Remembering What is Essential

By Co-Director Marcy Jackson

I know better than I do, and this kind of slowing down helps me remember what I know and do that!

—Retreat participant, National Staff Development Conference

Sometimes it takes someone or something to stop us in our tracks long enough to get quiet, slow down, and remember what is essential. All kinds of things can do that—unexpected news, illness, loss, even winter! As I write this, the Midwest is in a deep freeze and the necessity of stopping and attending to the essentials of staying warm, making sure there is enough food and keeping your pipes from freezing is very real. But there is another way of slowing down and remembering what is core, what is real—one not born of catastrophe, but born of intention. We see this happen all the time in the work we do in “circles of trust.”

Last December, some colleagues and I led a pre-conference retreat at the annual meeting of the National Staff Development Council (NSDC). Our group of twenty-two participants were staff developers, curriculum specialists, teacher mentors, and school leaders from across the country. Several said they weren’t even staying for the NSDC conference and had only come for this retreat. For most of these folks, the stakes were very high—they are passionate educators who are trying to contribute their best “lights” in the midst of often untenable situations, leadership demands and dysfunction, and a fearful school culture focused primarily on raising test scores.

But that in and of itself was not that remarkable; it’s what we see all the time in our retreat groups. What was remarkable (at least to us and our typical way of doing things) was the setting in which we were attempting to create a quiet “space apart” for these participants to take an inward journey. To start with, our room had no windows and was right off the lobby of this grand hotel where 4,000 people were converging to sign in for the NSDC conference. Not only that, but the door to our room didn’t close fully, so the sounds in the foyer intruded, sometimes swelling to a cacophony.

Our space was anything but conducive to doing the work of “welcoming the soul and weaving community” that we were there to do! Still our little group stayed focused, leaning into the circle and each other, aware of the clamor just outside the door as well as inside our hearts. They had come for a reason: to listen to their own souls speak and to remember again what is essential.

The door became a metaphor for us. We reflected on the fact that rarely in life can you close a door completely in order to become focused, be in silence, and remember. And at the same time, without the intention to do so most of us rarely slow down enough to step out of the busy and chaotic “lobby” of our lives to go into a quieter room where we can hear ourselves think—and, often more importantly, feel. That’s what happened, against the odds, with this group of dedicated educators in December. They walked through the door and, once inside, were able to bring their full attention to their own hearts and to each other.

While reflecting on doors I remembered a poem by Adrienne Rich that speaks of doors and our choice to go through them, or not:

Prospective Immigrants Please Note

Either you will
go through this door
or you will not go through.

If you go through
there is always the risk
of remembering your name.

Things look at you doubly
and you must look back
and let them happen.

If you do not go through
it is possible
to live worthily

to maintain your attitudes
to hold your position
to die bravely

but much will blind you,
much will evade you,
at what cost who knows?

The door itself
makes no promises.
It is only a door.

—Adrienne Rich, from Necessities of Life: Poems 1962-1965

Fundamentally interested in transformation as both a private and a public act, in a 1971 essay Rich writes:

…if the imagination is to transcend and transform experience, it has to question, to challenge, to conceive of alternatives, perhaps to the very life you are living at that moment.

For me, the NSDC retreat was a big reminder that conditions are rarely ideal or the circumstances altogether conducive to taking the time to slow down and walk into a quieter room. It’s our intention—and then acting as if “what we need is here” (to borrow a phrase from Wendell Berry)—that can make all the difference.