My mornings as a student in a typified schooling and academic enterprise often feel into a dread of how unfulfilling of how the classroom environment has developed today yet also this bittersweet mourning of how I used to be filled with joy to learn.
That joy of learning I learned when I first learned how to walk, understanding that at the base of learning is something so playful. That, in those latent fireworks of communing with what is growth and most real, learning ignite my passions towards loving that situations of challenge. Where I did not know and was so curious to find out that failure, setbacks, and those moments of intense feedback were the elements that married me to life.
That in finding out and walking the truths, a pearl could form exactly from those situations deemed so impure and often times I attached to as expressions of my identity. As if the learning process had anything to do with you, as I coming to understand it is more about losing myself in what I learn, so much so that when I return I am expanded, not lost in the maps of others or expectations foreign to me. And that our education system today so reflects circles of pain: instituting blame, guilt, shame, and identification with these tragic reactions and desanctifying these sacred grounds of knowledge wayfinding.
As I am so unfulfilled with the ways in which education, whether that be higher, lower or all that lies in-between, distorts the grounds of learning. A learning as love and leaping in tune with wild ways in which we need to grow. And how that wild horse of knowledge is only tamed, not in some numerically graded evaluation or some abstract performance, but in becoming intimate exactly with its unnameable grooves. Those grooves that are only exposed when we are fiercely vulnerable to the openness that learning requires. To tune into knowledge's heartbeat, its hooves that move and rustle from things uncomforted, and how unihibited we need to be to respect the need of gentleness, care, and a tending to remember.
That knowledge, in its ways of attempting to approximate life, whether that be of its essence or its deepest meaning, has forgotten the epicenters in which we shake. Those earthquakes that crack us into awakening to deeper truths, as we latch onto edges of the precipice for the fear of losing ourselves. As though we know how the aorta plays a role in our cellular bodies of cardiovascular circulation, the blood of our beings, the blood the sustains us through direct meeting and contact with wounds is so forgotten outside of our bodies.
And the architecture and apeture of our learning does not pierce into the natural intelligence of our own bodies, that speak to wisdom so deep that we muddy its waters through an understanding only scientific. Not realizing how much deep ways of learning can be discovered if we say the world as teacher rather than trap or as someplace to be 'improved'.
And yet we have forgotten, despite our studies of anthropology, anatomy, and biology, how much our bodies sustains and cares for us with how we have declared our bodies as a posession, almost as if like a car. [1]
And thus, disconnected from the deeper teachings of biota, and how the Earth loves us and how much we need to learn despite our techonologies and eerie sense that we are 'superior' to 'lower' forms of 'intelligence' and 'life.'
And I find myself with this question now beating within me: what feelings have I so disregarded that they have become background and so far on the edges of discovery? And how does these feeling engage myself with my own unfulfillment with education?
And the answer always come to this feeling of loss: that there is something we have lost in the deep ritual of learning and sharing—that campfire attention to stories. [2] And that intimacy and rapture found in deep listening to the person telling that story, sitting by a campfire on a dark night, so concretized, standardized and so disconnected in the modernity of the drowning florescent that drown up life lighting it up in such a manufactured artificial way. That learning loses its magic. And I see how learning how now lost many things, learning of the origins of the ways in which knowledge used to travel.
Francis Weller, psychotherapist and soul wayfinder, makes a point to this in the ways in which our grief (love for what is living and longing for in our separation from it) has become suffocated by our system of valorize shutting-down.
He asks the question:
"How do I come into contact and step out of contact with grief?"
Then brings sensitivity to the intensity of feeling grief:
"Because grief itself, like we've said earlier, can be overwhelming, particularly if it wasn't held earlier in our lifetime."
and then brings:
And whenever it comes up, I mean, I can't tell you how many times I heard it in my office, if I go there, I'm never coming back.
And I'll say to them frequently, if you don't go there, you're never coming back. You know, because so much of our energy's locked up in trying to avoid grief.
By avoiding the grief—feeling the weigth of what has been lost in the practices of our education—and not diving into that question of how far astray what we learn is from our true imaginations, we lose ourselves and have this intense longing to come home. Yet so much of the systems we live in today anesthesize these longings into pathologizations, as we see how deviations from the normal whether that be scores of student burnout, depression, and anxiety levels bolstering. To how they are dealt in ways that by no means address how healthly a response they are to a system out of balance—a system literally cooking our planet forgetting we are the chefs and participate in the preparation of a burning planet.
A system that requires students to sap their health with incentives of increasing numbers and buffeting a resume or application that is never quite complete. And a system that incentivizes regurgitative learning, an elegy to how much what we learn is in disarray from what is meaningful, as we literally and figuratively throw up what has been fed to us only for it to be forgotten. And its message to bypass any grounding in our bodies.
As if the messages of our schooling did rest in the cradling of our stomach and were to be digested into the cells that make us up, I would feel how the message would be cancerous. That the ways in which school so embodies blame and disorientation from our identities that only grow free from evaluation of whether or not we deserve our own love would actually made my body collapse. That the free force of letting the abstracts ways in which education now individualizes our studies away from collaboration and connection with how group work is so lamented, brings my understanding to see regurgitative learning to be a healthy response in our personal systems that keep us alive only in connection and collaboration.
And with how our systems so materialize longing onto to be found in consuming, I see the bitter antidote to the poison of consuming things that may not even be nourishing is in creating.
Creating—that efforted gentle and determined action of birth—is yet the most radical action to take within a system that so embodies collapse. And by creation, I do say creation washed away from the death of reaction, rebellion, and running away—those anesthesizing acts of a life uncreated but simply run through without any attention or presence. But creation as a response, as an act of inviting mess as the messiah to how our organized bodies so speak and transmit pain. Inviting without an RSVP, knowing that every situation is an intiation and invitation to learn, to expand my heart even as it is deemed broken to circulate in the blessed unrest of birth.
Creating requires us to put aside parts of ourselves to their death. Yet the challenge is how to hospice those parts of ourselves in collapse? When falling with the collapse is easier than the pain of diving down those impeded streams, facing obstacles that are requirements in removing the obstructing ways of seeing we often materialize to comfortize what we see. How do you mourn their deaths of parts of yourself reflecting the same collapse as the abrupt violence of our systems without becoming overwhelmed or retracting in repulsiveness to how much hurt there is around?
How do I hospice parts of myself when I face a world so allergic to self-care? When I face an education system where I feel that feeling of aloneness despite being surrounded by many? When I face an academic ecology where there is no love for struggles of learning but this convenienitized hoop-jumping of being 'right'. This shrunken, shriveled ChatGPT-esque prompting that we need to be a certain way to be accepted. And that acceptance only comes in letters rather than meeting our bodies in beloved belonging that we do not need to qualify for but NEED for our own health.
For I see an education system that is so disconnected from our hearts, in the sterility of well-intetioned science, that it is so challenging to feel the weight of collapse when normality is accepted as healthy. That the silence around any negative feedback from student to teacher, teacher to adminsitration, and any relationship to education to be so stuck in its own professionalism and bureaucratic systems that they forget the transformation we need lies in the messy.
In the places not yet understood but deeply felt. In the places of our bodies that we often so disconnect from when our pain is heavy. So then I wonder, how can school not get in the way of my education. And that premise is heavy.
- [1]
- As someone once made a point *(I forgot and update this once I rediscover the source) that we often relate to our own bodies as cars and that we start to only be grateful and aware of our health when juxtaposed to our bodies feeling pain and harm. And how, to use the car metaphor, we intimately see the body only in its negative form of disconnection: our body broken down almost like car that we stop wanting to be 'in' it or rather, more deeply, as a body. And in our ownership of our body that allows ourselves to use our bodies in slavery to what we think we need, we can also directly unlink ourselves from our deepest needs. Whether that to be fed or simply moving to the dining table as we tragically meet our need for connection and play watching Netflix or Youtube. (Back to text)
- [2]
- As much of learning can be simplified into the tapping different ways of story-ing the world. With history being the story-ing of the world through our conceptions of time and how past echoes into future and present. And literature and writing being ways in which we can be our own stories—so connected to even fictional worlds and how even the imagination can reflect our lives and refract into dreams either deferred or truly lived out.(Back to text)