Who?

It is as if the Open Hand opened, slowly, still opening, after reaching a great depth from many years of teaching, facilitation, and administration in higher education. I remember the exact moment when I became an educator. As a teenager, I had finally found something worth memorizing…it was this line from Socrates: “To be wise is to know you know nothing.” As I wonder about it now, why that line?

I became a Shakespearean when I read that Othello dropped the hanky, and I saw how Shakespeare, and later all the texts in our lives, were embedded with so many layers of complexity—cultural, historical, economic, social, phenomenological, psychological, and personal. A deep questioning of reality led me to share cultural texts with students—from literature to movies, from the Homer’s Odyssey to the New Testament to Toni Morrison’s Beloved—and to examine them for the things which drive our fears and desires as well as the deep unnamable nothings.

I extended my enjoyment of teaching, students, and curriculum to become an administrator, where I collaborated with others to develop strategic aims and reach departmental goals. I promoted DEI and workplace skills in the Humanities, developing in collaboration with others such courses as conflict management, interpersonal communication, and creative problem solving. My academic background was rewarding in so many respects, but I still got burned out. Only when I started studying the strategies from the learning sciences did I rediscover why I became an educator. I successfully experimented with innovative learning experience design, which disrupted many of our assumptions about the effectiveness of conventional pedagogy. Importantly, at this time, I refined my own skills of emotional intelligence, coaching, and mindfulness. I began to realize that maybe I really did know nothing, and that is exactly what motivated me to continually practice self-awareness. 

Later, I was introduced to contemplative art practice, which is often a non-conceptual or embodied practice. It is a different kind of knowing or an unknowing. After years as an academic, I had some inveterate habits of thought, and so I said to myself, "I can't draw" or "I can't do this." Like so many students, I had to be taught a growth mindset, and part of that entailed developing a non-judgmental attitude about whatever I created.  Each week, I slowly learned that trying, experimenting, trying again, was actually a lot of fun. I also realized that the journal I had kept most of my life--from the stories written in first grade to the weekly visual journals I write now--were actually a form of contemplative pedagogy. Every week, I make creative and unexpected connections between literary, philosophical, religious or theoretical texts and the daily living of my life--connections with the movies I've seen, the art that enthralls me, the music I hear, the people I meet, and the places I go.  I have been the quintessential lifelong and life-wide learner.

The Open Hand surfaced when I had reached a difficult moment in my life. I couldn't find a sense of rest or ease amidst the strong emotions and negative thinking. Desperate, with a kind of embodied intuition, I bent down while walking, and I picked up some dirt with my hand. I didn't know I had touched the silent ground of being, of no-where and no-thing. That's how the Open Hand began to open--it's always already opening--and it reminds me of what matters.