October 26, 2011

whoa

I just had a miniature explosion – the good kind – inside my head. I don’t quite know how to tell the story, but I’ll try to do it linearly. That’s usually a good strategy.

1st: I become an English teacher and rely almost completely on a book by Jim Burke to figure out what I’m doing. I think it’s a great book. I read every word, including the eloquent epigraph from one of Burke’s students:

Without companions, the world is a sea of stories with no one to listen.

2nd: I join Clusterflock.

3rd: I find that a certain Clusterflocker – Kelsey Parker – was the author of that epigraph.

4th: I hum “It’s a small world” to myself incessantly.

posted by in observations, quotes, surprise, teaching | * | 12 comments 

comments

  1. Kelsey Parker on October 26th, 2011 at 10:33 pm

    Hi!

  2. Sheila Ryan on October 26th, 2011 at 10:34 pm

    Sweet.

  3. Casey Cichowicz on October 26th, 2011 at 10:52 pm

    That’s pretty terrific.

  4. Andrew Simone on October 26th, 2011 at 11:12 pm

    Fucking A.

  5. Andrew Simone on October 26th, 2011 at 11:16 pm

    But seriously, there isn’t a single person here that doesn’t have at least one moment of spectacular brilliance, noticed or unnoticed. The longer I know you folks, the more I am agog.

  6. Deron Bauman on October 26th, 2011 at 11:40 pm

    Wow.

  7. Deron Bauman on October 26th, 2011 at 11:59 pm

    And Kelsey, that is a beautiful quote.

  8. Kelsey Parker on October 27th, 2011 at 1:20 am

    Thank you, Deron. I wish I could remember better what it was like to be that fourteen-year-old Kelsey. Everything changed within that year.

  9. Rick Neece on October 27th, 2011 at 5:33 am

    Whoa, indeed. Lovely.

  10. Jonathan McNicol on October 27th, 2011 at 6:30 pm

    Fourteen. Phew.

    Simone used exactly the right word. About all you folks: agog.

  11. Daryl Scroggins on October 27th, 2011 at 7:02 pm

    Luke–this is splendid; and Kelsey–your lovely mind was there before the planets formed.

    This reminds me of a wonderful passage from Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel Ceremony, a Native American (Laguna Pueblo) take on the importance of stories:

    “I will tell you something about stories,
    They aren’t just for entertainment.
    Don’t be fooled
    They are all we have, you see,
    all we have to fight off illness and death.
    You don’t have anything
    if you don’t have the stories.
    Their evil is mighty
    but it can’t stand up to our stories.
    So they try to destroy the stories
    let the stories be confused or forgotten
    They would like that
    They would be happy
    Because we would be defenseless then.”

  12. Kelsey Parker on October 27th, 2011 at 8:35 pm

    Daryl, those are wonderful words. Thank you for chiming in here, your presence is always a delight.

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