If you have taught––or survived school: You'll recognize yourself in my new memoir, "Teacher in the Rye: Doing It My Way"
Ken Wilber cites in his Brief History of Everything, an old joke about a King who goes to a wise person and asks how is it that the Earth doesn’t fall down. The wise person replies, “The Earth is resting on a lion.” “On what then is the lion resting?” “The lion is resting on an elephant.” “On what is the elephant resting?” “The elephant is resting on a turtle.” “On what is the…” “You can stop right there, Your Majesty. It’s turtles all the way down.”
Of course, it’s absurd to ask “how is it that the Earth doesn’t fall down?”
But this “old joke” raises the point that we are a species in all this together. From our earliest days as hunter gatherers, we have depended upon one another, now more than ever in our global world. And if we fail to live in harmony with the Earth, in the joke’s iteration there will be no more resting on “turtles all the way down.”
On another level, we visualize ourselves as part of the cosmos. In a metaphor coined by Stacy Ake, each of us is a fragment of a greater whole, a single stitch in a garment. As a fragment we depend on the fragments around us as we accept their contributions and make our own. As as stitch in a garment we do our part to keep it whole.
New teachers––true of all of us––do not replace predecessors as a light bulb replaces a worn bulb. They arrive in their classrooms, each of them a unique fragment, a lightbulb that has yet to be lit. They act as agents in the world embodying change––and offer their students agency.
At the same time, as “turtles” all of us work in communion to find meaning. If we don’t, we will not survive. Solitary fragments are shards, brittle, disconnected, like ones broken off from a ceramic mosaic.
