On Learning From Ourselves

In The Courage to Teach, Parker Palmer says, “This I can claim: every time we get in touch with the truth source we carry within…it becomes harder to forget or deny that we have an inner teacher that wants to lay claim to our lives.” I wish I’d known this while I was growing up—that I could actually listen to what occurred to me, that I already had within me knowledge and wisdom, my own guardian angels, an intuition I could learn to recognize and trust. But I, like most everyone else grew up believing that all the important answers had to be acquired from outside of myself, from the experts who wrote the textbooks, who graded my papers, who lectured from the podiums. It’s no wonder that my school papers always consisted of long quotes copied from books and journals tied together with slim strings of my own meager words. It’s no wonder I spent most of my 18 years of formal schooling believing the only authoritative voice I had was the one I borrowed from experts.

The Latin root of the word “education” is “educare” which means to “draw forth.” Is this because the ancients knew the best way to educate was to “draw forth” what was to be learned from the students themselves? After all inscribed on the oracle of Delphi are the words, “know thyself.”  Not “Know Aristotle” or “Know Plato.” The way most of us were educated was along the lines of “stuff it in” rather than “draw it forth.”  To be good students we learned to dutifully ingest and regurgitate the rules and guidelines and ideas of those who know more, so that we as empty vessels could be filled. As good students we learned to seek and then to crave the approval of our teachers. We granted them the power to call us educated. Judith Duerk in I Sit Listening to the Wind says, “If I am so perpetually terrified of being called a bad girl, so eternally blown about by the winds of my inner judges, that I cling to any authority that grants me marginal approval, then I risk that I might never, ever turn toward that within me that guides and orders my existence, that lets the truth of my life emerge.”

The summer before my fourth year of teaching, I flew off to Kentucky to the stately Sisters of Loretto motherhouse to attend a writing retreat—desperate to start a writing practice.  This was my introduction to WWfaC. At the retreat women listened to my fledgling attempts, helped me to hear myself, told me what words of mine moved them. Unlike the way I treated my students, they focused not on what I was doing wrong, but on what I was doing well, where my words were strong, and on what my unique voice was already able to do. They were the midwives of my writing voice, they shepherded me to a place of power. I left Loretto with a sure sense of my ability to write. Sure I could reveal on the page insights that were mine to reveal.

Since then I have become my own expert and I learn from myself how to write. I know that if I write the words will come Wm Stafford says, “Writers aren’t people who have special skills, rather they are people who trust what occurs to them.” I know if I keep trusting what occurs to me, trusting what bubbles up from within me when I give myself the gift of daily writing practice, and if I keep paying attention, I can reveal in language my inner vision. My dream was to bring WWfaC to Colorado to give other women the opportunity to discover more of what’s inside them, what they are capable of, to trust themselves and their imagination and to be supported by kind and gentle midwives. No red pens, no criticism, no experts, no workshopping, no cleverness, no rules, no concerns for the marketplace, only midwifery: women listening other women into speech. Women learning from themselves.

                                                                   

"With each passing semester of class, I return with more wisdom, more light, more love."