Last Monday, in my 7th grade ELA class, I introduced a weekly creative writing practice that I decided to call “Nourishing Notes.” We have done many small writing prompts before, but they tend to be inconsistent and constantly “pushed” to accommodate the other million and one things we are asked to do with our kids during any given school year. However, a couple of weeks ago I attended the NCTE conference (National Council for the Teachers of English – what an amazing experience), and one of the important takeaways was that offering students varying ways to express themselves through writing – with the option of choice and the abandonment of strict form, has the ability to help and heal them in ways that are beyond measure and thus immeasurably important.
To honor this, I am offering a “Nourishing Note” assignment every Monday to my students, and I am going to participate in the practice as well. I want my students to see me writing with them and engaging in the content as a form of reciprocity.
For the first Nourishing Notes assignment I read a chapter of Nic Stone’s new book Clean Getaway while students did a “Sketchnotes” – essentially doodling or writing down anything that stood out to them while I read aloud. I then asked them to choose one, two, or all of what they drew/wrote and use it as inspiration for a ten minute free write. They could have continued the story – written a different fiction about something that stood out – created a poem – or journaled about their lives.
I initially wrote two poems about the freedom of being on the open road – in the first chapter of Clean Getaway the protagonist, William “Scoob” Lamar, is on a surprise road trip with his G’ma in her brand new Winnebago. But as the periods progressed the epigraph that Stone chose to include was calling to me. It was a quote from Bryan Stevenson which said:
“Each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done.”
This quote spoke and continues to speak to me in many ways, and it would have stood out to me at any point in time, but it also caught my eye because I am currently reading Stevenson’s book Just Mercy about his time as a budding lawyer defending death row inmates from wrongful convictions and unlawful/racist judicial practices.
Upon pondering this quote here is what I wrote during three, ten minute periods. I shared this progression with my students but have cleaned up the writing for clarity and succinctness:
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“Each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done.” Bryan Stevenson
What is this perplexing human quality focus solely and so completely on the negative? One hundred positive comments and the one negative comment can bring you crumbling and crashing down, down, down into a black pit of despair.
How many of us dwell on events and incidents long past? Dwell as if we can actually go back and change what happened – instead of focusing on what we learned and how we can move forward?
And what about when (or if) you do something truly heinous? How and how long should you be punished for it? Do you ever deserve to “move on,” and what does that even look like? I guess it speaks to the philosophical question of whether people can be rehabilitated…
I, for one, believe they can be because the alternative is something I cannot bear. The alternative is a world I don’t want to live in.
Which then brings me to ponder Accountability – more specifically
Self Accountability.
Self Accountability as Sacred Acknowledgement…
Why is it so hard for humans to admit when they are wrong – for them to admit fault? Perhaps it’s because we have created a culture where one of the worst things you can be is wrong – where one of the worst things you can do is admit to being wrong or at fault.
BUT
What if that wrong, that fault we continue to deny is really the door to our individual and collective salvation? Not in some other world, not after we die – but right now. Our ultimate and untapped potential – A reservoir of beauty and truth so vast and deep that it is beyond our ability to comprehend – A wellspring of wisdom just waiting to be discovered and lived out.
In Wild Geese, Mary Oliver wrote:
“You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.”
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Here is where the thoughts stopped because the time stopped – because we had to move on. Again, I shared various parts of this over the course of the day. Most of the time I was met with perplexed stares from the students, which is to be expected (ha!). And then one student, who also connected with Stevenson’s quote, was brave and shared this gem:
An Original Poem by K
Each of us is MORE than the worst
thing we’ve ever done.
This says that single moments should
not define our lives.
Should not be who we are.
Should not be what people see when they
look at us.
Instead they should see more
they should see both the good and the bad
moments.
Because no one is just simply bad or good;
Everyone is both.
_____
Everyone is both.
What I appreciate about this poem is the call to recognize both the good and the bad.
Everyone is both.
Everything is both.
*Disclaimer: If it is not already clear, from this moment on, these are thoughts I am working through in my own mind – the throughline I am following and exploring on my own. In other words, the following was not shared with my students.
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We have a crisis in our country – a crisis that involves an (arguably) pathological obsession with the glories of our history, while simultaneously dismissing or even outright denying the transgressions.
Beyond that, we classify those who try to bring nuanced history to light, as un-American.
And beyond even that, and as a direct result of the above, we are unable as individual people to readily admit our faults and be held accountable for them.
We have not been taught to be held accountable well.
Because the thing about accountability is that it demands that we lean into vulnerability, which is another thing we have collectively chosen to demonize – for we equate it (falsely) with weakness. As a result, where vulnerability should live, defensiveness reigns. Like the cuckoo that invades the nests of other birds and manipulates them into rearing their young, defensiveness has tricked us into believing that this is the preferred and natural state of things. It has tricked us into believing that what we claim to be actually is, even when there’s overwhelming evidence to the contrary – even when doing so actually harms every single one of us.
But I am a good person!
But they are so nice!
But our country is so great!
We utter statements such as these (consciously or not) as reverently as we would any mantra or prayer, grasping onto the idea that being, or even simply presenting, as good, as nice, as great excuses us of the personal responsibility and thus accountability of any given situation. We hold onto our goodness, our niceness, our greatness as if it’s our passport to absolution, brandishing it anytime we feel threatened, believing that it pardons us from any recognition that we are in fact a part of a problem and thus we must work to be a part of a solution.
As if our intentions, negate the impacts they have.
They do not.
As if being good, and nice, and great is as far as our obligations extend.
They are not.
As if the amount of goodness, and niceness, and greatness we off-gas into the world makes up for all our transgressions, wherein the more we present as these things, the less we owe each other, our planet, and ourselves.
It’s a problem to say the least. As feminist writer Lindy West states in her hilarious and horrifyingly true book of essays The Witches are Coming, “If we’re going to pull our country and our planet back from the brink, we have to start living in the truth. We have to start calling things by their real names: racism is racism, sexism is sexism, mistakes are mistakes, and they can be rectified if we do the work.”
Ultimately, the good, the nice, and the great – what I have come to sum up as “the nice person phenomenon,” is an attempt by our corrupt systems to shield us from what is hiding both within and without. It is an attempt to shield us from truth. It is an attempt to shield us, ultimately, from ourselves. Because systems that are full of rot can’t abide us becoming our most true, embodied, awakened, and healed selves. They know that the fictitious cloaks they have created are shoddy at best, and that once we return to vulnerability, we will awaken and finally become aware of the truths that we have so long tried to deny.
The truth that we are in fact complicit.
The truth that we haven’t done enough.
The truth that we might not be who we think we are.
The truth that we have chosen to not know.
The truth that we have taken too much.
These are painful truths and because we haven’t been taught how to bear them we become complicit in the systems that work so hard to shield us from them. And because, tragically, we can’t see the potential beyond the pain, we deny ourselves, our fellow human beings, all beings on this planet, and the planet itself the potential of what could be. For it is not pain alone that awaits us. Pain is certain, that much is true, but there is also the potential of
transcendence.
Transcendence into a world that is healed, and fair, and good, and nice, and yes, even great.
Greatness awaits us, if only we are willing to tap into our inherent vulnerability and face
the truth.
I’ll close with a poem from Ledger by Jane Hirshfield:
Let them not say: we did not see it.
We saw.
Let them not say: we did not hear it.
We heard.
Let them not say: we did not taste it.
We ate, we trembled.
Let them not say: it was not spoken, not written.
We spoke,
we witnessed with voices and hands.
Let them not say: they did nothing.
We did not-enough.
Let them say, as they must say something:
A kerosene beauty.
It burned.
Let them say we warmed ourselves by it,
read by its light, praised,
and it burned.
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