Risk of Learning

I'm sitting in my living room this morning listening to classical music that my Man-Friend put on. There are moments when I don't understand the context, the transitions, the way the notes are moving into one another. It can feel chaotic trying to hear everything-- trying to respond and evaluate everything. This might sound silly to someone who is familiar with music. Either you have learned how to hear it all, or you have learned how to not hear it all-- I'm not sure which it is. The low thump of dark notes and the trilling run of high notes over the top, a piano duet that seems like a battle of wills. It's interesting and uncomfortable, beautiful and disquieting.

This is almost how I feel about teaching  this semester. The Maker Class and The POD might be the most beautiful, and disquieting, classes I have embarked upon to date. The Maker class is a challenge because I am as deeply invested in understanding how to allow myself to be a writer, artist, maker, creator in the world as  I am in helping the fellow learners in the class investigate how to do this.  That is to say, I am student.  I am guide-- but only by default of age and the authority vested in me by various power structures.

The POD, a connected look at education, is a way of learning I have wanted  with big pieces of my heart for a long time. The POD connects three classes via a theme, but Kleier and Fretz and I spent a lot of time this summer weaving the POD together in a deeper way than by 'environment' alone. That is an obvious theme, but the real meat of it is (for me, again) how do we make connection? How do we move between and make deeper connections in seemingly disconnected things: how do we make our understanding lead us to deeper communion?

The root of all this, the haunted muse that has been gnawing at me, is that learning is a calling. If I argue that learning is not memorizing, or parroting, or dancing to a set of lines and rules, what do I hope it is? If I want it to be related to being open, feeling, caring, seeing love in the world... ahhh, there is the risk. When  we are open to learning, we get hurt, burned, scored-- the disquieting tension of seeing too much beauty, glimpsing what subtle meaning the world can layer into every  moment, and the sudden loss of that. Learning is falling in  love with the world. Learning is  being dead asleep and having cold (brilliant, clear, dynamic, perfect) water poured over you.

I'm watching, listening, feeling, trying to hold on to every note we might be, what our community will create together. Classes are like musicians jamming together, or writers telling a story-- right now I am tense with potential and hope. Right now I am listening and trying to hear everything. Right now I am learning.