Reflecting Higher Powers

"Reflecting Higher Powers"

In just one week of blogging, I've discovered that I am replacing my face-front classroom, full of needy students, for another teacher's podium called CenterDoug, with vastly expanded audience, random access, intuitive connections, and, best of all, the magical ability to take back or erase or even beautify my chosen words rather than having to live up to and sometimes eat whole my more frivolous or poorly-timed words. I can edit what couldn't be edited in class.

Not, of course, that I've made that many treacherous faux pas, but, in one of my more notorious stumbles, I mentioned in a writing class that a former federal executive "who overlooked the Contra War, somehow, with his Beltway Bubble blinders on, should be, as Nicaraguan campesinos are, stolen from his big-pillared house back East in the middle of the night, then, forced to watch his body slowly being flayed by Ollie North's torturers in Honduras. This did not sit at all well with a few of my more-Colorado-Conservative-albeit-unconscious-18 year-old writers or their gnarly local grandparents, in 1987: it infuriated a top-honcho-FTE-jockey at my school, who probably summoned the spector of federal intelligence officers into my life at a time when, while not a rabid revolutionary by any means, I did wear Sandinista-red-and-black-Insurrection outfits to teach in, bearded and long-haired, every day, in support of their emerging democracy.

Comical, in the extreme, I was: at that time, my standard college teaching garb was a black-based Mickey Mouse sweatshirt from The Disney Store; a pair of black, overworn sweatpants--still wear 'em, as a matter of fact--stuffed in the tops of greatly-loved--discarded-by-a-neighbor--calf-high-riding boots, all cinched by a neckerchief of bright red bandanna below a radiant grin.

Ay-yi-yi! I guess I've mellowed.

Now, I just wear inflammatory buttons on my teaching overalls, distinguish myself with jester's caps of all kinds--my chappeaux--and have re-focused my life on BEING, first, then celebrating my life-long, active participation in the ongoing discovery of increasingly precious global solutions, from my ground on up, from my insides, looking out. Why rail against the incomprehensible? Just adds more anger to an already-way-too-angry world. I opt for joy, gracias a Dios, reflecting higher powers.

Gracias, CenterDoug