the classroom

The completion of the night brings the beginning, this day of salt water and coral stones. The ocean in southern Quintana Roo with its turquoise waters. Not many photographs taken here with a camera. Instead, I've been absorbing the elements of water, earth, air, fire, embodying the reflection of these things. Who are you really? They ask. And then they say, Just listen. Touch us and listen.

With the waves twenty yards from my cabana, with the brackish bath water from the tarnished spigot, I am unable to separate myself from the ocean. From salt. Neruda's words come to the room:

Water
Everything on earth bristled, the bramble
pricked and the green thread
bit, the petal fell
until the only flower was the falling.
Water is different,
has no direction but beauty,
runs through all dreams of color,
takes bright lessons
from the rock
and in those occupations
works out
the unbroken duties of the foam.



And the earth here is familiar, as though I have lived with the snakes and big cats of this place. As though my body could return to this dirt, beneath these trees. As though I may grow here as a tiny shoot of rosewood after the carbon cycle has turned me out into life again, someday.



From the top of this temple the wind comes without judgment, comes true to nature, mine, yours. Nothing to be embarrassed about, ever. Do you remember that what you wish for is already yours? That's what the wind says. Go where your love goes. Follow what you desire most. Who calls and who responds? I hear myself. I hear the wind. I hear myself.



And the sun, sculptor of every detail here on Earth.

A leaf falls from this tree, yellowed, lizard green. Speckled like a star chart. When the leaf speaks, she says, You too are like a galaxy, alive, pulsing.

What rifts I created in myself at times in my life, pretending I wasn't a daughter of all this. The nonsense of school curriculum.

But here I am. I smuggled all the wisdom of these elements into classrooms as a school girl, everyday. I felt disorderly with them speaking in me, opening my mouth in class after rehearsing the right thing to say, and out bursts these angular eruption of fire, stone sparks, water gushing, the raw and beautiful turbulence of the air nestling my speech.

I have never been anything but these things.

So here I am, in my true classroom without embarrassment. Full. Fertile in this knowing.

Say anything now, say anything.