a huge tree.  A long strong rope hung from the tree and an old canvas mail bag stuffed with old clothing dangled from the rope.  I thought it looked like a dead man.  We would climb the dead man and ride him as if he were a god and not a dead man or we’d take a running leap and hit the canvas bag with our bodies so hard the wind would come puffing out of our lungs with an oomph.  It was the best swing.  Sometimes I would just sit on the old bag with my cheek on the scratchy white, smelling-of-trees-and-dust canvas bag and swing it slowly or wind it up tight and let it go.  I got dizzy from spinning and from thinking.  There were six of us kids then and I just couldn’t figure things out.  Only the three boys stayed with this Grandma.  Mom and the girls stayed with her mom, my “real” grandma. 

I wondered if Grandma Dolly just didn’t like girls-or if it was me she didn’t like.  Or maybe she didn’t like anybody really.  Both Grandpa and my dad seemed like gray ghosts of men around Grandma Dolly.  They stayed outdoors as much as we did and Grandma stayed inside with her Miller beer and cigarettes unless it was time to pick beans or strawberries or time to stoke up the woodstove in the shed to make lefsa.  Grandma wouldn’t use any of those “new fangled” griddles that you plug in and would only use the wood stove in the cook shed.

But oh, it was good.  I even wondered about that, about how something that sweet and buttery could come from her grumbling and cursing in the hot cook shed.  And she grew a garden that went on forever.  There were rows and rows of strawberries and every vegetable I could imagine.  And she made a white, creamy garden stew with only her own fresh vegetables and real butter and cream.  Later, years later, I tried to make a pot myself and felt guilty as I dumped a cold, lumpy frozen sack of vegetables into the pot. 

I began to garden.   For thirty years now I have planted a garden in the many houses of my adult life.  And I have made garden stew-the real deal–and lefsa.  My lefsa is pretty good. 

And I still don’t know what my grandparents did for a living.  Now we have bought a bit of their old land and I’m planning to put my own berries there and to go each summer to tend the garden that my grandmother began.  And maybe there is just a little bit of Grandma Dolly in me after all.   

By Jamie | Posted in About Being All You Can Be, The Education Crises | Comments (3)

For Tom and Erica

February 23, 2008

A few posts ago I included a personal essay about the night my son, Tom, was born.  The post was about how I originally did not want a third child but how his birth proved to be one of the great gifts of my life–and still is.

Last night Tom called to tell me that he asked his girlfriend Erica to marry him–and she accepted.  They are now engaged and planning a wedding.  We talked again tonight (at length) and the thing that stood out for me more than all the other things we talked about was his tone of voice as he described Erica’s reaction to being asked to marry him.   It was so clear to me that he loves her–and that is all that matters to me.  That he loves her–and that she love him back. 

 I have another piece of writing from many years ago that I wrote about Tom.  He and I used to go to Hardy’s–me for a cup of coffee, he for a chocolate chip cookie and the chance to drink my little tiny cup of half and half.  This personal essay was written when he was still in high school.  Now he is 22 and lives and works in Denver, CO. 

This is for you, Tom.

 

Tomorrow

When my son was little, we formed one of those funny little bedtime rituals that now I can’t even remember where or when it began.  I would pull the blankets up around his ears tucking carefully and then, rather than saying “good night,” I would say “mañana”–the Spanish word for “tomorrow..  It was such a simple little word; but so forward looking, and it always seemed to send the energy of this day into the next.  Sometimes, I’d walk down the stairs already anticipating what good things “tomorrow” might hold. 

Now my “little” son stands a full six inches above my head and is striding toward manhood with a speed that makes me dizzy.  I have a huge regard for this young man-child.  I see him ask questions, inquire deeply, and grapple daily with reconciling the restless movements of his body and soul with an educational system too confining to accommodate such vast energy.

Oddly, his late evening routine of chores, homework, and shower always ends with him tromping up the stairs, turning his wet head and saying “mañana.”  I’m convinced that this tiny, positive ritual has acted somehow like a silver rope across the rugged, mountainous terrain he now treads.  It ties him to who he is and all that went before even as he now moves forward into what has not yet been mapped. 

Recently, I heard a wonderful Elder Lakota woman speak at a workshop.  She said we should always use words like “sweetheart, precious, honey, and pretty one” when we speak to our little children.  These words, she said, call their young wandering spirits back to us.  She explained that these young spirits are always off exploring other realms and it is important that they be able to find their way home again.  When we yell or use harsh words or call them names they can’t find the way back to us. 

This is what our small ritual has done.  When I say “mañana,” his spirit instantly returns from wherever it has strayed to and he remembers both where he has been and where he belongs.  He also remembers to anticipate what may come “tomorrow”.   And this is the right order of things. 

By Jamie | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (0)

On the Edge of Winter

February 19, 2008

This past weekend I decided it was time to return to the blank page.  Over the years I have done morning pages (Julia Cameron) and writing practice (Natalie Goldberg) on a regular basis.  It is a strange thing to come with no ideas, no inspiration, nothing to assure me that my writing spirit has not taken refuge (escape?) in the humdrum of daily life.  I never know what is going to happen and it is a bit scary.  I sit, have a cup of coffee, pick up a pen that flows smoothly and doesn’t “drag” me back, and then I wait.  I write about the weather.  I write about how important it is to dive in.  I write even when I don’t know what to write about.  And then . . . it is like a pulse or an energy or something comes into me and it begins. 

As long as I live, I will take that chance and see what happens.  There are so many people who run from that little pause–that empty second (or decade) before something comes in and takes the spirit for a pleasant ride.  Oh, how I do love that. 

Last week, a little boy seven years old who was bored, bored, bored met a funny little guy named Professor Den Drite who introduced him to the magic nation (his own brain).  And this past weekend it was old Simon, a character that appeared in my novel, Silver, and it now taking on greater dimension in my current story which I call simply, Still Mountain.  I made many discoveries about Simon as I scribbled.  He is old–many centuries old.  He is the master storyteller at Still Mountain School, a special camp where children who tend toward stories are taken to develop their capacity. 

All in process at this point.  So, below is a fun little piece that I wrote about my own creative process with writing.  I hope you enjoy it. 

Spring is very near.

Jamie

The Empress and I
(First published in Byline Magazine)

Once upon a time there was a little girl growing up in Blueberry Country where the swamps breathe, and the trees stand like soldiers, and everywhere there are jeweled lakes.  The land is so beautiful it forces her to learn language so she can speak of this beauty.   By seeing she becomes intimate with tiny, white spiders on a wild rose.  By hearing she learns to sing a song of wolves and birds.  By feeling she discovers the intricate design of a single snowflake on the back of her hand.  Finally, out of sheer frustration and unrequited love, she learns to write.

For one hundred years she writes, scribbling words on paper, filling page after page attempting to capture the beautiful gifts earth has given. 

Later, she sees the Beautiful People of the land linked also in some mysterious ways to the trees, and lakes, and sky.  She watches them, seeing lines and colors form landscapes of emotion on their faces.  With pen and ink she paints them.  She writes of the sigh, the tender thigh, and the repose of sleep.   She writes also of hidden cruelties, sticky loyalties, and the power of a single tone of voice.   All is caught in her search for the right word, the turning phrase, the rhythm of language and souls. 

When the girl comes of age, she tucks pen and paper into a pouch, asks her parents’ blessings, and leaves Blueberry Country to seek her fortune in the City of Writers. 

For years she wanders, seeking her place among the unfamiliar tribes known as writers.  Many try to discourage her from this foolish path.  Only one in a thousand, they warn, find the hidden City of the Writers.  Others, False Prophets of the pen, read her babbling-brook stories and explain that she really must not let the brook flow so freely but contain, restrain the fluid thing and they torture her pretty prose until she no longer sees it as her own.  Some living on the shadowy edges outside the City of Writers ply snake oil, luring into the promise of fame and fortune–for a price.  It is a painful time for the girl and she relinquishes the scrawling pen, determined to turn away from this dangerous pursuit.  

One day she enters the vast empty lands of the Great Plains.  The girl is profoundly confused by the lack of trees, the missing lakes on this dry, rolling lands and thinks perhaps she has found the moon.  Surely there can be no danger here of the land itself coaxing her to speak. 

All is well until, alas, one day she drives into the Black Hills only to find the hills them selves begging for the use of her voice and pen.  She begs them to release her. “I simply can’t.  It breaks my heart.” 

But the wise, ancient hills ask the fated question, “Can you not?”

And so she turns again to the empty page and submits.  She submits to the hills, and to the land, she submits to the blue ink pen, and the lure of her own soul, and she submits her pages to their fate. 

After many years, she takes her simple stories to the Grand Council of Literary Writers, bows before them three times and asks their exalted opinion.  The weary Grand Masters hum and sigh, nod and smile, leaving the truth and its pursuit entirely up to her.  The girl gathers her stories and leaves, more unsure and discouraged than ever.   

Along the weary road, the trees again stand like soldiers along her path.  They too hum and sigh in a language she cannot grasp and, once again, she submits, aware only that she knows not.  

Returning home, the girl goes to the river where the current is strong and flowing, and the water crystal clean, and she strips naked, shedding all the garments and coverings of her body and soul.  She strips off all desire, disappointment, her greatest aspirations, and lays them beside the pile of garments and then, at last, she steps like a newborn into the river and dives, seeking now only the deepest part of the river and her own spirit. 

By Jamie | Posted in About Being All You Can Be, On Writing, Uncategorized | Comments (0)

Blunt Force Impact

February 16, 2008

I’ve been listening to old talk tapes that I’ve made in the  many years of speaking to people–NLP, constellation work, education.  It has been an interesting journey to hear myself during the past years of doing what I do.  Today I listened to one that had my first husband, Wayne, on it.  He was laughing and loving NLP the way we both did when we discovered this amazing technology.  It was good to hear his voice–and although we didn’t make it as husband and wife, we had three great children together.  He was killed in a plane crash while flying his own plane.  It was the most difficult time of my life, and especially in the lives of my children.  Below is a piece I wrote many months after.  Lisa, Tom, and Nichol, if you are checking in on my blog, this may hurt a bit.   

Blunt Force Impact

The top of my bedroom dresser is buried again.  Outside, the sky is brittle blue, and there is snow on the ground.  On my dresser top are stray socks, bits of paper, stones, jewelry, a dead telephone, a newspaper clipping, and things I can’t yet see.  Deciding it’s a good day to clear it, I empty tissue paper out of a shoebox to begin with one thing empty.   

This sudden need to clear my dresser top is a distraction.  I just reserved a motel room at the top of Rimrock Highway, a place to retreat to in order to finish the final paper of my master’s program.  I asked for room number nine on the second floor near the rocky slate wall rising above Rapid Creek.  In my mind, I see the room–have been there three or four times already.  It smells of dust, old carpet, and too sweet deodorizer but it has no phone, and it’s cheap.  Except for the creek running below the rock wall, there’s nothing to distract me.  The position paper is on “belongingness”.  Ironic, I think, to retreat from my husband, my son, and my eight-year-old granddaughter to write about belonging.  Sometimes we step away in order to see more closely. 

On my dresser top is a boarding pass from Luthansa Air.  Last October we flew to Germany to interview Bert, a man with a deep soul who’s written a book on the hidden orders of love.  He spent a lifetime studying the high cost of belonging.  Americans are restless, he said, because we seek our ancestors.  We landed in Frankfurt and took a train to Kufstein, Austria where I felt strangely at home, familiar with the bits of lace on the edge of table runners, the red and yellow salt and pepper shakers, and the paper doily beneath my coffee cup.  My grandmother’s family once lived near here.  I didn’t know them.

On my dresser top is a single small, tan pebble with a light streak running through it.  It looks like the tip of a finger.   It came from the concentration camp outside of Dachau, probably hauled in with a load of rough gravel to keep the mud and memory from seeping up.  Atop my jewelry box is the small yellow booklet on Edith Stein, the Carmelite Nun who died at Dachau.  The nuns have surrounded Dachau. 

Belonging.  It holds the submerged energy that fuels wars, splits families, turns one against another, and gives the illusion of innocence when guilt is the only reality.  I sort the stray socks on my dresser top that have lost their mates, separating his from mine, seeking the lost ones.  Beneath the socks is a small leather box from India or Guatemala purchased in a third world store to support the workers from other nations.  Beside the leather box is another stone, this one from Vermont, gathered on a silent walk during a seminar on structural thinking following the trip to Germany. 

Where do we belong? Does human behavior link to long ancestral lines, hidden forces operating within the larger family of origin?  Or are we subject, in a chilly way, only to formal structures dictating action, emotion, and experience?  I resent being asked to choose a position, to select one camp and abandon all others.   What is the cost of this choosing?  It became the subject of a deeper inquiry.

The lone socks on my dresser are mated once again; blue to blue, beige to beige, paired for life, or until they separate once again.  I pick up a sand dollar on my dresser top.  This pretty bit is from Orange County, California.  The sand dollar, along with several stones, rest on my dresser top by intention.  I like stones and shells.  This particular sand dollar had a twin, one I found before the gulls plucked its center out.  It was the first perfectly intact sand dollar I’d ever found on all the beaches I have walked.  I broke it in pieces packing it for my granddaughter to take to show and tell.  The one on my dresser is the less than perfect one. 

Belongingness sounds like too-simple a topic for a position paper.  I narrow the topic from belonging to “conscious belonging”.  Conscious belonging is about gaining the freedom of self to not just blindly belong but to pick, choose, finger the cities of the self like the stuff on my dresser to determine what deserves care and attention, and what to discard.  Blind belonging is belonging because we fear not belonging.  It’s the go along game; choose a camp, take a position, and then fight to the death for that bit of ground. 

There is a book by Rilke on my dresser top.  Poor, brilliant Rilke.  His mother lost a baby daughter and later named her son Rainer Marie after the dead daughter.  Bert, the German, would see Rilke caught in the tangle of his mother’s grief, bravely bearing it for her, leaving only the legacy of his poetry behind.  Belongingness.  Inclusion.  Exclusion. 

Bert says the only group we cannot choose is the family.  To that, we simply belong, forever.  It stands alone among all other groups and holds even beyond death. 

When we defend a position we give up variety for belonging, loosing out on a vivid, wide-awake life.   When we defend a position, we become blind to all others.  We lose fluidity, flexibility, our right to change.  We lose our hearts.

On my dresser top are movies stubs from Manhattan downtown.  They say Bowling, short for Bowling for Columbine.   There is a theme running through the things on my dresser top.  Or perhaps I only imagine the theme because of the paper.  The shootings at Columbine School are about belongingness-or not.  Inclusion.  Exclusion. 

Suddenly, I see what else was on my dresser top.  Two photos.  Just remembering them slips me suddenly back into early September.  

The first photo is a long, horizontal picture of my 17-year-old daughter, Lisa, at the wheel of her car.  Her smile is big.  She has a fabulous smile.  Her left arm is extended straight out the window, her wrists circled with two blue bands of uncertain material.  “With attitude” the arm says.  Behind her in the image is a giant, cloud layered sky. 

The second photo also has sky but bare of clouds this time.  A steel power line structure takes the center of the photo like a giant.  And on the earth below, tattered, scattered, and burned is a single engine Cessna belonging to my first husband, the father of my three children.  Lisa’s dad.  It’s a newspaper clipping that reads “Local Men Dead After Air Crash Near I94 in Central North Dakota. 

The two pictures are incongruent with one another and with the things on my dresser top.  When I called Lisa in the middle of the night to tell her that her father was dead, she screamed.  As she screamed, her sister came in the door of her apartment in Lincoln, Nebraska and they screamed together.  I could hardly breath, listening to them scream, with me an impossible nine hours away, and my son still soundly asleep in his bed in the sunroom.  Rilke writes,

Finally, using both my eyes

I close my face,

And when it lies with its weight in my hand

It looks almost like rest.

That’s so they won’t think I have nowhere

To Lay my head.

Love.  The hidden orders.  Belonging.  Or not.  The social scientist, Kurt Lewin said it is not belonging but our own uncertainty of belonging that makes us vulnerable.  I buried those two pictures sitting on my dresser top in favor of stones and sand dollars, my mind’s gentle effort to shield me from this memory, of my children crying, and their blade-sharp question.  Do you think he loved us?  Really?

Blunt force impact.  I will despise those words forever. 

My children went with their uncle to the site of the crash and threw carnations of all colors gathered from memorial mourners over the site.  Then they dirtied their hands with soot and soil, digging like archeologists in search of any sign of him.  My eldest filmed the scene, ending with my 17-year-old son washing a chunk of metal that looked like a crude sculpture of cumulus nimbus clouds.  A piece of engine melted from form…to formless.  His back is to the camera, he squats, dipping the metal in a stock pond on a piece of prairie outside of Bismark, North Dakota.  In front of him, an incredible sunset swallows his hurt. 

Suddenly, I understand why my dresser top got so piled up these past two months.  Where to put all the things it contains–how to assimilate, integrate, how to fit each item into the greater soul of my own life?  I can’t file and tuck these things away and I can’t get rid of them either.   Again I think about the position paper, and of the tasteless motel room waiting for me at the top of Rimrock where I’ll go and sit cross-legged on a blue bedspread for the next twenty-four hours and write about belonging, or not; about conscious belonging, or not.   And in the meantime, my dresser top will pile up again, and again, and again.

By Jamie | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (2)

The “Heart” of Education

February 15, 2008

Tree of Knowledge

When classes begin on Monday, the week seems to fly by and my “posting” takes a backseat. Hope your Valentine’s Day was great. I stayed again out in Kyle last night to finish up some work and attend a meeting today.

This afternoon I had to crawl through my class lists and put in a drop slip on each student who had not yet appeared in my classroom. I was surprised to note that I didn’t put a single slip in for my two Basic English Level II classes. The students are learning the structure of a sentence inch by inch, beginning with the prepositional phrase and advancing slowly into dependent and independent clauses. Grammar! It’s so hard to believe that these students who have already spent a semester studying this are still strong, still with me and, in fact, many come in 20 minutes early to practice together, and to chat and hang out. This is on the Pine Ridge Reservation which sometimes offers notoriously poor early educational experiences.

The longer I work with Dr. Rita Smilkstein’s Natural Human Learning Process, the more convinced I am that learning is the most natural process in the world. Like breathing and eating, it sustains us. And likewise, the longer I work with this approach, the more convinced I am that the standard in-the-desk-lecture-and-fill-in-the-blanks approach is so against human nature as to be almost criminal. Learning, when allowed to happen naturally, is never dull-no matter the subject. It is exciting and challenging and the brain releases all those great endorphins until learning even makes us high.

Okay. My questions is, “How did we take this normal learning process and cage it in this terrible way?” Students are somehow expected to open the top of their heads and allow the information to pour into them via the learned expert at the front of the room. My experience tells me learning only happens when the student is engaged actively in the process-and having fun learning.

I started to go into a political discussion about budgets and legislatures but erased it. In my heart, I feel it is a system that must be killed because it cannot be fixed. It simply does not work, and we end up with adult learners who simply close the books because it is too painful. I don’t know what the solution it but I’d sure be interested in hearing your thoughts.

We have Dr. Rita snips on several places on our websites. She is my mentor for the work I am doing at Oglala Lakota College and she is a powerful advocated for students (natural born learners) everywhere. I’ll have Milt help me link up the snips we have produced so far here so you can share them with others. A bit of revolution is in order. Her website is http://www.borntolearn.net/ I strongly recommend We’re Born to Learn and Igniting Student Potential as excellent reads for others who are concerned about Ed-PTSD. I’ll also make available my own year-long graduate practicum report on the use of NHLP with developmental reading and writing students for educators who are interested in learning more.

I just talked to Milt and realized we have quite a bit of stuff on NHLP. Maybe it is time for it to all be on one site. I’ll see if that can be arranged.

P.S. I am writing a new children’s story-more on that later.

Jamie

By Jamie | Posted in About Being All You Can Be, The Education Crises | Tagged , , , , | Comment (1)

From My Adult Eyes

February 10, 2008

Today I did Family Constellation Work with a group at an agency here in town. Almost every month I decide that this is one “career” I don’t need to have anymore–and every month we set a date and I work with people again. I can’t seem to help myself. This work puts me deeply in touch with why we are human, and why we sometimes pretend that we are not. The past week I have been completing the revisions on a book I wrote and published in 1987 called Feeling Good About Feeling Bad. I struggled with whether to let the book die a natural death or whether to breathe new life into it. I’m glad I chose to republish it. One of the key things I have learned from NLP (a lifetime ago) is that unless we stay our current and correct age, we are vulnerable to time traveling and becoming become the person we were at age three . . . or five . . . or fifteen . . . or fifty. The brain is such a wily little character—it will toss us back in an instant. Its only goal is to somehow protect us from old hurts and harmful situations, but it forgets that we have grown since then.

Today I was struck by the merger between my former NLP work and the constellation work. The room was full of brave and wonderful people willing to go to great lengths to gain a stronger position in the world-and with their own dreams and desires. The room was also full of these little ones who flip back to being three or five or ten. My NLP training has taught me to recognize this and help the person gain their right age again so we can work on. It is an odd paradox that a painful history would continue to repeat itself throughout our adult lives—but it doesn’t have to.

All of my personal battles have been hard won. I’m fifty-four years old and have birthed and raised three children. These children have now made me a grandmother. I have studied hard-my own patterns and the ways of the world. I deserve to stay my age and to have use of all the resources of every minute of those fifty-four years. I refuse to let my wily brain toss me back to being the shy fifth grader who wore a white sweater all year because she was ashamed/uncertain/uneasy about growing breasts. At the same time, if I leave her dangling back there in my own history, I remain vulnerable to her needs. The solution is simple-take care of her, bring her into my world, and the problem resolves itself.

The solution is also difficult. We must be ever vigilant of the instant we travel to another time and become a younger part. It takes discipline of the mind and body and a huge amount of awareness. Most of the time it happens so fast we are not aware it happened until much later . . . sometimes too late to repair the damage it did.

When I first discovered that very shy part, I realized that she had many sisters in my past. One night I did a quiet meditation and imagined myself walking down a peaceful country road. I stayed my adult self while I walked and called out to the little ones hiding out there in the forest. It was the strangest scene-small, shy girls stepped out from behind trees, out of the long grass, from behind boulders and stepped out onto the road with me. They were wary-they did not trust my commitment to their safety and care, but I remained calm and sure and they began to walk along with me. As their trust grew, they began to dance and play and chatter like little girls will. It was so beautiful it brought tears of relief to my eyes.

And I have never forgotten or abandoned them since.

I hope you have a very heart-filled Valentine Day. Keep your money in your pockets and take care of each other in other, more special ways. Talk to each other, walk with each other, dream with each other-and most importantly, look out there at the future and reach for something with a little jazz, a little pizzazz . . . a bit of zest.

Also (my insecure part asked me to ask you this), if you happen upon this blog, please leave a hello or simple comment so I know somebody is out there.

Jamie

By Jamie | Posted in About Being All You Can Be, Uncategorized | Tagged , , | Comments (2)

The Bead Mandala

February 8, 2008

Jamie with The Bead PeopleLast night I spent the night in a motel beside Piya Wiconi-the main OLC campus in Kyle. Since I teach in Pine Ridge on Thursdays, I decided to make that a part of my plan for days when we have meetings on Fridays. It gives me some alone time and time to write. Last night I didn’t write much but played with beads instead. For some reason, The Bead People are so friendly that I can’t resist building a few in my down time. In the past year I have probably created well over a thousand Bead People but it’s funny, whenever I count them I only have about 3-4 hundred. They keep going away. You’d think I would get tired of them, but I guess it is my “knitting.” It calms me and restores my spirit.

I was thinking about how beads have been a part of every culture I know of. Beads were cut, carved or molded from stones, shells, cones, wood, glass, gold, silver, and on and on. Beads were used to adorn clothing and household items and used as a means of exchange. It makes sense that The Bead People speak a common language.

Next week, Milt and I will be taking The Bead People to a first grade classroom here in Rapid City. We’ve done several so far and the children send me the most wonderful thank-you notes after I leave. I always tell them that I’m a writer and show them a couple of my books (beside the one that goes home with The Bead People). One little girl wrote to me after we were in her classroom and said that “All the books in my house were written by YOU!” I loved that! The students also make up stories about their little bead person or tell me how they shared the story with their families. It is a wonderful experience and I look forward to doing more.

Since I am into beads tonight, I’ll share a little writing ramble from a client session I did with a young girl in my office a few years ago. She turned me on to beading Christmas ornaments. (Yes, N.-you know who you are.) Think of it as my Valentine gift to you. And if you haven’t heard of The Bead People or their story, The Wind of a Thousand Years-you can visit http://www.thebeadpeople.org/ to find out more.

Jamie

A Mandala of Beads

Just before Christmas, a young client of mine came in for a session and brought me the gift of a beautiful beaded cap sitting on a glass Christmas tree ornament. She had made the gracious, pretty thing, and I was so excited about it she offered to show me how to make one. “I have the stuff in my car,” she said.

I had my own private stash of beads tucked unceremoniously away waiting for the time when I would take up what seemed like a frivolous hobby. (I love beads-and small stones-but was sure that all of my other work was too important and the time couldn’t possibly be spared for beading.)

That day, we spent her entire counseling session beading, our heads bent together and us talking about issues of the heart and soul. We worked like two prairie women-our fingers busily stabbing small glass beads with a thin needle . . .three white, one purple, three white, one purple… By the end of the session, I had a small beautiful Mandala of beads forming on the table before me. My client wished me a Merry Christmas and left, and I returned to my “real work”.

However, the beautiful white and purple circle stayed in my mind like an itch. I pictured the bright circle sitting alone on a wide expanse of cherry wood (my office table) like a distant star. Strange, how that circle beckoned like nothing has for a long time. Finally, just before bed, I crept back out to my office at midnight after two hours of writing and working on other more important matters. I simply could not go to bed without first revisiting that little beaded circle. I had to add one more ring to it and so I followed the pattern carefully around the outer circle . . . three white, one purple, three white . . . and, when the loop was done, I went to bed feeling oddly satisfied.

This morning when I went into my office, there it was again. I touched it, feeling the loose connectedness of the beads and thought, “What a beautiful pattern.” It reminded me of the rangoli, the sidewalk circle the yogis of India create at the entrance of a sacred place. They sift colored sand to create intricate images of the Gods knowing full well that the wind and rain will probably destroy it by dusk. And still, they create it anyway.

It was then that I understood my attraction to the shiny circle of glass beads. My work is always about finding patterns-but perhaps I put too much time and energy into finding the patterns of ugliness and despair. I work with individuals and organizations but, like so many others, tend to see them in terms of the problem patterns without searching out the patterns of order and ease. We get so attached to our descriptions of the problem pattern until soon that is all we see-and then we cannot tell another story.

The rangoli, the medicine wheel, and my little circle of beads looping into other beads remind me to look and find the patterns of beauty and connectedness as well-and to seek that greater order. I will remember.

And probably, I am totally hooked on beading again but can now see it as a way to remind myself to look for the links.

By Jamie | Posted in About Being All You Can Be, The Bead people Peace Project | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

Inside the Mind of Jamie Lee

February 6, 2008

 Below is a crazy thing I wrote for NPR “post cards” one time.  I never did send it to them so I share it there.  Imagine it as an audio piece–lots of spooky reverb.  Just having some fun.     Jamie Lee

Greetings my dear friends,

I am writing this post card from inside the mind of Jamie Lee.  I whisper because I don’t want her to catch me in here taking notes and snapping pictures.  What I see around me is an odd and terrifyingly beautiful landscape of deep, rolling valleys and high mountain peaks.  At the moment it is as crisp and still as the Alaskan tundra, although beneath my feet I feel tremors and hear a low, thrumming sound, like a slow pow wow drum.  I know from experience that this is a fragile environment.  Her mind is a wild and sometimes frightening place to be.  One wrong move, a single loud sound could start an avalanche of fear and doubt tumbling down from those high peaks like an avalanche. 

Off to my right is the forest of her ideas.  Birds sing melodic sounds, ideas fly like bats and ravens each night and some are impossible to capture-elusive creatures that scurry behind the trees and hide.  The forest itself is dense, each tree competing for space and light.  Some stand tall and strong-others are spindly and weak. 

Wait, something down there in the valley catches my eye.  I walk, softly, softly down into the cool shade of the valley.  A river flows through.  In its depths are the things that swim through her mind; feelings, love, desire, creative urges that sometimes rush though whitewater and sometimes pool into deep lakes swimming with life.  Occasionally, the pools freeze over like winter ponds and all she is hibernates and grows still until the sun returns to melt the ice. 

All in all, it is a nice place to be.  I could spend my years in a place like this, build a little cabin, grow a berry garden, raise some chickens-if she would only agree to let me live in peace.

Wait-what was that?  Oh no, I think I said the wrong thing, took a bad turn. . . she heard me coming close. 

By Jamie | Posted in About Being All You Can Be, On Writing | Comments (0)

The Other Great Love of My Life

February 5, 2008

 I was wandering through old journal writings tonight and came across this one.  I am thinking of spring coming and planting berries on our new piece of land–and wishing my parents were still there and feeling nostalgic.  So I share this post with you.  A “timed writing” is just practice where anything goes.

jl

July 30, 1992–timed writing

I remember the low-bush look on the forest floor and me kneeling or crouching, sitting where the berries dance heavy all around and I can pick sitting down, my fingers bluing with time like my grandma’s hair.  I remember the feeling of berries rolling from their ripe, loose hold on the low bush and dropping into my hand and the tiniest sound of berries dropping into the bucket. 

The forest makes sounds.  It buzzes, sometimes too near-and even with sleeves and jeans and scarf, the mosquitoes find my skin and bite down like my own teeth into berries.  Juice, blood red, blue, and tiny pale green leaves that land amidst the berries like green lace.  “Mom?”  I call out.  She murmurs, still near-even a hundred years later, still near.

And the blue blush of my father’s face in the hospital bed.  Why did he die on their anniversary?  Why not sooner?  Later?  His face was plumped and his skin loose and cool like berries gone too long on a bush.  He didn’t like to pick berries.  Only mom and I liked the soft prayer of a berry patch, the pull of muscles too long bent over, and the contagious quiet that always left us with little to say.  “Mom?”  “Here.”  “Okay.”

She cried when he died.  Even with her tears and soft choking voice she leaned near him and told him, “It’s okay, it’s okay for you to go now.  I’ll be alright.  Really I will.”  She kissed his cheek, and stroked the hand that hosted the IV needle in his blueberry stained skin.

How I loved picking blueberries.  And my father.  The forest knew my name–would give me songs to sing and wind so sweet with green smells that I would stop, small animal, and sniff. 

My father knew my name.  I remember his soft hand with its short fingers walking through my hair as he threatened to kiss me with his face all white with shaving cream and me sitting, legs swinging, sitting on the stool watching him shave.

Later, I couldn’t take my eyes off his hands, so still on the bed.  I was glad he was unconscious.  I kissed his fingers, touched the blueberry mark softly.  I put his fingers to my eyes so his heart could feel my tears.  Salt.  Sweet.  Sweet love filling my bucket.

Dad liked to fish.

I don’t remember when we drew apart, what blue water flowed cool between us and made it so difficult to say I love you.  I need to know your thoughts, your inner yearnings.  Talk to me, Dad.  I don’t remember what went by or past or when.  A decade snapped its fingers and then another and soon I was not six or sixteen but thirty-six and I watched with envy as my little girl, Lisa slipped quietly into my seat in his heart.  A child is so easy to love.  Curtains of age hid him from me but flew open at the sight of my own child, so like me-but not me-in his arms.

Not anymore.  I never wanted to remember the ache gathering at the base of my skull that made me want to draw my body up tight and small and have him lay his fingers in my hair and stroke and one more time call me, “Pappy”.  Now, I never want to forget.

By Jamie | Posted in About Being All You Can Be | Tagged , , , | Comment (1)