Information

"Play with the information you have and decide what it really means."--overheard in a meeting today

The information I have is written on my body, patterns of freckles and a birthmark that only appear when I've had sun.  When read by the perfect reader, it shows where I've been and who I am on my way to becoming.  My hair, graying at the temples--accelerated these last few months--a white reminder of fears ability to bleach away color, to remove what was once bright and flecked with gold and replace it with absence.  The deep blue ring around my irises that corrals the other colors, a circle of green bright as any late summer field at sunset, the burnished gold of wheat, a rich brown like river soaked soil, has gotten darker.  Today it is almost black in its attempt to keep the riot in, to stop all the light from seeping out.

The information I have won't do anyone any good just yet.  I know what I know and cannot make anyone else know it.  We, teachers, work with an unquantifiable entity everyday and are expected to assess it, nurture it, mold it, educate it, and even feel for it, but the variable no one likes to talk about is buy in.  If they don't buy in to their own right to knowledge, to their own right to power, to their own right to happiness, no amount of Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, or Hurston is going to make them do it.

The information I have about you clings to the soles of my feet. I plant the truth of you with every step, precisely seeding your stories in aerated ground, each raised instep holding a hundred secrets you're not ready to part with just yet, my five toes kissing the earth with words you love, my heels grinding your hurts and sorrows into a fine white dust that blows up and around me with each new gust of early September wind.  When you are ready to hear your own authentic voice again, I will have a grown a garden of you.  It will sing your life in whispered rushes, each new note more graceful than the last.

The information I have means I am a lighthouse, burning in the blackness above an endless crash of ocean sorrow.  Waves breaking like so many birds, silkily rustling up, flushed from their little sanctuary by a force unseen and unseeable.  This water, intent on destruction, will never reach my light so long as the ladder I climb each evening holds.  So, I find my footing and rise, ever vigilant, to prove the promise most of you are terrified may come true: that if you want it enough, if you are willing to brave the rocks, at the end of your journey there will always be light.

The information I have is made not of words but of water, of wind, of color, and of skin.