Just as fairy stories start with “Once upon a time”, so all the stories we travelers shared in my hitch-hiking days started with “After college.” Just a month “After college” in my story, I was shown a beach. I was hitch-hiking on faith (that’s another story) up the California and Oregon coast. The driver wanted to show a beach to me so we parked on the side of the road and walked across a California summer meadow of golden dry grass beneath a blue clear sky towards a wind-shaped tree that marked the edge of the bluff and will forever define my memory of that beach. A trail descended from the tree down to a beach that was the most amazing one I had experienced. The mile-long beach itself was simple – narrow and very clean – to the point of starkness like an empty stage awaiting a ritualized drama. The beach’s dramatic character came from the cliffs rising like the backdrop of some strange Noh drama. The ocean was peaceful and that beach, just a month “after college” went deep into a very special place in my heart.
At some point during my two years of subsequent hitch-hiking, I hitched back to that beach to camp and soak in its presence. Again I walked across the meadow to that tree on the edge. This time I was alone and had the time to walk the entire length of beach. Further down the beach, I noticed a beautiful glistening in the surf-washed sands and discovered plentiful pieces of wave-smoothed abalone shell. The shells had been smashed by waves into small inch-sized pieces that had then been sanded and rounded into a variety of smooth, shiny shapes. I collected many of the more beautiful pieces. As I hitch-hiked around the country, I could give gifts of shell to people, perhaps like First Americans might have carried gifts/currency of abalone or obsidian when they traveled.
I returned to that beach again about 15 years ago. Again I walked down the very clean beach and partway down found the abalone jewelry glistening in the surf and again I gathered and carried it away.
I had an opportunity to return again last month. I looked forward to walking across the meadow but it was turning into a forest of coastal pine now. I dropped down onto the beach. Walked along seeing no abalone but then a phrase arose out of my unconscious: “The Abalone Shells are further down.” I kept walking and sure enough, a bit further I found First Abalone which I gifted to Alysia. I found myself thinking about the stability underlying “the abalone shells are further down.” Probably a combination of off-shore geology creating deep bedrock tidepools in certain areas coupled with dominant wind and wave directions pushing the shell fragments onto a certain area of the beach. Patterns of change: The distribution of abalone shell fragments changed hardly at all while the meadow was changing into forest and my life was changing from youth to passing middle age.
This passing through my life felt fine because of several nice developments. One development is that Chrysalis reached full enrollment this year. For several years we’ve planned on an enrollment of around 125 students but facilities limited our size. With our move to the Catholic high school campus, we are able to grow to this size. This was important in this year of severe budget cuts in California. The additional students allowed us to maintain our full staff without salary cuts.
The second development relates to one of the key quotations (from Complexity by Michael Waldrop) in Chrysalis’s founding charter. “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 [because] living systems never really settle down.” This year, a lot of interesting behavior is emerging from the teachers’ co-op as teachers exercise their creative abilities with more assurance. Much to my delight, one teacher and a parent started an after-school running club. Two teachers initiated a reading intervention program.
A third development is that the school achieved a wonderfully creative goal of installing a large play structure for our younger students. It’s covered with kids during lunch and recess.
A fourth development was that our test scores went way up. That was a bit awkward because we have always viewed the standardized tests as something our culture gives far too much significance to and, as a result, schools are allowing the test pressure to bend them away from what is best for the kids’ learning. So we’ve somewhat proudly maintained that we spend a significant portion of our time out in nature – even though nature will never be on the standardized tests. We’ve been content to be in the middle of the pack in terms of county-wide test scores, knowing the heart of Chrysalis lies somewhere else. Those schools scoring highest in the county are the upper middle-class schools and watching their competitive dynamics makes me aware of a feedback spiral between test scores, socio-economic status of the families, a school’s program, and real estate values. A school district that is perceived as having academic excellence will create higher real estate values for the homes within its boundaries. This means that families need a higher income to move into that district. There is, for better or worse, a strong correlation between socio-economic status and academic achievement so the school is able to achieve more academically which leads to higher test scores which makes that district appear more valuable which increases real estate prices… It also means that a lot of adult energy can press for higher test scores for reasons other than the learning of the children.
In September we learned that Chrysalis had the second highest elementary school test scores in the county. We, with 55% eligibility for Free and Reduced Price Lunch, were higher than all the upper-middle class schools except the wealthiest district of all which has only 14% eligible for Free and Reduced Price Lunch. We haven’t advertised our test scores because we don’t want to get sucked into that feedback spiral but it has been an interesting development. Tricky terrain but interesting walking.
The fifth development was my selection to participate in a Fulbright Japan pilot project that brought fifteen American and fifteen Japanese teachers together in Portland, Oregon for a week. The goal of the project was to share the best of our educational practices that can help our species achieve a sustainable relationship with the Earth. I felt a web developing, extending ever further outward, that would both support our work and allow the good things emerging within Chrysalis to flow outwards.
And the final development is I feel progress in writing a second book. I’ve rummaged around for many years with several false starts at a second book but the vision is coalescing into a structure and that gives me a sense of momentum each time I write a small piece that I can see fitting into the structure. Working title is Roaming within the Wilderness of Light.
For all these reasons, I felt mellow about my life path as I walked again along this beach so dear to me. My beach this time, however, was not incredibly clean like it had been all previous times. The beach was covered deep with a baroque richness of twisted coils of Rembrandt-brown kelp. Eventually I connected the beach with the typhoon that had blown itself against the California coast, bringing 50 mph winds into the Central Valley. The wind and the waves must have been fierce on the coast, surging the kelp off the rocks and piling it thickly onto the beach. Great swarms of flies rose up from the kelp wherever I approached. The flies were orgifying, trying to convert this massive gift of nutrients and energy from the sea into as many wriggling fly bodies as quickly as possible. Some of the kelp was turning to mush. This nutrient goop would work its way down between the sand grains, nourishing the buried beach creatures that sandpipers probe for. Groups of gulls sauntered along the kelp. This kelp is like salmon; a tremendous mass of nutrient energy flowing from the sea onto the land. The wind and the waves had pushed the ocean-derived kelp onto the land where the creatures of the air could feast, converting it into their world. This energy won’t swim hundreds of miles upstream like salmon but it will become insects and birds, some of which will defecate and die still further from the surf.
Another thing flowing up out of the sea was entire abalone shells. I did not find many of the small, polished fragments of shell; they were probably buried deep beneath the kelp. But entire shells of abalone lay amidst the kelp. Several of them had kelp holdfasts gripped to their shell. I didn’t realize kelp would attach to abalone. That is probably why there were so many intact shells; the storm that piled the kelp on the beach had also pulled the attached abalone off the rock. The kelp’s attachment to the shell was stronger than the abalone’s attachment to the rock. This also meant that during calmer times, some of the kelp strands floating out in the kelp beds must be slowly changing position as their abalones slid about.
So, thanks to the typhoon, I was finding all of these big shells. It was as if the abalone currency mint that normally churned out shiny nickels and dimes was clunking out big silver dollars, which I was scooping up in amazement. What would I do with this treasure trove? Hoard it? This wondering reminded me of a thought I’ve been turning over in my mind for several months, long enough for it to acquire the label of Two Investments.
This last summer we installed a playground at Chrysalis for our primary and elementary students. As I watch young children climb and slide and imaginatively play on the structure, I reflect on what a wonderful investment this playground is – from many angles. First is the investment in the health of the next generation. Kids are swinging across the monkey bars, climbing the ladders, growing strong. Second, from a financial point of view, for $18,000 we bought and installed a playground that should cost $70,000 or so, installed. This is because one of our parents noticed this playground sitting unused at another school. That school had been an elementary school but it was converted to a specialized high school. The playground, designed for 5-12 year olds, had to now just sit there, creating a maintenance and liability problem for that school district. So we bought it from them in a win-win situation. We got a playground in good shape for about a fourth the cost. They got rid of a liability problem, regained use of 3000 sq. ft. of playground area, and acquired funds that would help them retain a teaching position in these challenging state budget times. Plus the Earth benefited because we recycled a playground rather than impose the carbon footprint of constructing and transporting a whole new playground. Then there was a third benefit in that the county probation department did the work of moving and installing the playground for us. People on probation had the chance to participate in work that created something special for children. So, the playground has been an all-around wonderful investment.
Then I read that Wall Street was developing a new investment opportunity based on securitizing people’s insurance policies. People in hard times are cashing in their insurance policies for a fraction of their overall worth. Profit can be generated from this misfortune; the articles said interest in the new investment vehicle was running high.
I find myself contemplating the difference between these two investments. Many of the articles conveyed a sense of moral outrage that I agree with. But it’s the contrast between these two investments that I kept turning over and over in my mind. The Wall Street investment was building nothing of value. Nothing was being made better for our future – like a playground. But more importantly, it revealed such a pathetic lack of imagination. The playground – now that was creative in so many ways. But having billions of our culture’s dollars flowing into investments that generate more profit if people live shorter, more desperate lives is not creative. What’s profoundly pathetic is that those involved in this securitization see themselves as shrewd. They see themselves as smart enough to profit while I see them wandering further and further away from the heart of this incredible gift of being alive. My heart goes out to them – not anger. We were born into this world, gifted with the abilities to create upward spirals, to nourish gardens of new possibilities, bring forth surges of hope. And to end up near the end of your life having learned not even enough to move beyond such dark, sideshow come-ons is truly sad.
There is such a world of difference between extracting possibilities from a system—calling it profit—and helping possibilities emerge within a system. Contemplating the difference between these two investments deepens my certainty, born up in the rainy fields, that the power within money, like rainwater, becomes destructive if it becomes too concentrated. Currency loses its creative potential when it’s used to extract profit rather than generate capacity and that tends to happen as money concentrates. Money managers of a billion dollars won’t see the opportunity to move a playground, partly because it does not generate a “profit” (actually, it generates a huge profit but it isn’t in the form of money) and partly because it is too small for their radar. Securitize the insurance policies of millions of desperate people and a billion dollars can move in and out of that market easily. But it’s hard to easily move a billion in and out of the things that really matter.
So I’ve grown convinced that one of the most important gardening roles of government is to make sure its policies and actions have the effect of spreading out and slowing down the rate at which money tends to converge. Help as much of the currency as possible to soak in high in the watershed and nourish a thousand acres of growth rather than helping it concentrate in a two acre-reservoir at the bottom. Some people will scream “redistributing the wealth” but the wealth is always flowing, always redistributing itself. The way money concentrates currently is also redistribution of the wealth. One of the most important reasons for helping the flow of money spread out is because the thousand acres will transpire most of the water back into the air to fall as rain again, nourishing yet more possibilities. A secondary reason is to help protect the spirits of those close to the flow of too-concentrated money by decreasing the number of these places.
So here I am with large abalone shells overfilling my daypack. I have to help them flow upwards like the kelp. How can they nourish possibilities? Then I think of our teachers’ co-op and all the different gifts the teachers bring to the school and this idea forms of giving each teacher one of these beautiful shells – with an acknowledgement of the individual talents each one of them brings to the school for which I’m grateful.
As I wend my way through the thickets of beached kelp, I watch the group of gulls ahead of me move away. My attention fastens on the last one, the one closest to me. As his walk speeds up to almost a run, his wings open out. They don’t flap, just extend outwards. His scurrying feet carry him up a gentle rise of sand. As he passes the crest of the rise, I see his upper back lift and open. He hasn’t taken flight; his feet are still touching the ground. But as he passes the crest of the gentle rise, his wings lift part of his weight off from his legs so that each step touches lighter and further apart and his body expands as the shoulders lift upwards. I can see this in his body and I feel it in my upper chest and shoulders in sympathetic alignment and the lightness reminds me of a dream I often have sleeping where I am running, leaping across the ground and I become increasingly buoyant. I don’t fly. I don’t float upwards but I do glide forward for a greater and greater distance between each increasingly lighter touch-down and push-off.
And suddenly I stop short. Did I just have another grey-crowned rosy finch moment? The rosy finch/belly drop has become such an iconic moment in my life that I had always assumed it would only occur once in my life. This experience couldn’t possibly be similar because the rosy finch changed my life while this one only lasted a second or two. But then my memory reminded me that the rosy finch hopping off the ledge, wings folded, and something in my belly moving – had probably been only a second in time. And there was a similarity. With the rosy finch, I had felt the drop in my belly. With the gull, I had felt the opening lift in my shoulders and upper back. The locations and sensations were different but each could be very appropriate to the place on my life path where the two encounters took place. The first when I was about to fledge, afraid to let go and leap into the void, not yet knowing that the emptiness was filled with air that would bear me up. This one, many years along the path that opened thereafter, finely stretched between lift off and being grounded. Yeah, but still the rosy finch moment had changed my life unlike this one – and then my memory reminded me again that I didn’t realize the importance of the rosy finch at the time. Only months later, in retrospect, did I begin realizing how profound that belly movement had been.
So I left my beach, uncertain what had occurred. A few days later, the mother of one of our students came to talk to me and mentioned how she was feeling this sense of uplift and I thought to myself, “this is interesting.” With a certain sense of being called forth, I shared with her my encounter with the gull, and our conversation bore good fruit. I’ve had other experiences since where the lifting shoulders of that gull came to mind and I acted with greater grace. The gifts from the sea and beach flow further inland.
A story of the next time I returned to this beach eight years later.
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