Silence

I write a monthly essay for my school's newsletter. This is my latest:

Today we live in a noisy world, filled with the sounds of the television, electronics, phone conversations, leaf blowers, sirens, and traffic. Many of us rarely have the opportunity to experience silence or to savor the quieter sounds of bees buzzing, wind rustling the leaves, or a fire crackling in the fireplace. Silence can be scary. We often describe conversations with patches of silence as “awkward” or “uncomfortable.” We turn on music or the radio to fill the void, as if silence means an absence or lack of something worthy. Valuing and cultivating silence in your family’s life is an important goal as it encourages all of us to reflect and learn to take inner counsel.

In the Primary classrooms, we have an activity called the “Silence Game.” Dr. Montessori developed the activity by asking the children to make silence while they were facing away from her. She then whispered a child’s name and the child would walk silently to her. Today, we often play this game at circle time, stressing that making silence is difficult and takes a lot of concentration.  We sometimes light the Silence Candle and try to make silence for one minute, a very long time for some children. Our goal with this activity is to encourage the calming influence of a still body and a state of being that allows one to take in other sounds or stimuli, and to gain comfort with one’s own thoughts.

"When the children have become acquainted with silence...(they) go on to perfect themselves; they walk lightly, take care not to knock against the furniture, move their chairs without noise, and place things upon the table with great care.... These children are serving their spirits."
—Maria Montessori, Dr. Montessori's Own Handbook

For the elementary child, the Silence Game gives way to practical implementation of the skill. It is in place within the child, and silence becomes a more natural and known state. The children use it during class meetings or presentations when it comes in the form of listening. Self-reflection occurs with daily journaling as students chronicle activities and their feelings about their work. There are times when a silence envelops the classroom or only the sound of one child humming in deep concentration fills the room.

As we move into the busy holiday season, I encourage you to add silence to your family’s culture.  The sights and smells of holidays can leave strong imprints that don’t need elaboration with words. There is nothing quite like the silence of the first snowfall, or the twinkling of lights to inspire wonder. I’ll leave you with one of my favorite quotes by Abraham Herschel. It suggests to me the possibilities of moments of silence:

“Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement.”

Post-election blues, 2016

In wake of the horror of Donald Trump "winning" the election ...

My dear family,

It has taken me several days to find words. I’ve been absorbing so many other peoples’ insights wondering what more could or should be said. With the plethora of justice-oriented media sources out there, it’s not hard to find poignant explanations for what happened, what it means, and what work what must done. Given this, it has been tempting for me to keep consuming these perspectives without adding my own voice. But that is exactly the problem. I have to stop making excuses. We all do.

I am a white person from rural America. More than ever, right now this fills me with deep shame. I am sickened and enraged. This nightmare that is our new reality is multifaceted; the threats are numerous. Here, now, I am going to start with one: race and white supremacy (for a quick primer on what white supremacy means check this out). The onus of this one is on us. We have to pluck up the courage to start talking honestly and openly about our whiteness.   

I am reading and hearing comments from mostly white folks telling people that we must try not to point fingers. That we must move forward with love and a will to seek unity. In the sea of explanations for what happened, for how Trump was elected, there are attempts to paper over the extent to which race played into this election. I have to admit that my initial reaction was to push away the argument about the centrality of race. It is deeply uncomfortable. It is more comfortable for me to read narratives about how the democratic elite brought this upon us by neglecting the disenfranchised white working class voters. Like most things, a host of factors contributed to this outcome of a Trump win (and the discussion about the problem of the electoral college is part of that). But it is wrong to decenter the conversation from racism. Roughly 53% of white women voted for Trump. And this after 12 women came forward accusing him of sexual assault and a year of disgustingly sexist public remarks. No, race cannot be papered over.  

You may read this and feel defensive. I’ll ask you consider how personal it is, for all of us. The love of my life – a brilliant, accomplished, kind, brown-skinned man – is afraid to visit my hometown. His body is not safe. In the days since the election he has texted me multiple times in the wake of encounters with white supremacists saying he fears for his safety. Many of my closest friends are in the same boat. They are afraid to walk the streets of America, of their home, because the violence has already started. A swastika was painted on a building at my school; a Muslim woman was assaulted and had her hijab violently pulled off by a fellow student. As you can read here, the list goes on of racist hate crimes that are being carried out across the country.  

In Between the World and Me Ta-Nehisi Coates writes, “But all our phrasing – race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy – serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth. You must never look away from this. You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body.” This is what we must remind ourselves and our fellow white people, even when they, we, don’t want to hear it.

Coates helps us think about what whiteness is, how it has been constructed, and how we may begin to transform it. He writes, “Race is the child of racism, not the father.And the process of naming “the people” has never been a matter of genealogy and physiognomy so much as one of hierarchy. Difference in hue and hair is old. But the belief in the preeminence of hue and hair, the notion that these factors can correctly organize a society and that they signify deeper attributes, which are indelible – this is the new idea at the heart of these new people who have been brought up hopelessly, tragically, deceitfully, to believe that they are white. These new people are, like us, a modern invention. But unlike us, their new name has no real meaning divorced from the machinery of criminal power. The new people were something else before they were white – Catholic, Corsican, Welsh, Mennonite, Jewish – and if all our national hopes have any fulfillment, then they will have to be something else again. Perhaps they will truly become American and create a nobler basis for their myths.” Let us heed this call. Those of us who reject the brutal, hateful, and xenophobic ends for which whiteness has been mobilized have to make it be something else. We have to create and defend a nobler America. 

As a rural person I have a huge opportunity, a responsibility, to engage the communities that were critical to achieving this horrific outcome of a Trump presidency. As a white person I need to step up and stop being complicit in making people of color do the work for me. As a woman I do not have the luxury of stepping away from this fight – my body is a battleground. As an American I am obliged to do everything I can to fight the climate-change denying exterminationist regime our defunct electoral system has put in place. And as a human being who values dignity, respect, human rights, and freedom, I must not allow myself to be complacent in the face of fascism.  As a student of history I know that this is not just a setback, this is a catastrophe. We must mobilize. We must all ask ourselves what we can be doing to get in the way of the violence and injustice this political shift, this “whitelash” as Van Jones calls it, is emboldening. This is not easy; it is not supposed to be. But just as our history is a story of brutality, it is also a story of courageous acts of resistance and collective struggle. We are all being called upon to join, or deepen our commitment to, being a part of this legacy.   

I’d like to reiterate my brother Darby’s words here. In a recent email to our cousins he wrote, “If nothing else, the events of the past week are a reflection of ourselves living within a sick and greedy culture.  It is a lesson for us to act on our values and engage our skills.  We need to be deliberate and decisive so that we can organize movements that will defend and uphold social and environmental justice.  Despite the sobering claim of Bill McKibben that we will experience this election in geologic time, we must be patient because we are more able to make a difference if we are capable of enduring setbacks. Be strong and be bold. This is our call to action.” Amen. I am resolved to being strong and bold. I hope you will hold me accountable. And I hope each and every one of you will muster your own strength and commitment to defend and uphold what is right. Let’s talk; let’s have a reading group to build a vocabulary together. Let’s have the courage to engage in what is uncomfortable. For the consequences are grave. Coates writes: “The dreamers will have to learn to struggle themselves, to understand that the field for their Dream, the stage where they have painted themselves white, is the deathbed of us all.”

Be in touch.

All my love,

Tara