To Learn and Grow

At the Minnetonka Center for the Arts this week, I taught my first Making Photographs class. It did not go as I expected it would. Each of the students was looking for something different from the class than I anticipated. It was a good lesson in remaining open. After pondering how the class went I realized that this is an opportunity for me

To Learn and Grow

as a person as well as a photographer.

Learning and growth are not always comfortable.

I am relishing the opportunity to use all of my skills in exploring how to move this disparate group of photographers along in the unique direction each wants to go. But right now teaching doesn’t always feel comfortable. I think that I need to slow down and not feel like I need to fill all of the empty space in the class with a definite plan or an answer or an activity.

I need to ask more questions, explore more, and trust that I don’t have to have “answers.” Far better to ask good questions that elicit growth and learning. I am putting together a plan for next week’s class. Most likely some question or idea from one of the class participants will derail that plan. That’s okay.

Just breathe. Ten tiny breaths … Seize them. Feel them. Love them.
― K.A. Tucker, Ten Tiny Breaths

My promise to myself is to pause and breathe, just breathe, each time I think that I need to have an answer or to fill the silence.

And for all of you who might also be feeling stress in today’s world, here’s a poem by Mary Oliver.

Wage Peace

Wage peace with your breath.
Breathe in firemen and rubble,
breathe out whole buildings and flocks of red wing blackbirds.
Breathe in terrorists and breathe out sleeping children and fresh mown
fields.

Breathe in confusion and breathe out maple trees.
Breathe in the fallen and breathe out lifelong friendships intact.
Wage peace with your listening: hearing sirens, pray loud.
Remember your tools: flower seeds, clothes pins, clean rivers.
Make soup.

Play music, learn the word for thank you in three languages.
Learn to knit, and make a hat.
Think of chaos as dancing raspberries,
imagine grief as the outbreath of beauty or the gesture of fish.
Swim for the other side.
Wage peace.

Never has the world seemed so fresh and precious.
Have a cup of tea and rejoice.
Act as if armistice has already arrived.
Don’t wait another minute.

   – Mary Oliver

May you walk in beauty.

Note: I made the photos in today’s post during a 15 minute walk-about with camera at the Minnetonka Center for the Arts. I sent my class and myself out to make photos of whatever we saw that interested us. It was amazing to see what a different point of view each of us had when we came back and shared our photos.