I am a teacher — an audacious claim for one who learns more from his students than he imparts. Yet, my students keep me honest and thinking! In our last class a student was speaking on how we might steer our valley, our planet, towards a more just, sane and sustainable way of being — and, perhaps a more existentially meaningful life to feed our hungry souls.
My prompt called for how we might create a world imbued with justice, revered democratic processes and an allegiance to ecological morality. In his response, the student, Isaac Gerber, didn’t mention the usual: more justice, less greed, no mansions or private jets and greater economic and environmental morality.
Yet, his response struck a profound chord with our class, and with me. It seemed inspired and practical, sage advice — a viable reprieve for humans lost in a self-induced consumptive coma … A way to lessen our complicity in our ruinous ways and the stress we are putting on this Valley with our disharmonious relationships with each other, and the planet.
Isaac started with, and I quote:
“My favorite movies to watch are those that make you sit still through the credits, and my favorite books to read are those that make you feel something so strongly that you cannot read for a week afterward. I love food that makes you stop eating. I recently got to see a Monet painting in a museum. I stared at it for an hour, then promptly left. I simply could not walk around and see more paintings after I saw those haystacks.”
David James Duncan calls this “wonder.” Duncan writes,
“Wonder is like grace, in that it’s not a condition we grasp; it grasps us. We can seek truth without wonder’s assistance. But seek is all we’ll do; there will be no finding truth unless wonder descends, and unlocks us.”
There is an irresistible essence to this state of grace — like love, choiceless, and a wickedly contagious call for relationship. Wonder moves us to be intimate with the innate excellence of our human spirit. Wonder elevates our mortal mission to seek that which is inherently sacred in people, our world, our place and care for it, with a kind of allegiance and intimacy with one’s places that engenders love, care, grace and good sense. As my grandmother would say, “What you love, you care for!“
Isaac continued:
“This quality, this inherent good I strive for in my trips around the sun, is like how Miles Davis vibrates the air with his trumpet and the passion with which Muhammad Ali bounces in a fight. The beauty we seek is encapsulated by those people and their actions!”
When I heard Isaac speak, and watched a room full of people — at the end of a three-hour class — in a simple state of awe, I felt honored to share this moment with other appreciative souls, a moment when we glimpsed a truth about who we are.
There is at least an ember of this quality in all of us; we are a humanity born in “ancient, naked, stunningly perfect, simple ferocious love!” (Bryan Doyle)
It is my responsibility to fan my own ember, and yours, and chase the sparks. Sadly, we often choose vain abundance over beauty, tucking precious “haystacks” behind excesses. Excess and excuses are first cousins who hold sway, leading us away from tending to the innocence of our soul and the health of our world. Our uncanny willingness to justify what we dislike about what we do leaves us foolishly worshiping a pretense, polishing our shiny thin veneer of justifications. And, we are good at it. It hurts the world.
Isaac ended his talk with my new mantra:
“Fight tooth and nail for the beauty in this world and for the beauty in others. Stop being so damn gentle with the good in this world, but absorb it like Davis with his trumpet and like Monet with a sunrise. Sink those teeth in so that when the credits roll you do not wish for more, but instead, you can sit still in the beauty of memory. Monet was a man who saw the world and sank his teeth in. That is how I wish to live!”
Years ago a skeptical student asked Father Thomas Keating, an abbot in Snowmass, if and where he found God … Father Keating thought for a moment, stood up, stretched his long arms into the sky and with a graceful descending trembling of gentle hands … said… “When aspen trees shiver in the wind … I see God …”
Isaac is hungry for the real deal when people whose passion, attention and hard work spread the generous best of our human spirit. Whether it is Miles Davis, Monet, Father Thomas or Isaac, we share an unmistakable primal desire to live within the wonder imbued in our human spirit — it is a predisposition of our heart, to shiver as aspen leaves in even the slightest breeze. It is a simple magic that provokes a singular and profound concern for each other, our place and our planet.