Cultivating Creative Community
Is there an aesthetic to this moral courage of realizing and learning? To me, it is the aesthetic of the windowsill, the threshold, the horizon line, the human face of another. It is framing one’s own perception to experience the expanse beyond it. The expanse, indeed, of the far fields.
Hospitality is a good life, but it’s not an easy life. If you do it enough it won’t look or feel like it came from the beautiful pages of a magazine. True, biblical hospitality is born of grace—grace for the giver and grace for the receiver.
I offer my stories—my vulnerable, awkward, growing-up stories—because I’m leveling the playing the field. I want to bear some of what it is my students are going through so they will trust themselves to get at their stories. I’m attempting to pull something out of them, as the Nurse does for Juliet, as Mrs. Carlson has done for me.
Courage isn’t always forceful or strong. On the first day of my teaching career, some thirty odd years ago, my sweet husband gave me an art piece for my classroom with a quote from Mary Anne Radmacher that says: “Courage doesn’t always roar. Sometimes courage is that little voice at the end of the day that says I’ll try again tomorrow.” That’s me in a nutshell. And that’s the beauty of the thing. Because so far, I still have another tomorrow.
