The Big Dipper

An essay inspired by Zen in the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury.

And, of course, the more water you dip out the more flows in. (p. 81)

Of the things I read about in Bradbury, two ideas really stood out to me. The whole notion of keeping lists (he reports keeping lists of nouns, my variation on that was to keep a list of titles of the pieces I would probably write one day). By keeping those lists, I was able to dip some water out of the well of memories I had stored, some in untouchable places. And, I discovered that Bradbury was right! As I dipped out the titles, more memories, and consequently more titles, flowed in. Since that time I have gone back and written about some of the items on the list; others remain on the list as titles only. It is perhaps one of the most productive kinds of writing I have done, yet I failed to keep up with it.

This opportunity then, to read Bradbury again (perhaps my unconscious reason for suggesting the book), shames me into acknowledging my lack of discipline in dipping out of the well. It also provides the perfect opportunity to begin dipping overflowing scoops of memories out of the well in order for other memories to flood in. While Bradbury's memories are mostly of a personal kind used as mulch (and yes, sometimes fodder) for his stories, it is just as conceiveable that teaching memories would be as appropriate for such a list as personal memories. Perhaps it is my task on this blog to begin such a list...both of personal memories and of teaching memories...of the critical incident kind? It is exactly these kind of memories that I prefer to write about, to think about. The ways in which my personal memories and my professional memories intersect openly reveal who I am as a person and as a teacher.

"I teach who I am," Parker Palmer writes (in The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher's Life) and this is what I mean by the intersection. The point at which my personal and professional lives intersect is the very point at which I am the most real, the most truthful, the most alive. I personally like reading the stories of others that describe these points of intersection; the stories that let me see into the mind of another, to stand beside that other and see what they see, to imitate the thoughts and questions asked by the other as ways to uncover, shovel load by shovel load, the ins and outs of me.