What I've Missed Most is The Teaching.

Last Saturday, I conducted my nature writing workshop, Earth Words, at The Well—an eco-spirituality center near Chicago—for 10 interested writers, nature lovers, and those seeking to marry spirit and nature in their everyday lives.

We met for 2.5 hours in a bright, comfortable room adjacent to a lovely outdoor garden, though everyone agreed the time was too short, that they were just settling in—to the writing, to themselves—and then it was over.

A few days prior to our meeting, I’d prepared by reading and re-reading poems by Mary Oliver, essays by Barry Lopez and Leslie Marmon Silko, and excerpts from Kathleen Norris’s Dakota: A Spiritual Geography.  I thought about what writing exercises to use, what readings to bring along, how to connect the poems or stories to the writing and the students’ own experiences.

Then on that day, while in the room and actually teaching—guiding students in the writing exercises, inviting discussions of the readings—I realized yet again that it didn’t matter what I’d prepared or pre-thought about those 2.5 hours.   For out of the immediacy of the moment, and words read, written, and spoken, out of all of that came memories stirred and imagination ignited, discoveries made, thoughts and feelings more deeply understood.

This is what it is like for me to teach. 

I stumbled onto teaching by accident, almost 25 years ago, already middle-aged, a returning graduate student in English seeking refuge from a mind-numbing, soul-destroying job, intent upon reading—just reading—the best that had ever been written.   And then an offhand suggestion from a fellow graduate student, “Why don’t you apply for a teaching assistantship?”  Apparently having nothing better to do that day, I did, was accepted, and in 1987 began teaching my own classes in freshman comp at the same university.

I lasted four years.  I loved the teaching, and really loved teaching writing, infatuated with how it always took me places I never expected to go.  But I grew impatient with the indifference of most of the students, unhappy with the need to grade them.

Then in the summer of 1991, I picked up Richard Bolles’s What Color is Your Parachute?  and found buried in the appendix this by Frederick Buechner:  “The place God calls us to is the place where our deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”  

Though a card-carrying agnostic, those words changed everything for me, especially when I read “work” for “place.”  I knew I wanted my work to exist at the intersection of my gladness and what I thought many people hungered for—time to be creative; room to be imaginative; a place to tell their stories.   

It took awhile, but that’s the work I created over the next 20 years—writing workshops that served up the time, the room, and the place, and for adults of all backgrounds and ages.  How could I not be glad doing that?  How could I not be excited every time I rode the Red Line to the Newberry, or the metra to Barrington, or the big bus up to Madison? 

And then last year the recession, aka the "greatest economic downturn since the Great Depression."  Opportunities to do my work began to disappear.  Both institutions and individuals were—and many still are—in real economic distress, with discretionary spending taking an especially big hit.    

Woe are we.

But, as Robert Graves once said, there may be no money in poetry, but there’s certainly no poetry in money.  So while I could do the numbers and wince like everyone else, it wasn’t until last week, while in that place with those 10 people, the place Buechner so poetically described, that I realized that what I’ve missed most is the teaching.

Yes, I've missed going out to dinner more often, drinking the higher-end wines, visiting family in California and friends in New York.  I've missed buying whatever books and CDs strike my fancy.  I've missed all the little luxuries that make life so enjoyable.  But really what I've missed most is the teaching.