the woodshed.

On humility: I would describe humility as an open confirmation of the intellect and spirit. At university, it supplants arrogance, and may be experienced as the painful process of bringing clarity to thought.  Humility is cultivated when one is willing to be prodded into discovering the essential nature of life’s store.  Humility is embodied when one is willing to push back when explanations have been cheapened or abandoned entirely.  This is the foundation for intellectual discourse.  Humility, at a minimum, accommodates philosophical differences.

On integrity: Recently, the University of Virginia invited Dr. P.M. Forni to speak about civility in the workplace.  His most compelling argument was that civility is rooted in an empathic regard for others and ethics.  Yes, civility can be demonstrated in good manners, but it is ultimately evidenced in behavior emanating from decisions rooted in integrity. Decisions rooted in integrity. Civility defines the social space in which an exchange of ideas is possible.  It imbues those conversations with a distinguished synergy.

On bullying: Incivility, specifically bullying, on the other hand, is the genesis of violence. It frequently requires collusion. It has been known to rip institutions apart.

On the woodshed: Oh, how I long to wax about the woodshed being the mother of one’s darker nature. I long to make this pretty.  It is not. An icon of power over, the woodshed is positioned on the perimeter of the landscape, just beyond the ornamentals.  It is at once a warning and a destination.  It is menacing, even in the repose of the gloaming. 

UVa’s board of visitors, seemingly unhinged by philosophical differences with President Teresa Sullivan coupled with a desire to flex its collective muscle, escorted Sullivan to the woodshed sometime over the weekend of June 9, 2012.

I am town and gown. As a staff member at the University of Virginia, I have been seeking, for almost a week, a stabilizing force that includes a Jefferson quote and a pat on the back.  At work, my tongue has been pressed to the back of my teeth.  As an alumna, I struggle with the price of silence. Thankfully, my debt to the University’s professoriate far outweighs my fear of the woodshed.

Even the most incisive Jefferson quote does not seem dignified. 

harmony.

Active alcoholics and addicts can't abide boredom. They crave a different "next" and feign power in commotion.  They keep moving, keep kicking, keep dancing, keep reinventing. It's exhausting. I know it's exhausting.  Serenity does not have a palatable essence. Overexposed, active addicts will retreat and retrench; not join and breathe. 

They lose their way. They lose their voice. 

They clutch. They pose.

 

Such is my desire for harmony that one night last week, I dreamed that I owned a large ranch that was home to 5 cows and 5 lions. They coexisted unfettered on the open range. In my dream, I looked out and understood that this was unusual. And in that preternatural state of dreaming, I was also aware that I did not have to worry about my lions or, in particular, my cows.

I'm sure my dream sprang, in part, from a signal moment that occurred while I was on safari in South Africa. Our guide raced the open jeep to an area where he understood that a chase was underway. Dust up. Rattle. Roll. We approached an expanse and the guide slowed to a stop. Before us on the golden savannah under the late morning sun, lounged four lionesses.  Their demeanor was slightly aloof, but they held their power even in repose. A couple of hundred yards, if that, beyond them grazed a small herd of elephants, including a calf. Neither the mother nor the aunties appeared alarmed. In the jeep, I heard a soft collective gasp.

We sat there for some time, practically to the point of boredom. Every now and then, a lioness gazed back at the jeep. Periodically, an auntie elephant nudged the distracted calf closer to the herd. Paradoxically, there was no whoopin' or hollerin'. No alarm sounded. No dander raised. The young Afrikaans man at the wheel commented that this was indeed a rare occurrence . . . this peaceable tableau of those that normally would not mix. 

Cameras clicked. The college girls whispered "awesome." Everyone breathed. Everything breathed. Eyes softened. Cameras dropped to laps. The red dust swirled up and powdered our exposed arms, muddied our sweaty noses. The power of harmony was palpable.

the urgency of numbers.

This morning I was in Barnes & Noble sitting in a sturdy wooden chair sipping coffee, side-by-side, with a friend.  Every now and then I would glance up from my book at the test preparation books across from me. So many tests: SAT, GRE, ACT, PRAXIS, GRE, GMAT, NCLEX.  So many scores.  So many futures to hang in the balance.

A couple of high school kids and their moms passed by and chattered anxiously about math.  Was there a test or mathematical subject area that fell between analytical geometry and calculus.  Was it math analysis?  I shuttered.  My math analysis teacher used to bark at us.  In this case, bark is not a metaphor.  She barked.  I turned back to my book, "Dance of the Dissident Daughter," hardly math.

Voices started rising in the kid's section.  I heard a little boy stridently counting to ten.  I think he was asserting his seniority over a younger sibling.  One, two, three, four.  A crescendo and strong annunciation as he reached the final digits. Eight. Nine. TEN!  The urgency of numbers seemed inescapable.

Numbers, I think, are neutral. Numbers have no emotional essence in and of themselves. They are the stuff of birthday, sales, and grade calculations.  They need context for meaning.  They need other numbers and operators to do something.  I don't really know enough about numbers to write a glib essay on math, but I am chagrined to say that I am too often pushed around by numbers.  Do I have enough money?  Am I too old?  Do I need one or two?  How much does that cost?  How long will that take?  Is my salary out of range?  I don't have children so I don't have much experience with the countdown.  (My cat could care less about the countdown.) Many of us, at one time or another, have watched the New Year's Eve countdown with Dick Clark whose youthful appearance did not jive with his number.

There is little doubt we need numbers, even if we don't name them.  I'll see you in a few hours.  Sooner or later "few" will be defined, precisely.  "Where did the time go?" can be calculated.  And time, that number, is precious.  So what is the antidote to this sum of anxiety that bears down on me?  Love.

Love makes the time in between fall away.  Love slows the heart when fear wants to speed it up. Love lifts the spirit and softens the eyes.  Love helps us look just the same after all these years.  Love is sitting with, regardless of the hour. Love is my cat's paw reaching out to pull me close. Love is delighting in my nieces' debate over the characteristics of fairies. Love is trying to help a friend with taxes and a subsequent meltdown met with uncommon patience and concern.

Love is an unnumbered and incalculable exchange of words, silence, touch, and truth. Love.  Boundless love.

the bitter sea.

Despite my cat's insistent nuzzling, I welcomed 4 a.m. like the glorious promise of a sunrise over Angkor Wat.  There was sanctity and knowing.  I had slept through the night.  I did not have to rush.  I had choices.  Coffee first, then yoga.  The thought of yoga, then coffee.  Facebook, the thought of yoga, the thought of coffee, and then a mad rush to work.  There was compromise.  I had coffee at work.  Yoga at 7:15 pm. 

This morning the politics of 4 a.m. was not complicated.  I was not rounding 4 a.m. after a sleepless night.  "I should just stay up.  I only have 2 more hours of sleep." I was not wrestling with a barrage of personal or work issues, although they lurk.  They always lurk. I was clear.  The morning was mine.  Sanctuary.

I visited Cambodia in fall 2008. Sanctuary has long been a twisted notion there. Under the Khmer Rouge, schools were prisons.  Knowing was dangerous. Lush fields were graves. A polite term, graves. Scraps of clothing, remnants of the dead still rise up in that bitter sea, those fields.

As the bus approached the outskirts of Phnom Penh, our guide pointed out the stupa that rose up from the center of this killing field.  He explained that we would see thousands of bones and skulls in the base of the shrine.  He talked about the field and the importance of staying on the path. Camera bound and generally eager to digitally frame everything thing that I could, I decided that I would take only a single photograph of the pinnacle.

One click.

One click was my grace that day.  My grace in the bitter sea.

Shoop, shoop.

From 1966-1968 (give or take), I attended Bramlett Elementary School in Oxford, MS.  Oxford is only about an hour or so from Memphis, TN.  We day-tripped there frequently.  One time, my parents took my sister and I to have our waist-length hair snipped into pixies.  My mother had our cropped locks crafted into switches, hair pieces. We had thick blonde hair.  They would have made mean weaves.

In the 2nd grade, one of my best friends at school was an African-American boy named Curtis. He was tall, chubby, and had beautiful brown skin.  I remember that I liked to pat his soft arm.  He liked my coloring book interpretations (I used olive green to shade in a raincoat, which was somehow controversial) and that I could shake a mean hula hoop. Shoop, shoop. This made the teacher nervous.  This made the school nurse nervous.  Fortunately, despite several phone calls from school to home, this did not make my mother nervous.

On April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in a Memphis hotel. I don't remember where I was or the specifics of the next several days.  I remember the zeitgeist though.  Foggy, hushed, tense.  Not shoop, shoop.  I became nervous.  I dreamed of executions.  I dreamed of being chased. 

In the summer of 1968, we moved to Athens, GA.  Integration was a buzzword.  Its energy, though, was not soft and brown like Curtis's skin. No, it buzzed hot. During the months before school started, my parents drove us past the playground of West Broad Elementary School.  It was situated across the street from a housing project.  The school playground was broken, battered, gray, dangerous.  I was nervous.  My mother assured me that by September, the school and playground would look quite different. 

 By September, the playground glistened with new equipment painted in bright primary colors.  I was alarmed that the color of my skin had the power to change a school's landscape. That spring all the kids danced around a maypole. 

The Vietnam War raged on.  I remember seeing body counts on the nightly news.  I remember the disquietude of protest. I remember staging my own protest against an unpopular babysitter, Ms. Thurman.  Ms. Thurman with her red chipped nail polish. I remember trying to memorize the Gettysburg Address because I wanted a voice, but at ten years old, I wasn't sure of my own. 

I remember wanting secret places, darkness, and the clean vapor of night turning into day.  At 50, sometimes, I still do.  Shoop, shoop. 

mamallapuram

India is my mother.  She held me close to her brown skin. Her henna hand cradled my head. Her silk sari soothed my skin.  I exhaled and the snake was released.

Mamallapuram was not what I expected. The yoga was not western pretzel logic. It was prana. It was love. It was love pulling me through the ashram grounds to buy a coconut. A coconut!

The vendor, draped in silk, was so unassuming.  She pulled out a machete of a knife and cut a hole in the coconut without sacrificing a drop. I gave her a small fistful of rupees and I drank from the earth. Sweet elixir in a brown, fuzzy globe.

I wandered away.  I wanted my own henna hand.