Alina's Adventures

10 must-read articles about education.

A good education gives you something to stand for.

"The Democratic Education of Unschoolers" by Astra Taylor
n+1, November/December 2013

"The Joyful, Illiterate Kindergartners of Finland" by Tim Walker
The Atlantic, October 2015

"Educating Ourselves To Oblivion" by William Astore
Mother Jones, May 2009

"The Junior Meritocracy" by Jennifer Senior
New York Magazine, January 2010

"Why It's Not All Bad To Be Bored" by Alina Tugend
New York Times, November 2012

"What Danish Parents Know About Teaching Empathy" by Katie Hinz-Zombrano
Mother Magazine, October 2015

"Undercover Universities" by Emily Mulder
Yes! Magazine, November 2014

In the name of love: The Eldest at the Tuscaloosa PRIDE parade.

"Saving Kids From Nature-Deficit Disorder", an interview with Richard Louv
NPR, May 2005

"Leave No Child Inside" by Richard Louv
Orion Magazine, 2013

"Unleashing Empathy: How Teachers Transform Classrooms" by Lennon Flowers
Yes! Magazine, April 2014

"Charlotte's Webpage: Why Children Shouldn't Have the World At Their Fingertips" by Lowell Monke
Orion Magazine, September/October 2005

"Male and female ability differences down to socialisation, not genetics" by Robin McKie
The Observer, August 2010

And, of course, there are personal reasons for the choices we make. Here is what I've learned- and what I continue to learn- about our lives and education/s:

"Why I Homeschool" 

"Thoughts on Mr. Lookadoo's Approach to 'Self-Empowerment'"

"The Liberating Habits of Compassionate Men"

"Homeschooling and Socialization: The Heart of the Matter"

"Mining A Fallow Field For Stories"

"Visitation", a prose poem by David Shumate.

Fall is hammocks by the fire.

I'm slightly in love with David Shumate's book of prose poems, High Water Mark. Apart from admiring his craft, my affections tend towards the particular.

I am grateful for his "Prescription For Insomniacs". Because a poem is the best prescription of all once you accept the words which keep you awake. The price of a good night's sleep being so many unrendered stories.

Riveted by "What Hemingway Learned From Cezanne", which reads like a gallery visit, the conversations we create between artists and writers who inspire us. It's a sharp poem. Clear and edgeless.

Astonished by "The Blue Period". Muddling slowly through the thick muds of "Lifesaving"- the question at which point two people wish to lose the cares of loving another, return to the place where "she could just drive by".

Curious about "The Psychic Geography of Atlantis", and the Romanian reference.

Pacing the room with "The American Dream" in hand. Thrilled by his insight into immigration and assimilation. The phantom limbs that keep me up at night.

He tends the fire in the pit he
created for the Eldest's birthday.

And then there is "Visitation", the poem that hits me in all the right places. The poem that speaks outside spoken sense. Straight into smoke and fire.

 

Visitation

 

This morning I sit down with the spirit of my father. At first he is reluctant to join me. Perhaps he fears what we might say. Or something in the code of the dead warns to leave the living alone. I pour him some coffee. Offer him his favorite pipe. We start with small talk. How the others are. The time when we did this or that. He has lost that nervous edge. That tremor in his voice. As if we grow younger with each year of death. He senses something unsettled in me. That gnawing the dead know so well. He blows a smoke ring in the air and points his pipe in my direction. Take up gardening, he says. Become a shepherd. Or follow your way with words. He reaches over and places his hand on my shoulder. Like the foot of a bird, it weighs nothing. But it is more than enough.

 

Oh if I could only tell you about the bird, that stubborn phoebe that keeps returning to sit on my notebooks as I write. She is not enough, though. Not yet.

More poems from High Water Mark

"Passing Through A Small Town" (The Writer's Almanac)
"High Water Mark" (The Writer's Almanac)
"Teaching A Child the Art of Confession" (Reader's Connection)
"Mornings With Freud" (Indianapolis Public Library)
"Afternoon Nap" (Arabesques Review)
"Reading to the Blind Man" (The Writer's Almanac)
"Shooting the Horse" (The Writer's Almanac)
"Custer" (The Writer's Almanac)

"I set out into a poem imagining I am Kafka let loose in this modern world just to see how that feels, and I end up with the image of a lover straightening his tie, giving him a renewed sense of purpose."

Paul Holler talks to David about prose poetry craft (Eclectica)

Other poems by David Shumate

"Plum" (Agni)
"Amish" (The Writer's Almanac)
"Trains" (The Writer's Almanac)
"Chinese Restaurant" (The Writer's Almanac)
"The Department of Love" (Karen Kovacik)
"An American In Paris" (Karen Kovacik)
"Lincoln" (The Writer's Almanac)
"The Long Road" (AGNI)
"Mangos" (Plume)
"Bringing Things Back From the Woods" (Plume)
"Talking Animals" (Plume)
"If You Hire A Poet To Draw A Map" (Verse Daily)
"A Hundred Years From Now" (The Writer's Almanac)
"Welcome Home Children" (The Writer's Almanac)
"The Bible Belt" (The Writer's Almanac)
"Mannequins" (NEA)

The summer I want to forget without forgetting, somehow, these moments.

My life divides on the date June 18, 2015. The date mom died. All the details fall into categories of before and after. The photo above is a before. A photo from mom's iphone which she took on our last outing before she flew away.

See, when your mother flies to Amsterdam to see her niece's art exhibit- the niece she loved and wanted to support- and then dies overseas, it is as if she flew away. Boarded a plane and never flew back.

When the coffin arrives on a plane one week later, it's not a return flight. The body does not return smelling of apples and fresh-washed linen. The body does not return to smother you with smoochy kisses.

What comes back is a box you will never open. A story you don't want to read. A story whose text tells you nothing about the protagonist. Not one ounce of her life embalmed in that body that people want to see.

The life is divided. There is before. 

And there is after. And after. And after.

And the after never ends.

There is a hike somewhere above Dillon, Colorado where all you can see is her bright blonde bob just over the next hill. Because she hiked faster. And you can't keep up. 

There is a thunderstorm on the horizon and it is not a source of awe or beauty. You can't see it that way anymore. It is simply this: the promise of a downpour. A weather in which you can cry without being noticed.

There is Gnome's first tennis lessons. Because Bunica wanted them to play tennis. Because she loved tennis and you love her and them but it doesn't make sense to keep on loving if she has left. The other mothers crack jokes about bikini waxes and you try to make cheering sounds but the sun is too bright. And she is not here. To make you behave better. 

There is a game that the girls teach Isla. A game which involves jumping over a rope held by others. You are sure the game has a name but all you hear is Isla's laugh when you look at the photos. All you hear is how they taught her to jump.

All you see are the sunglasses she insisted on wearing through every leapy attempt. All you know is that she felt a connection between sunglasses and jumping. There could be no other option. And you know mom would be proud. But your heart breaks anyway.

There is a note in her trail book about a hike you took together last year. But she wrote the date down wrong. The date she recorded is tomorrow. A day that has not happened. Your son says it is a sign that Bunica wants us to hike it tomorrow. You hug him tighter than a cobra and he wonders when you will stop crying. You cry together. You don't think it will ever stop. But you will lace your boots and bite your lip and make what folks call "the best of it". Are they joking? What's happening right now is the worst of shit. Not the best of it.

There is, indeed, the hike you took to Lily Pad Lake with her last year. There is the hike you take again. This time, you call it a pilgrimage. This time you fold a boat to set loose in the lake where she smiled 1,000 times brighter than Colorado sun. You don't want to leave. You tell the kids descent is more difficult than ascent. You don't tell them why. You don't tell them that you can never go back to a place where she is with you. 

There are structures you climb just to move away from the chatter. You are scared of heights but you keep climbing things that put you out of reach. If you get high enough, then maybe no one will need you to tie a shoe or resolve a conflict over lollipops. The people you love are below. They won't climb this high. And so you cry because no one asks if a woman who climbs is crying. They only say, wow, that looks high.

There are books you read- Russian Nights by Vladimir F. Odoevsky- which make awkward promises about time. You feel yourself flushing. There are new forms of anger you have never encountered. Sudden comets of anger that blaze across your face. There are no unpoetic moments in the life of a poet. You'll take his statement and clarify: There is nothing poetic in the death of a poet. There is no poetry in a heart that stops. There is no beauty in this endless silence.

There is only the impossible, insoluble longing. And the destruction of present tense. This after and after and after. Nothing blessed.

A stunning secret garden in Holt.

It begins with flowers out front.

Earlier this summer, the King snuck the kids to visit the home of a lovely Holt couple with brilliant green thumbs. 

The knockout roses demanded attention. None of the half-hearted blooms you find in my untended yard. 

"Flower faces", we call them.
Because-- what else?

Gnome wanders among snapdragons.

I remember the childhood feeling of being dwarfed by plants. Wandering through paths which grew like whorls in the bark of an old oak tree. Nature's natural lines are curvy, as, perhaps, ours should be.

Lettuce and maples and wonder.

The pond.

Lilypads... and koi hiding underneath.

Roses hold the dew like cheeks hold childhood's tears.

A testament to what can be done in a tiny yard.

I admire this couple so much for what they made after the tornado's wreckage. What they cultivated and tended despite the damage. So many days when I wish I had a green thumb- or, at least, the persistence and dedication to put a garden higher on the list of things to honor in life. 

The Eldest came home with a tiny stalk of a crown of thorns plant which has developed into a happy, boisterous, multi-stalk crown of thorns sitting beside our front door. Every time he waters it, I think of how our lives have been enriched with blossoms handed along by others. I will always be grateful for these small gifts that grow into something bigger.

A few recent things.

Just because you call this home doesn’t mean home is not a form of self-defense. A band-aid heals but remains a barricade. The flag waves but has no hands. Mexican-Americans pour over lower borders like beetles from a moist log but they still die parched.

[from "The Ring in the Rain" published in Lingerpost]

 

Things I’ll never say again.
Settle, instead, for dictators and awful.
Treasures are stored inside
stories passed on as pickled
cauliflower recipes or mountains
rising mid-nose or a taste for sun
with teeth. Emotions are held back,
stockpiled into traditional forms.
Agony: a folk song old as wind.

[from "Holy Bread" published at Eunoia Review] 

 

It was Mabel’s idea. Everything from the temple to the mattress was Mabel’s idea. She read about the mattresses in a book about woodland Indians and the way she told it I was sure she could teach a class on the subject. So we sat in the temple and tore out hundreds of pages and wadded them up in our fists then unwadded only to wad them again until the paper was soft and smooth enough to feel the cotton inside. Soon only the covers were left. 

[from "Doppelganger" published in *82Review]

 

Whatever footprints persist
none of this is separate as it seems.

It was, after all, the Frank O’Hara poem,
that went through several hands

before it left me warmer
within your arms’ parentheses

the punctuation marked a girl
and how she lied to a perfectly

good poem. Whatever she quoted
you or him, the poem is the part

she can’t recover with our regret.

[from "Incident Concerning A Poem By Frank O'Hara" published at Logophile]

 

You call it unknown but what of me have you known and what more supple mystery than the nights of a creature who bleeds by the magnetic force of the moon.

[from "53/New Forms", a series of letters to Arthur Rimbaud
published in Lockjaw]