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Meandering

Near the beginning of my undergraduate work twelve years ago, I took Basic Physics 101 and liked it a lot. I did have some conflicts with the teaching assistants though. I often lost credit on problems because although I had reached the correct answer, I hadn't followed the most direct route to get there. Outraged, of course, at this discrimination, I would bitterly complain that although my solution was unusual it was logically valid and led to the desired end. I was referred to the professor who would grin at my strange loop-de-loops and agree that I had done it correctly.

At the end of the year we had a chat. He told me a story about another mature student who had no formal training in math or science nor even a high school diploma. This person desperately wanted to attend McGill University and so kept applying. Finally, admissions gave him one chance. He could take any course in the university and if he could pass it he could enroll as a full-time student. He chose Physics 101. Since he was dedicating all his time and attention to this single course, and had a lot riding on the outcome, he took copious notes in class, used office hours to ask for help, and did every single problem at the end of all the chapters in the text. The professor told me that marking that student's final exam was like checking his own work. The student had completely internalized his teacher's style of thinking and approach to solving problems.

Then the professor said to me, "On the other hand, when I mark your exams, your way of thinking is so different from what I have seen before and your solutions are so far out in left field that it's really hard to follow them. You never take the straight, simple route, but you do get there and you need to really understand the subject to do so."

This little chat gave me pause to think... especially since, in solving problems, I had no intention of doing it a hard or unusual way. I just looked at the problems and did what made sense to me. I had been away from school for 25 years when I began my undergraduate studies, and during that time of "figuring out things on my own" I developed an idiosyncratic perspective. In looking back on my feelings of being manipulated and censored in high school, I see that one of the reasons I left academia in the first place was that even then, I didn't "fit" so well.

Introduction

This is a narrative,
one of an untold number of possible tales.

A pause
in the journey
to re-collect
and re-consider...

some ideas I've wandered among
and
wondered about these past three years.

I can offer only that...

and the invitation to wander with me
through the memories and insights that might arise in the space

between
us.

I love to tell stories of my overland travels; places I've been and people I've met along the way. The telling carries me back to there again· but of course it does not. I am here/now (always) in the story which is not the same as being in the place where the story began· and yet it is. For the living world is a storied land, and any story that lives in me must have roots buried deep within the collective stories we live together embedded in the land.

I continue to try,
(it is, apparently, my nature)
with little luck so far,
to pin down
where the world ends and my story begins.
None the less,
I continue to try.

And yet,
Krishnamurti reminds me that:

Truth is a pathless land.[1]

Framing the View of a Nomad's Journey

Each of you on the committee, in his or her own way, has pointed to the need for framing. What I wish to say needs to be framed to invite the reader into a space in which it makes sense. Yes! And not only for this work, but in my life. I often announce my truth defensively, expecting to be misunderstood, and so tend not to frame it in a way that invites understanding.

If I can learn this,
only this,
then the years on this project
will be worth the effort.

The intent of this paper, and also of my Ph.D. endeavor, is to create space for experience. Along the way, I will suggest that this is a possible orientation to rational thought itself. We might think and write and converse not to figure out and prove how the world really is or is not, but rather to create a larger, deeper potential for conscious experience. Thinking is in part a process of separating the world into distinct entities which focuses and enhances awareness. This process can be seen as a means of creating the potential for experiential space. In order for this potential to become actual, the pieces must be organized and reintegrated into a systematic whole. Thinking is also a means by which we can fit those pieces back together again. Or not... depending on our experience and to whom we listen.

In recent conversation, David[2] said he is looking forward to the opportunity for me to share what I have learned during these past three years of reading and thinking. My response was/is anxiety tinged with dread.

Why?

My overland tales are not intended to be comprehensive travelogues, but evocative invitations. In their telling I feel free to speak my truth from the heart, to shape and reshape memories and words to invite that truth to shine forth. Perhaps my anxiety arises from fear that a more seriously accurate approach is required in describing this inner journey; that I must get the names and dates and locations right. But so much of what I've studied is forgotten. What was vibrantly important two years ago is now a faded memory.

I imagine (or have been taught) that education is like building a tower one brick at a time. As each layer of knowledge is mortared into place, it forms the base for what comes next. But I feel more like an intellectual nomad, living in a ragged tent, and wandering through the shifting knowledgescape of the present. The only ideas I can really see and touch and taste are the ones most recently encountered... and those buried so deeply in my soul they have become part of who I am.

I would like to more clearly propose this notion of journeying as a metaphor for what I see myself doing here at the university. In my physical travels, I begin with a destination somewhere out there far away. This sets a tentative boundary of the space within which I move. Setting my destination as northern Mexico creates a different context for the journey than if I set southern Chile as my eventual destination. Plans change and this is good. Holding a destination and timeline lightly is very different from being slave to a pre-established itinerary. During many years of open-ended travel, my style has changed. Destination often fades into the background as the events of daily life, arising wherever I happen to be, capture my interest.

While working as a guide for adventure tours in southern Mexico, I would describe to new tourists all the wonderful activities planned for the coming three weeks. But then I would pause and remind them to leave space for the unexpected. I would say that a vital aspect of Latin American culture is waiting. "What for?" they would ask. "Nothing," I would reply. "Just waiting; or rather just being open to whatever life should offer in the moment." I encouraged them to spend time sitting on park benches and curbstones with no intention of looking for anything special at all. Just being there to see what life would present.

Apparently I have wandered the knowledgescape the same way. I set a Ph.D. as my eventual destination, which creates a different space to move in than if I were heading for a Masters degree. But my itinerary is loose and in looking back at my footprints in the sand I see my path has meandered widely as I have seen and been entranced by ideas and conversations I've had along the way.

Education should be a journey of transformation that opens us to the mysterious unknown rather than encloses us in a fortress of facts.[3] In saying this, I realize I have invited you all to become mirrors of my life. I am drawn to consider where I began, where I might be going and how far I have come along the way. This is not entirely comfortable since I can see deep flaws in myself. In terms of a degree, it might have been more prudent to maintain some separation between us and present to you the polished face of a performer rather than requesting the opportunity to search for and show my heart. But this pathless land we are walking together is more enticing to me than any paper destination.

A Ph.D. project isn't an empty form previously constructed (like a paint by numbers picture) that just needs to have the content filled in. It should attempt to be new and fresh and creative in form as well as content. Projects tomorrow will be different from what they are today, the shape changed by the innovative work of each student along the way.[4] This makes things scary and difficult too. Where to begin? No, this is not really the problem. We can only begin over and over from where we are. But in which direction shall we begin to walk as we wander this pathless land?

Organization

The paper has grown into an introduction plus three sections: a Map of the territory, a consideration of my/our Journey, and Notes from the road. There are also stories, endnotes and an appendix.

The Map section briefly sketches the outline of a conceptual framework I often use to organize and stretch my own cognitive space. I have borrowed it from the work of Ken Wilber who, in my view, has a genius for integrating a vast number and range of ideas. This kind of mental organization is a challenge for me. My own consciousness tends to be more fluid and unstructured or become constricted and confused. Insights and musing arise, swirl for a time, then dissolve again. I question, and ponder notions and ideas, sometimes at length and depth, but do not have the patient intent to classify and sort these wonderings into an overall conceptual schema. There is nothing wrong with this. It is exciting and earthy. It is vibrant and alive. Still, the play of ideas becomes lighter and more lyrical when there is an open space within which the thoughts and insights can intertwine without becoming so enmeshed that they trip and collapse together in a heap. So during the past years I have tentatively adopted Wilber's notions for my own use. I use the schema here as a sort of cognitive Map on which to plot our course as we follow the path this paper is creating as it emerges.[5]

A map also serves a second, perhaps more important, function. While it does help me keep track of where I am, it also stimulates awareness of possible places I might like to go; of interesting worlds to explore. In reading Wilber I encounter the ideas of other thinkers located in the expanded space of possibility his map creates for me. I am often overwhelmed by how many books I would like to visit, how slow a reader I am, and how little time I have.

Like any powerful conceptual framework, this one has great hypnotic potential and I am sometimes in danger of becoming entranced by it and so confound conceptualization for direct experience. If I reify the conceptualization, it no longer serves its organizational and space-generating function, but itself becomes the content of thought rather than remaining a context within which thinking may proceed. At this point it ceases to work as metaphor and becomes concrete fact that asks to be accepted as true or rejected as false. It is my intention to resist this siren call and not defend or attack the conceptualization as right or wrong, but rather to value it as a broad, inclusive, and useful cognitive structure upon which I can hang ideas and doubts, questions and experiences.[6]

The second section, a description and consideration of the Journey, discusses some of the questions I have explored/lived during the past three years. It has a narrative structure carried by plot and time line. It is a story of an individual, a student named Bob, on a journey of transformation through education which centers on preparing for a one year retreat into wilderness solitude.

It is important to recognize that as this journey has become more immediately self-reflexive, the project has become more than the retreat into solitude. That phase, while still the focus and context for these preparations, is in the future, and this is now. Moment by moment development of mindfulness, as I will discuss below, is my basic method, and that process is ongoing. This moment, this one, as I sit here writing this line, becomes part of the journey I am exploring and describing. In writing this paper I can see that my work has become an exploration of Education as Spiritual Practice or Spiritual Practice in the Context of Education.

Section three sends in personal Notes from the road. They are not intended to provide an accurate record of where I've been, but rather to evoke memory, insight, feeling in both myself the writer, and you the reader. They are sometimes poetic and may make no rational sense. There are multiple, perhaps contradictory, voices calling to be heard as they whisper their truths.

These three organizational sections might be called rational, mythical and magical, and we will get to these notions soon enough. But first I want to celebrate that, like all conceptual systems created to organize life, this one is fuzzy. It is not clear where one section ends and the next begins. While each section tries to behave properly, the boundary between the Map and the Journey is porous, and the Notes insinuate themselves promiscuously into the other two sections. (To identify them, I have used a distinct font which you have already seen.) Down the road in the Journey, I will discuss how the classic divisions between "realist", "impressionist" and "confessional" tales in ethnography dissolve in autoethnographic work. In honesty, I can not clearly separate this trichotomy. There is always ebb and flow between poetry and analysis, personal and public, subjective and objective, inside and outside. I invite you to move into this tale and dance with me among analysis, description and musings.

The extensive endnotes are set apart to maintain the flow of the main story of the paper, but the separation is not necessarily inherent to the material itself. The appendix is relevant but not integral to the main story. It is a paper previously written which explores pedagogical approach as well as the relationship among skill sets, conceptual thinking, direct experience, and transformation in teaching and learning.

It is impossible to discuss all the ideas I have explored during the past three years (even if I could remember them), yet they have all been important and relevant to my journey in some way. Truly I have followed my heart in this journey. I am troubled to look at my bookshelf and see the faces of forgotten friends and adversaries sitting there. Remembering has never been my strong suit, and as age works its magic, the specifics fade even more. As I have said, this is troubling. But as Vipassana meditation teacher S.N. Goenka repeatedly tells his students, "The task is to see and accept the world as it is, not as you would like it to be."

The question, "What is the relationship between lived experience, conceptual explanation, and spiritual knowing?" is a dark cloud hanging over and within my head. I remember the committee meant it as an exciting question pregnant with possibility and playfulness. What happened? I feel oppressed by this need to discuss what I don't understand. Why aren't these ruminations as lyrical and delicate as cherry blossoms dancing in the breeze overhead? Often these internal w(o/a)nderings bring just such joy as does this spring day, but not today. I am caught between the rock of my ignorance and the hard place of my need to finish this stage of the journey and move on to prepare for the wilderness. Recently, David recalled for me that the suggestion to write this essay was meant to make life easier, not harder.

Spring Daze of Shadow and Light

Yes.
This anxious need for perfection is internal
and must be lived
internally.

What is this hole of dread? How weird.
What is this going on?
The dread, to some extent, floats freely,

but lingers

linked to Lee. [7]

Will he criticize my work? Pick holes in what is not logically precise and internally consistent? Painful expectations. Yet through all our previous interactions my writing has improved.

Why then this tight anxiety?

I wish my work to evoke
and feel it can't
if meaning and argument
must be nailed down.

But this can't be right; not with my committee.

Perhaps it is the fear
that I am not
up to the task of doing it well.

"Not Good Enough!"
the old voice whispers.

Of honing the words
to speak the lyrics,
sing the melody,
softly stomp the rhythm.

Fred Bunnell speaks of a vibrant, new world born in the shadow of his encounter with cancer. Each day now he celebrates life. Peter[8] also finds wonder in what he does each day. This awakening, no matter its source, is on the path of transformation. I sometimes feel this vibrant joy in the wilderness or wandering the byways of South America. But I am weary of seeking Îout there,' somewhere else. I am learning slowly to remember to look under my desk and deep into this computer screen to find it right here all around me.

Yet...

Cherry Blossoms

Yesterday,
I sat facing this empty screen.
Beyond my window the cherry blossoms called;
I wanted to be anywhere but here.

Finally,
giving in to the passion of my springtime heart, I gave up and danced softly into outside.

Are you remembering?
To take time to remember...
That life is fleeting and the plum blossoms
(lyric pale pink aureole caressed by dark twisting branches and trunk,
soft breeze ripples, shimmers, flickers
Shadow and Sunlight)
will be gone tomorrow.

Are you remembering?
To take time to sit
and lean into the tree's tough strength against your back - held in wonder,
and bathe in the tender pain and beauty of the moment?

I leaned and soaked then began to consider,
how I might speak of that body knowledge in words;
and found no desire to do so...
I wanted only
to lean and soak
in the sweet cut of my passion for living.

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