Winter

Wow.  I am looking out at a true blizzard, snow blowing and whirling in the wind, wildly waving trees, the sound of fierce wind turning the corners of our house and whipping over the stone walls.  Inside it is warm, the fire flickers, the one we usually do not light during the day. Today is the day to do whatever makes the house warm and cozy.

Friends have been giving me winter inspiration now for a few weeks.  Our  illustrator friend, Penny Dullaghan (who designed our new website), wrote a blog post about about the Danish concept and word Hygge (pronounced ‘hooga’ or ‘hyooga’).  She says…”it is hard to translate but basically means…coziness, togetherness, well-being, warm tucked under blankets, candles lit, good conversation, snuggled up and happy” all in the middle of winter.  I love that idea!  Looking for and creating the wonderful things that are available during this time of year.

Speaking of that, we have been in Vermont for a few weeks and have been spellbound by the winter wonderland on walks and cross country ski expeditions.  The soft snow perfectly balanced on tree branches and twigs, the intense blue sky, the crunch of dry snow underfoot.

I have been taking another oil painting class this month and how delightful to immerse myself in color surrounded by young, enthusiastic college student painters whose boldness has rubbed off on me.

And then, I want to go after color and compose it and smell it and taste it inside while outside is all white, brown and gray.

Lastly for this post, another dear friend gave me a Mary Oliver poem all about snow that seems perfect for today.

May your winter be filled with Hygge and your shoulders covered with stars.

"Walking Home from Oak-Head" by Mary Oliver

There is something about the snow-laden sky in winter in the late afternoon

that brings to the heart elation and the lovely meaninglessness of time. Whenever I get home - whenever -

somebody loves me there. Meanwhile I stand in the same dark peace as any pine tree,

or wander on slowly like the still unhurried wind, waiting, as for a gift,

for the snow to begin which it does at first casually, then, irrepressibly.

Wherever else I live - in music, in words, in the fires of the heart, I abide just as deeply

in this nameless, indivisible place, this world, which is falling apart now, which is white and wild,

which is faithful beyond all our expressions of faith, our deepest prayers. Don’t worry, sooner or later I’ll be home. Red-cheeked from the roused wind,

I’ll stand in the doorway stamping my boots and slapping my hands, my shoulders covered with stars.

Storytelling and Classrooms

Here is a poem from the January 6, 2015, Writers’ Almanac, a favorite daily web newsletter.  Stephen Dunn gives us pause in our digital (formerly analogue) age, to remember the power of oral story telling, both for the teller and the listener. Stories by Stephen Dunn

It was back when we used to listen to stories, our minds developing pictures as we were taken into the elsewhere

of our experience or to the forbidden or under the sea. Television was wrestling, Milton Berle,

Believe It Or Not. We knelt before it like natives in front of something sent by parachute,

but when grandfather said “I’ll tell you a story,” we stopped with pleasure, sat crosslegged next to the fireplace, waited.

He’d sip gin and hold us, his voice the extra truth beyond what we believed without question.

When grandfather died and changed what an evening meant, it was 1954. After supper we went

to the television, innocents in a magic land getting more innocent, a thousand years away from Oswald and the shock,

the end of our enormous childhood. We sat still for anything, laughed when anyone slipped

or lisped or got hit with a pie. We said to our friends “What the hey?” and punched them in the arms.

The television had arrived, and was coming. Throughout the country all the grandfathers were dying,

giving their reluctant permission, like Indians.

"Stories" by Stephen Dunn from Local Time. © Quill Press, 1986.

For Grandfather, to tell a story was to embrace an act of imagination that transcended reality…with the help of some gin.  Through his story he expanded his universe and probably, to some extent, escaped the pressures of his reality.  On a deeply intra-personal level he connected with his best beloved grandchildren.

For the children, grandfather’s stories became the extra truth beyond what we believed without question.  Grandfather transported the children into an imaginative world that invited questions and wonder; that suspended the reality of facts to be believed; our minds developing pictures     as we were taken into the elsewhere     of our experience or to the forbidden     or under the sea.

Some of my fondest childhood memories are sitting on the couch with a couple or three brothers asking Grammy to put the picture book down, and tell us another rabbit story.  With a twinkle in her eye, she would; and off we’d go into the woods and fields, into vast networks of homes in tree trunks and burrows; confronting unlimited joys and terrors.  She’d anticipated Watership Down by forty years.

Dunn holds this marvelous creative environment in stark contrast to the television, something sent by a parachute.  Somehow the moving pictures of the worlds of Milton Berle, Believe It Or Not, and certainly, Oswald, left little to the imagination.  The humor invited mindless mimicry and the news was simply shocking.

The purveyors of the world of creativity and imagination, grandfathers, the wise ones, didn’t give up...but, they did die.  And with their deaths came “reluctant permission” to dwell entirely within the reality of television.  The grandfathers, the older generation, were “like indians” surrendering to the inevitable domination of the other, in this case, television.

As teachers, we can revive the world of grandfathers and grandmothers, the world of imagination.  We can create environments in our classrooms that embrace storytelling.  This is not to say that reality is to be avoided; much is to be learned in the hundred languages we need to understand in order to survive in this world.  However, it is to say that there is much to be discovered in the extra truth beyond what we believed without question so that we can thrive and continue to imagine and to create a world where we all want to live.