Teacher

I am very lucky. I get to teach what I love in incredible places and get paid for it.

Today I was able to take the students out on the patio in the morning sun and have a discussion all about environmental philosophy, land ethics, spirituality, and American conservation. Delving back into our conscious to memories of place and self. For me digging up my early memories as a child roaming the forests on the 12 acres and beyond of our home in rural Virginia. Walking barefoot through the creeks and swamps following deer trails, catching bullfrogs and black snakes, and rambling through hardwoods of sycamore and oaks, swampy pine forests, and thick brambles with my dog Frisco. Nostalgia for the smell of the salt marshes on the Eastern shore, the blooming of the dogwoods in spring, and the kaleidoscope of color bursting from the Blue Ridge in the autumn. These are just some of the memories that make my heart sing, that make me nostalgic for Virginia. In a way my own land ethic and sense of place, though for a long while now my life has been nothing short of nomadic.

We read A Sand County Almanac this morning, a true classic. Aldo Leopold was visionary long before his time and though he writes of his everyday observations of nature and the seasons gone by on a small unassuming sandy soiled farm in Southern Wisconsin he writes with insight and passion, wisdom and spirit. His is and continues to be a call for internalization of land ethics, self sufficiency, wholeness, and responsibility. Juxtapose those ideas with the reality of conservation and ¨land ethics¨ in America today and you have the ingredients for a lively discussion. And so it went on the sun warmed bricks of the patio this morning.

I remember a piece of art I picked up a while back that reminded me of these butterflys I blipped today. A postcard print I sent to some awesome friends that recently had a baby. It was a drawing of a person blowing away the seeds of a dandy lion on the wind. Instead of seeds though they were the shapes of children blown out to land someday and grow. It said ´Teacher´ down the side in the style of those bright colored building blocks typical of kid?s early toys. I thought it was gorgeous and most appropriate for them. Will being a teacher himself and him and Julie now teachers in the truest sense of being parents. Anyway, I dont know how good a teacher I actually am but I enjoy it and of all the things to do in this life teaching has always seemed of unequivocal value to me. There are many things that the world needs no more of, do we need more sales people, more bureaucrats, more investment bankers? The world always needs more teachers and there is so much to be done. These butterflys adorn the walls walking down the stairs of the house in Cuenca. They always remind me of that painting.