imtalkinghere

PS. More on "Many Ways"

I wrote in my last post that if we want an effective public school system, then the old system – constructed on a very narrow (antiquated and false) notion of intelligence – must be completely transformed to incorporate Many Ways of educating children.

A logical first step might be to transform some of the ways we talk about education.

Just one example: A friend who teaches fifth graders in the LA County School District was telling me about the challenges of bringing certain kids up to speed.  He gave the example of the kid who arrives in fifth grade without having mastered his multiplication tables – this in spite of the fact that third and fourth grade teachers drill this material relentlessly. My friend described the many (brilliant) encouragements and techniques he used to get the child caught up so he could proceed with fifth grade math, all to no avail.

“Well, that kid needs to be taken to another kind of class.”

“Oh!” the teacher exclaims. “They call that warehousing and it’s a dirty word.”

Warehousing? A warehouse is a place where you store things that you aren’t using. I’m not talking about anything close to a warehouse! I’m talking about a place of great activity and experimentation and educational commitment to awakening that kid to learning – to tapping his way.

Perhaps we could think in terms of Staying Conscious. Taking the non-learner to another environment says "Let’s be very conscious about what’s going on here.” Keeping the clear non-learner in class is the go-unconscious choice. It acts as if the child is a full, operating member of this learning group. He is not. It acts as if this kid is not sapping energy from the rest of the group. He is. To maintain his reality within this group makes him a failure and a negative influence as if that were a healthy choice. -- It’s a big lie. Big lies are not conducive to learning. Big lies make children anxious and angry. At a largely unconscious level. Which is dangerous and destructive.

Yes, I'm talking about a much more complex educational system – a network of approaches rather than a slim progressive line. In other words, it is a more natural, whole, and realistic approach to learning.

Or, we can just keep pretending…

_____________________
UPDATE: 1 August 2008

Recently, I heard of a prison program where young offenders are sentenced to three months of dance. Three months of intense daily discipline and repeated practice in a creative endeavor that requires working well with a group. At the end of three months, they give a performance. Apparently, it has been remarkably effective. Think about this as a paradigm shift. Put young offenders in the punishment of what we call prison... OR... put them in a place where they have to accomplish something new, spend their physical energy productively,  experience grueling discipline - and the satisfactions thereof, tap their creative energies, and conclude with a beautiful event where they can be appreciated for all of that. Of these two choices, which is more likely to turn a life around and provide a positive return on what society has invested? --- Not a prison/warehouse. A vital change center. There are so many ways we could utilize an intensive artistic discipline  - not just dance, but all the arts - to wake up and re-motivate the kids who are currently suffering through school and making their classes a suffering for kids and teachers around them.

Okay, okay, okay – I admit it! I’m truly, madly, deeply in love with Ken Robinson.

By the way, that’s Sir Ken Robinson to you. So there.

Do you know him? We should all know him.

Because he’s the only person I know who is pointing in the right direction when it comes to transforming our failing education system.

This was brought home to me even more painfully this week as I watched a public education panel sponsored by The New Republic (fora.tv) … which was excruciating. Five extremely experienced and deeply committed white men talking about how to reform the public school system to do better what it was organized to do in the past. This way lies more failure, fellas.

We need a Whole New Way. And that new way needs to be Many Ways All At Once.

My views about education were formed during ten years as an adjunct at a small liberal arts college, where every year I faced a sea of largely blank student faces. Their shocking lack of critical thinking skills and creativity was enough to make any serious teacher cry.

More than one colleague lamented, “Teaching college today is like teaching high school thirty years ago. These kids are nowhere near ready for what we used to call higher education.”

My own college mentor – a dream prof, born to teach – at another, better college with smarter, more adept students  retired early because, he said, he didn’t know how to teach the students who started showing up in his classes starting in the 1980’s.

One day, a masseuse asked me why I stopped teaching, then added, “You know, I have a lot of college professors as clients. They all say their students are a mess,  that college is not what it used to be. They all just seem so beaten down by it.  So I was just wondering what your experience was.”

I don’t really like chatting when I’m on the table, so I kept it short. “Too many dead people,” I replied.

Now, I was teaching at a Christian Brothers college – think repressed gay guys, think sexual confusion, think profoundly embodied denial – so we had more than our share of dead there*, but the saddest kind was the one the students brought with them.

Yes, there were some standout students - the ones who knew how to study, who enjoyed reading, who revealed a deep and adventurous curiosity, who knew how to make an argument, who had original thoughts. You could see something clicking behind their eyes. They would take chances.  Sometimes you might even get as many as two of these in one class. And, believe me, you were grateful for them. But the vast majority came in damaged.  Something about their world had squashed their spark and now they were just going through the motions of education – as consumers, not learners.  “Just tell me what you want. Give me the recipe for a good grade. And I like more videos in class.”

NB: Some research indicates that classroom groups do not rise to the level of the best students; rather, they descend to that of the worst. This matches my personal observations.

While many tenured profs talk frankly about these realities in the faculty lunch room, they know better than to spew this honesty more widely. For one thing, if word got out that the college is full of weak students, it might further diminish the number of good students – and that would be a bummer. For another, when one’s lifelong dream is to be a college professor and then “college” turns out to be so much less than you had dreamed of… well, it's embarrassing to admit that one’s professional life is not all one cracked it up to be.

But others are talking. Retired profs, adjuncts, and consultants are starting to call things what they are.

So what’s going on? How did it all go off course? Clearly, it is a convergence of multiple elements, many of them external to the educational system. Today’s students have been raised in a world of constant distractions and too little quiet, focused silence. That has to be part of it. To hear their stories, a majority of them have had dreadful diets throughout most of their youth. Lots of pre-packaged foods done in the microwave.  I recall a talk by Joseph Chilton Pearce in the early nineties where he outlined the negative brain chemistry effects of ingesting the artificial hormones in beef and chicken; brain development effects which cannot be turned around, by the way. And non-parents would not believe how many pharmaceuticals these kids have taken by the time they reach eighteen. Constant antibiotics. I once had a class in which 8 of 20 students were on Prozac – and that’s just the only one I knew about. This appalling statistic revealed itself in the course of a public speaking class. From a more positive perspective, I could argue that today’s children have evolved to a level of sensitivity and right brain development that is at odds with our archaic, left-brain approach to education. So it's all of this and more.

As for the education system itself, a bulb lit over my head about ten years ago as I watched a PBS documentary on the history of our national school system. Before 1950, fewer than half of all students made it to high school graduation and out of that, a very small number went on to college.  The others either fell away for lack of “fit” or left to go to work in jobs that did not require college or even all twelve years.  (This was back when the USA made stuff.) In short, our educational system was conceived for a fairly narrow band of intelligence. The elite who went to college were the ones who fit the form.  Today, we give a lot of lip service to “higher ed for everyone” but we have not altered the pipeline to adequately serve a wider range of intelligences. Result: Most public schools cannot and do not honor and awaken enough souls to create healthy, thriving learning environments.

Every time I hear one more expert – or worse, politician – talk about the need for better math and science classes, I want to scream. Channeling kids into particular fields is not the solution.  Awakening them to the joy of learning (something, anything they love). Nurturing their creativity. Disciplining and expanding their critical faculties. These are the essentials. With these in play, they will be drawn to the correct courses for their own needs and interests – and they will learn in spite of whatever shortcomings exist in their classes or in their teachers.

I fell in love with Ken Robinson because he’s the first expert I have heard who gets this – completely - and argues brilliantly that we cannot “reform” our way out of our education crisis. Transformation is the ticket.  Hence, Robinson’s honored place under Essentials on the right bar. 

Please give yourself the treat of him. In short form (20 minutes).  Or longer (55 minutes). Preferably both. Then start demanding a paradigm shift. Loudly. Often. One beauty of the web is that these talks can be accessed, projected, and discussed at PTA meetings, teacher meetings, civic group meetings, etc. So  get cracking.

This is where we live, in a time when so much that needs fixing requires radical restructuring. Let's stop wasting our time - and undermining children - with less than that.

* And really, parents, don’t throw all that tuition money at a place where denial is a central organizing principle! The odds of something tremendous flourishing in this kind of soil are wildly against you. Period. End of story.

Surrounded by Grandmothers

It started about six weeks ago. The feral cat we once called Mother now had three grandchildren, newly arrived in our postage stamp of a back yard. I was out there trying to scoop each one up and handle them, socializing them for future adoption. As I crawled around their hiding zones, my right knee hit a clay shard and started to bleed. It was one of those cuts that's hard to stop, so I went inside and reclined on the sofa to elevate the knee. In a zone that alternated between meditation, napping, and reverie - and I can't tell you which one I was in when this happened - I saw Mamaw... my maternal great-grandmother, Emma Rosenberger... standing in front of me. She said, "I am just the gatekeeper," then moved aside to reveal what seemed to be a "light essence"  in female form. It was moving and memorable and I have revisited that image many times in the interim.

Then, a few weeks ago, while cleaning out some old files, I came across two cassette tapes from almost twenty years ago. I had sent my mother a written list of questions about our early family years, and she - in the interest of wide-angle perspective and objectivity - had invited Alyce and Mary Kay, two lifelong friends, to join her in answering some of them on tape. I hadn't listened since they first came, wasn't even sure they would still play. As it turns out, the cassettes had held up beautifully and by the time I was through the first of four sides, I decided I needed to transcribe them... which is how I ended up spending hours - days really - with three incredible women. Now, for this to make sense I need to mention that for more than half of his adult life, my father was a royal shit-heel, a violent man who beat his wife and roughed up four children and perpetrated a lot of damage in his community. We can cut him a certain amount of slack because, after the first eleven years of "family life", Dad was diagnosed as psychotic - paranoid manic-depressive - and for the next twelve, Thorazine and other medications may well have saved him from manslaughter charges. Just barely.  I can say this with ease because what transpired is no secret - not between Dad and me anyway, and I love the whole of him - and me - too much to reduce his story to something fake.

So there I was listening to the three women - their children grown now - reviewing what they lived through with such clarity and strength, wisdom and humor.  At one point, they were talking about Dad's unfortunate habit of punishing people by sending destructive anonymous letters, and...

Mary Kay
Now, was that one (to your boss) after the ptomaine thing?

Alyce
Uh-huh.  That “ptomaine" - that was when Tro had the hotel and used to tend the dining room bar at night. Jack and I had been going up there every now and then, usually meeting Shirley there on evenings when Tro was working but, you know, wasn’t real busy.

Mom
You were making sandwiches for the hotel then...

Alyce
And they had a new stove or something he wanted to show me, so we went off to the kitchen together while you and Jack stayed at the table. Well, no sooner did we get through that kitchen door, than he was saying all kinds of things – I’ve blocked them out now – but he was…

Mom
“Proposing…”

Mary Kay
Putting the move on you, was he?

Alyce
Yes! And I became violently ill. Immediately.

Mom
She ended up in the hospital rather than admitting to all concerned what had actually made her sick!

Alyce
Lord. Up until then, I really didn’t get what he was working up to. Oh, he was always acting so solicitous  and so helpful.

Mary Kay
But, Alyce,  did you not know that the man could not be trusted?

Laughter.

Alyce
Obviously not. Talk about gullible!  - And up until that time – this is so embarrassing – I was telling Shirley how concerned he could be and I was sure he wasn’t up to no-good. So dumb! ...And then that night in the hotel kitchen I was just so shocked, I actually passed out.

Mary Kay
Did you really?

Mom
Out cold on the kitchen floor!

Laughter.

Alyce
And when I came to, Tro was bent over me saying ... “Was it something I said?”

Wild hilarity.

Mom
And then she threw up.  ...  “No, it wasn’t anything you said!”

They laugh so hard now you can hear them dabbing tears from their eyes.

There they were, these grandmothers - once child brides of the fifties, now on the other side of so much hell and high water -  with this tremendous bond of friendship still intact, their voices musical, their laughter free, their honest conversation a thing of rhythmic beauty and, I have to say, all of them still sexy. There is simply no better company in the world than women like this.

Then just yesterday, the Greek was cooking dinner when I came into the kitchen. He was deep into it, but as soon as he saw me, he turned off the burner and said, "You have to see this." He walked me to the kitchen window.

"Do you see it?" he asked. "Look at the tree."

It was dusky. I was staring at the yucca tree with four trunks.

"There where it splits."

Blink. Blink. "Are we both seeing the same thing?"

"A crone's face."

"That's what I see, too. Picasso eyes. I wonder when she came."

"Today's the first I noticed her. The sun was starting to go down when I got home and at first I thought I was seeing a cat sitting in the crook there... but then I realized."

"It's like a spirit."

"I know."

"A grandmother."

"Uh-huh."

This morning, first thing, I went to check if she was still there.

She was.

Is she there for you?

Independence

NPR’s Morning Edition launches its show this way every July 4th. If you’ve ever come out of sleep to this on your clock radio, you know it’s a glorious wake-up moment. I picture those 56 brave and cunning men – average age 33 - in a miserably hot and muggy Pennsylvania summer. For their signing, seventeen lost everything they had and died paupers... five or six were captured and tortured... others lost all their children to the war... nine died.

Listen.

Gifted

The plant that exploded into a bush this past week was lemon verbena, no doubt sourced by some tiny particle of potential remaining from that verbena I tried and failed to grow two summers ago. Or maybe not. Maybe some seed rode the wind over our fence. As I observed it with amazement out of the corner of my eye the last few days, I remembered the British doctor who said that when he makes house calls he always walks around the outside of the home to see what is growing - "wild or with particular zeal" - there, since in his experience, what the earth offers up with insistence is often just what the people in the house most need.

So I’m sipping lemon verbena tea, thank you very much. And yes, the medicinal shoe fits.

You see that line in the banner above?: life is a conversation and Every Thing is talking. This is what I mean by it. Every Thing is communicating with every other thing all the time. Words are a small portion of this. It is energies and symbols and signs and feelings and rhythms and dreams and vibrations and wise offerings from mother earth and much more than I can name or know. Too bad most of us are lousy at harvesting the many gifts at hand. Or in recognizing just how “gifted” we all are.

And yet, for so many people this remains a whisper of possibility - and longing - deep in the psyche. I submit as Exhibit A the fact that yesterday's New York Times article "Mystery on Fifth Avenue" is among those most forwarded today. It's about a home with hidden messages and clues... things that "remain largely unnoticed"... that seem "random"... that might even cause one to question "sanity"... but which reveal, in fact, a loving treasure that wants to be found, is meant to be found.

A friend who read it wrote to me, "I want to live in a home like this." I probably should have written back, "You do."

Stonehenge

The news comes that scientists have determined that Stonehenge was a burial ground for cremated remains  – probably for some ruling dynasty -  for centuries before the massive stone monument was erected.

“Some scholars have contended that the enigmatic stones, surrounded by a ditch and earthen banks in concentric circles, more than likely marked a sacred place of healing. The idea is at least as old as medieval literature, which also includes stories of Stonehenge as a memorial to the dead. So there could be an element of truth to both hypotheses, experts say.”

In other words, today’s advanced scientific equipment seems to have finally confirmed what medieval literature said all along...

Here’s what interests me more:  Why?  What is it about the spot – its energy – that made it sacred space? I sincerely doubt that folks were just randomly milling about and said, apropos of nothing, “Gee this is big and empty, let’s ditch this cremated stuff here and maybe we’ll just pop these big, tall stones here, too. What the heck.”

What if human beings in 3000 BC – like most indigenous cultures – were still able to feel the energies in places and things and respond appropriately?

If we could hurry up and get some scientific data on that, please… perhaps we – their numbed-out descendants  - could wise up to more of what surrounds us.

The Loyalty Thing

The other day, my eyes happened to fall on a Q&A with David Mamet in Vanity Fair.

What is the quality you most like in a man? Steadfastness.
What do you most value in your friends? Loyalty.
What is your motto? Be Prepared.

These struck me as the answers of an Unevolved Male*, and largely fear-based. I mean, can't you just feel the fortress being built in this collection of values?

Victoria, what do you value most in your friends?
Truth.
Refined perceptions.
Humor. - I love, love, love laughing hard with friends.
Wisdom.
Depth.
Insight.
Wide-angle smarts, including emotional intelligence.
Spiritual awareness.

I could go on and on and on before I got close to anything approximating loyalty. But then, I value what I enjoy in my friends - their fine qualities in service to themselves - and the dynamic back and forth of the meeting of our energies, not what I want them to owe me in the event of... some booga-booga.

Of course, the George Bush White House, with its premium on LOYALTY! - "Here's yer commutation, Scooter!" - over pretty much everything else - truth... wisdom... depth... - has been my royal education in certain red flag warnings of the immature male.

Tragically, George didn't embrace that  Boy Scout oath as well.

* Author and radio host Caroline Casey would no doubt say The Unitiated Male, which is probably more on point.

My fellow knuckleheads...

The most striking thing about (what I caught of) the pundit analysis of Senator Obama’s brilliant speech on race and religion is this: They all seemed blown away by the power of his thoughts and the honest courage in the way he shared them...

“This speech is probably the most monumental speech since Martin Luther King as it relates to matters of race…"  - Dr. Floyd Flake, Pastor of Allen AME Cathedral, a Clinton supporter, on Charlie Rose

"The rhetorical magic of the speech—what made it extraordinary—was that it was, at once, both unequivocal and healing. There were no weasel words, no Bushian platitudes or Clintonian verb-parsing…  It was a grand demonstration of the largely unfulfilled promise of Obama's candidacy: the possibility that, given his eloquence and intelligence, he will be able to create a new sense of national unity—not by smoothing over problems but by confronting them candidly and with civility." - Joe Klein, Time Magazine

"Obama offered himself as the man who rises from flames and invites you to rise from your own. He took a grievous embarrassment and moved his lesson to the plane of prophecy. Talk about hope; talk about audacity. Tears came to my eyes. I don't think I'm especially hard-hearted, but I cannot think of another time when the speech of a presidential candidate watered me up." - Todd Gitlin, professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia University

“And so at 11 o’clock AM on a Tuesday a prominent politician spoke to Americans about race as though they were adults.” – Jon Stewart, Daily Show

... BUT it was this very fineness of Obama's talk that made them wonder how it would “play” to “regular Americans.” Regular Americans – you know them, they are what Clinton strategist Mark Penn refers to as “jugheads”. Or Pennsylvania “knuckleheads”, as someone in Philadelphia described them to Newsweek's Howard Fineman.

See, this is the commonly shared view of the ruling and mainstream media class – that elections are about who can herd the biggest bunch of idiots into the voting booths. You get those doggies moving with game-playing and manipulation and absurd spinning and fear…oh, never go short on the fear…and be sure to keep all ugliness going as long as humanly possible, without leaving fingerprints, of course.

Is this who we are?

Is this how we live up to our serious responsibilities as citizens in a democratic superpower nation?

Because the assumption is that we are a bunch of knee-jerk, over-emotional non-thinkers. 

Senator Obama bet another way yesterday. He spoke to America as if we could process sophisticated, nuanced, and plainly true words. As if we want to see, to understand, to grow. And heal. As if we want to take the good we've been given by America and show our gratitude by making it even better.

It is surely a test of us to see how We The Knuckleheads respond to that.

It is also a test of the Democratic Party – to see how its leaders line up to support Obama's deeply respectful approach to us... as if we are not just a bunch of jugheads.

Of course, I realize that all these most positive scenarios will require some hope.

Obama's 2002 Speech

Since it's being belittled this week, let's have a look at it:

October 2, 2002

Good afternoon. Let me begin by saying that although this has been billed as an anti-war rally, I stand before you as someone who is not opposed to war in all circumstances. The Civil War was one of the bloodiest in history, and yet it was only through the crucible of the sword, the sacrifice of multitudes, that we could begin to perfect this union, and drive the scourge of slavery from our soil. I don't oppose all wars.

My grandfather signed up for a war the day after Pearl Harbor was bombed, fought in Patton's army. He saw the dead and dying across the fields of Europe; he heard the stories of fellow troops who first entered Auschwitz and Treblinka. He fought in the name of a larger freedom, part of that arsenal of democracy that triumphed over evil, and he did not fight in vain. I don't oppose all wars.

After September 11th, after witnessing the carnage and destruction, the dust and the tears, I supported this administration's pledge to hunt down and root out those who would slaughter innocents in the name of intolerance, and I would willingly take up arms myself to prevent such tragedy from happening again. I don't oppose all wars. And I know that in this crowd today, there is no shortage of patriots, or of patriotism.

What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war. What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other armchair, weekend warriors in this administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne.

What I am opposed to is the attempt by political hacks like Karl Rove to distract us from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in the median income - to distract us from corporate scandals and a stock market that has just gone through the worst month since the Great Depression. That's what I'm opposed to. A dumb war. A rash war. A war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics. Now let me be clear - I suffer no illusions about Saddam Hussein. He is a brutal man. A ruthless man. A man who butchers his own people to secure his own power. He has repeatedly defied UN resolutions, thwarted UN inspection teams, developed chemical and biological weapons, and coveted nuclear capacity. He's a bad guy. The world, and the Iraqi people, would be better off without him.

But I also know that Saddam poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States, or to his neighbors, that the Iraqi economy is in shambles, that the Iraqi military a fraction of its former strength, and that in concert with the international community he can be contained until, in the way of all petty dictators, he falls away into the dustbin of history. I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a US occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences. I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of Al Qaeda. I am not opposed to all wars. I'm opposed to dumb wars.

So for those of us who seek a more just and secure world for our children, let us send a clear message to the President today. You want a fight, President Bush? Let's finish the fight with Bin Laden and Al Qaeda, through effective, coordinated intelligence, and a shutting down of the financial networks that support terrorism, and a homeland security program that involves more than color-coded warnings.

You want a fight, President Bush? Let's fight to make sure that the UN inspectors can do their work, and that we vigorously enforce a non-proliferation treaty, and that former enemies and current allies like Russia safeguard and ultimately eliminate their stores of nuclear material, and that nations like Pakistan and India never use the terrible weapons already in their possession, and that the arms merchants in our own country stop feeding the countless wars that rage across the globe.

You want a fight, President Bush? Let's fight to make sure our so-called allies in the Middle East, the Saudis and the Egyptians, stop oppressing their own people, and suppressing dissent, and tolerating corruption and inequality, and mismanaging their economies so that their youth grow up without education, without prospects, without hope, the ready recruits of terrorist cells. You want a fight, President Bush? Let's fight to wean ourselves off Middle East oil, through an energy policy that doesn't simply serve the interests of Exxon and Mobil. Those are the battles that we need to fight. Those are the battles that we willingly join. The battles against ignorance and intolerance. Corruption and greed. Poverty and despair.

The consequences of war are dire, the sacrifices immeasurable. We may have occasion in our lifetime to once again rise up in defense of our freedom, and pay the wages of war. But we ought not -- we will not -- travel down that hellish path blindly. Nor should we allow those who would march off and pay the ultimate sacrifice, who would prove the full measure of devotion with their blood, to make such an awful sacrifice in vain.

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi - My Great Good Fortune

I didn't expect to say more than what is just below this. But James Wolcott's two references - 1, 2 - brought up some memories.

First, about the good fortune: I learned TM when it cost $35.00 for students.  I got to spend time with Charlie Lutes (great pictures here),  one of MMY's first US allies, and one of the most delightful teachers I have ever known. I attended the first conference on Creative Intelligence where I had the extraordinary experience of witnessing Bucky Fuller and Maharishi (whose degree was in physics) engage in lengthy, vibrant conversations about the nature of the universe, and where, as a volunteer, I sat in after-hour staff meetings with Maharishi - saw his unassuming humanity, kindness, simplicity up close and for real. I became a teacher of TM when Maharishi was doing the training, which meant I learned from him daily for more than six months.

Toward the end of that course, my sister and I received word that our seventeen-year-old brother, Clayton, had died in a car accident. Because we were in a period of deep meditation at the time, Maharishi wanted to see us before we hurled ourselves into the emergency activity of flying home. We sat on either side of him as he talked a bit about heading back into activity and made arrangements for us to complete our training (the part where he personally gives you the mantras) later that summer at a different location.  My sister had the presence of mind to ask, "What can we say to our mother to comfort her?" Maharishi answered, "When a mother loses a child, rather than think about the future she won't have with the child, the true feeling - the one to concentrate on - is gratitude for the years she had with that child... because if the mother has done everything she can to love the child and feed and clothe the child... (and here he paused for emphasis) and educate the child, then she has done all she was meant to do for the length of time she was given, and wasn't that a wonderful thing to have?"

And then he handed each of us a flower to take to her.

We were both struck, my sister and I, how the point about education was so perfectly apt for our mother. And the way he had emphasized it, as if he knew her.  He had turned to his left and looked directly into my eyes as he said that. No, my sister said, "He turned to the right and looked directly into my eyes as he said that."

I still have days when I wish I could know Clayton as a grown man. But those days of grief right after our return to the U.S. were positively loaded with support and meaning and mystical power and, yes,  gratitude.

Just a  couple of weeks ago, I was listening to To The Best of Our Knowledge on NPR. The author of a new book on the Beatles was talking about their time with Maharishi, including the part about the groupie-charlatan from London who blew into Rishikesh and convinced John and George that Maharishi was having an affair with one of the women at the ashram. The interviewer asked if the allegation was true. The author replied, "Someone told me...and I know for a fact...it was."

I laughed out loud at this absurdity. (Being the peaceful meditator I am, I also shouted, "Do some decent research, asshole!)

"I remember taking George Harrison to meet (Maharishi) in 1993. George had gone to apologize for the bad behaviour of the Beatles back in 1969. Back then, the Beatles, especially John Lennon, had insinuated that the Maharishi was having an affair with Mia Farrow."

According to those who were at the retreat with them, George and John were asked to leave the ashram due to drug use.

"When George apologised, the Maharishi said there was nothing to be sorry about. He said the Beatles were angels on Earth with their music and he could never be angry with them. George wept."    - Deepak Chopra, in the Times of India

(Chopra also has this fine essay in the Times on Maharishi the man.)

There were other ridiculous things in the radio interview as well. I felt so fortunate for those experiences I'd had that allowed me to recognize so clearly the true from the untrue.

Then, a few weeks later, another episode of the same radio show..and more Maharishi. This time it was long time meditator Geoff Gilpin, whose book The Maharishi Effect explores the changes - some wonderful, some downright odd and disappointing - he observed in the TM movement over the years.

Which reminded me of something Maharishi once said about the nature of Truth - that it is something that must be lovingly tended like a garden or it slips away. Sages appear. They share Truth. Then, over time -  via structures and/or due to the consciousness of individuals and the times -  it becomes distorted, corrupted, even lost. Until it comes again.

And so it goes.

And sometimes ... sometimes ...you get really, really lucky.

The essential truth that Maharishi taught was not one you get from someone else, but the One you tap and nurture within.

Jai Guru Dev.