Teacher Creature Unschooled

 The moment when I took off "The Boot" for the first time in two months and walked on my own two feet was... wobbly?  It felt like I had just stepped off a cruise ship after months at sea, or perhaps ridden a gravity-scrambling rollercoaster. It felt as if my injured foot were somehow longer than the other one, like maybe it had been made out of clay and someone had been pulling on it all this time. Like Gumby. Or, remember Stretch Armstrong? It was also exhilarating. I was kind of amazed and impressed with myself, witnessing my own first steps, my glorious moment of freedom. Tears welled up when I felt both feet firmly on the ground with nothing but the soles of my shoes in between, knowing what this meant, a single-step journey to start my next 1,000 miles. My ever-supportive niece-slash-wing woman who witnessed it seemed genuinely proud and excited for me. Now I am slowly weaning off the protective Boot and enjoying increasing amounts of Sneaker Time every day. I've be...

 Once upon a time there was a beautiful and clever princess. As a young girl she saw beauty everywhere and paid attention to tiny miraculous details all around her. She noticed colors and patterns and found things that others had lost. She invented imaginative games to play with her sisters and sang and drew pictures and read books. One night after the young girl had become a lady, she wandered into the painted desert, for the evening sky was such a magnetic shade of purple and the sagebrush sent such sweet scents wafting through the cool night air. The world was so beautiful in the waning light that she walked farther and deeper into the wilderness than almost any of the villagers had ever been before. As darkness fell, she became weary. She lied down upon  a soft patch of earth and, taking in the gentle evening sounds of the desert, she fell asleep and began to dream beautiful, colorful dreams. Some time later, the townspeople realized she was missing from the castle and the...

 It's hard not to feel betrayed by a broken bone. Part of my broken bone story is how it's changed my relationship with my body. I've always prefered to think of myself as someone who is physically strong. I take pride in the wilderness hikes I've done, in challenging yoga poses I've worked on and occasionally found may way into, in my ability to lift heavy suitcases and move furniture around. I used to live in a 5th floor walk up - that's not for the faint of heart!  All of a sudden I made one wrong move that interrupted a tiny piece of bone and it fractured that part of my identity. I was rendered weak and fragile, in need of special handling.  I found myself incapable of many things that once felt easy. I lost some agency.  Six weeks of limited mobility and a lot of streaming television later, I find myself breathless just from moving around the house.  If I were an antelope I'd've been picked off by a lion by now. My phone's pedometer stopped giv...

 The world has looked very different to me for these past 6 weeks with my broken foot. The hardest was when I  was restricted to non-weight bearing on the injured foot. Everywhere I went I was hoisting myself along on crutches or in the extremely retro wheelchair I borrowed from camp. All of a sudden architectural and geographic features I'd barely ever paid attention to became focal points defining my freedom of movement. I learned that my house was not designed for wheelchairs. A half-inch lip over the threshold into the kitchen became my nemesis. I needed at least two limbs to make it over - either both hands to move the wheels or a hand and a foot if I was attempting to carry something. The chair fit through the doorway, but just barely. I left probably dozens of scuff marks on the wall when my aim was a little off.  I began strategizing my kitchen entries and exits for maximum efficiency. The approach to the bathroom wasn't much better, because it involved an L-shape...

 If there is something we have learned from the pandemic it's patience.  This is a different kind of patience than the kind we summon in a traffic jam, or in a long line at the grocery store, or in waiting rooms, or when you're stuck on hold. That petty patience is daily, perfunctory, run-of-the-mill patience. The patience of fulfilling immediate needs. Sort of a small-scale, micro-level patience. This new patience, pandemic patience, is the type that is required to deal with the inevitable and the unknown. More in line with glacial, geologic time than the hurry of appointments and errands and alarm clocks. The new patience exists in a dark hallway. All you can see is as far in front of you as your flashlight can illuminate. You don't know how long the hallway is. But the only way to find the end is to keep moving forward. Sometimes the hallway seems to double back on itself, like a maze - haven't I seen this landmark before? Did we make a wrong tun and backtrack somewh...

 To: 5th Metatarsal, c/o my right foot Dearest Precious Tiny Piece of Bone, I'm sorry I never knew your name until you were broken. I never knew how instrumental you were for balance and walking. With that, I never realized how much moving and walking defined the boundaries of my life. You're only an inch or two long, but without you in tact my whole life has been enclosed, shrunken, transformed.  I never knew what you looked like before you were broken. Now I've seen quite a handful of x-rays from all different angles. I saw your jagged, diagonal break. The doctor called you unstable. (Her words, not mine, please don't be offended.) I've been watching as you try to fill in the gap and knit yourself back together. Several times my fate has been sealed by the looks of you, encoded and enclosed into a shiny CD of the digital scan. Never realized what power you have over me! One instant you were whole, the next, fractured. The innocent victim of too much pressure and f...

I've been taking a class called Finding Freedom. It's an anti-racist workshop for white women about confronting, understanding and transforming our roles within the structures of white supremacy. One of our homeworks this week is to reflect on these words by organizer and liberation-seeker Mary Hooks:   “To avenge the suffering of our ancestors, to earn the respect of future generations, and to be transformed in the service of the work. Let’s get free ya’ll!" and to come up with our own call to action. Here is mine so far: To banish the shame sown by our forefathers and reaped by every generation since; To be accountable for harm we've caused or allowed, while refusing to be victimized by our shame; To repair the harms that have been caused against our will but in our name;  To leave behind our mythical innocence in the name of truth; To reject the hollow niceties of false nurturing and embrace compassion with one hand and accountability with the other; To cure ourselv...