WKHardy's Blog

A thorough explanation would not be forthcoming.
Not in all the ages of our lives,
Though we asked in ten thousand ways.
And when we gave up the asking, the waiting,
And searched instead through senses and intellect,
We again felt captured.
Something there is that rings in us.
That fires us, and awes us, and makes us breathe.
Makes us clasp ourselves, in, with, and through
Wonder.
Then leaves us.

So we create our glorious radiant sets of symbols,
Shining, and in shadow.
Our mantel, both displaying and beshrouding;
Do we dare to crackle free of it?
And rephrase that implanted question?
And recognize forever
The Will that in the primal formed us,
Has forever fired us,
And has forever, though it seems to beckon,
Been our own?

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The morning rose, yellow and lavender,

Calm and wet.

She turned from her misgiving window,

Paused in her musing doorway,

And passed across her grass lawn

As so many variations of her had done.

Perhaps it was the escort morning birds that

launched her.

Perhaps she had sufficient preparation at last.

Or perhaps her soul had had enough.

Certain of nothing but the momentum

She carried herself, confident,

Farther than ever before.

For the first time, she asked nothing.

At the first turn, the voices of the birds changed.

She felt herself release from urgency.

She spread herself, relaxed and broadened,

And passed her atoms among the atoms

Of all that was around her.

After that, she heard, truly heard

No voices but her own.

After that, there were no more turns.

POSTURE

This experience is here now.

Now.

It’s here, and it’s here now.

Have I feared it?

I have.

I wade now in the thick of it.

It weighs heavy on the thighs.

The torso strains for balance

But leans and continues forward.

The head is bowed, but only for a moment,

Then looks up.

All is bearable it seems, after all,

And more.

For what was false in the posture of the

No-experience

Has become integrity in the motion of the

With experience

And opens a future that would feel everywhere

Without alarm.

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What is the charge that is given us then,

When we have seen through the Theosophists’ veils

And know that our own personal Will

Has become our finest direction,

Is nothing but The Truth,

And a child comes to us and is born

As our child ….

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Once there were new eyes                                                                                                                       That answered time with flashes                                                                                                            And always knew why.

(untitled)

Gasping, we held ourselves at last erect.                                                                                              “Behold!” said one of the Angels. “What mortals are these                                                            Who have turned their eyes to the heavens?”                                                                                    “We who have loved until we know of nothing else.”                                                                        The words were strong in our hearts and resounded                                                                               without being spoken.

(untitled)

DRESSED IN OUR

MOST PLEASANT ARCHITECTURE,

WE SCANNED THE EMPIRE AND WE GAVE IT LIFE.

IT IS OURS;   WE ARE SO BOLD.

WE SMILED AND WAVED AND REPORTED

TO EACH OTHER.

ANOTHER BRILLIANT DAY’S WORK, WE SAID.

MARVELLING AT WHAT WE HAD WROUGHT,

OVERWHELMED BY OUR POWERFUL POSSESSIONS,

WE PATTED OUR BACKS

AND SHOOK OUR HANDS

AND MADE OUR WAYS TO BED.

DREAMING OF ANCIENT HONORS,

DREAMING OF DREAMED OF NATIONS,

WHEN AVID JOURNALISTS,

WHEN TIRED HISTORIANS,

WOULD TELL OF THE MACHINATIONS

OF THE MIGHTY,

WE, IT WAS, THEY WOULD WRITE,

WE WERE THE ONES WHO LED.

AT LONG LAST, COMING OF AGE,

THE AGE OF MANKIND

GLANCED OVER ITS SHOULDER

AT A FILIBUSTER DISCARDED IN THE WEEDS.

This is the first entry of the contents of my recently self-published book,

Once There Came A Thought

The book contains ten poems written since sometime in the 1960’s, and the lyrics to fifteen songs that I have written beginning sometime in 2002. Copies of the book may be purchased for 20.00 US dollars by contacting me –

williamhardy11@gmail.com

THE BOOK

                     Once There Came A Thought

                      Once there came a thought                                                                                                                     That evolved itself into                                                                                                                             All else that there is.

(untitled)

When a person has expanded and contracted                                                                                    Through several lifetimes                                                                                                                            during a single life-span,                                                                                                                    Laughing and reaching,                                                                                                                          Despairing, then gathering strength,                                                                                                   Becoming ever more quiet of voice                                                                                                       But forging an undeniable and far-reaching will,                                                                              Then does selection become effortless —                                                                                            Any and all choices having become beneficial.                                                                                  Loneliness does not exist.                                                                                                                        And absolute companions are unexpected,                                                                                        Even have become indescribable,                                                                                                          But are wondrously                                                                                                                                      and unmistakably recognized.

Released

On the trampled mirror, there

lay eight months of ambition.

Across the room,

The door was ajar.

On the outside step,

There lay one last footprint.

Across the air, the wake swirled.

Some time ago, I started a website called School of the Open Road, after Walt Whitman’s poem Song of the Open Road, which poem is about learning how a self grows through grasping more and more of the essence of every bit of what life in this particular world offers us. The goal of my website was to present examples of people who had become their own best teachers, one of the primary points of this blog. The website featured a nineteen-year-old man who had taught himself to play concert-level piano in about a year and a half, that time culminating in his public performance of four classic works for piano and a composition of his own. No one ever read the website. Anyway, I’ve recently had a notion that supports all of what I try to say about schools, that notion being that the internet has made schools obsolete. I try to show that true learning takes place when the learner has chosen to do the learning rather than having it pushed onto him or her. I have suggested that schools should be like libraries, where a person who wants to know or learn something can go into a building where there are rooms and equipment and even, perhaps only by arrangement, teachers to make it possible for the person to work towards his or her goal. The internet provides avenues to all of that, without the need to go to a building, or for anyone to have to set up or maintain such a building. All of my points about the efficacy of autonomous learning find their finest tools for demonstration and practice no farther away than the internet. Schools can still work for the youngest people, while they are learning the alphabet and writing and basic arithmetic and such, or that can be done at home if parents are industrious. And schools can serve somewhat in societies that have yet to afford computers in every home. But once the skills and the computer are there, and the internet provider is paid (someday, that won’t be part of the formula), any type of learning and to any degree can begin and can proceed at whatever pace the learner wishes it to go. No school necessary at all.

Just to let you know, the ideas that I’m writing about here are perhaps best followed by starting at the beginning — reading the first entry before reading the others. That first one was posted 2010/10/19 — Schools and Prisons and Crap n’ Stuff.

Okay, so the idea here is, maybe to try to put it simply, that my goal as an educator has become — and should be, as I see it — hell, I feel it, sense it, hell, I vibrate with it — the goal of all of education in any society’s system whatsoever — to help people understand, grasp, and really I should use some word like re-grasp, because we all knew this when we were the children that we were before we started school: that we are, each one of us, our own best teacher. Schools are not the centers of learning; they must be seen only as places where suggestions for learning are made.

Each one of us is our own Center of Learning. Spend as much time as you want in a school, it is you who decides how much you pay attention to what is being suggested at the school, to what extent you actually go along with the suggestions that are being made at the school, how much you really learn at the school, as a result of the school. You could just as easily be following your own suggestions, but we have all been cultivated to see schools as where we go to learn, and to regard what we do outside of schools, at least until we are eighteen years old or so, as something that is not quite as important or valuable as being in the school, doing what the school and the society says we should do there. If there were no schools, we would, each one of us, find ways of learning what we were really interested in learning, provided that the society in which we lived allowed us to do that, made it possible for us to do that, gave us the freedom to do that.

To illustrate, which means to make a picture of what it is that I’m talking about, if you haven’t been able to make your own yet: There was a time in my life when I trained in a martial art and came to the point of earning an instructor’s certification. That meant that I had had to do a lot of special sorts of training and teaching at the studio where I was a student, and then I went to a training center and did what they said I should do in order to become an effective instructor of that particular martial art, and all of this could only happen after I had spent some years practicing and training and testing and finally reaching a point where I had enough experience in the art to actually be able to do all of this extra stuff in order to become an instructor. So I got the certificate. That certificate would “expire” after three years. So a few years later I was living in a little community and some people there wanted me to start giving lessons in this martial art and so I said okay and somebody wondered if I were qualified to be a teacher or something like that, I don’t remember how it all happened, but I realized that my instructor’s certificate had expired and I said that to somebody and so somebody asked if I could still teach the lessons. As if all of the learning and training that I had done and all of the experience that I already had in giving lessons in the martial art were in the certificate. As if the center of the learning that I had done had been the martial arts studio where I did my training, and in the extra school that I went to for instructor certification, and not in me. That learning is in me, for chrissake! The learning that each of us does stays in us, and really, it starts in us, when we make the choice or feel the impulse to learn something, and decide to start learning it, then we really learn it and it stays in us. It doesn’t fade out, disappear, become invalid, become irrelevant like the information we used to get the highest score on a test at the school and then we have forgotten most of that information two weeks later. When we choose to learn something, have the personal interest in something that takes us to the point where we want to learn more about it, then we focus on it and learn it as works best for our own particular learning style, and that usually means that we learn it fast and forever.

Schools should be, and society’s should be, recognizing that, and schools should be formatted based on that — that people learn, actually really and usably and satisfyingly learn, only what they want to learn, and only when they want to learn it; that forced learning, required time in classrooms, is a waste of everybody’s time, and resources.

Okay, so here’s a little more, another story, another example of what I’m talking about — about how schools as they are now just flat-out miss the point, although most everybody involved with the schools, except for most of the students, seriously thinks that they are doing it right and that the students are getting benefits.  I recently heard of  a meeting of the faculty of grade levels seven through twelve at some school. The group doesn’t meet very often, so when they do, you would think that they would want to discuss something like the latest research on brain development, or learning styles, or how to make their subjects interesting to students who, as I have mentioned, don’t really want to be hearing about those subjects, don’t really want to be hearing about anything that they haven’t chosen to hear about, don’t really want to be in the school. But on this day, at this meeting, this group was discussing whether or not the older students should get to have drinks in their classrooms during lessons, and also whether or not the kids should get to wear hats in the classrooms. Hats, and drinks. Professional educators. Students, and the school that supposedly exists to serve them. This discussion about hats and drinks actually got pretty heated, with some people raising their voices and talking about how the school needed to stand for something, and to show the kids that they stand for something, and make some rules and show the kids that those rules are really going to be enforced, that the school will stand behind the rules that it makes.

So now, yeah, you see? I think that’s really a good example of what I’ve been talking about. How schools have become more obsessed with rules in many cases rather than with helping people learn stuff. I almost laugh sometimes at how the word “schools” rhymes with “rules”. It makes a lot of songs and jokes possible. I mean, is that a coincidence, or an irony, or a serendipitous occurrence, or a cosmic chemical attraction or what? Yeah, it only rhymes like that in English, but still, a lot of people think about English these days. Anyway. So do we, who like to think of ourselves as, and really want the rest of the world to think of us as, professionals in the field of education, do we really want the students who go through our schools to be thinking back thirty years later and think something like, “I’m so grateful to my school for helping me learn how to follow rules”? When almost all the successful — yeah, really, almost all of them, you can look it all up yourself on the internet if you haven’t already noticed it a lot in your life — artists, musicians, architects, business entrepreneurs, writers, dancers, journalists, clothing designers, sometimes even lawyers, and on, and on, and on, when those people are interviewed they all come around to saying something about breaking some rules, going beyond the rules, doing something that is unexpected, outside the norm … do we as educators really want to take pride in how effectively we create and enforce a bunch of rules?????? Rules about hats? Kind of sounds like a … a … a … a prison, maybe? Similar way of thinking anyway. Maybe not quite as harsh as a prison, a school I mean, but it’s a similar way of thinking, this artificial construct that needs a lot of rules to make people behave in certain ways that they would behave in anyway if they were in a place that they had chosen to be in rather than being forced to be in it.

If the students, yeah, here I go again now with how I think schools really should be, if the students really want to be in the school, really want to be learning what is being talked about/demonstrated/provided for purposes of experimentation and practice , in the classroom, they won’t let something like something that they are drinking or something that sits on somebody’s head get in the way of that learning, and they won’t tolerate somebody else doing something like what always happens with hats in schools as they are now, and that is that the students are so tired and tense from somebody else always wanting them to do something rather than them doing something because they want to do it themselves, that just to relieve the tension in some way please god, they start grabbing the hats off each others’ heads and throwing them around and chasing each other and stuff, and that’s why all eight of the schools where I have worked have had rules about no hats, is that kids can’t control themselves, simply can not, repeat, can not, stop themselves from taking hats off other kids’ heads. Hell, I even do stuff like that myself, I’m usually so full of tension, even after seventeen years of standing in front of a group of people who don’t really want me to be there and trying to keep them interested for at least an hour at a time, I even sometimes do little dance steps and stuff, or snap my fingers in some sort of rhythm or something, because of all the tension of the situation where I look at the students’ faces and also see their parents’ faces and the other teachers’ faces and the administrators’ faces and all the people who are expecting that something good should come out of this situation where nobody really wants to be there.

So, yeah, if students really wanted to be there, if the society had been thinking and talking and behaving in that way for a couple of years, or now, it’s probably going to take ten or twenty years if we decide to start trying to change it now, where society was having the philosophy and attitude and approach to education that each person could handle taking responsibility for his or her own education and choose for him or her self when to start working at learning something, or several things, or however it would be for that individual, if that’s how it were, then students would learn how to manage those really important things like whether or not to have a drink with them in the classroom, or to wear a hat in there. They would learn that all by themselves. They would eliminate, all by themselves, the stuff and the behaviours that would keep them from learning, because they had chosen to do the learning, chosen to be there to try to do the learning, and they would be irritated about something that was making it harder than it should be to do the learning and they would get rid of it, or not do it, all by themselves. There wouldn’t need to be groups of professional educators using their professional time arguing about rules about hats. Arguing about how to make this construct work, how to make this artificial situation that has sort of hypnotised whole societies for a hundred years or so work. They could use their professional meeting time to talk about Multiple Intelligences. Or Summerhill School. Something that actually recognizes how human beings learn.