Sansaku: No Exaggeration
1/19/18
There was no need to take attendance, I could see it in their eyes. “Come on, Brett. Wake up, you’re absent.” He told me, “I’m sorry. Now I’m here.” I asked, “Are you sure?” He had to think about it.
I feel no need to change the names, although I might at times. I only intend to expose myself. There are secrets not mine to tell.
I come from privilege and a long line of teachers, but we had fallen from financial grace and lacked opportunity. When I worked at a summer camp in college on the border of the park in Estes, I thought the only thing better would be a school. Here it was.
Cap and Betsy had an old black lab named Gus who was blind but knew the school far better than I. I followed him around and watched the way he listened and sniffed. I decided he’d be my teacher. I didn’t even know everyone’s name when I did my first head check.
Dawson was my guide that night and told me stories as we waded through the snow from one cabin to the next. When we entered Christina’s world, I sniffed the candles and the incense. It reminded me of college. Christina would have been burned as a witch had she born in the thirteenth century.
Dawson whinnied like a horse when we entered the cabin and Christina didn’t like it. When we left I asked, “What was that about?” He explained her last name and I got it. She was one of the sixty-four who lived here. She reminded me of no one.
I loved how she wrote, but discovered one day the source of her style. She plagiarized. I didn’t tell her how I knew, but a friend in college had written a song using the same poem. I just said, “Stop it, bad magic.”
If there had been piercings and tatoos back then, she’d have shown me. Good thing we didn’t have them. I saw more than enough. Her roommate, another Chris, was in her nightgown on the bed. I tried not to look too closely. She made it clear, she wanted me to see.
At sixty-four, Timberline fell within the ideal range. A community needs to be big enough to get all the types and variance, but not too big to split. Much larger and factions form. It wasn’t homogeneous by any means, but we were well homogenized.
The yin-yang-Tao has sixty-four hexagrams and each hexagram has six lines. When I threw the coins for Timberline and my place in the scheme of things, I wrote down fifty-three, Gradual Progress. I looked it up along with the changing lines.
It’s the image of a tree on the mountain. These trees do not shoot up like swamp plants, but will someday influence the landscape. At timberline, the trees see the forest and each other. And a wild goose draws near. She has a destination. I’m thinking of my soul.
The reading goes on and I’m taking this from the Wilhelm-Baynes translation. Jung wrote the foreword. “The work of influencing people can be only gradual. No sudden influence or awakening is of lasting effect. It is necessary for the personality to acquire influence and weight. This comes about through careful and constant work on one’s own moral development.” It was talking straight to me.
I made a mistake at the very beginning. It started with head-check. The students mistook me for a counselor and told me things I didn’t need to know. And in no time at all, I knew who was violating, with whom, what and how. It held me hostage, like blackmail.
Was I the only faculty member who knew? I was new and blind, but learned to sniff and listen. This is no exaggeration.
bestslowly 