Sign #1: It is 80 degrees on my porch, but I spent 8 hours in a 7 degreed fog-banked class and today, well it didn’t seem so bad (at least up until the 3:30 pm community healing dance. That blew it up for me…. So let’s give this sign only 1/2 credit.)
Sign #2: I make it through the day without logging every minute like some paranoid attorney.
Signs #3-10: I am beginning to appreciate my teacher.
A. I find myself beginning to believe that my teacher is secretly talented like Picasso, knowing how to do phenomenological studies but choosing not to. this is not a good sign.
B. I found out today that we don’t have two teachers, we have three. One, as you may recall, is with us spiritually because she remains physically in Florida. The other is M. P., my professor’s son’s dear friend who was like a part of their family, who was killed on Mount Tam many years back. My professor stops at the site of his death to speak with him every morning, at which point they have a sort of team meeting on what MP wants to do that day in class. This one strikes me as more reasonable than the Florida co-teacher-spirit. Until Teacher-In-Flesh says, “I was talking to him this morning on the way in and he told me that I forgot to tell you a lot of stuff. So the first thing is.... hey, what does that say?" (he cocks his head at words scrawled all over the board. So much for MP’s input today.) So he gets all off-kilter and looks at the chaos known as his written mind/Matthew's words to him, which he now cannot decipher, on the board.
C. I even appreciated that as he tilted his head at the board, it was all silent for several minutes before his next professorial bomb-drop quote: "I wanted to thank you for being here, because this class is not a typical class; this class is almost devoid of content, but it is full of emotion and feeling, and it is kind of a mystery." This somehow makes me feel less crazy. (Reminder... Sign #3-10, people, signs #3-10)
D. Plus, a very sweet person in my class checks in about yesterday, saying that “we took a walk, where I gave thanks to the trees, while [my dog] gave thanks to the squirrels, and then the little man and I went to the beach and gave thanks to the sunset together.” And I? I barely found his sentence noteworthy.
And then E: we did many things as a class all day, but I? I shaded and scribbled and blended and generally covered every ounce of my skin and clothing a fine layer of pastel-colored charcoal dust all day. I never was a neat artist. It was almost better than haiku as a Sanity Maintenance Device. And I felt, well, close to ok.
And last but certainly not least, (F) Other Horrified Student is now volunteering for everything, from being an Eagle Man in our community healing bear dance to shaking rattles to reading his spiritual journey poetry.
Maybe Stockholm Syndrome is unavoidable?
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