In the old days school began in September, after Labor Day, but this weekend I listened to stories of my grandchildren as they anticipate their first day back in school. One of my favorite bumper stickers says: “If you can read this, thank a teacher.” We can all thank our teachers both for the skills they taught us, and for the ways the ways in which they helped us grow as a person. Light a candle for a teacher this week.
One of my plans is to go back to school this fall. I want to start reading more widely, visiting some author friends I have left on the shelf for too long and meeting new ones. One of the old friends is Loren Eiseley, a naturalist, poet and observer of life who says that he spent most of his life on his knees not in prayer but in school, learning from the world around him. In an essay entitled “How Natural is ‘Natural’” he says that we “stand at that point where the miraculous comes into being, and after the event [we] call it ‘natural.’” In this same essay he writes: “It is not the outward tools of man the toolmaker that threaten us. It is . . . that we have created an unbearable last idol for our worship. That idol . . . is no less than man [sic] made natural.” And, again, “The special value of science is not what it makes of the world, but what it makes of the knower.”
Thinking about my school days and rereading Eiseley, I am thankful for all the teachers who introduced me to the worlds around me and to the worlds within me. So, this week I will light not one candle but two.
In friendship,
David