The Secret Garden

So it's weird when you get this little running theme in your life and everything springs from it and weaves together like it was meant to be. You have this ever? I think some people call it coincidence, but in "The Secret Garden" we're reading, they call it Magic.

I'm subbing in 3rd grade, long term, it's ending Friday or they keep saying every Friday that it's ending but I think this Friday it's for reals (ies), and at first I couldn't WAIT to break up with my class because whoa who wants the responsibility of 18 people's education on their hands and nowhere to wipe the blame? But since it's been almost four weeks, something started happening, and I don't think it was just me. There's a lot of chaos in a classroom, you're mostly just standing in the middle with your mom voice and your suddenly huge tribe of children busting out around you like the ones that come scuttling out of the fat lady's skirts in the Nutcracker ballet. You think you're pretty much yelling into the pirate ship wind, and your ship is going down and not even Jim Cameron can save you.

And then a little boy who is only 8 writes an amazing story out of Native American symbols on his buffalo skin (fake)(no actual buffalo we're in L.A.) paper and this boy is a smart boy but he's not much on behaving, being only 8 and mostly interested in laughing and he has one sort of winking eye all the time but anyway, we're doing this art with Indians for fun and social studies and his story in symbols was:

"many days. great sadness. War. many people. hurt. many people. make peace."

I don't know if it was the  simplicity of the crumpled brown paper and the broken arrow for peace, the simple lines drawn that he chose, that stood for suffering, and then hope, and the talking without words, the pictures drawn on paper he had softened with his own hands -- or maybe it was the way he was just looking up at me after he read it, and when I said to him, meaning it "that story is beautiful. It's my favorite," and he looked stunned like I had granted him knighthood, and land in England, rolling green hills. Then later he said to me, sort of sideways, when no one else was there, by the board - "was anyone else's your favorite?" And I got to say honestly, in our quiet little space, "Nope." It is filling to watch and actually see your good words fill another person. And it's not that whatever I think is the greatest thing, it's that if you saw the careful and sweet work he did, and the epic way it sounded, like today's world - this tenuous, volatile world we live in - and he chose to find peace. I don't know, his voice mattered.

Anyway, the springtime is growing up and around us, like the secret garden, and the crippled character Colin says, "I AM ALIVE," as he stands up and is made strong just by the beauty of a garden. As the old teacher will be coming back in from her extended stay in drug rehab or wherever she was and who cares, because I got to leap into myself as the fake teacher, leap in and bathe in it all. I like creating. We made Starry Night Van Gogh's, and block letter names for area and perimeter, and tomorrow we're going to watch a chemical change when we bake bread in the breadmaker. Science. We're attacking every subject, like we're getting somewhere/rocketing them forward I hope, with art and creative projects. And the room will smell so good.

I am alive, beauty weaving through me, and spreading out to all those little kids. Or maybe it's them doing it all, and I'm just the loud one shouting nonsense into the wind. I think I'm sailing the ship, but they're the ocean. Just a guest in their garden.