The More You Look- The More You SEE...

It has been a double-edged sword couple of days.  I’ve been filling in at one of our local high schools.  When an administrator is out sick, they bring in a replacement so that someone can come down and help in the office, so I cover that teacher’s classes, but then I am also available to cover other classes for emergencies, relief etc.  I have been a variety of people and covered an interesting mix of subjects this week, but some of the classes broke my heart.

It is hard for me to see kids who are turned off school.  Some of them have dropped out several times, skip school, smoke drugs and have a variety of learning disabilities that truly stack the deck against them.  I tried to teach one group of 17 English this week with no lesson plan since the movie they were supposed to watch got misplaced.  Ouch!  We tried all kinds of creative things with words and short sentences, but it was like pulling teeth and dodging bullets at the same time.  I came home yesterday feeling very bruised creatively at the dullness I saw behind so many sets of eyes.

But the more I keep looking for unusual ways Creativity can sneak into our lives, the more I find.  I didn’t have my camera at school today, but when I left, there was this band of dark, steel blue across the sky as the heavens opened up on the hill, but not down in town.  The lighting was odd and dramatic.  When I drove up past Magnetic Hill to get Nick, the rain was pouring down in sheets, but by the time we came down 10 minutes later, there was a huge rainbow arcing across the city from end to end against vivid fall coloured trees.  It was so amazingly beautiful that it took my breath away.

INHALE:  There is plenty of ugly to look at in our world... on the news, in dark alleys, under rocks, behind facades and in the futures of some children.  Sometimes when we don’t like what we see, we just have to look at things a different way.  Other times, we have to go looking for beauty and possibilities in other things to change the afterimage on our retinas to something else.  The trickiest part is to know when to look away and when to look more intently.

EXHALE:  There are faces and odd shapes in more than just peppers and patterns.  What do you see in the tree at the beginning of this blog?  A wise wizard? A scary monster?  Grab your digital camera and go hunting for some neat twisted or unusual shape out there to capture for your scrapbook.  Take some time to really LOOK at the small stuff, the odd stuff and recharge your batteries after the work week.