Cairns 71

Beginning of the Long Nights, 2012

The first rains of California’s winter rainy season were perfect (from a Gaian sense). They were gentle but steady, four or five days apart with warm weather in between so all the sprouting seeds got off to a strong start, raising a protective leaf surface over the ground before the pounding rains which are now coming. I am hopeful of many wonderful rain walks. Runoff and soil will probably dominate the next issue. This issue is mostly about systems thinking.

Chrysalis

Every now and then Chrysalis passes through challenging times and each time, memories of specific challenges I encountered and overcame while hiking cross-country rise into consciousness and I feel my spirit slip into a stoical confidence that never doubts that we’ll find some way through. Might have to retrace steps, go some other way, or devise something unexpected but some way we’ll make it. That gesture of lifting up the shoulder straps to temporarily relieve the pack’s weight, take a breath, and then press on is deep in the bones. And again I say thank you to all those years of roaming and the gifts they nourish.

On the other hand, a book was just published which spotlights Chrysalis along with ten other schools in the country. Trusting Teachers with School Success: What Happens When Teachers Call the Shots is an examination of teacher-led schools. The authors’ hypothesis was that if teachers had the power to shape their school, the school would exhibit those characteristics that research has found in high-performing, creative businesses. The authors list those characteristics and then use them as windows to view eleven schools, chosen for teachers having some significant empowerment in running the school. Good read.

Teaching systems thinking

Each year I experiment with teaching systems thinking to my eighth grade “What is Possible?” class. (Ostensibly, American history.) I want to share my opening lesson that went very well this year.

I cut enough ¾” PVC pipes in half so that each student in the class had a 5’ pipe. The first day we spent 15-20 minutes outside trying to balance the poles on our hands. Some of the kids knew how to do it but many of them had never done this before. Homework was to take their pipe home along with a paper that had two assignments. The first was to have a parent sign that the child had either successfully balanced the pole for one minute or had practiced trying for at least twenty minutes. The other assignment was:

“Based on your experience so far, what specific suggestions or tips would you give to someone who was just starting to try learning how to balance a pole?”

We discussed this at the next day’s class. Students then practiced balancing again and were then given the next assignment.

“Based on your experience so far, who is in control of the balancing: you or the pole? Write a well-constructed paragraph explaining your answer with examples.”

That assignment generated a really good discussion. Some thought we were in control, some thought the pole, a few thought that both were in control.

Then I experimented with using Powerpoint to structure an interactive lecture. What follows is the second draft that I will try next year. The slide text is in bold, followed by my description of what will or did happen during that slide.

So why are we balancing these poles?

(This question is a fun invitation to start connecting the kinesthetic experience with something academic.)

How many of you felt your light shining brighter when you were balancing? Why? Where did this come from?

(Chrysalis’s mission is “encouraging the light within each student to shine brighter.” This question invites students to bring their emotional experience of enjoyment (they all enjoyed balancing the poles) into the discussion and start analyzing the dynamics of balancing.)

Because you and the pole form a SYSTEM.

From Greek – putting something together 

Definition – a group of “things” PLUS the relations connecting them that, all together, form a larger “something” with interesting behaviors of its own.

(I’m rather proud of this definition of mine. In the past, I’ve pulled definitions from systems thinking texts and run into problems trying to fit them to three large categories of systems: (1) natural, abiotic physical systems such as the solar system, (2) biological systems that usually have a purpose such as the heart, and (3) human-created systems that have a goal such as a government structure. My definition blurs the specifics of purpose and why a particular system exists to make the central idea of relationships between parts more accessible to eighth graders.)

“Things” are easy to see.   “Relations” are less obvious.

However, the relationships between parts create behavior that none of the constituent parts could produce on their own – such as the pole balancing upright.

Certain patterns in these relationships emerge over and over again within a diversity of systems. Understanding these patterns can give us insights into a diversity of systems.

What is the pattern in our relationship with the pole?

Pole starts to fall.

Eyes see top of pole moving.

Brain sends message to move hand.

Hand moves the bottom of the pole beneath the top of the pole.

Top of the pole starts to fall in a different direction.

(Class corroboration of this sequence with several personal inputs from them to create emotional connections and buy-in.)

This sequence of cause and effect goes around and around.

Eye reports motion to brain

Brain tells hand to move

Hand moves bottom of pole beneath top of pole

Pole starts to fall in new direction

Eye reports motion to brain

Brain tells hand to move

…….

This is a Feedback Loop

Feedback occurs whenever cause and effect loops back upon itself.

Pole balancing is an example of a Balancing Feedback Loop.

If the pole starts going one way, feedback guides our hand to move it back. This kind of feedback stabilizes a system.

Our bodies possess many balancing feedback loops.

         If we get cold, we shiver. If we get warm, we sweat.

Balancing feedback loops can create situations of Dynamic Equilibrium

Equilibrium – from Latin – Equi = equal, Libra = scale (as in a balance scale)

The condition of a system when competing forces are balanced, resulting in no net change.

Hand supporting underneath

Gravity pulling down

Learning to drop your hand as you move the bottom of the pole is an important part of pole balancing.

(Dropping the hand a bit as one moves the bottom of the pole back under the top is important. By dropping the hand faster than the tip is tilting to the side, the tilting is reduced.)

Before you learned to drop your hand, many of you experienced a different kind of feedback loop.

         The pole starts to fall away from you.

         You push your hand in that direction.

Because you don’t drop your hand, you end up pushing the falling pole away from you.

The pole moving faster away from you causes you to start walking in that direction.

         This pushes the falling pole even faster.

         You start running towards the continuing-to-fall pole.

This pushes the falling tip away faster than you can run and the pole falls to the ground.

The pole falling away from you causes you to make a move that causes the pole to move away from you even faster …

This is an example of what we will call an amplifying feedback loop.

         A change leads to even more change.

Instead of stabilizing the system, this feedback amplifies the change within the system.

(Technically, I am supposed to use the phrases negative feedback and positive feedback loops. But these words conjure up emotional images for kids that interfere with the actual pattern. So I used balancing and reinforcing – as used by another author. Balancing works (especially in terms of balancing poles) but I’m thinking that stabilizing draws the mind to the consequence of the feedback loop. Reinforcing gets muddled with balancing so I’m trying amplifying instead. That feels like a more direct expression of the consequence.)

This system of pole and me can experience either feedback loop. Both are possible.

Amplifying feedback loops can be helpful or harmful.

         Learning leads to more learning.

         Money invested leads to more income which can be invested.

         Trust among friends leads to greater sharing which deepens friendship.

Stabilizing feedback can be helpful or harmful.

You want to change a bad habit but a stabilizing feedback loop keeps you centered within it.

Stabilizing feedback loops maintain a steady body temperature.

So don’t think of either stabilizing or amplifying feedback loops as good or bad.

They are re-occuring patterns we will encounter over and over again in systems.

(I had more in my talk about goals and subsystems but as I created this second draft for Cairns, I decided that those topics deserve their own presentation after some other hands-on experiences.)

A month after teaching my pole lesson, I was listening to election blather. It’s easy to think there are enemies out there: illegal immigrants, the CIA, corporations, blacks wearing hoodies, different enemies for different folks. But then I thought it all might be like balancing poles. If one is working at creating a dynamic equilibrium that rises above static equilibrium, then we enter into a relationship with the world where various forces around us will always be acting to move us back to a lower, more stable level. Always we will encounter these effects. We’ll never have “peace” in the sense of freedom from these forces. But we can have greater calm if we don’t interpret this presence of downward-acting forces as the evidence of enemies out to get us. It’s just feedback with the nature of the universe, creating a dance that helps us maintain and raise this “unnatural” pole higher into the world.

Takers

During the presidential campaign, it was easy to slip into a Romney-bashing “the privileged rich see everyone else as moochers and takers.” But I remembered something from our museum days. Alysia and I worked at a small, regional natural science museum. Our director wanted the museum to grow into something larger and more prestigious so she hired consultants. One consultant’s job was to estimate how much could be raised through fund-raising. He gave the museum a list of wealthy people in the country and their phone number and told the museum to cold-call these people. Our secretary hated the job. Tom Hanks was on the list. If a tiny museum 700 miles away is cold-calling people like this, they must be receiving many calls like this each day. Unknown people asking for some of your money—now that’s an experience I’ve never had. I would think it could drain one’s spirit and make one feel like one is, indeed, surrounded by takers.

A pinch of change

Another part of systems thinking I’m teaching is my rules of flow. As I was planning the presentation, I noticed that my change bowl—a broad, ceramic bowl where I place the spare change that’s in my pocket at the end of the day—was spilling over with heaped-up change. $50 had probably accumulated within it.

That’s happened before. Our grocery store has a machine where you can dump your loose change in and the store will give back a percentage of its value. I’m a frugal, full-value guy so I would never use such a machine, but it’s an indicator that other households also have overflowing change bowls. Every time my change bowl overflows, I start putting a handful of change into my pocket and make payments with change. If something is $3.78, I pay it all in loose change. When the bowl becomes half empty, I start forgetting and change begins to accumulate once again.

So my change bowl could be a good example for my students of the rule of flow that if inflow is greater than outflow, the stock accumulates. This led me to think more deeply about change bowls. Why does the change accumulate?

The change bowl is where I park the change from my pockets at the end of the day when I hang up my pants. Why do I take the change out? Because some days the pants go into the laundry or the pants get hung in a way that the change falls out. Way back in time, I learned to take the change out of my pocket when I get undressed for bed. So a few times each week, change inflows as small amounts (usually less than a dollar).

In the morning, I put my wallet in my pocket. And my car keys. But I don’t put change in my pocket because it’s a new day. Change isn’t something you put in your pocket. It’s something that accumulates in your pocket during the day. It’s something you get, not something you take. And that’s when I realized the fundamental nature of the change bowl. It has no outflow. It looks like it does; the change is just sitting, ready for the taking. But in action, nothing flows out until it is overflowing. Once I realized that, the solution appeared. Transform my image of loose change as a tool I put into my pocket each morning, just like my wallet. It doesn’t need to be a handful. A pinch will do.

Two things happen when I start putting a pinch of change in my pocket. The first is that change flows out as I use it to pay with exact change. If something is $3.78, I’ll give the cashier a $5 bill plus seventy-eight cents in change. That is seventy-eight cents that has flowed out of my change bowl and onward to someplace else. But the second, more wondrously subtle effect is that change stops flowing in. Because I am paying the change part exactly, I stop getting change given back to me. Each morning I take a pinch of change out of the bowl; each evening I put a smaller pinch back in. My bowl is half empty and slowly, steadily dropping. A time will come when my change bowl turns into something small, just a nightly parking place for twenty or so coins.

Meanwhile, in class, if I have to make an arbitrary decision, I tell my class that I’ll just reach in to “my pinch of change” to get a coin to flip and they all smile, remembering my change bowl and the rules of flow. I occasionally bring in the bowl so they can see the level dropping. And the phrase “pinch of change” gives a certain British properness bit of fun to putting it into my pocket each morning.

P.S. Back when I would deal with my change bowl’s overflow by periodically loading my pocket with a heaping handful of change, I found that cashiers often expressed gratitude for the change because they have the opposite problem. The change that accumulates in change bowls has been drained out of cash register drawers. Several times a day, the cashiers have to sign out more rolls of change because we pay in twenty dollar bills, not a twenty plus the amount of change. Because many of us don’t put a pinch of change into our pocket each morning, precious metals are turned into tons of extra coins that are cycled around by armored trucks so that tons of metal can accumulate in millions of change bowls.

 

Thank you

I received more feedback from folks in response to my last Cairns, “Getting Help”, than I have from any other article I have ever written. Many of your letters contained two similar sentiments: that the going for help was suspenseful and that the story brought tears to your eyes. Thank you for this feedback.

So on our third day of our wedding anniversary’s five day float down the Willamette River, our kayak snagged and flipped and suddenly Alysia and I were in the water. We had been exploring a side channel of an island. A derelict wooden bridge once connected the island to the mainland. Floods over the years have accumulated snags against its pilings so the rushing current dives under the snags. It looked as if this snag dam probably went all the way across the channel but we didn’t wait to see. Being swept into and possibly under the dam could be fatal, so we immediately turned upstream and paddled away from the dam. Unfortunately, the current in the side channel was strong and we weren’t able to make it the hundred yards back to the main channel. We tried… but then the kayak highsided and half a soaking hour later we gave up trying to rescue the stuck kayak. We needed to rescue ourselves instead.

Our bag of dry clothes had floated away but we got our tent and sleeping bags out of the boat. The bank of the island was a steep, ten foot slippery slope. Alysia slipped as she struggled up and she started feeling chest pains. (She had to retire from teaching last year because of her heart.) At the top of the bank were blackberry brambles four feet high that we had to push through. The current had ripped off one of my sandals so I had a sock and sandal on my right foot and only a worn-out sock on my left that left the ball of my foot and heel bare to the hooked brambles. We carried our equipment over to the main channel side of the island and pitched our tent where we could wave down a passing boat – though this weekday was cloudy and we had not seen another boat all day. Alysia was beginning to shiver. We set up the tent and took off our wet clothes and got under our sleeping bags together, bare skin to bare skin. Alysia had her medicine pouch so she took a nitro to control her heart spasms. But that dilates blood vessels, letting more blood flow away from her core, making her colder. We lay together. Her belly was cold; she was in an early hypothermic state. But her heart spasms were worsening so she took another nitro which made her shiver more. We lay skin to skin, gradually warming one another. Now we were worried about her heart. Waiting a day for a passing boat didn’t feel safe. We agreed I needed to try going for help but the only way off the island was that derelict bridge or the snag dam beneath it. We agreed that I would come back if I couldn’t make it across and that if I did make it across, I would blow the whistle so she wouldn’t worry.

Next part

I need to stay as warm as I can, so of the soaking wet clothes that are available for my naked body, I first put on my fleece jacket. Then I put Alysia’s wool sweater over that. Over that, I put the thickest of our life jackets, both for warmth and for protection from thorns. Then I put back on my wet pants. I put my sock and sandal on my right foot and my worn through sock on my left foot. A memory of another pair of socks makes me pause. I rummage through my daypack. Among its contents are a sock and a hand towel. I redo my left foot. First the new sock. Then I wrap the hand towel around that and then pull the wornout sock over the towel to hold it in place so I have 2 ½ layers of cloth beneath my feet (2 layers on the ball and heel, 3 everywhere else). I decide not to wear a hat, thinking it might keep snagging in the brambles. I bring my soaking wet wallet; it has my insurance cards. I take a long swig of water. I want to keep my hands free to deal with whatever lies ahead so I don’t want to be carrying a canteen. I take another swig and then set off across the field.

The ground is level and soft and I make good time towards the bridge. I begin looking for some sign of the road/ruts the wagons and farming equipment surely would have made going back and forth through the years but I can’t find any. I pass a row of old apple trees. I have only a kayak-level approximate sense of where the bridge stands. A solid thicket of blackberry rising seven feet high prevents me from seeing anything in the channel beyond them. I back out into the field again, walking back and forth, scanning for any clue to the bridge’s location. None. So I estimate a location for the bridge, choose the spot where the brambles look lowest and head in.

I have never pushed through an overgrown blackberry thicket before but need is pushing me. My feet rarely touch the ground. I place them on the one-inch thickest canes, both to push down my main resistance and also to hold me a foot or two higher within the thicket. This keeps my head above the thicket so I can look around and also presents less resistance as I push through. The fingers of each hand carefully take hold of the two largest canes immediately before me and delicately hold them to the side. Delicately – but also this finger to cane will be the contact by which I maintain my balance. I then push my right leg forward, place my sandaled right foot onto the largest cane within reach, and push through the canes. The smaller canes scrape by. The larger might scratch or get hooked onto my clothes and require an extra effort to force my way past. Then I bring my left foot up beside my right food and try to place it on the same large cane. Unfortunately, the largest canes have the longest, woodiest thorns but I can’t really look down to place my foot and my foot, having to push through the brambles, doesn’t have the freedom to be placed precisely. So I simply have to place my socking and toweled foot onto the cane. Sometimes this hurts but most of the times it’s all right (relatively).  Repeat. In this way I push through twenty yards of brambles. The thicket grows deeper as I draw closer to the edge. Several times I break down through the canes to ground level. Then I need to stop to pull up my sagging pants so that I can bend my wet cloth-garbed knee enough to get my right foot back up on a large cane. Because of the resistance of my wet pants, I usually have to use my hands to help raise my foot up onto the cane. Then I look up through the opening I dropped down through, and select two canes above me to help pull myself back up onto a thick cane.

In this manner, I eventually reach a point where I can see beyond the thicket. The top of the bridge is visible off to the left, upstream. I study the situation – and conclude that the distance to the bridge is such that pushing straight for the bridge through this deeper part of the thicket will be harder than going back out the way I came, moving back up alongside the thicket to the right place, and plunging back in from there. This I do. Going back is slightly easier than the initial push through the thicket. I go back up the field to where I now think the bridge will be. The thicket is taller here. I would choose some other place except I’m pretty sure that the bridge is on the other side of this place.

I pause. I really don’t want to push through the brambles again. My feet and hands are already hurting and I don’t even know if, at the end, I’ll be able to get across the channel. But really, I have no choice. Alysia needs help. She won’t get help unless I push through these brambles. So again I push into and through the bramble thicket.

When I finally push through, I am off to the left of the bridge. But I’m also on the edge of the sloping bank and below me the brambles give way to non-stickery plants along which an animal trail threads. I drop down onto the trail and follow it towards the bridge. It wends back up to the top of the bank and ends within ten feet of the bridge in a broad bedding-down area, beautifully green, surrounded by a wall of tall brambles. If I was a deer, I’d love to lie down here. But I’m not. I sigh. If I am going to cross, I must push through this surrounding wall of brambles to the edge of the bank right where the bridge is. That is where I will either be able to walk across on the bridge or drop to the snag dam below. As far as I can tell, the bank is almost sheer on this side so a few feet to either side won’t work. I have to get right above where the snag dam hopefully touches this side and drop straight down onto it. So, I step up onto the canes and push on through.

In a few minutes, I approach the edge of the bank. I am just downstream of the bridge and from here I can easily see there is no way to cross on the bridge. The last span is completely missing. Getting on the bridge would require a ten yard leap from brambles. Therefore, the only possible route across is the snag dam – if it stretches all the way across to this side. And that I can not see. I become aware that my mouth is dry. Very dry. I push to the edge of the bank. It is a straight drop down through brambles into a current flowing swiftly right against the sheer bank. I can see the snag dam and it looks like it will be crossable if I can get on it. But I can not see that place where the dam would touch this side if it does come all the way across. That point lies just around a slight corner. If only I could reach my eyes five feet to the left.

You know the move you have to make if you are standing in deep water and you want to start swimming? You can’t push off so you “roll” from upright to horizontal. I crouched down in the blackberries and made a roll like that and pushed my head out through the brambles, trying to extend my eyes out those five feet to the edge beyond that corner. It was like swimming. Very little of my body weight actually touched the ground; the brambles were holding me up. I finally pushed my eyes far enough for them to see down – and one six inch diameter log completed the connection. As far as I could tell, the dam was crossable.

The next day, Alysia shared with me how she was very anxious while I was gone because she was afraid that I would die doing something dangerous in trying to get across. I told her, without forethought but quite honestly, that that would never happen. I was going for help for her. If I did something that resulted in my death, I would not be able to go for help. If I couldn’t make it across, then I would return to the tent and lie with her, help her stay warm and we would remain on the island until we saw a boat go by even if it took a couple of days. So I was not going to get killed. But I was going for help. I was hiking for two. That describes my mental focus. Determined enough to push through a hundred yards of blackberry brambles and rip up my feet and hands but focused enough and aware enough of my limits to not get killed.

So there was the log crossing below. I crawled the rest of my body up to where my eyes were, rolled around beneath the brambles so my feet were below me and hanging on to the brambles, let my feet slowly slide ten feet precisely down onto that log. I crouched upon the log as I cleared both my body and mind of the brambles. The brambles were behind; this damp 6 inch log with the current racing beneath it was ahead. When I was clear, I carefully crossed onto the snag dam. Every possibly unstable step I tested before committing weight. Near the center of the dam, a few of our floating supply bags pushed against the logs. I lifted them up onto the dam. I considered carrying them across with me but decided to leave them behind. I was going for help, not rescuing replaceable items. The opposite bank was solid bramble too but one of the snags in the dam had a long branch that angled up out of the dam to the top of that bank. The bottom part looked walkable but the branch narrowed higher up. I considered whether it was safe to walk up it or not. Then I remembered. I’m going for help. Style is not part of this adventure. I sat astraddle upon the log and scooted my way carefully up. From the top I could see a farmhouse nearby. I dropped off the branch back into brambles but it was only ten feet of brambles and then I walk walking on a field of soft grass towards the house. I blew the whistle loud and long, three different times, to let Alysia know I was safely across. (She didn’t hear them so remained anxious for another half hour.) Then I walked away from the river towards the farmhouse. Two vehicles were in the driveway.

Next Part

I knew I was going to have to ask for help but I could feel myself pushing through all sorts of psychological brambles as I walked up and rang the doorbell. Pushing through brambles going for help is heroic and easy; needing help is not. I’m not supposed to ask for help; I’m supposed to figure it out on my own. It’s embarrassing to have to call 911. Competent people don’t have to call 911 (except to help out others). My pride doesn’t want to do this. When a woman came to the door, I said, “I hate to admit this but my wife and I need to be rescued. May I use your phone to call 911?” The dispatch got the information, informed me that because of Alysia’s heart condition, they would be sending paramedics on the sheriff’s boat, and that a deputy would be coming to pick me up and take me to where the boat would bring Alysia. So then we waited for the deputy. Of course, the mother and father and six-year old son were wonderful. They asked if they could get me anything. Of course, I didn’t want to be a bother. I turned down warm tea. But when they offered water, I remembered my dry mouth and accepted that. They invited me inside but I felt too dirty and muddy so they offered me a chair at the doorway and we sat and talked.

I felt this hyper need to give back. I had needed help from them and so I must give something in exchange back. But all I had was my soggy self so I tried to be the best person I am capable of being – friendly, courteous, very grateful. The boy got out a new block set. I love interacting with kids so I started giving him building challenges. Now that I had accomplished going for help, whatever mental/chemical reinforcement was easing up and I started feeling cool in my belly. Just a touch of a shiver. Uncomfortable but bearable. Of course I didn’t mention it. At one point the boy went out and got an energy bar and came gave it to me. He didn’t ask (or I might have refused); he simply offered it so I accepted it with the full gratitude that I truly felt. When the deputy arrived, the boy gave me another one for Alysia. I told him that when I gave it to Alysia, that I knew she would say “thank you very much.”

The deputy drove me to the landing where an ambulance had just arrived. The boat arrived a minute later. Alysia’s wrapped in our sleeping bag with an IV in her arm. “Hello, my love.” “Hello, my darling,” we chant to one another. Lots of help there; my call had come near the end of a sheriff/paramedic training day on the river. They get Alysia into the ambulance. Again I feel this hyper need to somehow give back, if, in no other way, to let them know how grateful I am for what they are doing for us. I go around shaking everyone’s hand and thanking them. Then the ambulance driver tells me to get in the front seat and we are off to the hospital. He cranks the heat up high. That feels good.

It’s twenty miles to the Corvallis hospital up Highway 99. It’s late afternoon. The road is empty so we are hauling right along engaging in good conversation (partly because again I am striving to be the very best person I can be to express my gratitude and partly because the driver is just a neat guy). As we drive along, I notice a gentle throbbing in the highway signs and later realize that the late afternoon sunlit highway signs are also reflecting our oncoming red flashing light. Shortly thereafter, I realize why the highway is empty. Cars are on the side of the road. I look farther ahead and I see cars a quarter-mile ahead pulling over for us – and before us is open road. Tears come to my eyes. All these strangers helping Alysia get to the hospital faster. We’ve all pulled over to the side for an ambulance or a fire truck. It goes by and we pull back onto the road and continue on our way. But it is a very different perspective to see it from the front seat of the ambulance. Like Moses parting the Red Sea, the highway miraculously opens up ahead of you. We are all strangers helping one another within this miracle. I start talking about this with the driver and by the time we reach the hospital, we are talking about how as fathers we are trying to do the best we know how to pass on to the next generation what is needed to make the world a bit better the next time around.

Next Part

We disembark at the Emergency Room. They put Alysia under a hot air blanket. She’s on an IV. Then they ask me to go up to Admissions. Yay for my soggy wallet with insurance card. Again, I strive to be my highest self with the man at Admissions. Then it’s back to the Emergency Room. And that’s when my situation finally hits me. I need help. I can not continue on my own. I am standing in a strange hospital in a completely unknown town hundreds of miles from home. Our kayak and all of our camping supplies are lost. Our truck with its extra supplies are fifty miles away (and I have no key to that truck). My wife is in this hospital. All I have are the soggy, bramble-filthy clothes I have on. All I have on my left foot is a muddy, shredded sock. Painful scratches cover my hands and soles. Night is coming. The river has ripped away all of my stabilizing frames of reference and I am disoriented to a deeper level than I am aware. But, and this is the point of this story, that disorientation allows me to enter a state of grace. I have to ask for help but it’s all right now because these interactions are sacred. I’ve tended to interpret the “Tis more blessed to give than receive” as ‘you want to be the giver, not be a receiver’. But like in the front seat of the ambulance, I was experiencing this from a different perspective now. When we need help, we are allowing others to rise into the blessed state of expressing their love through an act of kindness. It’s OK, Paul. You need help and it’s OK to ask.

So I go up to the emergency room counter and ask if there is any place where I could get an old set of dry clothes. She says “just a minute” and comes back with a plastic bag with a new sweatsuit in it and shows me the bathroom where I can change. I go in and notice the bathroom has a shower. I go back and ask if it is all right to use the shower and they say yes and bring me some towels. So I strip off my filthy clothes and take a warm shower. I need to stand in the hot water a long time until my cold belly stops shivering. As my belly warms and relaxes, I feel one frame of reference rise into place. I towel off and open the sweatsuit bag and inside is a slip of paper that says this sweatsuit is a gift from an organization that exists to help people at the hospital in my situation. And again tears rise in my eyes and I think of all the other people who have stood here in a similar situation. Their house burns down, a car accident, and everything is upended. I put the sweatsuit on and another frame of reference slips over me. I am clothed.

I put my filthy clothes in the plastic bag, clean the bathroom carefully so no one else has to do it, and walk out barefoot. I check in with Alysia. They are going to admit her overnight until her heart spasms settle down. In a state of grace, I see the nurses interacting with Alysia. The boating sheriff comes to the hospital and tells me that they were able to retrieve everything – the tent, the supply bags I left on the snag dam, even our submerged kayak. He says he saw our truck key in one of our packs and will bring that to Alysia’s room when he gets off duty at 1:30 in the morning. I am open-mouthed with astonishment and gratitude.

The chaplain is summoned to help me. His name is Sean. He is going to drive me to the Mario Pastega House, a place on the hospital grounds for people like me or families whose loved one has need to come to the hospital for special treatments. Sean asks if there is anything else I need and I say with amazing ease, “slippers.” He takes me to the House: it has a common room/kitchen/dining room with small motel-like rooms leading off. Over the fireplace is a wooden plaque with words. Comfort, Love, Hope. The lady on-duty shows me the shelves with food I can prepare if I’m hungry, shows me the laundry rooms and says “Here, let me wash those dirty clothes of yours.” She shows me my small motel-like room and still another frame of reference rises into place.

I use their phone to call our truck shuttle person and leave a message asking if its possible to have our truck shuttled down in the morning. By now it’s around 10 at night. Sean drives me down to K-Mart and as we drive I learn he is a seminary student. He is interning this summer at the hospital and this is his first night and I am his first …? helpee? Hey, this is wonderfully special and I joke how we need to turn this experience into the stuff of sermon material. I buy a pair of cheap slippers, a bit too big so they won’t rub against the torn-up back of my heels. He brings me back to the House. I heat up a can of something for dinner, then shuffle up to the hospital to check in with Alysia, and shuffle back to my room. I take all the cards and paper out of my wallet and spread them around to dry out. My disoriented mind and sore feet prevent me from deep sleep.

The next morning, I have cereal from off the shelves. I call the shuttle people and they did shuttle our truck this morning. Sean shows up and asks if he can help. I easily ask if he can drive me down to the boat landing several miles away where our truck will hopefully be. We drive up to the hospital. I say good morning to Alysia and get the truck keys that the sheriff did indeed drop by in the middle of the night. Sean drives me down to my truck. I thank him. I unlock the truck, put on the seatbelt, turn on the ignition and another frame of reference roars back. I am autonomously mobile. That afternoon, Alysia is released and we stop off at the county maintenance yard and pick up our kayak and all the camping supplies the sheriffs rescued. The frame of reference of cherished property is restored.

Weeks later, my hands and feet have healed but not all of my comfortable frames of reference have returned – because I needed to ask for help and that took me to a place beyond where I had always been before.

Backpacking Class

I offered a backpacking class this spring as part of Chrysalis’s Friday afternoon electives. One thing I enjoyed was the way in which the kids began to play with the natural surroundings. I led three different hikes to three quite different campsites (beside a river, along a plateau’s rim, and beside a lake). Each location led to a different kind of play that was responsive to that location—by which I mean they did not play the same kind of game in each place. By the river they practiced skipping stones. They played among the rocks on the rim. At the lake, they sat out on a promontory and drummed on a fallen log, making music together. Each trip was composed of kids of different ages, several of whom would not, at school, hang out together but within this context, they worked and played well together with an improvisational intensity, responsively evolving to each occurrence of something different. And at every campsite they wished to build a fire. On the two trips where we could build a fire, I imposed a 25 stars rule. It had to be dark enough out that they could count 25 stars first. They had never counted the stars coming out before.

 

But my strongest impression happened a mile into the first hike. We encountered a small stream flowing across the trail. The kids were stopped by this flow of water 1-2” deep and four feet wide. “How do we get across?” There was no bridge. There was no “official” answer. They turned to us for the answer – but the real answer is “Anyway that works.” Step on rocks in the stream. Go up or down the stream until you find a narrower spot. Jump. It’s up to you to figure out. The world is full of problem-solving challenges but most of the time we are semi-mindfully following along on paths developed by others. Such paths are easy to follow but they don’t develop our sense of capability, of self-reliance. As we hiked on, over other stream crossings and challenges, the empowering delight shone brighter in their eyes. As we waded around later in the river, one boy exclaimed purely, “I feel like I can do anything in the world.”

 

 

Scientific method for kids

I, and probably hundreds of thousands of other kids before and after me, have been and will be bored by lessons on “the scientific method” with assignments where we wrote out a description of some class experiment using headings of Hypothesis, Methods, Observations, Results, Conclusion. It felt fake, unexciting, a boring procedure that seemed incapable of actually being the powerful method by which science has uncovered so many marvels.

 

We do lots of hands-on science at Chrysalis. If it involves investigating some new phenomenon, we usually begin with open-ended exploration. Lots of excitement. Exclamations of “Cool” attract the attention of nearby students. They see what the initial exclaimer points out and then go replicate it in their investigations. Ripples of discovery spread out and reflect back and forth throughout the classroom.

 

That’s when it hit me. This is the real Scientific Method. Kids do it naturally. Discover something so cool that you communicate your excitement to others who then explore the thing from their slightly different perspective and share back and forth. Discoveries swirl around back and forth.

 

Then I saw those boring paper assignments in a different light. They are practicing the form developed by adult scientists to communicate to an invisible audience of other scientists the essential nature (and recipe) of their “Cool!” so that distant scientists have the opportunity to respond like the kids in the class do by replicating it. Like the famous Zen saying that the finger pointing to the moon is not the moon, the “scientific method” assignments are fingers pointing towards the moon of the phenomenon itself – but they are not the moon. They are not the scientific method.

 

(My editor points out that the scientific method is more than the discovery and sharing of cool things. It’s also the thought-shaped repetitive interaction with the phenomenon in an attempt to reach a deeper understanding of it. This is a good point because many children will tend to do random manipulations of the phenomena and will focus on seeing what might happen rather than going deeper and trying to understand the patterns and the why of what’s happening. But I think writing down the “parts of an experiment” does not develop this kind of thinking and could actually occupy one’s mind in a somewhat confining task that prevents it from happening.)

 

Spiralling Mudholes

When kids discover positive feedback spirals (often called “snowballing feedback spirals” because things can grow very quickly in the same way that one can start with a snowball and roll it into a snowman), they can get so excited that their excitement contributes to the feedback spiral snowballing ever faster. Last week, kindergarten students had gotten their hands on a small container that they had filled with water and poured into a small depression in the playground. This water began soaking in, softening the surface layer of dirt. Their small hands could scrape some of this into mud that could be played with outside the depression. When the mud is scraped away, the depression becomes larger, able to hold more water, produce more mud and thereby grow ever faster. By the time I noticed, the hole was a foot across and the kids were covered with mud.

 

Ravens and Landshaping

I spend lots of time at what I call Ink’s Creek Play because it represents the most photographically beautiful possibility for showing what effects my plays with runoff can have. It’s hard to get there in the rain so that’s a challenge but the rest of the time the trip out to there is always a beautiful kayak, hike, or bike ride. A perfect weekend day of adventure to go out, photograph, observe, ruminate. This last time, a croaking high in the sky drew my eyes up to two ravens circling. One was above me. The other was up over the next drainage. Then I saw “The Fit.” “My” drainage faces south. At mid-day, the grass-covered, flanking slopes of the headwater forms a parabolic reflector, heating the air and creating thermals. The next drainage over also faces south. Two thermals side-by-side. Two ravens riding high, side-by-side. This got me thinking about how a raven would develop a feel for the shape of the land below through the feel of the air pressing up against its wings. These drainages would develop thermals at mid-day. Earlier in the day, the thermals would develop in drainages facing more easterly (and in late afternoon, in drainages facing westerly). I remembered how in my younger days, I loved bicycling over certain places because the dips and rises of the land transmitted a kinesthetic, non-cerebral direct pleasure. I just loved the feel of that passage over the land and I wonder if ravens might also develop favorite places where flight simply feels more fun at certain times of the day.

 

Just sayin’

In Cairns #22, I described a sweaty moment on a steep uphill climb when I vividly realized that the appearance of swear words in my inner monologue was feedback that my mindfulness was slipping. The insight into the connection was so strong that I took a vow then and there to not indulge in swearing and, instead, to see its appearance within me as one of many feedbacks guiding me along my way.

 

I’ve noticed a similar thing happening within our culture with the expression “just sayin.” I first became aware of the expression on Fox News. A speculative rumor or lie would be said, followed by “just sayin” as if that excuses the falseness in a way that allows what was just said to remain. Then I began hearing it in the conversations of some of those around me. Not insidiously but in a way that excuses and therefore invites mushy thinking. Then I heard myself saying the phrase. It can slip out so easily because it allows me to step away from any responsibility for integrity or truth. It robs me of the opportunity to experience how the words we choose can acquire power. Buddhism, I think, talks of the three mysteries we are given: body, mind, and voice. “Just sayin” leads me away from one of the most important journeys we can make with the mystery of our voice. And so there emerged a recent time when I decided that the emergence of that phrase from my mind/voice, like swearing, will be feedback to help steer me towards greater mindfulness in the words I speak.

 

Kids use the similar phrases (“just kidding” or “just messing around”) when they are called on bullying someone. As Alysia points out, “It allows us to not face our intentions. The victim has no recourse; the perpetrator escapes from culpability.”

 

Annular Eclipse

Redding was right in the path of an annular eclipse last month. (An annular eclipse would be a total solar eclipse if the moon were closer to the earth at the time. Because it is a little too far away, the moon can’t quite cover the sun so that at “totality”, a ring of the sun is still visible.) I went out to a vast, quiet spot to watch it. The dimming of the light is outside of our experience. We have the daily dimming of sunset but this is different in many ways. At sunset, the sun is low, passing through more atmosphere so the dimming of light is associated with a changing of color. During the eclipse, there is no change of color – just a dimming. Also, at sunset, the sunlight is being cut off by a horizon that is only a relatively few miles away at the bottom of an atmosphere so some of the blocked light still bounces “around and over” the horizon. But during the eclipse, the light is being cut off 240,000 miles beyond our atmosphere. Another difference is that sunset is an event propelled by the turning of the Earth. We have lived with this pace all our lives; it is familiar and known deep in our DNA. An eclipse is propelled by the motion of the Moon orbiting the Earth. Something is happening at an out-of-this-world pace and we don’t have the experience to understand it. Nightfall is our only experience with dimming sunlight but the visual experience of an eclipse is nothing like nightfall. It is other-worldly in the full, literal sense of the word.

Cairns of H.O.P.E. #68
End of the Long Nights, 2012 

Two eyes stories

Last month, googling around led me to the high school reunion page for the kids that I had gone to grade school with, my childhood friends that I had not seen since I had moved away more than 45 years ago. There was a list of the kids with contact emails. And suddenly I had the opportunity to bring full circle something that has hung on me for many years. So I sent the following email (and received from her a gracious reply).

Greetings from Mr. Bond’s 6th grade class a half century ago.

I came upon this WaHi class reunion webpage this morning and realized I could send an acknowledgement across the years.

One day in 6th grade, you and I were working together on some assignment and I happened to look up at your face and into your eyes and within your eyes I saw the most beautifully radiant light I had ever seen. In describing this moment to others, I always use the word “smote” for it accurately describes what the beauty of your light did to me. I quickly looked away but in that split second, the beauty of your light smote deep into my soul. It was a special moment I have carried ever after – along with a regret that something within me made me turn away so quickly from something so beautiful.

Many years later, my wife, Alysia, and I created Chrysalis Charter School. Nine years into its history, I had a class of eighth graders in whose eyes I saw the same beautiful light. I wanted them to learn to appreciate this gift. So eyeshine became something we began talking about, sharing with one another. Magic happened with that class. One thing that happened is we teachers realized how fundamentally important this magic was and we changed the school’s mission statement to “encouraging the light within each student to shine brighter.” That change made a profound difference within the school. Every parent knows when their child is shining and when something is dimming their light. And a teacher can see that too – if the school encourages/permits them to use that light as the feedback to guide all interactions. Encouraging the light within (as opposed to focusing on standardized test scores) has led to a very special school, one we are still exploring the possibilities of. So many of the parents of children who transfer in from other schools say, a few months into the school year, “Thank you. I have my child back again.”

So across the years, I send you a thank-you for the gift of beautiful light you gave me – and a meditation on the mystery of life – how a “glance” can help change the lives of hundreds of kids two generations later.

May your light grace all those around you.

Second story

Each Wednesday morning we have a Tree Assembly where the whole school (135 students) come together at the beginning of the day to share time together. Before we sang this time, I told the following story. (Our theme for January is “I can make a difference.”)

“I want to tell you a story from my childhood. Back in fourth grade, we had a music teacher who would come in once a week to teach us music. One day, she had us singing a song. I was singing away because I enjoyed singing and I looked over at Dick Ashmore who was sitting there (I pointed in the direction because I remember where he was) and he looked at me with eyes that said, ”How pathetic that you are singing. Don’t you know boys don’t sing.” In an instant, my throat muscles tightened like an iron band and my singing shut down. I remained that way for 25 years until I met Alysia and she helped gradually loosen that tightness in my throat.

“That tightness for 25 years was really sad because singing is a great joy. The Buddhists say something like we are given three great mysteries: our body, our mind, and our voice. And to shut one of those down is really sad. Dick Ashmore made a difference in my life. It wasn’t a good difference and he wasn’t aware of what a big difference he made but he did make a difference. You, too, can make a similar difference but in the other direction. As we sing, you can shine your enjoyment of singing. And maybe there are a few here who, like me, have been cut off from their joy of singing. If so, you can let them know with your eyes that it is safe here for them to undo the tightness and begin to sing again.”

When I pointed to where Dick Ashmore had sat, my “felt sense” stirred so somewhere in the middle of this talk I improvised something like. “It was only a second and nobody else knew and I didn’t know how to tell anyone else – and this makes me realize that all of us are probably walking around with these life-changing moments within us that other people never know about and we don’t even know how to talk about.”

Which is the main idea I want to communicate here within Cairns – this mystery of our individual selves, unknown to others, and how, within our lives, much of it flows on but every now and then, something happens, eyes look into eyes of another, that goes far deeper and possibly within a second, we have been altered. Or, from another perspective, that life seems to flow along at a certain volume but at any unpredictable time, it can suddenly deepen and change can happen at a rate far beyond that which we assume, based on other times.

P.S. My sharing this experience opened the school to greater singing. Two of our teachers said it invited them to sing more fully after a lifetime of holding back and the kids singing is definitely more spirited now.

 

Ink’s Creek Play

After several dry months, we finally had some rain and I got to go on a rain walk. I have to kayak down to a remote area to reach the play currently closest to my heart. I arrived several hours after a heavy, all-night rain. Though the bare head of the gully did have a small flow of runoff sliding down its channel, no water was visibly flowing on the slopes above that.

Neither was water visible within two long diversions that I had created above to spread runoff out onto the flanking slopes. I knelt down where a diversion began at the center of this beautifully rounded drainage. I began scraping along the diversion, clearing away the grass that had grown in and lowering the diversion by a ¼ of an inch. Water oozed into the diversion and began flowing along it. As I cleared the way “downstream” along the diversion onto the slope, water no longer oozed into the diversion. A little further, the water flowing along the diversion across the flanking slope began soaking in. After ten yards, all the water had been absorbed into the ground. This got me thinking about what effect this had on the flow of water within this drainage.

Different areas have different absorbencies. The soil beneath an oak tree is very absorbent with a foot thick layer of moldering leaves and acorns worked over by worms and burrowing creatures, stirred by foraging birds. Channel bottoms, on the other hand, become quickly saturated because runoff converges upon these areas so they must try absorbing both the rain and the runoff. This convergence, both of runoff and percolating groundwater, continues after the rain stops. By the time I arrived at my plays, the soil had absorbed whatever rain it was going to absorb. Now that absorbed water was percolating down, moving from the slopes and converging upon the channels which were now saturated so the water was oozing up to the surface. My diversion was leading this oozing “excess” away from the saturated channels (that would have been able to absorb no more) back onto the flanking slopes that could absorb more, now that the rain had stopped. So my diversions were doing more than spreading out runoff; they were also spreading out percolating groundwater.

 

Animal Trails

I  like the intimacy of animal trails. They are wide enough for my feet but no wider. They heighten my awareness of myself as a solitary animal walking upon the land. When I leave human trails to roam cross-country, I often find myself converging with animal trails because local minds think alike. Animal trails are local. Most human trails lead us efficiently to some place 3, 6, 10 miles away. They lead us through side-drainages as quickly as possible. But each side-drainage is a fractal drainage unto itself. What we pass through in five minutes on a human trail can open into hours of roaming on animal trails. Animal trails lead us to all the places within drainages. Therefore, trails are continually converging and forking. This trail is splitting to lead up into this side drainage. This converging one is coming up from a stream crossing somewhere down there. Like roads, the trails that are more “important”, followed by many, are beaten larger into the ground.

These trails reveal the solution to how to move over the terrain ahead with least energy expended. The land is an ever-rising and falling corrugation of interlaced ridgelines and drainages. To move over this complex 3D world with the least energy is important to a wild animal. Walking consumes energy. If energy is abundant (such as in the spring), one can afford being frisky. But in the winter when sunlight is low and and of short duration, animals must conserve. How does one move over the land to do what needs to be done using the least energy?

Euclid says the shortest distance is a straight line but if there is a ridge (or drainage) in between, the shortest path is not the least energy path. How one handles that ridge depends on the shape of that ridge: its length and height along its spine. One extreme solution is to go around the ridge staying on the same contour line, never gaining nor losing elevation. This works when the ridge is extremely steep and high, saving on the considerable energy of going up and down. The other extreme is to go straight up and over the ridge. This works if the ridge is low and gentle. However, the most efficient way is almost always somewhere between these two extremes. They angle up towards passes, down towards drainage crossings. The steeper the land, the more a trail will tend towards the contouring solution. The gentler the land, the more likely the trails will straighten into gentle curves. So the main animal trails I come upon are the least-energy solutions by which to pass from one place to another.

This is not to say that an animal figured and mapped this all out. Imagine a first trail that is not the most energy-efficient. There will be some places along that trail where another animal, following the trail, will see a place where the trail climbs higher or drops lower than it needs to – and this animal will “shortcut” this section, tightening the trail. Over time, a succession of animals helps etch the solution upon the land – and the trails, in turn, help create and bind a now-more energetic community.

Animal trails, like our highway systems, link place to place. Mice trails go from “city” to “city” but the larger trails go to the low point over a ridge (the pass) or to an easy stream crossing. Every drainage has several low points along its bordering ridge and every stream has special crossings so I am surrounded by a constellation of these places. Animal trails help me walk with greater awareness.

Watershed Harvesting

Thank you, Ben Sibelman, for sending me the following link. It’s shows the result of the watershed work I do but on a larger, village-organized scale.

http://eempc.org/film-channel/2009/12/10/hope-in-a-changing-climate.html

Internet cattail seeds

Every few months, I find myself doing a Google search on my name. Three fourths of the links are to used book sellers. But the rest link to webpages where someone is somehow including my work within theirs. My ego enjoys this but the main reason I do this is because it expands my faith-deepening experiences with the idea of “allies emerging.” It’s wonderful to experience how people take in ideas, combine them with their own experience, and then express some new creative form. It’s like sexual reproduction – the combining of two different individuals from which emerges a new generation. An image I often have is of each of us as cattails. On sunny, warm days, our seeds drift up into the blue sky to land who knows where, possibly on some wet mud thousands of miles away. The following example from the other side of our continent touched me deeply, leaving me wondering what is possible (and who are these people?).

“We practice and support everyone to reduce aggression, reduce speed and fall in love with being the elegant, evolving Earthlings that we are. Fall in love with being present in a garden. We are The People inspired by Paul Krafel’s work and we go out in the slopes and valleys of our homelands, slowing, spreading and sinking water.”

Customized Bumper sticker

I went on-line and created/ordered an “Occupy the Higher Ground” bumper sticker for myself. I like it because “higher ground” contains three meanings to me. The first is that of military strategy –higher ground gives you a tactical advantage – which implies that we are serious about this. Our intention is to succeed in this endeavor. The second is that of ethics – that this struggle is not one of confrontation pulling one another down in the mud but of a lifting all our aspirations upwards so that our energies achieve a resonance that creates new possibilities. That our goal is not defeat of the “other” but of finding a higher, common ground. And the third is my own personal fascination with “Go high in the drainage. Up there we will find a place where we have the power to shift relative balances so that allies emerge.” I ordered a couple extra in case you want one.

Helping turn the prow of our entropyship, the Earth, back upstream so that Earth’s evolving consciousness may explore the vast headwaters of the Universe for billions of years to come.

Cairns of H.O.P.E. #67 – Beginning of the Long Nights, 2011

Jets and Eddies

Alysia and I have our favorite kayak run on the Sacramento River . There are four places along it where the whole river’s current narrows into a powerful jet. The current then blasts into slower water, shearing it into whirlpools four to five feet wide sucking the surface down 6-8”. The left edge of the current sets the slower water on the left whirling counter-clockwise while the right edge of the current generates whirlpools spinning clockwise on the right. Looking ahead, I guide my paddling so that I cut between these two directions of spin. However, with each whirlpool, some of the forward energy of the current is sucked downward, emerging downstream as upwellings that boil up and flow outwards in all directions from the center of the upwelling. Just as the first whirlpools we come to are the strongest, so the first upwellings are also the strongest, pushing up a couple of inches above the surface level. When the water flowing away from the center of an upwelling shears against the main current that I am trying to follow, smaller whirlpools are set spinning. The smaller whirlpools generate smaller upwellings that set up smaller whirlpools that lead to smaller upwellings. The force of the main current dissipates throughout the slack water via a fractal intertwining of whirling ins and boiling outwards. The same dynamics can be seen throughout but now they are slow and broad, pushing up or pulling down the surface only a fraction of the inch. I’m still trying to follow the line between the counter-clockwise and clockwise rotations but the force of the current has just about expended itself and no longer has the momentum to force its way onward. Instead, the slow uprisings push that dividing line back and forth until the current is gone.

Except, I can still see an ever-shifting line threading between slow counter-clockwise whirls and clockwise whirls. Both those whirls jointly turn the water between them downstream. I can feel the water pull me along if I hit the line right and feel it push me aside if I stray into the whirls. It’s an intriguing area. At the head of the jet, it is definitely the force of the current that drives the whirlpools. But now down here, it is the residue of the rotations that create whatever movement could be called a current. At some point along this gradient of dissipating current, a shift happens within the sequence of cause and effect so that the current causing/creating the whirls becomes the whirls causing/creating the current.

The line between the two whirls gets pushed around so much by the slow upwellings that it is challenging to stay close to it. I look further ahead, trying to detect the earliest sign of the next upwelling. Is there a pattern within this slow motion turbulence that will allow me to anticipate and cleave the pattern smoother?

Chrysalis

Last school year was a hard year. Alysia developed a heart condition that forced her to retire from teaching – much to her frustration. She is still adjusting to retirement and occasional limitations. The other hard thing was a group of parents who wanted Chrysalis to become a school where parents tell teachers how to teach. That was a surprisingly soul-sapping experience. Over the summer, most of those families enrolled elsewhere so we are past that problem. However, I’ve channeled most of my energy into Chrysalis to make sure we have a good year this year.

Alysia, on the other hand, is bringing much of her retired energy to the Occupy Redding movement. So each morning I go to work on our school and each evening I come home to political discussions. The two nourish one another in a complex way that will contribute to this mélange of a Cairns .

The Best

More than twenty years ago, early in my time in Northern California, I went to give a nature presentation at the public school that had a reputation for achieving the highest test scores in the county (and, not coincidentally, having mostly children of doctors, lawyers, and other professionals along with high property values). The school had a front gate, over which a sign still proclaims “Through this gate walk the best students in Shasta County .” I hated that sign. I hate it because it represents one of the many ways in which children born into privilege are taught to think of themselves as better than other people.

Our county has more than twenty-five (mostly small) school districts within twenty miles of each other. Families may apply for inter-district transfers so competition between schools for students is much stronger than the national norm – and the competition for students who score high on test is very high. This competition leads to lots of advertised comparisons and claims about being the best school, usually based on test scores. Chrysalis tries to avoid going down that road. Though our test scores are high (especially considering that we don’t focus on the tests and we do spend part of each school week out in nature (which will never be on a standardized test)), we know that if test scores were the way we measured ourselves, we would surrender that teacher empowerment we treasure. Also, as a charter school, we maintain that because each child is unique, there is no such things as a best school. What our community needs is a diversity of schools so that families have a greater opportunity of finding a school that works for their child.

For both of these reasons, for almost twenty years, my mind almost reflexively swerved away from thinking the word “best” in terms of Chrysalis. But this summer, it suddenly hit me that there was a whole different way of using “best” in education. How do we, as a school, bring out the best within our students? How do we encourage their best? Best – not as a comparison of public externals but as a sorting of inner paths within our students. This meaning has released the word to flow over my tongue many times each day – in a way that feels organizationally powerful.

Last week we received this email from a new Chrysalis family.

“I just wanted to check in with you guys to tell you each how grateful we are to have (child’s name) attend school at Chrysalis. (child’s name) has NEVER come home from school crying about teachers or children being mean to her. She is anxious each day to get up and learn something new. Her brain is ON FIRE for learning about the Oregon Trail and Science on Fridays. She says “Math is fun the way they teach it”. Each one of you has touched my daughter (figuratively of course) in a way that I cannot begin to express gratitude for. I truly believe we were led to Chrysalis for a reason. The other day I was speaking with (child’s name) and asked her how she liked Chrysalis compared to her old school. She remarked “Are you kidding mom, Chrysalis saved my life.” That is pretty much it in a nutshell… Does not get much better than that!

“Even simple things like, saying our last name correctly, mean a lot to us. In the five years she went to the other school, they mispronounced our name the whole time. Despite our correcting them.

“I know people complain about things when there is a reason but also realize that not as many people send an e-mail just to share a positive. This is that e-mail. Thank you again.”

We hear things like this every year, especially with new families. We call them Chrysalis miracles. We are doing some things right.

Bottom Up

Ten years ago or so, I was giving Chrysalis’s annual report to our sponsoring board. I used part of the report to quickly soapbox our opposition to the “all eighth graders will take algebra” movement that was being pushed from on high. (American students are falling behind other nations’ student in science and math as measured by these international tests. Therefore, we will raise our standards so that all students will have taken algebra by eighth grade.) The superintendent politely but firmly shut me down with a “we believe that if taught right, all eighth graders can succeed in algebra”. We, at Chrysalis, never went along with that. Throughout our existence, only a portion of our eighth graders were ready to grasp algebra. They do very well. The rest of our eighth-graders solidify their understanding of pre-algebra and then go on to algebra in high school.

Last month at a meeting of charter schools, this same superintendent was explaining that research was showing that not all eighth graders are developmentally ready for algebra and that it is a mistake requiring them to take it. (The way he phrased these comments contained a coded apology acknowledging I was right many years back.) But back ten years ago, we absolutely knew we were right; we didn’t need some foundation or government-funded published research to know that. We were positive because we were teaching mathematics to eighth-graders.

An important part of Chrysalis’s DNA was inherited from the book, Complexity, by Waldrop. It is most concisely phrased in “Use local control instead of global control. Let the behavior emerge from the bottom up, instead of being specified from the top down. And while you’re at it, focus on ongoing behavior instead of the final result. ” Declaring that all eighth-graders will take algebra is a perfect example of “being specified from the top down.” Similarly, in my mind, the current focus on standardized test scores exemplifies focusing on final results rather than the daily ongoing behavior of students.

In a similar fashion, we are absolutely sure that research will eventually announce that one of the main stumbling blocks to students learning algebra and higher mathematics lies in the way schools currently teach fractions at the third-fifth grades. Far too many students lose their understanding of arithmetic in these grades because fractions are taught far too quickly and superficially. Young students who have learned that multiplication makes numbers bigger are confused by fractions where multiplication makes numbers smaller (and by fraction division that makes numbers larger). In the hope of raising test scores a bit higher, students are led through too many procedures without the time to understand them. If you don’t really understand what 2/3 means, you have little hope of understanding how to add a/b to c/d. We are sure of this fraction-algebra connection because (a) we take the time to teach fractions well and we can see the difference in the upper grades between our long-time students and new students who have transferred in and (b) Alysia teaches our math curriculum to parents (so they can help their children with homework). Most of the mothers experience our fraction curriculum as a revelation and share how they lost it with math somewhere between third and fifth grade.

Somewhat similar, there is a current “push” for more rigorous evaluation of teachers. An article in the New York Times described a new law in Tennessee that would require principals to do 4 observations a year of each teacher at the school. The article went on to say how principals don’t have the time in the day to do this plus everything else they have to do. As the administrator of Chrysalis (some would call me the principal but I am annually evaluated and re-hired by the teachers), I receive much of the correspondence flowing to principals and superintendents. I could easily fill most of my time driving into central offices for meetings with other administrators on how to create a better school. I let most of it flow past because I also teach two classes a day and there is the actual stuff of the day like playing Frisbee with the kids during lunch or working with a student who isn’t getting his homework done or checking in with the other teachers or being available to parents.

Waldrop wrote in Complexity: “Since it’s effectively impossible to cover every conceivable situation, top-down systems are forever running into combinations of events they don’t know how to handle. They tend to be touchy and fragile, and they all too often grind to a halt in a dither of indecision.” I would add another problem to the list. It is far easier to send commands down the hierarchy than to actually execute them. Therefore, log jams can form near the bottom (where the work actually happens) unless the upper echelons of the hierarchy exercise great restraint in their directives and do what’s necessary to develop the trust that will allow them to give to the lower levels of the hierarchy creative autonomy. (Alysia adds: Instead they create orders that are impossible to follow like ‘all children will be proficient at grade level by 2014’. Everyone knows this goal is unachievable. The shear created by being forced to try to do the impossible wastes enormous amounts of creative energy that get spun off into useless whirlpools leading to spiritual dissipation of everyone involved.)

Similarly, I once was talking with a fundraiser about Chrysalis. I was explaining how our small size allowed deeper personal relationships between teachers and families. And the fundraiser said, “You know, the Gates Foundation experimented with small schools and found it didn’t make a difference. Do you think you are smarter than Bill Gates?” I don’t know if I am smarter than Bill Gates or not (I do know he is richer than me and helped create an organization that grew much, much bigger than Chrysalis) but I am closer to the students than he was and I have a different measure of success (“encouraging the light within each student to shine brighter”) than he probably did and I’m not looking for one model of education to scale up to a national solution.

More top-down money is entering the charter school world, looking for educational models that can be scaled up so as to have national impact and/or make money privatizing public education. Schools like Chrysalis are considered “mom and pop” charter schools that have nothing to offer in this search. I believe we do – but it’s not what anyone “up there” is looking for. One thing we have to offer is our mission: encouraging the light within each student to shine brighter. Notice how those nine words follow the dictate of “Use local control instead of global control. Let the behavior emerge from the bottom up, instead of being specified from the top down. And while you’re at it, focus on ongoing behavior instead of the final result.” Public education is being shaped around the measure of standardized test scores – with many consequences we see as damaging to students, teachers, families, nations. “Encouraging the light” is a different measure. At the profoundest levels, Chrysalis and similar schools pose the question of whether we as a nation are even searching for the right thing.

The other thing we have to offer is a teachers’ co-operative model of a school. The top-down, command and control hierarchy of public education can make many things happen. But is it making the right things happen? The teachers at Chrysalis have both academic freedom and the support of one another. It’s a potent combination. The teachers work together a lot. This might be a consequence of our size. The school is not large enough to have two sections of a class being taught by two teachers. Therefore, every teacher will theoretically teach every student. Plus the teachers run the school. My job as administrator is to try to handle all the administrative tasks teachers don’t want to be bothered with while giving them voice to all the decisions that matter. One implication of the teachers running the school is that our collective salaries are dependent on how well the school does. One can’t focus only on one’s own classroom. Each teacher has the opportunity to improve the entire school.

One example of this was the way we hired Alysia’s replacement last year. The leading candidates all came and taught a lesson with the kids who would be in the teacher’s class this year. All the Chrysalis teachers observed – and had the chance to talk with the candidate during the day. But what was nicest was that after Casey was hired, almost all the teachers spent time with him over the summer helping him get ready in a variety of ways. He feels very supported and got off to a strong start from day one of this school year. His strength and confidence benefits everyone.

When I listen to the national dialogue, I hear a distrust of teachers. Teachers need to be observed and evaluated… so they don’t get away with stuff. They need to be ever more firmly set within a hierarchy beneath a higher-paid level of administration that will hold them to the standard. A greater percentage of the resources entering the system is allocated to levels above that of the classroom. Communicating distrust is not the way to inspire the best within someone. One of the joys of Chrysalis is watching the wonderful things that emerge from trusted, creative free teachers helping one another.

Or to put it another way, the direction the national reformers are wanting to take it is in a direction very different from the one we are exploring. I believe the difference lies in the difference in our intents. The “reformers” see the top-down hierarchy as a method they can use to quickly create reform throughout the system therefore they don’t question it or seek to replace it.

Occupy

A similar national conversation is taking place with the Occupy Wall Street movement. Can a “horizontally- organized” movement produce anything? My experience with Chrysalis confirms interesting things can emerge. We live in a very conservative area. However, when I’ve participated in Occupy demonstrations (holding up a Honk 4 Change sign), I’ve been delighted that probably one out of fifteen cars honk, one out of ten of the other cars give a thumbs-up or wave and only one in a hundred gives a thumbs-down type of display of disapproval.

Credit Default Swaps

As I read stories about the Eurozone’s crisis, I hardly ever read about credit default swaps – but the few times I do see mention of them, it seems they play a significant role in the crisis. So what are credit default swaps? The main characteristics I hear of them in articles is that they are a fairly new “instrument”, one of those “derivatives” – whatever they are, and that they are very complex, not easily understood. That doesn’t tell me much.

One day I decided that as a good citizen, I should know more than that so I looked up “credit default swap” on the internet and started reading. I learned enough to make me think our culture needs to have an understanding better than “hard to understand” and since I don’t see many such explanations around me, I will take on the amateur job of presenting some things about credit default swaps that I think need to be more widely understood.

Credit default swaps are contracts between two parties based on whether some organization will default on its debt. The contract is for a certain period of time. One party periodically pays a certain amount of money to the other. In return, the other party becomes legally bound to pay the first party a large amount of money if that organization defaults during that period of time. I’ve heard credit default swaps described as insurance against default and perhaps they originated that way.

For example, a corporation could enter into such contracts. By paying a certain amount of money each year, they have a guarantee that other sources of capital will cover their debt if, by some chance, they had to default. Also like insurance, if the corporation is perceived as increasingly likely to default, then that corporation will have to pay more to entice the other party into entering a contract that will cost that party a great amount of money if the corporation defaults.

However, in many ways, credit default swaps are not like insurance. The biggest difference is that the corporation or nation whose possible default is at the heart of the contract does not have to have any connection with the parties making the contract. Imagine two people making a bet as to whether a train arrives on time. Other than its reputation which presumably influences the odds involved in the bet, the railroad company has absolutely no financial connection to the bet.

Second, credit default swaps have been unregulated. There is no limit on the amount of swaps involved because, as just mentioned, the contracts have no connections with the actual organization that has the debt. Say a corporation has a hundred million dollars of debt. Credit default swaps are not limited to a hundred million dollars of value. The only limit to the amount of swaps is the willingness of two parties to enter into such a contract. No one knows how many swaps exist and to what extent various parties are legally obligated by them. For example, if A and B enter into a CDS contract, B could sell their part of the contract to C (and never notify A) and C could sell it to D who sold it to E and A would never know.

The final key point about credit default swaps is that the vast majority of them are sold “naked”. I can’t quite understand how this works with credit default swaps but I understand this in terms of stocks and options because my dad would do this, causing stress within our family so let me use them as an example. An option is a contract between two parties to sell some stock at a certain price within a certain time frame. Say you have a stock that has a value of one hundred dollars. You might sell for one dollar an option that obligates you to deliver that stock to the person holding the option for one hundred ten dollars anytime in the next half year. If the stock does not reach one hundred ten dollars during that time, the contract expires worthless. You still own the stock plus you made an extra dollar on it. On the other hand, if something were to cause that stock to soar to one hundred and twenty dollars sometime in the next half year, the other party to your option contract would exercise that contract. You would have to sell your stock to them for one hundred ten dollars. You made a ten dollar profit on the sale (instead of twenty) plus you made the extra dollar from selling the option so you came out all right. However, the other party, by buying the contract for one dollar, just purchased a stock worth one hundred twenty dollars for one hundred and ten dollars. If they turn right around and sell the stock, they make nine dollars (ten on the stock minus one for the option contract) on an initial investment of one dollar. That is a 900% gain on investment in half a year. They did very well.

Selling options naked means doing the same thing except you don’t own the stock. You make one dollar each time you sell an option contract for someone to buy the stock from you – but you don’t own the stock. As long as the stock price does not move too much upward, you do fine. You make a dollar with each contract and you haven’t had to tie up any of your money in the actual purchase of a stock. If you sell a thousand of these contracts, you can make a thousand dollars without tying up your own money. It’s a free money machine – as long as the stock does not rise above one hundred ten dollars.

However, if that happens and the other party exercises their option, suddenly, you are required to spend one hundred ten dollars to purchase the stock and then give it free to the person exercising the option you sold. If you had sold one thousand of those options, you must spend one hundred ten thousand dollars to purchase the stock and then give it away. (You might have to spend more than that in a rising market.) You’ve lost one hundred ten thousand dollars (minus whatever you made from selling naked options before this bad turn in the market). That’s what selling “naked” options means.

So credit default swaps can be sold naked. And “Most significantly, unlike insurance companies, sellers of CDSs are not required to maintain any capital reserves to guarantee payment of claims.” (Wikipedia) According to Wikipedia, the vast majority of credit default swaps are sold naked. (A current estimate of the CDS market is 30 trillion dollars, twice the entire GDP of the US . One estimate from the Bank for International Settlements for the entire derivatives market is 592 trillion dollars.) From a short-sighted point of view, selling naked makes sense because it gives you maximum leverage. You get the highest rate of return on the money you have to put up. And rate of return is what it is all about when you are some investment house or hedge fund. A very powerful feedback spiral connects your rate of return and the amount of money invested with you. If you can produce a high rate of return for your clients, you can charge a higher commission and will have a lot more clients.

All of these characteristics of CDS come into play in terms of what is happening in the Eurozone. You get the sense that big banks made naked commitments of trillions of dollars on national debts on the assumption that a “credit event” would never happen and now it is threatening to happen and that no one really knows who would be responsible for paying up and whether they actually have the reserves to pay up. Or, to put it more forcefully, that if a “credit event” occurred and all the legal obligations proceeded as contracted, that the majority of the people whose wealth and power gives them control over vast swathes of the world would be destitute. Destitute in the sense of no clothes on their back. No roof over their head and still with such crushing debts that their descendants for ten generations would be slaves to their debt. In addition, all of the institutions that support their place of power would be bankrupt and no longer exist. Therefore, these people are using all their wealth and power to avoid a “credit event” or deflect it away from them. They have vast power to do this. However, much of their power lies in the ability to enforce contracts so that in order to wiggle out of their contracts, they must undermine the very source of their power. (Part of what strikes me as currently strange is that there is lots of attention focused on forcing governments into austerity cuts and creating billions of dollars to intervene in these markets but little talk about regulating these markets so that governments, the press, and people would actually know how much and whose money is at stake.)

A few weeks ago, it was announced that a deal was going to be worked out whereby banks had agreed to take a 50% “haircut” on Greek debt. But this deal was announced to be “voluntary” and would not be a “credit event” which suddenly made more people aware that a committee from the International Swaps and Derivatives Association determines what constitutes a “credit event”. This association is made up of the major financial firms selling the swaps so there is a growing concern “that credit default swaps are not insurance at all, but rather instruments that big banks use to benefit themselves.” NYTimes, November 19, 2011, Scare Tactics in Greece , Nov. 19, 2011.

If the big banks determine what is a “credit event”, then it becomes even more likely that they would sell trillions of dollars of naked swaps because the committee they control can vote that a default is not a “credit event” and so guarantee there is no down side on these naked sales. Someone once said something like “the way to win the game is to own it.” I have the feeling that what we are seeing is that “Wall Street” (in a more international sense of the phrase), through the creation of credit default swaps and other derivatives, created an alternative, non-governmental currency which, if governments use their assets to bailout, effectively becomes the currency so that “Wall Street” becomes the owner of the printing of money.

One of the main issues of the Occupy movement is economic inequality. Whenever I think about it, I keep coming back to my watershed work. For me, economic inequality is a vital but secondary issue. The more fundamental issue is how should money ideally flow within an economy? I believe it should be recycled often to fall again and again as rain upon the slopes. What we are seeing is a concentration of wealth low in the watershed and how unproductive it is down there. Trillions of dollars in credit default swaps. What kind of truly human aspiration is that serving? Trillions of dollars being leveraged for what? One can argue that more of that money should be shared more widely in the name of economic justice. But I think there is a more politically powerful perspective of economic effectiveness. How pathetically little is being truly created by all the money that has flowed too far downslope. A failure of imagination is draining our culture of economic vitality. It’s not an issue of rich vs. poor but an issue of how possibilities drain away when wealth accumulates downslope. All of us, rich and poor alike, would be uplifted by a flow that recycled and held the wealth of our species higher in the watershed. I believe it is spiritually important to see this as a long-term issue, not of taxing the rich and giving to the poor, but of adjusting thousands of the ongoing flows within an economy so that the money keeps getting recycled back up to flow over and over again.

A half hour after writing the above, I read in Yes! magazine a book review of The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone by Wiklinson and Pickett. A few sentences from the review. “The crux of The Spirit Level is that the best measure of a country’s well-being is not GDP or wealth overall, but its distribution of wealth. Of the developed countries (the focus of the book), those with highest income inequality – the United States, Britain, and Portugal – have the lowest levels of social “goods” such as educational achievement, long life expectancy, gender parity, and trust among neighbors. They have the highest rates of mental illness, obesity, violent crime, teen pregnancy, and incarceration.” “One of the remarkable insights of The Spirit Level is that income inequality affects all social classes, not just the poor. The most unequal countries have rates of mental illness five times higher than the most equitable – for everyone…. The authors emphasize that subtracting the poor from the analysis does not change the score. ‘Inequality,’ they suggest, is ‘like a pollutant spread throughout society.’” “Reducing inequality – not increasing growth – must form the centerpiece of any effort to improve well-being.”

And a few days later after writing that, we learn that a small part of our government secretly lent 7.7 trillion dollars to Wall Street firms without letting Congress know.

As you probably know, I am a big fan of tiny shifts high in the drainage. One little shift we have been enjoying making involves the almost daily receiving of credit card junk mail from the big banks. They include a returned postage guaranteed envelope. We put those envelopes into the mailbox. Junk mail is only profitable if the amount of business it creates is greater than the cost of sending it out. Sending those envelopes back has the power to double the expense of the practice – which could lead to banks stopping the practice – which could prevent some unwary citizen in the future from getting trapped in debt (and save trees).

How did you find this place?

I took one of my former students on his first backpack trip. We hiked cross-country over a pass down into a beautiful meadow. As we hiked back the last day, Bill asked “How did you find that place?” Some surface answer moved towards my tongue but then I paused. There was a good answer I sensed but it was complicated, hard to explain to someone not familiar with the land. As I sorted through possible approaches, one truthful word emerged. “Gradually.” Once that truthful word was spoken, it opened the space so I could take the time to explain how a hike twenty years ago led to another hike that went a bit further that led to another to another until I came upon this meadow which then led to attempts to find an easier route to it. And after all that, the true answer that Bill needed to hear emerged, “By continually exploring my edge.”