Lately I’ve found myself searching for more vision and inspiration. I get my fair share from the children in my life and for that I am immensely blessed. But lately I’m needing more to keep balanced with all the shit going on!
Like a lot of people, I look around at the world and can get pretty overwhelmed by what seems to be unraveling around us. Some days it feels like we are watching the slow collapse of a civilization that has forgotten how to care for itself, each other, or the living earth. I can only take so much of the headlines and outrage before I need to go looking somewhere else. Not for someone to tell me everything is going to be okay, because I’m not at all sure it is. More for people asking different questions. Not just, How do we fix what is broken? But maybe, How do we become the kind of people capable of creating something different?
That search has brought me back to Bill Plotkin, Joanna Macy, and others who have been thinking about this stuff for a long time. I’ve also found tremendous encouragement over recent years through the Mad Pride/Psychiatric Recovery movements and communities like the Institute for the Development of Human Arts, the Icarus Project, and the Hearing Voices Network. After spending a good part of my life understanding my own experiences through the pretty narrow language of psychiatric diagnosis, finding people willing to wonder if these experiences might also be meaningful, transformative, and deeply human has felt like coming home.
These writers and communities, along with the children, give me some hope that another way of being human together might actually be possible. Maybe not in my lifetime. Who knows. But I don’t think that really matters. Seeds still need to be planted.
One idea from Bill Plotkin that keeps sticking with me is that we can’t create a life centered civilization from the same consciousness that created this one. We need new maps. Or maybe new ways of seeing. Plotkin believes this requires something much deeper than coming up with better ideas. He calls it soul initiation, a transformation that loosens some of our attachment to the dominant culture and opens us toward a deeper relationship with ourselves, each other, and the living world.
He also believes that individuals and whole cultures can get developmentally stuck, and that much of our culture is stuck somewhere around early adolescence. When I look around, that really doesn’t seem too hard to believe. Just look at who we glorify and choose to lead us! If Plotkin is right, then what we need is more than better policies, technology, or even better education. We need to grow up.
I’ve been sitting with that, and I’ve started wondering if my own life has included a kind of soul initiation that I never would have chosen and certainly didn’t understand while I was going through it. If so, it came through two pretty unexpected teachers. One has been more than thirty years spent alongside young children. The other has been a lifetime of experiences once labeled bipolar disorder.
These used to feel like two completely different parts of my life. They don’t anymore. Both have pushed or pulled me toward the edges and somehow, in very different ways, back toward something more heart-centered, wild, creative, and alive. Something that feels increasingly like it was there all along. And I’m still figuring all of this out. I’m entering my sixties now and thinking more about what it means to become an elder. Not just getting older. Hopefully becoming an elder. There seems to be a difference.
A lot of my deepest learning has happened in what I’ve come to think of as edge spaces. Places where the assumptions of the dominant culture loosen enough that you can start seeing things differently. I don’t mean being somehow above the culture or escaping it. Just getting far enough toward the edge that some of the things everyone takes for granted start looking a little strange.
Madness brought me there first. Not romantically. Not gracefully. And certainly not without a lot of suffering. Those experiences blew apart a lot of what I thought I knew about myself, about what a successful life was supposed to look like, and sometimes even about reality itself. For a long time the only language I had for any of this was the medical language I had been given. It has taken me decades, along with finding communities like IDHA and the broader Mad Pride movement, to begin making sense of it in a way that actually feels true to me.
I wonder a lot about what gets lost when people who experience the world with unusual intensity are seen mostly as problems to manage. I don’t want to romanticize this. The sensitivities that can come with madness can be incredibly difficult. Terrifying sometimes. They can overwhelm a person and everyone around them, especially without sleep, community, good support, and people who aren’t afraid of what is happening. But that’s not the whole story either. Some of these same sensitivities can show up as empathy, imagination, creativity, spiritual longing, unusual perception, and an ability to notice things other people don’t seem to notice. Maybe if we could sometimes see these experiences as connected to a culture that is itself pretty sick and in need of healing, we would meet people differently. I wonder what has been lost because we were so busy trying to get people back to “normal” that we never stopped to ask what their experience might have to tell us.
And then there are the children, my other great teachers. Early on as an educator I started realizing that the kids needed me to do less. That was a pretty big revelation. They didn’t need me filling their days with lessons and activities and all the things adults think children need. They needed room. Room to play, work things out, be bored sometimes, and discover what was already there. The more I stepped back, the more interesting things got. And the more I realized they were teaching me at least as much as I was teaching them.
Year after year I’ve watched groups of children arrive as strangers and slowly become a community. They come with different temperaments, fears, gifts, family stories, sensitivities, and ways of moving through the world. Then something starts happening between them. They make up games and stories. They develop rituals and inside jokes. They fight. They hurt each other. They figure things out. They sometimes need our help and sometimes very much don’t. Slowly a little culture forms. It can be a beautiful mess, and underneath it all I keep seeing a kind of relational intelligence that seems to have been there from the beginning. It comes out most clearly when we adults can get out of the way enough to let it.
This has completely changed how I see education. It seems pretty clear to me that much of modern education is based in fear and preparation. We’re worried about whether children will be ready for kindergarten, ready for middle school, ready for college, ready for jobs, ready for a future none of us can even predict. And while we’re busy getting them ready, we can easily squash some of the very things they are going to need. Especially imagination.
I don’t think we are going to think our way out of the mess we’re in using the same systems and habits of thought that got us here. Whatever comes next is going to require a huge amount of imagination. Not imagination as fantasy or escape, but the ability to see possibilities that aren’t here yet. Kids do this all day long. They create worlds. They change the rules. They become dragons and mothers and thieves and animals and whoever else they need to be that day. They follow strange ideas just to see where they go. They don’t seem nearly as bothered as adults by things being unfinished or not making complete sense. I think we need a lot more of that.
Of course they also need adults. Mature adults. Or at least adults doing the work of becoming more mature ourselves. They need boundaries and protection and someone to help carry things that are still too big. Stepping back doesn’t mean disappearing.
I also think our schools need to become places where children get a lot more practice living inside questions. We adults seem obsessed with answers. The right answer. The quick answer. The answer that gets the grade or settles the argument. But most of the big questions these children are inheriting don’t have clear answers. Maybe we should stop pretending they do. Maybe learning how to stay curious when you don’t know is part of the education.
Those of us who have experienced what I affectionately call madness may have had a little more practice with this than most. Sometimes you get pushed so far outside your comfortable ideas about who you are and what reality even is that the old answers just don’t work anymore. That can be terrifying, but you also end up sitting with some pretty enormous questions. I used to feel like I needed to answer them. I don’t so much anymore. Some questions seem to get more interesting the longer I leave them alone. Maybe there is something useful in learning how to sit there without knowing.
“Be patient toward all that is unresolved in your heart… Try to love the questions themselves… Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given because you would not be able to live them — and the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answers.”
— Rainer Maria Rilke
And none of this means much without community. That might actually be the foundation underneath everything I’m trying to say. Before kids can imagine freely or wrestle with difficult questions, they need to feel like they belong. They need to know what it feels like to be part of a community where people get mad at each other and repair it, where differences don’t have to disappear, where feelings aren’t shameful, and where each person has something the group needs. After thirty years, I think this may be some of the most important work we do. Let children experience what a healthy human community actually feels like. Maybe that is education.
Joanna Macy called the movement from an industrial growth society toward a life-sustaining civilization the Great Turning. I love that she didn’t promise it would happen. There’s something strangely freeing about that for me. We don’t get to know how this turns out. We just get to decide how we participate.
Maybe the Great Turning is already happening all around us in small ways that don’t make the news. People protecting a piece of land. Someone caring for a neighbor. Teachers doing things differently. Communities figuring out how to repair something that has been broken. People refusing to give up on one another. I have no idea what difference thirty years of sitting around with kids is ultimately going to make. But maybe that isn’t mine to know. Maybe the task is just to figure out which little piece of the turning belongs to us and take care of it.
So I guess this essay is me putting a few of my pieces out there. They come from the odd place life has asked me to stand. Somewhere between children and madness. Teacher and student. Adulthood and, hopefully, elderhood.
I used to think I needed a map. Now I’m not so sure. What I seem to have is more like an overgrown dirt trail. I can’t see very far ahead and I’m not entirely sure where it goes. But I want to follow it. Somewhere between thirty years of listening to children and a lifetime of trying to make sense of madness, this little path has slowly appeared beneath my feet. Maybe eventually it connects with paths other people are finding from their own places along the edges.
Maybe that’s how a new map gets made. Not by any one of us knowing where we’re going, but by finding each other out there.
Maybe I’ll see you on the trail. :-)
Much Love!
The Mad Preschool Teacher (He/Him)
Wonderful and deep. Thank you for writing this.