Who is to say that horse whisperers aren’t as big a deal as kindergarten teachers? Like making a difference. I have a hunch that that’s what I want for my legacy; “He made a difference.” I imagine some nice gentleman saying, “he did so and so and that made a difference.” It wouldn’t have been this way unless he had done that. Atilla the Hun made a difference. OK, let’s try, “He made it better.” Better for whom and how? And did they agree that it was better for them? And this better thing, temporary or lasting? A moment or generational? Everything is cultural, tied to the time and venue. How broad this difference?

Now, I am reasonably content taking actions, thinking about these things. Reasonably content? There’s a flow to the mind, a feeling of movement consistent with identity; I suppose that’s agency, the ability to act. To act; to participate, to relate, engage. Identity comes first; who am I? How did I get this way? What am I going to do about it? Whisper at horses or teach kindergarten? Choice, making a difference⎯choose your battles.

What is the life of the mind of a six year old girl who walks all day to fetch twenty pounds of water for her family in Sudan, fearful every step of the way of the janjaweed and rape? Certainly she makes a difference, and almost as certainly she has no choice in which battle to choose. Ah, relative to the situation in which one lives. Relativism, once you let a bit of it in it infects the whole. It’s all here, there, now, then, you, me, I teach kindergarten, you carry water.

I have been thinking a lot about this moment. The last chapter. What will I say? What will I conclude? I conclude that you just have to start somewhere, and then let the rest flow. The journey word, the journey line is where it’s all at, and George picked that word, didn’t he? He is as good a photographer as a writer, but perhaps even a better writer? You can judge that better than I. We started recording this project almost three years ago exactly, on May 21, 2007, when Ruby was just eight and a half months old, the same day as my brother-in-law and newest niece’s birthday. So much has happened along the journey from when George and I first crossed paths. I could write another book about the reflection on that meeting, and how I think we are off to take our own paths once again. I don’t know why I feel this way, but I do. The erratic change in season is one reason, the oncoming summer with all of its high and low pressures crashing. It’s gonna take a turn, but it’s for the better, not the worse. We all have to believe this, we all have to wish upon a star to make this true. Is Chaos Theory at the center of all this? Relativism, and emotional, spiritual relativism beyond the physical, beyond the e, m and c squared, to only c, isn’t that the derivative of the formula? 2c? Doesn’t the rest disappear when you differentiate it as we head towards infinity? I did take Calculus, twice I think, and that is the heart of change; Calculus is the study of change, isn’t it? Being able to get at the slope of a tangent line as it touches the circle. We can never ultimately measure the circle since the circumference is the diameter multiplied by pi, a number that never ends, ad infinitum. It all comes around, and I believe in the universal, cosmic connection between the written word and the physical world. That’s the first thing John wrote in his Gospel, what they could refer to as the Jewish Gospel. But, as the equation shows, it’s not about the mass, or the energy originally and eventually, it’s about the speed of light, it’s about the light, doublelight, twice the light, between two spirits. No matter who those two spirits are, they are two spirits, and when merged remain two still, but rays or particles or both of light that burst into the universe.

In physics we choose the representation in which our intuitions will be most useful in simplifying calculations.

That’s what it feels like at the beginning, of time perhaps, to merge with another being, to fall in love. Scariest goddamn thing I ever did, but I did it, and I survived. Keeps getting easier, the explosion is simmering, but it’s the goodstuff after that, after the explosion, when the matter cools, when we became the Earth, and each other’s lifesource. In the beginning, George’s search was external, in his achievements, in his property, in all those lonely alleyways and faces captured through his photographs; but then his search became internal (as he said almost any time I’ve heard him talk about the book), about when he was almost 40 (I am 40 in February), and he took another path, and it lead him in a whole other direction, to claim his self and his being as an artist, and here he is at 78, an artist, who is married to a very worthy woman (when he believed as a young man that no worthy woman would marry an artist, so became a physicist and professor to please his childhood sweetheart, though never asking her opinion before making such a pivotal turn). It can happen. Change gonna come, and like Snoop Dogg says quoting Sam Cook on John Legend’s album, you betta be ready for it. Change gonna come, nephew.

Maybe it’s a small shift, a polar switch, or maybe we’ll come into a little money? And then that’s an entirely other journey. Money. I’m pretty sure is what messes the whole thing up. Having more than another, thinking you’re more than another because of it. We made it up, this money thing. Made it all up so we didn’t have to have a tangible trade, we couldn’t have a trade we Jews, no one would trade materials with us, us Dirty Jews, so we found a way to be included somehow, through the money, but even Jesus said that money is for Caesar, not for the people, stop worshipping the Golden Cow, Moses said, and look where we are now. Takes humans millennia to learn, and learn for good, huh? None of us are worth worshipping, or all of us are, and I’ll take the all of us. There is a next stop, a differential in our spiritual beings, it’s just not about the material, it came last, easy come easy go. We use money to abuse, enslave, push down into the ground, more than we use it to lift up, to elevate, to coordinate, communicate, to make better. Let’s take the face off the paper and coin, and turn that silly S double slash symbol, or whatever it is, in any country, and turn it into a Peace symbol. C’mon Barack, whaddy think? Redeisgn the look of money. It’s not as if many of us use cash anymore. It’s all digits now. Easy come, easy go. No longer dungeons filled with gold and silver and myrrh.

Once you go relativist on one thing, say beauty, you’re trapped, you’ve got to go relativist on everything, absolutely everything. The only thing left that is absolute is relativism; there are no absolutes except that everything human is relative. Relative to our own beingness, our own experience, our own whatchamacallit thing called your mind; each more queer than the other. OK, the fact that we are each unique unto ourselves demands this absolute relativism. There are no universals, just uniquenesses.

Last Wednesday, George and I attended a reception on his behalf at the Flying Dog tasting room and then spoke at the magnificent Tattered Cover in downtown Denver on a dark and stormy night. Ruby jumped on my lap a few times during the discussion, and I had to step down from the platform because Moses was screaming behind the wall. My mom couldn’t settle him any longer. He’d been away from his mom for too long that day, almost four hours by then, and he needed me. These are the formative years, the ones that count, and I have to let my kids know they come first. These are the years that build their foundations. George is enjoying the spotlight. It’s where he should be now, living within a happy light. I don’t want to get in his way.

Collaborative cultures are not without their problems or limitations. Collaborative cultures can be bounded or restricted in nature with teachers focusing on rather safer activities of sharing resources, materials and ideas, or on planning units of study together in a rather workaday fashion, without reflecting on the value, purpose and consequences of what they do, or without challenging each other’s practices, perspectives and assumptions. Collaborative cultures can degenerate into comfortable and complacent cultures. Collegiality can be reduced to congeniality.

But in their most rigorous, robust forms, collaborative cultures can extend into joint work, mutual observation, and focused reflective inquiry in ways that extend practice critically, searching for better alternatives in the continuous quest for improvement. In these cases, collaborative cultures are not cozy, complacent and politically quiescent.

Collaboration should be an articulating and integrating principle of action, planning, culture, development, organization and research. Collaboration is a productive response to a world in which problems are unpredictable, solutions are unclear, and demands and expectations are intensifying.

Besides, I’m pretty sure George doesn’t want to pay me anymore for our artistic collaboration, and I get it. We both weren’t raised with the healthiest attitudes about money: that he wasn’t worth indulging on; that I should fear it wouldn’t be there one day and then what?; that the recipient perpetually owes the giver; that money is dirty and authoritative.

Charity comes from the words caring and love, for what evolution demands us to do evolution must provide us some psychological reward in return. Just as evolution demands procreation and provides a gratification as incentive, evolution demands charity and provides a feel-good to go with it; not that everyone develops a taste for it.

Giving and getting means that someone who has shares it with someone who does not have it, whatever it is. The dictionary meaning defines charity as “The provision of help or relief to the poor,” and, “Something that is given to help the needy;” when used in that sense it implies a top dog/bottom dog relationship; “I have a surplus and you are needy.” Famine relief is an extreme of this kind of charity. The dictionary also defines charity as “An act or feeling of benevolence, good will, or affection.” The relationships between giver and getter should be different from the one meaning to the other.

There is an unequal power relationship between the giver and the needy. The giver has the power either to give or not to give; the getter has only the power to ask, not demand. Such unequal power relationships, unless there is established trust, bring a multitude of bad feelings: fear that nothing will be given, shame at being needy, anger at feeling trapped into a situation of neediness. There may be gratitude, and it may be a sullen one at that. This power relationship contaminates in this way whether or not the giver has feelings of “benevolence, good will, or affection.”

Suppose the acts of benevolence, good will, or affection are more significant, impinging even upon the path of life? Suppose there is no chance of equaling out in countable terms? Suppose there’s unequal power between giver and getter? Is it possible to equal out in total satisfaction; for the giver to get as much as the getter, the getter to give as much as the giver? Sure, and it’s not easy. The tricks include:

• The nominal giver and nominal getter must have a commitment to a common cause or vision.
• There must be equal commitment to the cause or vision.
• The nominal getter must not feel needy.
• The nominal giver must not feel that the nominal getter is needy.
• The nominal giver must not feel special privilege, only participation.
• Acceptance of “give according to your ability to give.”
• Judgment and blame dealt with emotional honesty.
• Attention must be paid to what satisfies the nominal giver, what satisfies the nominal getter.
• Attention that satisfaction is delivered all around.
• Communication, Reflection, and Celebration

If attention is not paid to leveling the satisfaction field the relationship will become giver and taker and will not last long unless the giver is a sicko.

Maybe we’ll sell enough books one day for me to enjoy further compensation? In any case, this is my parting from this project, from these telltale essays, otherwise they would never end. I need to breathe, reevaluate, return to these ideas with some reflection from a moved position. No telling how long that will take. People’s Press is on its way too, learning from its mistakes, winning awards, accumulating new titles and staff. George is contemplating a book about education. Who knows? Maybe one day there will be George Stranahan schools, the way there are Rudolph Steiner (Waldorf), Maria Montessori and Reggio Emilio schools? I do believe there are different philosophies of teaching and learning that work for different kinds of children. We should not assume a single philosophy that benefits all people, or that one is superior to another. We are blessed in our little community to have access to many different styles, including the four mentioned above. Why shouldn’t all other communities enjoy the same privilege?

Most, if not all, of us have placed ourselves in a role of authority in an organization that has adopted a romantic, rather than merely a liberal, philosophy. What will these romantic authorities think and do? By what measures are we to be held accountable for this behavior? Who will show us, tell us?

It is only to the extent that we shed authoritarian power that we can give to others author power, the power to create, originate, influence and be experts. Thus one measure might be “How much power have I successfully given to others?” Although power with is not a zero sum entity, the power given is reflected in the authority received. Actually, I suppose authority cannot really be given away, it can be shared with others thus creating a larger total of authority.

George helped to give me a voice and a place in the community, and how do you really thank someone enough for that? You can’t, but I have tried. I can’t say for sure what it is I gave to George. He will have to tell you that. What he should know, though, is that an expressed “thank you,” uttering those two simple words directly, means more than any indirect appreciation that one needs to interpret; and that the exchange of money is only that, and should be nothing more. One can still love and act freely within a commercial framework if the intention and integrity are truthful. And that is what art is – a chipping away, a digging for, a clawing at, a revelation of the truth in whichever medium you manipulate, in whatever fashion you struggle to get there. I gained significant confidence as an artist through the publication of “Phlogs,” and now I wonder how the trajectory of my self’s journey will propel, or be propelled, into the unknown. I hope to see you there, too, where our paths may continue to cross.

Let’s imagine that hope makes things different. Hope⎯things could get better if I hang in and hang on.

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