Beowulf, revisted

Ever been part of a class in which you studied Beowulf?  I have.  Twice.  The first was in high school.  We read an anthologized version that had been heavily edited and contained lots of bold-faced explanations in the margin of the textbook.  The second was in college, when we read the real thing.  The whole thing.  And we talked about it.  For days and days and days. 

Just to set the stage, here: Beowulf is the oldest surviving poem known to man. It’s hard to read.  Really hard.  That sucker has almost 3,200 weirdly placed lines telling convoluted story of Beowulf’s long and awful battles with beasts and demons.  I remember nothing about it—just utter, full-on bewilderment.   It’s a miracle I survived the ordeal.

If it were a text vs. reader matchup, this reader lost.  Both times.

Here’s the truth:  Beowulf humbled me.  A lot.  Both times I read it, I had been feeling pretty smart.  I could quickly comprehend most texts I came across, and could talk at length to friends and teachers about meaning, theme, purpose, point of view, and all the other story elements we rely upon when we talk about texts. 

Not Beowulf.  I couldn’t seem to dig my way through the thick writing, the metaphor, the rising and falling action.  I relied solely on the text’s margin notes and Cliff’s Notes for a fighting chance in my battle against this poem.

Most of us, even those who weren’t English majors, have the story of the text that humbled us.  The one we just couldn’t grasp.  For some of us, it was Shakespeare.  For others, like me, it was an epic poem written hundreds of years ago.  It may have been philosophy—Socrates, maybe, or Plato—that stumped us, no matter how hard we tried or how much we were told it’s a Large Part of our Grade.  We’ve all faced off with a text—and lost. 

I recently stumbled across a college literature anthology.  I flipped through the pages, landing on Beowulf.   I skimmed through, feeling embarrassed that I’d never really understood it.  I wondered if I might have a better chance now, having grown in confidence and experience as a reader, and knowing how to hunt down online resources and supports. 

So in a valiant display of fierce defiance, I dug in.  I’m two decades beyond when I last laid eyes on the piece, and this time, knew what to do. I read, and I read again, and I read again.  I consulted websites and library books.  I found blogs and websites to talk me through the story.  In time, I came to a peaceful, if begrudging, sense of understanding.  It was hazy, but it was there.  There was not a great epiphany of understanding—no “ah-ha!” moment, no elation, no conquering fist thrust in the air.  But there was respect:  I recognized that the poem held layers and layers of brilliance, especially when the context and setting were considered.  And the story was actually pretty good. 

I finally feel I can put it away for good.  I also feel satisfaction: I did it.  I saw the light at the end of the poem, as well as I needed to, anyway.

I have talked a lot about the times it is best to abandon a text, but at the same time, I believe there are texts we shouldn’t abandon forever.  There may be some real good to come out of trying again.  Maybe it’s the gift of understanding and mastery.  But it may also be a gift of humbleness, resilience, and respect.

Final score?  Beowulf—2.  Me—1.  But my win is the one that counts.    

Questions to Ask

A few months ago, I wrote this post—about how reflection only works if we put ourselves in front of a mirror and take a really close look at ourselves, without letting blame get in the way.

I heard from some teachers and school leaders who asked for specific questions they could consider when looking in that mirror. 

Here’s a start.

When thinking about successes:

How did the momentum begin?

What was your role?

What was the antecedent to success?  In other words, where did it all begin?  

What are next steps?

When wondering what areas need improvement in your work:

Look at the people you work with.  Do they seem negative, frustrated, or unable to move forward?  Why might that be?

Are people talking to you—repeatedly—about a particular need or concern?

What makes you fill with dread?  What are you avoiding because solutions are murky or difficult? 

When thinking about traits you’d like to foster in yourself and others:

Make a list of your favorite character traits.  Install them into this sentence (I use "loyal" as a character trait in my example, because I looooooooove loyalty):

What does (loyalty) mean?  To whom are you (loyal)?  Who do you feel is (loyal) to you?  Why?  

What kind of people surround you?  Are they people who make you a better and bigger person--or an ineffective, marginalized one?   

When you are struggling in your job, and aren’t sure why:

What are you loving right now?  What is "filling you up"?

What is making you uncomfortable?

Are there ways that you—or others around you—could work more efficiently? 

Are you balancing your work with your life?  Are you doing the things you need to do to keep you healthy? 

What commitments have you made?  Are they the right commitments for you, for now, for the people you love?  Are you honoring them?

These are just a few questions to get you started on trying to figure out what is working and what isn’t.  It’s not easy being a teacher and a school principal, especially these days.  Pointed, focused  reflection on how we’re doing can help us keep balanced and tuned into our own success and challenges. 

I Didn't Expect Today

This godawful election is finally over, and like a lot of people, I didn't expect it to end as it did.

And I really didn't expect how quickly I would need to deal with my own feelings about it—my shock, my dismay, my acceptance, my grief—so I could help others deal with theirs.

It's my job, and I was honored to do it, today, of all days.  This day.  But I didn't expect it, so I wasn't ready, and I probably wasn't very good at it.

What took me aback?

I didn't expect to hold teachers while they wept.

I didn't expect to force the words, "You must get yourself together.  Because you must be your best, regular, uninjured self when you receive your students."

I didn't expect to tell them, "You must prepare yourself.  For children who are repeating what their parents say.  For it being their truth.  You must prepare for conflict and confusion in conversations."

I didn't expect to be angry.

I didn't expect that a night of restless, limited sleep, divided by bleary-eyed iPhone news updates, would leave me so ill-equipped for the emotional upheaval in myself and those around me.

I didn't expect a low-grade headache and stomachache all day.  That my eyes would fill with tears unexpectedly, quickly, and without warning.

I didn't plan to have no words to describe my swirling emotions.  There isn't a word that gathers it up, all together: fear + shock + dismay + betrayal + disgust + loss of hope + insistence upon hope.  Is there?

But I do insist upon hope.  I do.

And I believe things happen for a reason.

So there is reason in this.  Maybe not rationality, or logic, or anything that resembles predictability--but there must be a reason for all of today's unexpectedness.  And I will seek to find it, and seek to understand, and seek to accept.  And hope.

Modern Poetry and Quotes

My sophomore year of college, I reluctantly enrolled in “Modern Poetry.”  It was required for all English majors.  Obviously.  It was also the only class I had dreaded:  I’d always found poetry—the kind written by real poets—to be hazy and nebulous, and had never been able to penetrate what seemed a special, secret language found in poetry.

When the class started, I learned the poetry we would study wasn’t “modern” at all, but rather a study of very un-modern poetry.  The most “modern” poet on the syllabus was sixty years dead. 

Okay, then, I thought.  Whatever. 

The point, I discovered, was to show us the progression of poetry over time, and how it influenced poets who were writing in more modern times.

So: We started with Beowulf, then made a multi-century jump to John Keats, then spent time with Ralph Waldo Emerson, then Walt Whitman, Emily Dickenson, and W.B. Yeats.

Studying these greats, I finally understood.  These poets!  So, so good!  Some of their one-liners were breathtaking, in the literal sense:  I would read a line, stop, breathe, not breathe, think, and re-read.  These lines, written some 200 years earlier, spoke to me.  Me.  A scrappy but lost college girl who was trying to manage college and a looming life. 

I now recognize that I connected so thoroughly with these poets because of their simple way to encapsulate something real, something true, and something universal that everyone can understand.  In fact, I now identify my connection with these poets as the beginning of my ongoing love affair with quotes.

Many—most?—people love quotes.  They speak to us.  They are simple, one-line zingers that capture a collective reality, something we’ve all felt or can understand. We hear a quote, and we think, Yes!  We think, Someone understands.  We think, See?  I’m not alone. 

Let’s go back to the original masters, the ones that spoke to me so many years ago from the pages of a Modern Poetry textbook. 

Yeats: 

Think like a wise man but communicate in the language of the people.

Do not wait to strike till the iron is hot; but make it hot by striking.

And say my glory was I had such friends.

Emily Dickenson: 

Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul - and sings the tunes without the words - and never stops at all.

If I can stop one heart from breaking, I shall not live in vain.

Forever is composed of nows.

Emerson:

To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.

Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.

For every minute you remain angry, you give up sixty seconds of peace of mind.

Right?  Those words?  Those thoughts?  How something said a century ago can still apply to us, today, here, now? 

I imagine these expert poets, penning these truths so long ago, with charcoal and ink-dipped pen.  And still, here, today, they speak to us with their essential truths.  We still share them, pin them, post them, and Tweet them.  And most of all, in this modern world of ours, we learn from them.  

A Little House

Amanda Seyfried’s song, “Little House,” is a beautiful one about love and loss and… oh, geez, I don’t even know.  Something deep and important, probably.  But when I sing along, I’m not thinking about meaning; I’m just remembering one particular little house.

When my sister was a junior in high school, she went after a wayward basketball during a heated game against a league opponent.  She collided with their point guard, a feisty bundle of sass named Lisa.  My sister’s knee got all torn up—“blown out” was the term we used—and she crumbled to the ground, all grimaced and clenched.  Lisa stood stock-still, the ball resting between her inner elbow and her ribcage. The gym was quiet.  My sister rode on the team bus home, because that is what one did.  The emergency room doctor shrugged his shoulders and prescribed something to help her sleep.  My parents took her to an orthopedic surgeon the next day, who gamely went inside her knee to tie things back together again; she determinedly dug herself out of the whole thing with crutches, an ugly brace, and weeks of physical therapy.

Not long after the surgery, Lisa called my sister to apologize, a move I found to be ballsy and kind.  Unnecessary, too, but that’s what made me admire it so.  After all, everyone knew injuries happen frequently in sports; bodies collide, and thus there are broken bones and ripped tendons and torn ligaments.  It’s no one’s fault.

But Lisa was sorry anyway.  That it wasn’t her fault—?  Irrelevant. 

My sister and Lisa developed a friendship over the phone.  They talked every night for a couple weeks. Lisa had the wit and timing of a seasoned comedian, and my sister gamely repeated every bit of their conversations to me.  I loved Lisa.  It was a crush by proxy.

 

Lisa’s parents invited our whole family for dinner; I was giddy with excitement.  Lisa had a whole gaggle of brothers and sisters, and I loved big families who made lots of noise and laughed a lot.  I pictured them all living together in a huge, fancy house with high ceilings and big, open rooms for everyone.  One of Lisa’s sisters was my age—JoAnn.  She and I played basketball on opposing eighth grade teams.  She was full of spunk just like her sister.  I imagine us as best friends.  Forever, probably.

We set off late in winter, the time of year when the sun sets before dinnertime.  My father drove, squinting at a ragged scrap paper with an address scrawled on it.  We pulled into a short gravel driveway.  Then, it was I who squinted.

The house was tiny.  Tiny.

Three rooms, unless you count the bathroom.  Four, then. 

The kitchen and living room were one.  The three girls slept in the second room; the three boys slept in the third.  I don’t know where the parents slept; maybe the couch, or with one of the kids.

 

I couldn’t have called the place charming.  It was anything but.  It was a house hard at work to contain a fire-y family of eight.  It was cluttered with stuff.  The rug was frayed and tattered, and smelled like the black Lab that slept atop it.  The corners were dusty and dirty.  Paint was muted, peeling.  There was a clock on every other wall that was stuck in time, batteries and cords not working.

But it didn’t matter, not one little bit.  When we knocked, all eight of them met us at the door with hugs and handshakes and laughter about basketballs and busted knees.  I felt like a queen who’d been invited to a very important and exclusive party. Lisa’s family found cleverness and humor with the simple and the stupid.  I felt my ribs crack-y from laughing. 

We had lasagna.  Vats of it, it seemed.  It was so gooey and cheesy that some mozzarella flopped down on my chin and flung sauce on my chest.  The garlic bread was that delicious frozen grocery store kind—drippy with salty grease and piles of parsley and garlic.   There was a salad of iceberg lettuce, chopped carrots, red-ish imitation bacon bits, all mixed up with Kraft French dressing.  We ate together, all of us squished together, the six of us and the eight of them, brought together only because of a wayward basketball, and I thought the house might pop with all the personality and joy.

I hated leaving.  I’d never been in such a small space where there was so much love.

They came to our house a couple times, and we to them a few more times, and then time and life’s stuff faded the family friendship into a memory.  But I’ve never forgotten that house.  It was as small as anything I’d ever seen but oh, oh so big.   

When I’m old, I want to live in an itty-bitty little house, just like that one.  I want it to only be big enough to fit me—and anyone who wants to come and help me fill it up with happy laughter and lasagna for dinner.