This year, I taught a very difficult high-school English class. Nothing I tried fired my students’ imaginations.
Then I came up with a project I called “Photo Story”: I went through my copies of The Sun and chose a variety of photos. I mounted the photos on cardboard, labeled each with the name of the photographer, and slipped them into folders. On Monday morning, I randomly handed out the folders to my students. Over the next two weeks, I told them, they were to write a narrative from the point of view of one of the people in the picture, using clues from body language, setting, and expression.
My students live in a very rural part of New York State, and few of them have been out of the area. In this project, they had to open their minds to how other people might feel in situations very different from theirs.
When the narratives were complete, each student mounted his or her story next to the photo, and we displayed the finished products in the classroom as a gallery showing for teachers, parents, and students. These kids hadn’t had a lot of success with the written word. To them, writing was the boredom of tests and reports. But many parents and school personnel were impressed by the depth of their stories; none more so than I.
I have saved my students’ creations to cherish in those times when what I do seems to matter little. For twenty-seven years I have attempted to instill a love for the creative process in my students. I think I may have done it, just a bit, with these kids. For this one project, they had to think about someone other than themselves. They had to be moved. And they were.
The Sun is the only magazine I can think of that makes me cry. And it’s not always sadness that brings on the tears. Sometimes it’s just the shock of feeling another’s experience.
I have cried, with an issue of The Sun on my lap, in trains, on buses, at cafes, and in airplanes above the clouds. What can it be that so effectively elicits this response? Soul.
Usually when I check the list of upcoming Readers Write topics, it looks something like this: “Isolation,” “Loss,” “Ending It All,” “Depression,” “Really Bad Depression,” “Despair.”
I wasn’t quite sure what to think when I saw the August 2000 topic: “Happiness.” Had new editors taken over? Was The Sun still The Sun?
When I received the August issue, I quickly turned to the “Happiness” section. The first entry was by a woman whose mother said she wished she’d never had children. The second was about the terrors of anorexia. The third featured a family whose house burned to the ground.
Yep, it was still The Sun, all right.
Many of the pleasures James Hillman and Genie Zeiger attribute to old age [“Old Soul,” August 2000] are the same ones I found in the midst of grief. There were comfortable chairs and bird song, rich flavors and the changing seasons. Pleasure welled up, reminding me of why we grieve when the people we love must leave this life. I was much more aware of small pleasures: a good night’s sleep, the relief of a healthy bowel movement, a moment of forgetting when something made me laugh.
I appreciated Hillman’s remark about the need for more old people to become politically active. Before I knew grief, the anger that for many years had found an outlet in activism was a sharp weapon; my words could be cutting and sometimes shrill. Anger is useless against grief, however, and with my discovery of this, my anger has been humbled. It does take courage, as Hillman points out, to engage the world politically — especially from a position of reason and compassion rather than self-righteousness and anger.
As a longtime subscriber and a lover of black-and-white photography, I was thrilled when The Sun changed its cover to a full-page photograph. And now, back to back, you have chosen two cover photos that are among the finest portraits of human beings I have ever seen: the July photograph, by Gloria Baker Feinstein, of the young girl holding the bird; and the August photograph, by Ethan Hubbard, of the girl with her hand on the old man’s shoulder. I keep them propped up on my kitchen table side by side, so I can enjoy them together. The gaze of each subject is so open and unabashed as to raise the hair on the back of my neck.
I am an avid animal lover and have always wanted to adopt a few farm animals and let them run free, without the impending doom of the slaughterhouse. I came away from Ruth Foster’s “Death of a Milk Cow” [July 2000] with very mixed feelings. Her writing revealed how even an animal whose purpose is functional can touch the human heart and cause grief with its passing. I couldn’t help but feel horrified, however, that while Foster’s family was doting on their precious milk cow, they were routinely killing her calves and serving them at the dinner table.
I found Bill McKibben’s “Consuming Nature” [July 2000] intelligent, entertaining, and thought-provoking. What at first seemed to be just another story about grass-roots activism deepened into an exploration of the meaning of consumption: that any choice one can make is technically just another brand of consumption, but some choices lead to improved quality of life — and not just for ourselves, but for numerous species, for the earth itself.
Like McKibben, I live in challenging circumstances: the high altitude of my hometown means difficulty sleeping, snowstorms until June, bears in the garbage, hellish hail pummeling my annual excuse for a garden, and cold, cold, cold. But there are also unparalleled joys: breathtaking light and ever changing vistas, a lack of crowding and near absence of crime, the tender golden aspen against a surreal blue sky. One might say that McKibben’s flies are my altitude.
The close of McKibben’s story, while not conclusive, suggested hope that others will begin to make better choices as “consumers.” I was encouraged to find that unexpected numbers of his town’s inhabitants seemed headed in the direction of noninterference with nature, rather than immediate self-centered gratification.
Though I agree with Vine Deloria that the fate of our planet is in peril [“Where the Buffalo Go,” interview by Derrick Jensen, July 2000], I feel that it is simplistic and unfair to lay the blame on science and “Western ideology.”
Native Americans have a lot to be unhappy about. It doesn’t matter whether Deloria’s people migrated across a land bridge to get here or were here since the dawn of time: there’s no justification for genocide. But the mass slaughter of Native Americans happened because of greed and misuse of power, not science.
While science has certainly produced many horrors, it also has the potential to save lives. We no longer have to lose children to smallpox and scarlet fever, and most of us in this country can hope to live well into our seventies and eighties, something unheard of centuries ago.
It’s quite fashionable in these New Age days to blame left-brain thinking for all the woes of the world, but it seems to me that most of our problems are still due to the seven deadly sins — from which logic and analysis, the hallmarks of science, are conspicuously absent.
I was moved to tears by Vine Deloria’s graceful and confident description of the world. I am attending medical school in Seattle, and I have tried again and again to explain to new friends why I don’t feel like myself here. They understand that I miss my husband, but are puzzled when I say I miss myself. They know only this small, limited version of me, the part that fits on an airplane. The land where I normally live, the community of people and plants and animals there, the hot summers and the freezing winters are who I really am. Deloria has helped me remember this.
I was grateful to see the interview with Will Campbell in the May issue [“Radical Grace,” interview by Jeremy Lloyd]. As a left-leaning Christian, I often feel isolated from American culture. The mainstream media portray Christianity as if it were synonymous with fundamentalism and the Right. Alternative media seem either to ignore Christianity altogether or to denounce it. It is rare to hear anything about those of us who hold Christ dear while believing that the Christian Right has gotten it wrong — not just in its political agenda, but in its theology.
It was refreshing and gratifying to read an intelligent and respectful interview with Campbell. I read his Forty Acres and a Goat almost a decade ago as part of a college program. I am a Christian today because of that program, and Campbell’s books and ideas were a significant part of my rebirth.
Now I’m married with an infant son, and I struggle with what it means to be a Christian in new and different ways. Jeremy Lloyd’s interview reminded me of where my ground is.