“ever-widening circles”

This week my eighth grade literature class worked with two Rilke poems: The Panther and The Tower. I like doing the two poems together because the first is about a caged animal’s spirit/will that is circling inwardly down while the second is about the poet’s spirit/lifepath circling outwards. This second poem has the line, “I live my life in ever-widening circles.” My eighth graders had a hard time understanding what that line might mean because they are only a little ways into life.

During our outdoor discussion, someone noticed a cluster of escaped helium balloons floating upwards into a blue high sky. Kids could relate to the balloons so I had the balloons be the topic for the day’s “quick write” which eventually led to one of the students’ doing a mime of the balloons being released and floating upwards. He did a great job that inspired other kids to try which led them to asking me to do it.

Now, one of the characteristics of “spirited teaching” I’ve written about is the willingness of the teacher to model what we want to have emerge in our students. So when my students ask me to do something, I try to do it with full immersion, no holding back. So I became a balloon, bobbing and swaying and twisting the way balloons on strings do and then being released, finally floating out of the room, bobbing down the hall and out the door – much to the delight of the class. After class, Mercedes came up to me with a big grin on her face and asked how I could do that with a straight face. Her question caught me by surprise. It had never even entered my mind to laugh because I had been the balloon that was floating away. There was lots of wonder and delight and apprehension but nothing funny – from my point of view as a balloon.

But then her question took me back to my high school days and the really great tympanist in the Portland Symphony Orchestra. He had an aura of total presence when he played that would just keep drawing my attention back over and over throughout a performance. I learned that he had a national reputation; he did solo and small group performances throughout the nation. I attended one of these performances in Portland. At the end of one piece, he started moving crazily throughout the room percussioning on every available surface in the most slapstick humor manner. We in the audience were laughing uncontrollably but that did not break him out of the frenetic intensity of his increasing craziness.

Months later, I attended an ensemble performance that included him. Afterwards, as he was preparing to move his instruments, I went up, a wondering high school boy, and asked him how he could keep a straight face through that performance. He answered “because that was how the music was written to be played.” That answer was beyond my comprehension until he said it. He brought that ability, that perspective into my consciousness.

Now Mercedes’ similar question brought me full circle but it was a widening circle because the first time I had been the child asking an adult who was capable of something I hadn’t imagined and now I am the adult capable of giving that answer to a child. I live my life in ever-widening circles.

I shared this essay with the class. It led into a wonderful discussion of what can lead our lives to circle wider or not and what the kids would like their life path to look like. Their writing assignment became:  describe an encounter you’ve had with an adult that opened you to new possibilities.