Teaching
is a kind of learning,
much like loving,
mutual goings-on,
mutual forbearance,
life itself, you might say.

But how shall I improve
the swiftly-dimming hour?
I shall deteriorate
amid bucolic dreams
and gather in my fate.
There’s lots worse ways than that.

Alas,
some goodbyes are like death;
they bring the heart to earth
and teach it how to die.

Excerpt, Farewell to Teaching
By George Johnson, The Essential George Johnson

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I wrote these lines down many years ago.  Words so well said that I did not want to rely upon my already over-taxed memory to retain them.  Now, they seem more crystalline, germane to the form of life now surrounding us.  How is society to cohere, how are individuals to thrive, to explore and express their individual gifts?  Everyone knows this is a matter of teaching and learning.  

Now in a radically financialized, hyper-competitive, Darwinian survival game what about the learning; the transfer of cultural legacy, the cultivation of rootedness so necessary to realizing the self?   As the commons are de-funded, regarded as unnecessary overhead, and I am referring to social security, public education, affordable/accessible health care — the young, the aged, anyone not in a position to be responsible for themselves …..will be crushed by the weight of neglect.

What is called for is a return to the earth.  Can we honestly confess that life is a matter of love, of a reciprocal give and take; that no one is to be abandoned, left outside of that circle?  The mutual goings-on are observable in the emergence of spring, in the lumbering emergence of two portly marsupials, opossums that live under the shed in my back yard.  In a few weeks, I can only prepare in ground in our garden plot as an act of love.

There is only one good way to gather in our fate, one way to learn how to die.