My Life as a Teacher
Teaching is a noble ferrying between
the ports of knowing and not knowing.
—MN
I come from a family of teachers—my father, my brother, my wife, my aunt. In the Jewish tradition, teachers are revered, learning is revered. Rebbe means “teacher.” In the Jewish way of learning, questions lead to relationship and embodiment more than a catalog of answers. The reward for learning is more an enduring sense of knowing than a storehouse of knowledge.
Abraham Heschel confirms that:
In the eyes of the Ashkenazim [Jews of Eastern Europe], knowledge was not a means for achieving power, but a way of clinging to the source of all reality. In the eyes of Hasidim, study for the sake of acquiring scholarship was considered a desecration. The aim was to partake of spiritual beauty.
For me, the effect of being a lifelong student and teacher is that such a commitment has made my heart strong. In Hebrew, lev tov means “good heart.” In this way, learning and teaching, together, evoke the practice of a good heart. My life as a poet coincides with my life as a student and a teacher. For the poet’s call is to reveal how the source of all reality empowers a good heart to sustain the Web of Life.
Surviving cancer in my mid-thirties only deepened my life as a teacher. By surrendering to the miracle of life in order to survive, my sense of learning and teaching was transformed into an ongoing covenant of care. But my sense of learning at a deep level goes back to my childhood. When eight or nine, I fell in the schoolyard, skinning my knee badly. While flat on the ground, I was forced to listen to the Earth itself for the first time.
Not long after that, I found myself on my father’s thirty-foot sailboat listening to the sea as it carried us. I was instantly a student of this massive, clear, flexible element that was holding us up. These early experiences of listening directly to life taught me that strength and resolve are always restored through the complete surrender of our naked attention.
Once on the other side of my cancer journey, I realized that the things we suffer and the things we love provide us with an Inner Curriculum. When we least expect it, it is working with what we’re given while staying close to what we love that is a constant teacher.
Some of the thresholds I have been drawn to learn from and speak to over the years include:
awakening to the paradox and true gifts of suffering,seeing obstacles as teachers,having the life of poetry and the poetry of life continue to blur,understanding creativity as an expressive form of healing,exchanging the want to be great for the great chance to be,understanding how giving attention is more essential than getting attention,learning from the acceptance of our limitations,and awakening to how we need each other to be complete and useful.Each of these thresholds presents a choice-point that each of us must personalize, if we are to live a full life. So, through journaling and conversation with a friend or loved one, I invite you to explore each of these reflection-points over the next few months, one at a time, in an effort to better understand your particular place in the Universe:
Describe an interior space that suffering has opened in you.Describe one obstacle and how it has changed you.Describe one experience in which the boundary between you and another has blurred.Describe one form of expression that has been healing for you.Describe one experience that allowed you to be, rather than achieve.Describe what getting attention has done to you and what giving attention has done to you.Describe your struggle to accept a limitation.And describe a recent experience in which you needed the presence and help of another in order to feel more whole.Often, giving ourselves over to the life of experience yields the next phase of our Inner Curriculum. For each of us has our own language of wisdom, the way every tree casts its own pattern of light and shadow, though they all draw on the same Source. With every heartbreak, discovery, and moment of joy, with every lift of presence that touches us where we didn’t think we could be touched, with every cut and confusion, another letter in our alphabet of wisdom is decoded. Take a step, learn a word. Feel a feeling, decode a sign. Accept a truth, translate a piece of the Mystery written in our heart. Day by authentic day, we learn our inner language. To be conversant in the web of relationship that our authenticity reveals is the work of every soul.
In the Jewish tradition, the word sabbath literally means “the one day we don’t turn one thing into another.” Perhaps, the quintessential learning position is a form of receptiveness through which we relate to things as they are without turning one thing into another.
Humbly, after a lifetime of teaching, I’ve come to see that you can’t change anyone. So, what am I doing in the many circles I convene all over the world? Well, I’ve come to see that being a teacher means serving as a greenhouse: providing light and warmth to the living things before us so they can grow in the various ways they are meant to grow.
If I am invested in changing you, that assumes I know what you should be changed into. This is presumptuous and dangerous. In the realm of transferring knowledge, there are definite and precise things to learn and skill sets to master. But in the deeper realm of knowing, there is no such arrival point. There is only the constant becoming of our soul on Earth, which no one can prescribe or schedule.
As a tree grows from the imprint of its seed, each life grows in the world from the imprint of its soul. We can only water the seed for each other and care for each other’s growth. In this regard, our being directs our doing. So, I encourage you to water the roots of your being so it can grow its gestures into the world.
In a modern age that commodifies everything, our challenge is to grow from the inside out, letting every holy calling find its own expression within us and between us. After decades of listening to the stories and struggles of others, I can bear witness that teaching, in its most profound form, is not moving a life from here to there, or from effort to achievement, or even from chaos to order. Rather, teaching is creating the enduring environment in which the seed of the soul can know itself and blossom.
With this in mind, I invite you to consider the vantage point from which you relate to your students, no matter the size or shape of your classroom: What are you looking for when you look into your students? What are you listening for when you listen to your students? What are you hoping to grow in the garden of their minds? How will you prepare the soil? How do you know when you should not turn one thing into another? How do you know when you should turn one thing into another? How can you best help each of your students by meeting them where they are?
Recently, I was teaching online, exploring the topic of “Heart and Path” with 542 eager students in China. As they were journaling, I quietly watched this honeycomb of lives unfold through the tiny, square windows that were connecting us through Zoom. I was looking into home after home, from living room to bedroom to dining room table. The fabric of humanity was being woven before my eyes. And there, I chanced to view a woman at her kitchen table journaling. She was perhaps in her late thirties. Behind her was an elderly woman who was combing the younger woman’s hair. I imagined it was her mother.
I was opened deeply by the softness of this moment. The tenderness of this mother and daughter embodied all I was speaking to. I was in southwest Michigan in my study and 6500 miles away, in a small kitchen, these two gentle women were living their lives. It was a privileged glimpse of life loving itself, like a small flower opening along the forest floor. There is always an unexpected instant when I teach that brings me more alive. And here it was.
Like a biologist who talks endlessly about the conditions that allow for molecules to join, who is at a loss for words when seeing the very atoms of life pulse beneath his microscope, I was speechless to witness the very atoms of love at work three continents away. And while I wanted to cry out in affirmation of all I can’t explain, I remained silent, like a bird watcher, not wanting to disrupt the small beauty that had landed before me.
After the session ended, I sat for a time in my study, replaying the image of the aging mother combing her daughter’s hair on the other side of the world. It flickered like a candle in my mind that helped me find my way back to the source of all reality.
Moments like these, which can never be planned, affirm, yet again, that teaching is pointing toward all that makes life possible, toward all that helps us go on, while praising the living presence that no one can live without.
The things we suffer and the things we love provide us with an Inner Curriculum.
Questions to Walk With
In your journal, describe the smallest thing a teacher did that helped you or changed you or led you to who you are.In conversation with a friend or loved one, tell the story of an unexpected moment that brought you more alive. How did you come upon this moment and what did it bring forward in you?
Copyright © 2023 by Mark Nepo