Posted in Mindfulness, Mysticism, Pronoia, Rats, Spirituality, Tao
Posted in Dreams, Jungian Depth Work, Meditation
Posted in Family, Music, Relationships
In one of my dreams this morning close to the time I woke, I was carrying two toads–one very large and one smaller. There were people around me, and I was going through a sort of obstacle course on my way to another part of a large complex of buildings and structures. I was outside. The ground was damp, packed dirt with no grass. There was more undeveloped area in this compound than there was indoor area. To make it easier for me to grab onto the rungs of jungle-gym-like structures on this trip from one end of the grounds to the other, I put the toads in my large smock pockets. But at some point I realized that the toads could come to harm or escape if I did that. So I held them in my hands. Then I came to a point near the end of the short trip across the grounds of this institution-like place (monastery? nursing home? college campus?) where I needed my hands to keep my balance. My friend (a combination of two females I know in real life, both of them very big-boned, sort of Amazon women) was there by the ladder, so I asked her please to hold the big toad for me. I started to climb down the ladder as the last part of this obstacle course and looked over to see that my friend had put the toad in her pocket. SIGH. I had asked her to HOLD the toad. I had pockets of my own. I could have put the big toad in my own pocket. I didn’t want the toad in a pocket, which is why I had said, “Can you please HOLD this toad for me for a second while I climb down?”
There was an incident in real life that happened shortly before I retired for the night that ties into this dream. I won’t recount the event, but I do know that had I caught myself mumbling, “if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself.” This is how I felt in the dream when my friend put the toad in her pocket. Why had I entrusted her with the toad?
When I looked up toad as symbol, I found a wonderful blog article that explores the frog/toad in world mythologies. This is exactly what my Jungian analyst used to do when we needed a little help interpreting a dream. She called it “amplifying.” She would go through this huge tome that contained information about every item and animal and food and …well…everything you can think of followed by what that thing represents in various cultures and mythologies over the world through recorded history. One or more of the meanings would always jump out at me, resonate with me. Then we were onto what my subconscious was trying to talk to me about via my dreams.
Animus integration. Transformation. Inattentiveness.
Inattentiveness? On Thursday I hit “REPLY TO ALL” and composed an email to my coworkers very quickly (because I had to be in a class in 15 minutes) without taking extra care with my wording…to ensure I wasn’t stepping on toes. See my previous post.
Toads, toads, what do you want to say to me?
Anna would ask me about the essence of this friend in the dream…the one to whom I pass off the big toad. She is 80% my friend X and 20% my friend Y. X is a compulsive talker and not very mindful, in spite of wanting to be.
Posted in Complex, Dreams, Jungian Depth Work, Shadow
Posted in Age 40 to Now, Books, Canadian Life, Community, Food, Locavorism
We were enjoying a night of socializing with a large group of people, something we almost never do. The food at the Spanglish club summer barbecue had been wonderful, the hosts gracious; many people had come over to the corner of the backyard where we were camped out in order to make our acquaintance and chat a while.
When it came time to pack up, I had an encounter with a rather loud fellow who had had a few beers. I had drunk one at 6:00 before we went to the party and had drunk another over the course of three hours while there.
After overhearing an exchange between me and someone else regarding a spiritual practice, this guy started pontificating, giving me advice. Before I even knew what had hit me, I was complexed. Unconscious. Not vigilant. Not like a cat at the mouse hole. More like a napping cat.
My ego went to town.
Afterward I felt so gross, so yucky.
What was bothering me wasn’t so much that I had tried to put Mr. Know-it-All in his place, but that I had done so right in front of my acquaintance who’d shown an interest in ACIM.
Great, Kel! Great job being an ambassador for meditation. A lot of good it’s done you, apparently!
Grrrr.
After we left the party, we went and sat in the dark at the marina. We talked softly while water slapped the side of the pier. A delicious breeze was blowing, welcome relief after a warm and humid day.
Sylvain pointed something out to me: while it was good that I had recognized my ego’s getting the best of me in situation #1, my ego had then slipped around and come in again through the back door. There was the ego activity I could see, but the little monkey was taking me for another ride I couldn’t see: caring so much what my colleague thought of me.
These eggs are popping open faster than I can keep up. On the mat this morning I’d ended up in tears when a realization had bubbled to the surface that I’d been judgmental and hurtful with a friend recently. Now this.
Sylvain sat close while I cried. I took a deep breath and applied The Process to the uncomfortable feelings. Then I calmed down and we talked a bit more before he walked me home.
Posted in Age 40 to Now, Complex, Jungian Depth Work, Shadow, Spirituality
That’s what my Jungian Analyst would call it, I think: shadow work. It feels as if someone has pulled back a curtain and shined a light into the psychic closets where I like to hide things.
Thursday at Spanglish club we were divided into teams and competed to see which team could build the taller tower out of straws and craft sticks before the buzzer went off. We had about seven minutes and could not speak our mother tongue to get things done. I was limited to Spanish, but most of my team members are just starting their study of that language.
At first I was quite frustrated that my team (unlike the other team–whose progress I could see from where we were) had no central leadership, no plan, and was not delegating tasks. I tried offering ideas, such as using the heavier materials at the bottom of the tower to make it more stable, and suggested we might assemble a cube shape for the base. I asked, “Could one or two people start cutting pieces of tape and lining them up here along the edge of this chair?” Nobody responded. I began cutting off pieces of tape but nobody was using it.
Two women wordlessly went about shoving materials together in a haphazard way that struck me as completely illogical. I was certain their structure would fall over and cost us the competition.
The women’s Calderesque sculpture–with wads of packing tape wrapped here and there–began to take shape, though a very strange shape.
The facilitator kept reminding us to practice language. Communicate. On our team, nobody was doing that unless you count my occasional pleas for some sort of plan to be followed. It was not two-way communication; I was talking to the air.
The other team’s structure looked like it was designed by an architect or engineer. It had right angles, was solid and looked like it would stand the test of time.
With about ten seconds to go, I noticed there was a straw sticking out the top of our junk heap, so I crimped the end of another straw and stuck it in to gain height. I did that two more times.
When the buzzer went off, our crazy, wabi sabi packing-taped haystack with a needle nose emerging from the top was taller than the other team’s structure.
Afterward, the facilitator asked us to talk about what had happened on each team with regard to communication. I did not keep my frustrations a secret. I envied the other team’s having a leader who delegated jobs.
Someone on the other team said that sometimes a strong leader type shuts down people’s ideas and doesn’t do things democratically. The leader type defended herself by saying that when you don’t have a lot of time, you can’t indulge in voting.
A quiet man on my team pointed out to me, “But we won, Kelly.”
Blink.
Blink, blink.
What? Oh, details.
Wait a second. A little voice whispered to me, What your teammate just said to you is important.
I didn’t want our tower to be taller. It shouldn’t have been. It had come together willy nilly with no planning. That’s not supposed to work.
Boy, do I have a lot of de-programming to do. Fortunately, I seem to be getting a lot of assistance with that right now.
Posted in Tao
Posted in Age 40 to Now, Complex, Jungian Depth Work, Shadow
Oh, my. It’s not all fun and games. My Expanded Self, as Scheinfeld calls it, is leading me to lots of “eggs.” I think I can safely say that this is the same as sources of shenpa in the Tibetan Buddhist model and complexes in the Jungian model.
Scheinfeld offers a tool for dissolving these knots, these tangles that are keeping us from our full potential as limitless, omnipotent beings.
As I invest in doing this process, lots of ugly stuff is coming to the surface for me to work out. It’s not a lot of fun to look these gremlins in the eye.
Posted in Age 40 to Now, Complex, Jungian Depth Work, Kali, Perfectionism, Shadow
continued from previous post
Xavier wanted an apartment with a tub or shower, but I won. It wasn’t too hard to win this argument, because Xavier wanted us to live frugally, and we were able to save a lot on rent by accepting a traditional modest flat with nothing but a water closet (toilet and very small sink in the corner with only a cold-water tap).
“No te preocupes,” I told him. (I spoke Spanish to him and Japanese all day while out and about.) “Don’t worry; there is a public bath every few blocks. I’m sure there’s one near here.”
I ventured out on my own the first time, promising Xavier I would show him the way next time. We lived on a busy street, which meant constantly having to dust what little furniture we had. Little phrase book in hand, I approached the first kind-looking soul on our block. About halfway up the street toward the subway station was a little produce stand run by an ancient man with a moon-shaped, very wrinkled face, a gold tooth, and full head of grey hair. Peering down at the phrase book, I said to him:
“Sumimasen, anooo, o-furo-ya wa doko desu ka?”
He showed understanding with “Ah! Ah!” and escorted me to the end of the block, then pointed which way I should turn when I got to the next street. I thanked him with a few bows and “Doomoo arigatoo.”
The picture of a Japanese bathhouse on Wikipedia no more resembles the place I found than Macy’s resembles a Seven-Eleven. It was just a pair of doors crammed between a wholesale rice dealer and a laundromat. The door on the right had the kanji for “woman.” I entered and looked around. There was a place for me to take off and stash my shoes. To my left I saw an older woman sitting behind a tall counter. She wasn’t facing out toward the room I was in, but rather was facing the direction of the doors. Just then a man came in through the men’s door; he was in a room on the other side of the raised booth in which the old woman sat. He paid her and disappeared from my view.
“Ikura desu ka?” I asked while fishing around for my money.
It seems to me that I paid around 200 yen, or around the cost of a subway ticket.
Having done all that reading, I knew to bring my soap, shampoo, washcloth and towel. I wasn’t sure what to do next, but noticed a woman and child getting dressed while standing in front of a locker. I found an empty locker and began to undress, placing my clothes inside. When I was nude, I slid open the next set of doors to the bathing area.
All along the east and west walls were shower spigots, but not nearly high enough off the ground for me to stand under. Near the door through which I’d come were stacks of blue plastic benches. I noticed that women and girls were seated on these benches, each in front of her own spigot. I followed suit.
In Japan it is a strong taboo not to contaminate the bathwater, which is communal. You should first wash yourself thoroughly with soap, rinse, and then think about joining others in the piping hot, relaxing bath. So I proceeded to use my sponge and lufa, soap and shampoo to get squeaky clean. I noticed other people were even brushing their teeth. Note to self: bring toothbrush next time.
When I was finished, I walked over to the big bath on the far wall where five or six older women were happily soaking up to their necks. A couple of them had washcloths on their heads. I put my hand in to test the steaming water and found it to be almost scalding. There was no way.
I turned to go, and heard the Japanese women calling after me. I turned back. They were beckoning me to come on in.
“Atsui desu!” I said.
They were very insistent in their gestures. I MUST come back over. So I did, thinking they hadn’t yet gotten my point about the water being HOT.
“Atsui desu! Atsui desu!” I couldn’t remember how to say very or too. They chuckled at me, then the youngest of the women came over to the side of the tub and showed me a cold water spigot. She showed me how to make a spot of cold water to step deftly into without disturbing the surrounding very hot water. So in I went, sliding into the little pocket of cool water we had created.
I won’t kid you. It was still too hot around my feet, and soon the hot water came back around me. But I had done it; I had managed to get in. They saw my pained, tense expression and laughed at me. They used universal language of eyes and smiles to say, “Take a load off! Relax! Be happy!”
Then I laughed, too, realizing that my shoulders were up around my ears. I took a deep breathe and released the tensions of the day. I settled down and began to enjoy the soak while sweat began to bead on my forehead.
======
When my fingers and toes began to prune, I bid my new bath friends “Dewa mata” and exited the bath. I wrapped my towel around me and let myself out through the sliding doors to the change room. There I spied myself in the wall-length mirror. I was red as a lobster from toes to neck, but my head was still white. I put my clothes back on. Just before I turned to leave the changing room and grab my shoes, I heard the words “excuse me?”
A lovely young Japanese woman with rosy cheeks, wire-rimmed glasses and shiny, shoulder-length black hair was standing there fully clothed in jeans and a floral print top. She asked me if I spoke English. I said I did. Yuko introduced herself. She had lived in Hong Kong for twelve years and spoke English, she said. Her mother-in-law owned the bathhouse. When I had come in, the proprietress had called her daughter-in-law straightaway to say, “There’s a gai-jin in the bathhouse!” I stood there awkwardly–introvert me–not very strong in the small talk department. Was knowing English a foundation for friendship in Japan?
This was the first of many such odd encounters during my year in the Land of the Rising Sun.
Posted in Friendship & Friends, Introversion, Japan, Pronoia
con’t from here
During the nine-month wait for my visa, I’d read every book in the Central Arkansas Library System about Japanese culture. I knew the hand gestures for money, girlfriend, bad, and excuse me, please let me pass. I knew not to stick my chopsticks upright in my rice lest I commit a serious social faux pas. With Berlitz tapes and stacks of books I had gotten a head start on speaking some basic phrases and memorizing the two syllabaries (katakana and hiragana) and even a few of the ideographs from the system of thousands of kanji that were introduced from China before the fifth century. I even knew how to bow and cover my mouth when I laughed like a proper Japanese woman. I was prepared to give up my bus seat to a man and wait to enter the household bath after all the men in the house had bathed. I wanted the full cultural experience. Yet I was also prepared for the fact that no matter how many years I lived in Japan or how fluent I became in the language, I–a non-Japanese–would never, ever, ever, ever be fully accepted as an insider. The books I read explained why I would always be seen as an outsider, and I came to understand and not worry about it.
When our downstairs neighbour invited me to the Wednesday night meeting of her temple group, I saw it as an awesome opportunity to practice Japanese and become engulfed much more fully in the culture than if I turned down her invitation. As for the religious and/or possibly spiritual side of it, I already considered myself a pantheist capable of participating in any of the world’s religions. I would allow my overflowing faith to flow through the vessel of these rituals and metaphors.
In Japan there are four main schools of Buddhism comprising nine sects. Naturally, it was the only proselytizing sect that found me. The other ones do not knock on doors, but certainly do welcome the curious and spiritual tourists who knock on the doors of their temples.
Since there are not many “gaijin” on the northernmost island of Hokkaido, it caused a bit of a stir when my neighbour walked into the room with me in tow. They had so many questions for me, but my Japanese was still rudimentary. Occasionally there would be someone who spoke a few words of English, but most of the time I just repeated the words they seemed so desperate for me to understand, having no idea what I was saying.
My neighbour began inviting me down for tea and snacks and lessons in what and how I should be worshiping. I continued to accept her invitations to the weekly meetings and tried very hard to follow the lessons, but the words that seemed so crucial were nowhere to be found in the Japanese language workbook we used in the class for fellows‘ spouses on campus.
In the meantime, Mrs. K also invited me to chant with her in front of her Gohonzon. She loaned me some beads and a sutra booklet. I understood that one day I would have my own and could return those to her. I tried following along in the sutra book as she chanted, but it was all written in Japanese. I could read Japanese, but at a kindergartener’s pace. It wasn’t fast enough for me to be able to join in and chant with everyone else.
One day, out of the blue, Mrs. K invited me down to her apartment to meet someone. When I got downstairs, I was introduced to a tall, young American. Daniel san was a practitioner of the sect, though he lived with his Japanese wife on the other side of Sapporo and attended a different temple. Over the next couple of hours, he filled me in on all the things patient Mrs. K and her friends on Wednesday nights had been trying to get through to me.
I learned what that piece of paper is hanging inside the Butsudan. It’s the object of worship. On it are written from top to bottom five kanji. We open and close each chanting session by repeating them. After listening to Daniel san try to explain the meanings of the five ideographs, I came up with my own spin on them:
Namu – I bow down to, I devote myself to
Myo – all the laws of the universe
Ho – and all of their physical manifestations
Renge – the law of cause and effect
Kyo- the union of all of this with me, the human
So all of that is put on the paper scroll, and then you worship the scroll. Works for me! Daniel san gave me a romanized version of the sutra book so I could practice getting up to speed. He told me that on my own, I could chant very slowly, but that when I was with a group, I would notice their tendency to take it at a really quick pace. He told me that Mrs. K wanted me to come with her to the temple on the coming Sunday morning. Okey-dokey.
I will tell you about the temple later. But first, I have to tell you about the public baths, which I promised you after chapter II and then never delivered!
Posted in Age 40 to Now, Japan, Spirituality
I am no stranger to the notion of magic and the ability to bend the laws of nature as we think we know them. Right after my big mystical or religious experience when I was 19, I was floating on a cloud of faith. I took off for Europe with a summer’s worth of babysitting money and a backpack. Right from the start, strange things happened with regard to money. For one, I was able to fly across the ocean to England for just $149. I had a friend who was moving to New York City and offered to let me ride along (he would even detour to Newark Airport for me) if I would contribute to his gasoline expenses. I agreed to that, but when we parted at Newark, he said he had changed his mind. “You need money more than I do,” he said. Over the five-month period I was hitchhiking around Europe, I lived completely in the moment in each moment, filled with faith that nothing could harm me unless it was meant to happen–in which case I was at peace with it, even if that was my death. I spent money when I needed to spend money, and did not keep a running balance. I had no idea when I would run out.
When I stayed with a man for a few weeks in Valencia, I insisted on buying some of the groceries. Every time I passed any panhandler or beggar, I placed some coins in the outstretched hand. At the end of five months, I somehow still had enough money for the return flight to America. In Newark, I found that I still had enough money for a bus ticket back to Little Rock. Without having budgeted or worried at all about money, I arrived back home with $7 in my pocket. When I then stopped to do the math, it was impossible. There was no way my initial cache of babysitting money had stretched to that extent. I had eaten in diners and paid for overnight lodging in inns. I had never passed up an horchateria without going in to sit on the high bar stool and order one of those tall, cold, nutty drinks. My theory was that each time I gave alms, God had put twice or three times that amount back into my other pocket.
The fervent faith of that period of my life eventually waned (first a little, then more), and so did the frequency and power of the miracles. Then last summer, I reached a spiritual turning point. I quit my job (on faith) and decided I would spend my life’s savings to change careers. Instantly strange things again started to happen with money. It started coming at me from the woodwork. I kept a budget spreadsheet in Excel to predict how long my savings would last. This was so that I would know when it was time to give my landlord two months’ notice and still have enough money left to hire movers. At the end of each month I took all the receipts out of that month’s envelope and entered them into the spreadsheet. Last month’s balance less all the expenses should have equalled my new bank balance, but it never did. I always had a higher bank balance than expected. Some of this I could account for, like tax rebate cheques, a huge income tax refund, gifts from my mom. But there was still other money creeping in that I could not explain except by perhaps assuming that I make typos in Excel.
When Annie started reading Busting Loose from the Money Game, she seemed a tiny bit hesitant to report on her blog some of the things she started to experience. Or maybe she was not hesitant so much as she always accompanied these reports by a disclaimer that she knew some people would think she sounded crazy.
I am now reading the same book–the one I told you in an earlier post bases its philosophy in the metaphor or model of the world around us as hologram. It’s one of those paradoxes that can really boggle the mind. Well, I suppose all paradoxes boggle the mind!
According to the model, all the people, things and events in my hologram are just my creations. The people are characters and my Expanded Self writes their scripts so that they support me in the Human Game to learn what I’m here to learn. So people will ask, “wait a minute… are you saying nobody else is real?” Well…yes and no. Other people are real in their own holograms, but that is none of my business. I am not to worry about them in their holograms. I just worry about mine…in which they are just characters I have created. We are in each other’s simultaneously, or something like that. I don’t get too bogged down in the particulars, I just give myself over to buying it long enough to see if it works.
Scheinfeld promises that weird things will start to happen once you start “The Process.” These weird things, which can be small at first based on our budding faith, are designed to show us that we are indeed creating our reality as we go along. Once we see a small thing happen, we build confidence in the model and then we become capable of more astounding manipulations of our hologram.
I am just starting Chapter 13 and have decided to document my experiences with the process here just to have a record of things so I don’t forget what happened when. I have been using “The Process” with every uncomfortable situation that arises in my life, most of which have nothing to do with money.
I went on Amazon.ca yesterday because I’d been reading a paper online about the challenges of teaching literacy to adults with learning disabilities. There was a list of suggested books, and I wanted to see if one of them was available on Amazon. I found it and moved it to my cart, which already had two books in it from a previously abandoned shopping trip. One of those books is one I would like to take with me on our holiday, the other is one I feel every pronunciation teacher should read and own. The cart total was $63.61. I don’t have money in my budget for $60 worth of books, so I again left the cart without proceeding to checkout.
Sylvain came over because we had agreed to do something together. As we were leaving the building, he guided me to my mailbox to check my mail. There was a window envelope from the government that looked suspiciously like a cheque. I couldn’t imagine what it could be because I have already received my income tax refund and have already received the first of three installments of a tax rebate that everyone in Ontario has read about in the newspaper and in public information flyers. There was to be one installment at the beginning of the year, which I got, another in December 2010 and the third of three in June of 2011.
I opened the envelope to find a tax rebate cheque for $64.64. This is my Ontario Sales Tax Credit. I guess it has nothing to do with the HST rebate. I took this as a sign to trust my abilities in my hologram. As a show of my faith, this morning I logged back into Amazon and ordered the books. I give thanks to my Expanded Self, as Scheinfeld calls Her, for this small sign to get me rolling.
Posted in Jungian Depth Work, No Coincidences, Pronoia
Posted in Age 40 to Now, Books, Relationships, Windsor Restaurants
Posted in Pronoia, Spirituality, Tao, Teaching
Posted in Age 40 to Now
The earliest memory that I can loosely link to this subject–though I was years aways from knowing there was such a subject–was when I was in grade six (sixth grade to you Americans). My father, a university prof, had died 2.5 years earlier, and my mother–a school teacher by profession–had hauled us back from California to be closer to her parents in Arkansas.
Mrs. Broadman was guiding us through some grammar worksheets one chilly October morning. The kids around me weren’t doing so well with the exercises. Problem number one at the top of the worksheet was “Tom gave the book to Mary and _______ (me/I).”
I have a very clear memory of an odd thing the teacher said to us in an attempt to help us do better on the worksheet: “If it sounds right to you, it’s probably wrong.” I became immediately aware that this rule of thumb didn’t work for me at all. I was scoring 100% on the worksheet by asking myself what sounded right. I was raised in a household where we didn’t split our infinitives or dangle our modifiers. Also, I had spent the first eight years of life outside the South.
Since I haven’t been officially tested or diagnosed, I can’t claim to have Asperger’s Syndrome. But I can tell you that one of the traits I share with many in the spectrum is a tendency toward pedantry. For several years during my youth and young adulthood, I really thought I was doing the world an enormous service by correcting grammar wherever I went. I carried a red felt-tip marker to facilitate improving signs, adding or subtracting apostrophes on flyers on bulletin boards. I was grammar woman! I should have worn a leotard complete with cape and big red G on the chest.
I didn’t know or perhaps just didn’t care that my compulsion to interrupt friends to correct their spoken grammar was unwelcome, obnoxious, socially boorish even.
In 1983 at UALR, in the linguistics classroom of Professor Jamie S., my eyes were opened. The dictionary, she told us, is not the product of a panel of people who sit around and decide what words should mean or how they should be used. It is a report on how words ARE used by the majority of educated speakers. Furthermore, she informed us, language is constantly changing. With the exception of a cumulative work like the O.E.D, dictionaries are continually having to drop words that have fallen out of use. New editions also must incorporate neologisms that seem to be surviving the test of time.
Jamie compared human language to an organism. It has a life of its own. It morphs, and there is no stopping it, she said. Jamie scoffed at the prescriptivists–those people who think you can tell humans which grammatical structures to use and how to use them. Just look at the English of 100 years ago, or even 50 years ago. Rules that were once hard and fast have fallen by the wayside. Could any school teacher have stopped the Great Vowel Shift? Of course not. Can any amount of kvetching or rapping young knuckles with a ruler stop people from splitting infinitives? Try telling the writers of Star Trek that they can’t say “To boldly go where none has gone before.” They can and they did.
Under Jamie’s tutelage, I slowly began to open my eyes to my own narrow way of looking at language. Ebonics, she taught us, is not “sub-standard” English. It has its own beautiful grammar with a subtle array of tenses and aspects beyond the ones available to speakers of the “standard” dialect. And as long as we’re on the subject, I should add that my TESL teacher pointed out to me twenty years later that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy.
An entire world was opening up to me…that of objective, descriptive linguistics. To enter this world, I had to check my value judgments and “right and wronging” at the classroom door. Jamie was a brilliant instructor and eventually won me over, though my prescriptivist compulsions were a bit hard to abandon at first.
I’m sure my friends and lovers were greatly relieved when I stopped correcting their grammar. Poor red pen no longer traveled with me in my long-strapped, embroidered-in-India hippie purse. The sign at the local grocer’s indicating which wicket was for shoppers with “Eight Items or Less” stood unchallenged by me. Language is changing, I chanted to myself if I noticed my blood pressure threatening to rise.
Nevertheless, my ear for what prescriptivists might call “good grammar” came in handy over the years. I was chosen in each of a series of jobs to be the writer of procedure manuals and proofer of memos. In spite of having switched teams, I never abandoned my mother tongue–the one that was handed down to me from two parents in academia. I grew up bi-dialectical, though; I could easily slip into Arkansas-Oklahoma Southern on demand.
Fast forward now to the fall of 2009. I’m sitting in a second-storey classroom in an old brick building across Bloor from Honest Eds in Toronto. Over the period of twenty plus years between graduating university and entering the TESL program, I had grown a bit lax in my descriptivist allegiance. A wee bit of prescriptivism had slunk back in, I will admit. Okay, actually I only permitted myself the guilty pleasure of correcting another’s speech with one person. Yeah, you guessed it: poor Sylvain.
On the first day of the Teaching English as a Second Language (TESL) course, we met the woman who would take us through all 16 weeks of training to become ESL teachers. She was tall and maintained a slender figure with twice weekly ballet classes. Her slate grey hair was cut in a cute bob that she tucked behind one ear. She had a decidedly English nose which she had come by honestly–by being born in England. Did I imagine it or did she look down that aquiline nose on first surveying us–her next batch of aspiring teachers? I got the feeling she wasn’t terribly impressed with the motley crew that we were. Can you tell that I loved her? I get school-girl crushes on my teachers very easily.
During the first seven weeks of full-time schooling we covered the practical aspects of TESL with a focus on settlement English. During the second seven weeks, we dove (or dived, if you prefer) deeply into theory: second language acquisition hypotheses, Chomsky, Krashen, the history of second language pedagogy from the 60s to today and everything in between. We were not told which methods to adopt in our teaching, but were rather asked to do some critical thinking and decide for ourselves. We defended our positions in end-of-term papers and on lengthy essay-format exams.
Prof. J did a brilliant job of not tipping her hand to let us know which theories or methods she thought were bunk. One thing, though, was made very clear. There is no place in the settlement English classroom for a staunch prescriptivist. Newcomers to Canada have a right to know that there is more than one English out there. For every lovely textbook rule they will need in order to be hired and do well in an office setting, there is a caveat to deliver: it’s not the way most Canadians actually speak. We have to prepare them to understand and be understood by the majority of speakers with whom they will be interacting.
Hence our TESL course included coverage of such things as the quotative be like, the high-rising terminal, grammatical patterns that are becoming standard (ones that would make my grade five English teacher roll over in her grave), grammatical patterns that may or may not become standard, and so on. Rather than relying solely on grammar books and dictionaries to determine what to teach our students, we learned to delve into corpora.
Your friendly neighbourhood prescriptivist might have issues with “everyone remembered to take their umbrellas,” but a search of a North American corpus that includes the New York Times, Globe and Mail and Washington Post reveals that the structure once considered wrong due to lack of agreement between singular subject and plural possessive pronoun is becoming standard. Yikes, you say? Get over it, I say.
One of the most fun aspects of our in-class exploration of our changing language was when we would use the population of the class itself as a small sample. How many of you say, “different than?” she would ask us. How many say, “different from?” What about “different to?” Do you say “data is” or “data are?” What’s the plural of stadium?
Over and over I was a minority of one. Part of this can be attributed to the fact that I was the only one in the class who’d been raised south of the border. But mostly I believe it is due to the fact that I was raised by academicians and then fell firmly in love with my prescriptivist teachers, which only solidified an idiolect that sounds contrived to many but is completely natural to me.
In one instance Prof. J was talking about a prescriptive rule and added, “Nobody really talks like that.” I sheepishly and very slowly raised my hand, but not very high, to squeak, “I do.”
So there I am…someone who still uses whom and occasionally even tucks the preposition safely in front of it lest it dangle untowardly at the end. And yes, there still are some people who use the subjunctive. I did so in the previous sentence.
But while I love my whom and wish desperately that one of my favourite bloggers would learn this rule, I have to remember that my students deserve to be prepared for the real English they will encounter from day to day. Don’t tell Mrs. Broadman.
If you liked this essay, you might enjoy:
Two new but amazingly related teachings have dropped into my life in the last 30 days, making it obvious to me that the Universe is saying, “Here is the next chapter. This is what you are meant to open yourself to now.”
One of them called to me from the pages of Annie’s blog. She is reading Busting Loose from the Money Game and is working a process presented within it. I am in a period of my life where I am experiencing less anxiety around money than I ever have before, in spite of being in a situation that is less financially stable than I’ve ever been in before! That doesn’t make much sense, does it? I think that is why the book first intrigued me–because I suspect that I’ve already got a good (accidental? intuitive?) head start in understanding the principles presented in the book. Even though my interest was piqued, I didn’t decide to put the book on my wish list until Annie reported that the philosophical foundation of the process presented in the book has tie-ins to the metaphor of the world as hologram. I have read Michael Talbot‘s The Holographic Universe and found that it resonated very strongly with my belief system. Coincidentally, when I brought it up at WMG, I discovered that Gerry was reading it at the same time I was.
Sylvain bought the book for me for my birthday. There was a shipping mix-up and he had to execute an exchange by mail, so the right book only made it into my hands yesterday.
At the same time as this is happening in my life, Sheila and Gerry of WMG have decided to start another round of A Course in Miracles, which they have led three times before. There are many groups who “do” this course, but I guarantee you that when Sheila and Gerry do it, it’s not going to be a cake walk. As Sheila put it, “the Course is not for the faint of heart.” I was not keen on the notion of giving up two more hours of my free time / Kelly time / alone time each week. But there was small whisper inside my heart telling me what I already knew and could not deny. I am meant to do the Course. This is a chapter in my training manual that is being put in front of my face now for a reason.
If you are in / near Windsor, Ontario and are interested in joining this closed group before it starts in September, please contact Sheila and Gerry via the WMG website before September 6, 2010. We plan to meet at 1:00 p.m. each Sunday for a year to work our way through the workbook lessons by doing one per day on our own, then getting together as a group each Sunday for guidance.
The “this is no coincidence” feeling is pulsating very strongly around me now.
Last night at Spanglish, the facilitator asked us about freedom. What does freedom mean to you? That was the question of the evening, to be explored in English and Spanish. Some spoke of economic freedom, some of freedom of speech, religion, dress. R talked about life in Cuba. F talked about life in El Salvador and freedom from violence. Two of us spoke of freedom from the mind…freedom from the self-imposed prison that results from a lifetime of conditioning by parents, society, the science of the day, the school system, etc.
I sense that I am about to embark on a mind-blowing journey into possibility, into a systematic method for breaking out of the prison of illusion, the prison of consensus reality.
Posted in Dreams, Jungian Depth Work, Meditation, Mindfulness, Mysticism, No Coincidences, Pronoia, Spirituality, Synchronicity, Tao
I was on MLS the other day looking at house prices in Windsor for a friend who is thinking of moving here. Out of curiosity, I took a look at house prices in Detroit. Oh. My. Goodness. Take a look at this five-bedroom beauty on 19 acres (is that a misprint?) for $122,500 USD. Craziness. Mind you, it’s a short sale. How sad that someone has to walk away from this house. But man, wouldn’t it be fun to scoop it up?
During the morning, I helped out in the level one class. My buddy Juan has come completely out of his shell. He raises his hand to participate in all the activities just like everyone else. In fact he is quite brave, if you ask me. Even though he needs more coaching once he gets up there, he’s not at all afraid to go up to the board to try to write a word in front of everyone. Today I noticed that one older gentleman (let’s call him Mr. Chen) was reluctant to go up in front of the class even though the woman next to him had whispered the answer to him and showed him what to write once he got up there. He kept shaking his head “no.”
But Juan was willing to do it. Juan got up there and painstakingly printed out a word while peeking at a flashcard. His letters were all over the place, some tiny and some big. His T looked like an I, but his A was great. He missed the S altogether. Mr. Chen saw that Juan was not embarrassed by his wonky letters. He was just happy to participate, happy to get my thumbs up as he passed me to return to his seat. And then the elderly man was ready to give it a try after all. He did fine, of course. His letters were pretty, evenly spaced and well-formed.
Today was field trip day. We went bowling. Mind you, I am not usually a joiner. When I was at the insurance company in Waterloo, I read a book about getting raises and promotions at work. One thing the book said was to make sure you go to all the company functions and social events. And so I stopped my pattern of skipping picnics and parties in favour of a few delicious hours alone with a book.
I decided to come along on this field trip in spite of never having bowled not because I want to be seen as a joiner, but because I was looking forward to the bonding experience with the students. I wasn’t even planning on changing into bowling shoes. But then it occurred to me that I wasn’t setting a very good example if I was running around saying, “You have to put on special shoes, it’s a rule,” if I myself didn’t then go put some on.
The next thing I knew, another teacher asked me if I would be willing to be on the team with a certain three students. Well, those are the students I feel closest to anyway. We have a little friendship building as they tutor me in their language. I said I certainly was willing if they didn’t mind a team mate who had never touched a bowling ball in her life.
Oh, my goodness, did I ever have fun. I think it’s all those years of being in the same room with a television on which hours of bowling was being shown. I must have picked up something through osmosis. Or maybe I learned something during the three months we had Wii. Whatever. It was a blast.
One senior woman who can only come to class twice a week has a cute ritual she goes through at the end of every one of my pronunciation classes. ”Now teacher,” she says. “I was not here yesterday. May I have the sheet from yesterday?” And every time, I pop open the rings of my binder and hand her the worksheet with the prior day’s date at the top. Two of the other teachers whom I’ve observed have a habit of running off only enough copies for the number of students present at the time. Not two extra in case someone else shows up. So my senior lady makes a point of thanking me every single time, saying: “You always think of me, teacher. Thank you.”
Oh, and I got two new students in the pronunciation class. I overheard one say to the other at the end of the hour, “What a fantastic class.” They said they would definitely be back on Monday. Yay!
Posted in Pronoia, Spirituality, Tao, Teaching
