Lessons from Teacher Mary

Economic Development Report

A feeling of conspiracy hangs in the landscape. The physical density of the trees, their scale and variety gives the impression of Assembly. It is as if they are preparing something, understood only if you can decode the wind that lends them voice. This dark and heavy feeling that nature gives is offset at times only by the sky and its mirrors, the rivers, lakes and seas. In these mirrors the verticality of the trees is dwarfed by the immensity of the sky, dressed in fine brocades of silvers and grays and adorned here and there with a blinding, golden light, all reflected below on the surface of water.

The possum and crow are wrongly maligned creatures. The chatter and activity of the crow, always close to us, shows them in eager playfulness, wishing to be included. The sulking possum however, seems resigned to his lot. My guess is that if asked, he would happily provide an evening of fine, possum tales.

Having been away for nearly thirty years, moving around the town leaves me with the feeling of having lived many lives. Things seem to be glanced at as through a thick glass, frozen in time. This tree, or that house being something which I had seen long ago, and now glimpsed again through the duration of all these lives.

Potlatch

So, in the lives before our lives, the exchange of surplus took place upon these lands in a highly ritualized form of gift giving between the Multnomah and the Cascade tribes. Worth, or status was not achieved through accumulation of wealth, but in redistribution of it. In some extreme examples of Potlatch where a gift could not be matched in reciprocation, entire villages would be set aflame or destroyed as a matter of honor.

Generosity

The flight was long and void of thought. Any small discomfort, anxiety of fear was in the end dissolved in the kind chatter of native New Yorkers working at the airport. A series of transactions set this body in motion. Sold objects, the giving of gifts and donated monies circulated to form a structure for movement. But emotions are also shared, traded and spent.

“I have no idea what I am doing”

a fair disclamer.

“Neither do I,” she said

And so I entered her service.

The most common way of seeing any situation of ‘caretaker’ fails take into account the lessons learned from the subject of this care. Closer looking will show a generosity given with grace.

Surplus

What is extra is given freely, an expenditure without reciprocation. Where there may have been in another situation no excess, no reserves or smallest of luxuries in sight, the people in that small room gathered what they had within themselves and gave without reward. The small speakers in the room played songs that had been paid for in advance.

Gifts

A song was sung by a group of people who had gathered around her bed. Word of this gift spread throughout the city by text message, phone calls and taxis. News of this gift never failed to cause a smile. It was a song that kept singing.

A husband, a father and two brothers built a porch. This was the gift of the husband. When the two sons arrived, home from school, the jumped allover the framing, getting in the way of saws, screws and planks. From just inside the open door a mother laughed, a large, black dog at her feet. Though the gift was for her, everyone enjoyed it.

 Collection

People felt they owed something even though no formal invoice had been written. They felt this way because of the service and generosity that she had extended and practiced, and which they had been the recipients of, could actually be felt as a physical weight after she left, a debt no longer in abstract. Maybe this weight is what they should have measured, when lives and lives ago doctors and priests attempted to measure the weight of a soul.