Treasure Map / Advent Day 6

I teach guitar lessons these days. A couple of years ago, I volunteered to teach Colin, the son of Josh Snow and Tracy Lease, friends of ours in Fairbanks – Tracy was my yoga teacher last year. Colin, at age 8, has a passion to become Eric Clapton, or John Prine, and it’s fun for me to see how a child learns music. For one thing, singing isn’t second natue for Colin. He works at it, finding the pitch, memorizing the melody. Sometimes he just can’t find the tune at all. I usually have to sing in falsetto in order to provide support because singing an octave down from him is confusing. (Last year I taught group guitar lessons at Chinook Charter School, but that’s another story. Whoa!)

Colin wanted to surprise me yesterday, after I’d taught him a couple new songs I’d worked up, "The Times They Are A Changing," and "Your Flag Decal Won’t Get You Into Heaven Anymore." He wouldn’t let me see the page in his notebook he was playing from. Then he played "Jingle Bells," and followed it with "Deck the Halls" and "Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer." Earlier in the lesson, he told me to turn around, and I realized that they had a big old Christmas tree all lit up.

What a surprise! I felt a sudden confirmation in what I’ve been saying the past week, that people want to be on track, waiting for something important, they want their lives to have a direction, they love traditions that help them know they’re on the right path, that others have been here, that there’s a treasure map they’re following, and they’re on course for the next big clue.

Part of the surprise was disappointment. I have a thin skin, which is annoying. I suddenly thought of myself as Kierkegaard’s Hegel. Let me explain. The Danish philosopher Kierkegaard, said of his predecessor, Prussian thinker Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, an authoritarian metaphysician: "He builds a great castle in the air, but then goes into life and lives in a dog house." I realize how enthusiastic I become with ideas and plans, but yet how the opportunities to put things into place can escape me.

For example, were I to spend even an hour thinking about what would be fun as preparation for Winter Solstice, for Christmas, a celebration of light returning in the darkness, a celebration of darkness itself, I would get very excited. But would we put these things into practice in our family? Colin plays songs I prepared for him and other kids at Chinook last year, but Matteo hasn’t heard me play a Christmas carol for him in his life. (Note for today, play music together!)

We do have a little son, right now, making getting things done a little more challenging. We don’t get out much, like to cabins or on hikes. We don’t actually get out in the course of a given day, except to drive around town and get groceries or do errands. I have this idea of "being in Alaska" which includes loving the dark, the cold, and getting out in it, skiing, skating, feeling the wild "otherness" of the land and the sky, the forests and the frozen rivers.

I sometimes panic, like yesterday when Matteo came home from preschool saying the days of the week, and I realize that I’ve missed realizing that it was time for that. Has yet another "station" passed us by. I want to read a hundred books on childhood development and ideas for creating a stimulating environment, and I don’t. I want to throw balls around with Matteo, and we don’t. The days fly past, and Matteo doesn’t even know how to poop on a pot. Though they know how to do that, too, at preschool, and he brags about his accomplishments in peeing. And so he should.

Yesterday I wrote fifteen little poems to the letters of the alphabet to put in the drawers of Matteo’s tree-shaped Advent Calendar, but when Marin didn’t have time yesterday to "execute" my idea at work, I got super disappointed. Instead of remaining committed to the idea and finding a way still to bring it to fulfillment. Instead of thanking her for what she had gotten to do (I’d hoped for little "packages" of text with Marin’s line drawings, that would unfold, little "treasure maps") and leaving the fine tuning for next year.

There’s this parenting consultant on the web, Scott Noelle, who takes a profoundly gratitude-based, trust-based approach to raising kids. Every day I receive a little encouraging message in my in-box, sometimes it seems a litte woo-woo, but usually it’s helpfully different from the Hegelian way I see the world, trying to control things, figure them out once and for all, instead of finding and unfolding the piece of paper and discovering the next clue in the Treasure Map.