04.05
How did I get here?
More importantly, how do I keep going?
Teachers. Masters in their own right…and I’m talking about people who teach as their professional career and others that I’ve considered teachers, which include family, friends, other influences, even events and ethereal forces without a corporeal body.
The list could go on forever, so I’m going to do this in parts as they come up.
Fate
(Eos, Mother Earth, Goddess, etc.)
I call her fate because she guides me through life. When I say I worship “Fate,” many people misunderstand. Usually people take “Fate” to mean that I believe my actions are pointless because self-determination doesn’t exist–it’s exactly the opposite. Your “Fate” is your self-determination in the great dance with everything else’s self-determination. The greater body of the will of every living thing combined with the form of the dance steps– that’s Fate.
She’s always willing to teach me as much as I’m willing to learn. She’s there asking me to be with the decisions I’m making, whether they bring me high or low. Every time I feel inspired, every time I feel at peace, every time I feel the warmth of existance–that’s Fate and I dancing together–stepping, spinning, and dipping to the beat of the world around us. When something harsh or painful comes into my life, I’ve no happenstance to trace it back to but my own call to learn something from the situation.
When I’m not feeling right with the world, this is when I’m sitting on the bleachers, trying to convince myself and the world that I can’t dance. Whenever that happens, Lady Fate is always beckoning me to get on the floor and move my feet. She knows, as well as I do (though I deny it sometimes,) that we can dance in every moment. As the amalgam of all I see and hear, Fate is my ultimate teacher.
Joe Nacca
(English Professor)
I was a junior in high school determined to avoid English 12. With my Mom’s help, we fought our way through a loophole that would allow me to take English 101 (Composition) and English 102 (Literature) at Finger Lakes Community College over the summer before my senior year instead of sitting through the entire next school year.
My plan was to eliminate English classes from both my high school and college careers in one fell swoop. Back then, my plan was to be a physicsist, and the requirement of English for a B.S. in Physics was a simple one-two punch. Like a Jan-plan course, the schedule was compressed…three weeks composition, three weeks literature. In 6 weeks I would be finished with English for the rest of my life.
Looking back at this now, I realize my favorite high-school teachers were my English teachers. I had no idea why I wanted to rid myself of language and literature so early in my life. It must have had something to do with fervently pursuing the sciences; I felt words had no place in my future.
Joe Nacca changed that. Going to a college English class for four hours a day seemed like a curse to me, but I kept telling myself it was for the greater good. If I sat through this class for 6 weeks, I would be done with it forever. Then I met Joe, grey hair flopping down to his shoulders and a button down dress shirt. He was an immediate paradox. What made even less sense to me was that I was enjoying the class. We had one major essay to write each week, and I was given the opportunity to express myself through whatever topic I wanted. After three weeks, I was starting to produce critical writing all my own…long after the class was over, essays became my primary form of expression. But it wasn’t over. After I completed English 101, I was introduced to literature that made me realize how much I loved the art of the story. It wasn’t the works that were important though, it was how they were delivered to me. In a college setting, we were asked our opinions, and people responded. There was a living forum of responses from the students, and a man just as passionate moderating the class.
Though I doubt I would be studying particle collisions at CERN, I also doubt I would have the same passion in expressing myself if it weren’t for my attempt to escape from the literary world. My subsequent classes with Joe Nacca were the tipping point leading me toward a future immersed in prose. In my senior year of high school, I withdrew from Calculus II, never to return to the world of hard science again expect in an armchair hobbyists capacity.
Just two of my many teachers in life.
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