This evening just before dusk I trimmed a large pink rose bush my wife planted near our front door. It had been damaged by the hail storm we had a few weeks ago, and also had some kind of rose disease. However, the main reason I was trimming it was because it was overgrown and out of control. I have never known what I was doing when I have pruned trees or bushes in the past. I always start out slow, snipping small bits here and there, then gradually cutting larger and larger branches as I figure out where the bush can be cut. It is intuitive and in all probability not very precise, but the plant is forgiving enough and within a few weeks looks the better for what I have done. Now here is where if I were arrogant enough I would make an analogy between the rose bush and my students, but I don’t think I ever progress past the initial slow snipping with them. I can see the benefit of a one room school house where the teacher would work with a student over the course of several years. Yet, when I look at some of my students at this time of year, I am thrilled to think that I only have to listen to them for a few more days, then I am rid of them. Teaching is such an odd thing. We never, really, see the end results of what we do in our classrooms. The students leave before whatever we did has a chance to bloom, if it ever does. And if something does occur there is no way to know if it was due to what you did or perhaps some other teacher, or fellow classmate, the student had years ago. I guess the guiding principle should be to just try to do no harm, with both the rose bushes and my students.
I leave with a quote, that has little to do with the above, but it is pretty and intriguing:
The flesh sources indefinitely, never moving away from the setting that gives rise to it. The flesh opens, petal after petal, in an efflorescence that does not come about for the look, without for all that avoiding the look. The blooms are not seen.
Unless by an other sort of look? A look that allows itself to be touched by the birth of forms that are not exposed in the bright light of day? Yet, nonetheless, are there. Invisible substrate for the constitution of the visible. These gifts give themselves in the direction of an outside that does not cross the threshold of appearance. They suffuse the look without being notice by sight. Irrigation by a sense-intuition that flows back and forth from the flesh to look, from the look to the flesh, with neither the ek-statsis that attends a contemplation that has been resolved nor a confinement in lack of light. Irradiances that imperceptibly illuminate.
from “The Forgetting of Air” by Luce Irigaray
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