…you must
Be the thing you see.
— from “To Look at Any Thing,” by John Moffett
Scholastic book order day in Mrs. Rader’s sixth-grade English class was my favorite. Once, I thumbed through the newsprint leaflet and selected a poetry anthology called Reflections on a Gift of Watermelon Pickle.
When I became an English teacher, I got my hands on the bright yellow hardback edition that’s sitting here beside me as I write. I’ve read it so often, the binding is creased, and the book opens automatically to John Moffit’s poem, “To Look at Any Thing.”
I assigned this poem for the first time to an eighth-grade class of sullen farm boys, doomed to summer school. I don’t remember their reaction, but I’m sure I read the poem aloud, earnestly, as I have every single year to high school, undergraduate, and graduate students; teachers in professional development workshops; and the occasional heartsick friend. Like a slippery trout, the poem makes its way back through fast-moving waters to be caught and released again and again.
There will never be a year of teaching–or a day in my life–when I do not need to “enter in / To the small silences between / The leaves /…And touch the very peace / They issue from.”
Yet every time I read this poem, it catches me by surprise. I stop barreling through my life long enough to pause and look out the window. I breathe. I wonder what the thing is that I must be.
Cindy O’Donnell-Allen
When I was 17, my high school English teacher told me I was a writer. He knew I would be a teacher before I did. Now, I’m a professor in the English Department at Colorado State University (CSU), where I also direct the CSU Writing Project. I was a high school English teacher for eleven heartbreakingly and gloriously unpredictable years.
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I read The PIague when I was a junior at Notre Dame, in 1978. I’d been given an assignment to write a paper about the book but had confused deadlines, and I realized at about 6 p.m. one evening that the paper was due at 9 a.m. the next morning – and I hadn’t read a page, had no idea what it was about.
Monks and holy guides of many different faiths agree that each person has their own “grace.” As Thomas Merton writes, “And each way is a grace, a special way is a special grace.”
On the mantel above my fireplace sits a representation of Quan Yin. I keep her there where I can always see her, because she embodies my intention and my spiritual practice as a human being and as a writer.
I lived in my suburban townhouse for nine years before I set foot inside a neighbor’s house. I knew their names and enough for a few minutes of small talk, but after that it felt safer to hurry back inside…
