Maybe we could

 

As I add more flesh to the bones of my "religion of trees" book I'm refining my voice. The book isn't and doesn't aspire to be academic, but rather accessible to tree-curious people more broadly. Yet still get my claim on readers' trust, or aspire to, through experiences including academic experience. I'm trying to write like I've learned to teach.

The writers of many of the other tree books of recent years, where they are not professional arborists or tree scientists, claim our attention through exotic travel, tree climbing, interviews with famous and less famous tree protectors and cultivators, or deep dives into relationships with trees, either of long standing or intensively. These tree book people read each other and, to some extent, write for each other too. Yes, I'd love to be one of them! But I haven't done what they have.

What I bring is somewhat different. I've read their books, but I also read lots of other kinds of books - including religious studies books. As importantly, I'm finding, I have developed a way of teaching this material that is playful and interactive. The "Religion of Trees" class, you'll recall, is watered by a shared practice of drawing. I used this in an AAR presentation two years ago, too, to enthusiastic response. In the book I'm including about twenty drawing prompts, at suitable moments in the unfolding of the argument. Readers are invited to draw not in a separate notebook but in the book itself. This is the first one:

As you picture the Buddha beneath a tree, what kind of tree do you see? Try drawing it.  

A friend who's been reading the draft with me has been delighted to do each one, and I enjoy seeing his doodles and sketches in my binder of drafts. I love the thought that my book, if ever it gets published, will become a personally meaningful object to readers in this way. (In this I realize I'm drawing on something from very long ago, the way Rick Warren insisted that readers of The Purpose Driven Life write in the book to open a more personal and dynamic relationship with it.) 

Why we're drawing isn't explained. If pushed I'd say I've learned it's meaningful through doing it in class. I'd explain that it can be a way of helping grasp and absorb ideas, a way of slowing down, a way of switching gears, a way of activating a more visual or lateral thinking, a way of surfacing and connecting to the gifts and questions each of us brings. It's effective if done once and exponentially more when it becomes a practice. It's also fun! My hope is that the reader will enjoy the feeling of having fun together with me, not the archetypal professor experience.

I hope that these invitations resonate with a way of moving through material that is playful, exploratory, occasionally digressive, rewarded by unexpected discoveries more than knock-down-drag-out demonstrations, open-ended. What I seem to be good at is finding connections between things others haven't thought related, and making them in suggestive rather than didactic ways. I love finding value in multiple viewpoints. (At one point I've written: "It’s not my intention to correct and replace but to contextualize and complement.") 

All of this comes pretty easy, I'm finding, if I give myself permission. A little harder, or maybe just later in this process, is something else: speaking from my own experience, or constructively. Not just: people have had all these fascinating thoughts and experiences but I've had xyz experience or I think about things in this different way. It's not that I don't have experiences or opinions, but my Princeton religious studies training makes me leery of the claims to authority of first-personal experience. Also: who am I, what should it matter what I've found? My experiences with trees are pretty tame compared to those of some, including many of my students!

Still, it's coming to seem like a natural part of the voice which invites readers' participation and shared exploration of the experiences and traditions of others is sharing some of my own intimations and hopes. Never "so do this!" but some "maybe we could"? Or even, since I love providing new meanings and implications for received ideas, "maybe we are already..."

Work in progress

I've been back at school three times this week, for air conditioning and quiet as I wrestle with my squirrely "religion of trees" manuscript. 

But the place feels haunted. Who's still connected to this place? The details of our "total reorgani-zation" remain opaque, the energy of the community dispersed.

Calm between storms

Unguarded

Today was a good New School day. 

I had lunch with the TAs from the just-completed iteration of "After Religion" (in the dappled light of the courtyard maples, despite the barriers), happy to learn how the experience has been useful for them. Before and after that, I had zoom interviews with potential TAs for next year's iteration, and, wow, what a cavalcade of talent - and in areas entirely different from this year's two stars. It's exciting to think about how the course will be reshaped in consultation with a new crew. (Choosing just four of the ten I spoke to won't be easy.)

There's something more than usually bittersweet about perching between past and future at this end-of-the-schoolyear moment, since so much is uncertain about next year. Several of the potential TAs face the loss of an advisor or even their school. And who knows what world we'll be teaching in (if we're still there) in January 2027?! Scare quotes-framed though it is, it feels a little like cheating on the pain of the present moment to make even provisional plans for next year.

But I sure do hope The New School makes it through, and as much like the fabulous if flawed beast that it has been as possible. I felt that in the worlds of curiosity and commitment of these graduate students, and again when I rounded out my day with a visit to the senior show in the BFA Fine Arts program, which included work by two of the "After Religion" students. The array of gifts on display was overwhelming! 

This picture isn't from that show, but from one I found my way in accidentally: MFA Textiles. These works are (I think) part of a project of found materials called "Fibres of Thought" by one Vidushi Parashar, whose description includes the words:

In a world that's attracting us to the constant chatter and noise, this project focuses on the tender mutation that one goes through to release the feeling of overstimulation. ... The aim is to let each form ask people to loosen their grip. To soften. To laugh. To linger. To remember what it means to be unguarded. I am interested in what happens when we are disarmed by delight. When laughter opens the body. When something playful can hold something devastating. When wonder becomes a method of survival.

How much we give each other in this school...!!

Greening

The maples are winding up their tricolor stage

Moodboard

Some scenes from a nervous New School today: an undergraduate, receiving a prize for experimental poetry, reads a favorite very non-experimental poem; tulips under scaffolding seek the light; title slide for a talk by Amitav Ghosh at the New School for Social Research's first "Festival of Ideas"; courtyard maples nevertheless doing their thing.

Merry Christmas!

Curvaceous

First blush

Bud yet

Meanwhile, in yesterday's afternoon and today's morning's light... 

Cotton candy snow

Buds

Our new semester begins today. (My class starts tomorrow.) In the midst of uncertainties large and small, the show somehow goes on, for now.

Constructed environments

While the Lang courtyard enjoyed its last day before the new semester, I was in a place new to me - the "Sky Room" atop the Parsons building at 2 West 13th, booked by a Faculty Senate co-chair who teaches in Parsons' School of Constructed Environments. These spectacular vistas are to the southwest and northwest. You can't see the original New School buildings, home to the Lang courtyard maples, from here. 

Bare

 

 

 

 

A last look at the courtyard maples before the holidays take me westward. This year's leaves are long gone.

Visibilize-ing Care

As part of the Visibilize-ing Care Festival in the spring, I'll be doing something to mark the restoration of our relationships with the Lang Courtyard trees, once human access to them is restored. But today visibilized other efforts at care, and needs for more. 

The university leadership met online with the faculty of our college, answering various precirculated questions about the impending "voluntary" and likely subsequent "involuntary" departures of faculty and staff, and their effect on curriculum and student enrollment and retention. We didn't learn much. The administration isn't looking for new ideas. They think they've set in motion necessary and humane processes for reducing the workforce of the university in the face of enrollment decline. (The goal seems to be 10-15% of FTEs, however that falls out.) They emphasized that the "voluntary" stage was a way of showing respect and care for the community, maximizing "choice" and even generating new "opportunities," words that went down like lead. 

After they left the zoom room for another meeting, we faculty had some time to debrief. What are the options facing those deemed "eligible" for "voluntary" departure, how spooked are students by imminent changes and how spooked should they be, have we any leverage? It took some time for the spell cast by their budgetary logic to be broken. We're talking not just about people's careers but their livelihoods - families and health care - our lives. There must be other ways of addressing the budget crisis, one for which faculty and staff are not responsible, after all; why are these not being explored? 

The zoom grid, with more people than usual with their cameras on, felt like holding cells, but we could see each other. Someone had to leave and said "in case I'm not here next year, I love you all." This was someone offered early retirement. Others have other "choices," or none. A recently-hired part-time faculty member put it bluntly: "we need to be clear that a lot of us aren't going to be here next year." Sadness rose to anger and resolve. We're not letting this go down without a fight.

I was struck by how the administration's attempt to show care (they could have just let people go as some other places have, they explained, or fired everyone and let them reapply for their jobs, as others have) had backfired. As the deadlines approach for the "eligible" to opt into "voluntary" departure (Monday!), and then to accept or decline the specific offer made to them (2 weeks after that), and then for the administration to announce such "involuntary" departures as they deem necessary (starting January 2nd), we are a community stricken in ways we don't even know. (I know that I am less at risk than many others at this juncture.) The love flowing over the zoom barriers was palpable, tinged with fear and grief.

The convener of the March "Visibilize-ing Care" festival mentioned that some thought the anguish of university restructuring made this the wrong time for it, but others thought it only more valuable. My part of it, "Care of Trees," is inspired by the ways one of the "Religion of Trees" classes marked the passing of some of the Lang courtyard maples. Even as we mark the restoration of some relationships, we - whoever we are, for a lot of us aren't going to be there - will have to find ways to mourn the ruptures of others, too.

Wintry mix

Predictably, the Thanksgiving break was long enough for the courtyard maples to shed all their leaves. The ground will still glow red for a spell, but other color will have to wait until the red buds at the end of leafless branches let loose in the spring... Or so I thought, only to be surprised by cardinal (not in the photo)! 

Aflame

Fenced off

Makes a cool picture, though... 

Windfall

It's called "red maple" for the stems, not the leaves, dontcha know

Walled garden

 

Seen from above you almost don't notice the trees are now off limits