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The Institute

PHAT Buns - Dogs N More

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Monarch: Legacy of Monsters Season 2

On Her Majesty’s Secret Service

Still Life with Silver Jug, Quail’s Eggs, and Three Strawberries (2021)

The silver jug unsettles me more this week than the strawberries console me.

At first glance, the painting appears serene: three strawberries resting in ripeness, quail’s eggs sealed in potential, porcelain bowl luminous against darkness. But the true center is the jug. Its convex surface gathers the room into itself and bends it. The window fractures into geometry. The table elongates. The artist stands within it present, yet warped.

It is a faithful distortion.

What I cannot ignore is that the reflection is not false. The artist truly stands there. The room truly exists. The light truly falls as rendered. The jug does not invent; it refracts. The curvature belongs to the vessel, not the subject.

This has been my experience of the past weeks.

Applications compress decades into bullet points. Cover letters flatten vocation into paragraphs. Interviews reduce narrative identity to timed responses beneath fluorescent light. Then comes the emails:  measured, procedural, final. “Not the right fit.” “Lacking experience.” “Overqualified.” “Too negative.” The language is precise, almost polished. It carries institutional authority. It feels like truth.

It feels like looking at myself in a funhouse mirror.

The temptation is to dismiss the distortion entirely, to insist that they do not see me. But relational existence does not allow that luxury. We do not construct identity in isolation. Charles Horton Cooley described the self as emerging through the “looking-glass” of others’ perceptions. George Herbert Mead deepened this claim: we become who we are by taking the role of the other toward ourselves. Even Hegel insisted that recognition is necessary for self-conscious freedom. To be seen is to be formed and informed.

If multiple rooms read my candor as negativity, that perception carries weight. Social reality is co-constructed. Perception shapes opportunity. It opens or closes doors. In that sense, perception creates reality not metaphysically, but institutionally.

The jug’s reflection matters.

But it is not total.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty reminds us that perception is always situated. Every vantage point is embodied and partial. The jug curves because of its structure. The hiring committee sees through its own structure: time constraints, internal politics, risk aversion, cultural preference for optimism over complexity. They encounter not my life but my presentation within their frame.

The distortion, then, is neither pure illusion nor ultimate truth. It is relationally conditioned truth.

This is the more difficult position to inhabit. It requires humility without collapse. It requires asking: What in my presentation produces this reading? Where might honesty harden into severity? Where does intellectual seriousness and critical positionality register as negativity? These questions are not self-erasure; they are acts of refinement.

And yet there remains something irreducible.

The strawberries in Brown’s painting are not reflective surfaces. They do not mediate the room. They receive light and hold their form. Their redness is unapologetic, saturated, immediate. They will bruise. They will decay. But in this moment, they are fully themselves.

Paul Ricoeur distinguishes between idem identity, sameness that can be described, measured, evaluated, and ipse identity, the deeper narrative selfhood that persists across change. Institutions judge the former. They assess competencies, experience, fit. But the latter—my continuity as teacher, builder of programs, companion to students navigating loss and redemption—cannot be exhausted by evaluative language.

Rejection threatens narrative coherence. It introduces fracture. I begin to wonder whether the distorted image is more authoritative than my lived history. The mind is quick to internalize the curve. If enough reflections bend in the same direction, one begins to feel permanently warped.

But the painting resists that conclusion. The distortion is visible precisely because the surrounding objects are rendered with clarity. We can trace the curvature. We can see the physics of it. The artist paints herself within the jug not to correct the distortion, but to acknowledge it. She stands there, small yet undeniable.

Perhaps this season is less about advancement and more about recognition in its most difficult form: misrecognition. Hegel argued that recognition unfolds through struggle. It is not immediate or symmetrical. It emerges dialectically, through conflict and revision. To be misunderstood is not to be erased; it is to be caught within process.

The deeper question presses harder: Is my vocation dependent upon being accurately perceived? Or can it persist even when refracted? If leadership is an extension of who I am, then it must be durable enough to survive temporary misalignment between perception and essence.

The jug reflects according to its form. I present according to mine. Institutions evaluate according to theirs. Reality is forged through encounter.

I cannot deny that others’ perceptions contain some truth. They reveal how I land in particular rooms. They shape what becomes possible. But they do not define the entirety of my being. They are angles, not absolutes.

The strawberries still glow.

Their ripeness is not contingent upon approval. They exist fully under light, aware of perishability yet unbent by reflection. Perhaps that is the discipline before me: not to reject the curve, not to internalize it uncritically, but to hold steady in the light that reveals both distortion and integrity.

I am, in part, who others see.

I am also more than any surface can contain.

Age

Age

By Jim Croce and Ingrid Croce

I′ve been up and down and around and 'round and back again

Been so many places I can′t remember where or when

And my only boss was the clock on the wall and my only friend

Never really was a friend at all

I've traded love for pennies, sold my soul for less

Lost my ideals in that long tunnel of time

And I've turned inside out and around about and back and then

Found myself right back where I started again

Once I had myself a million, now I′ve only got a dime

Difference don′t seem quite as bad today

With a nickel or a million, I was searching all the time

For something that I never lost or left behind

Well I've traded love for pennies, sold my soul for less

Lost my ideals in that long tunnel of time

And I′ve turned inside out and around about and back and then

Found myself right back where I started again

Well now I'm in my second circle and I′m headin' for the top

I′ve learned a lot of things along the way

I'll be careful while I'm climbin′ ′cause it hurts a lot to drop

When you're down nobody gives a damn anyway

But I′ve traded love for pennies, sold my soul for less

Lost my ideals in that long tunnel of time

I've turned inside out and around about and back and then

Found myself right back where I started again

Samaras (aka Helicopter Pod) and Bee

Never Flinch

The Bodyguard

First Flowers of 2026

The Prisoner (1878)

There is something about this painting that feels distinctly middle-aged.

Not in the body of the prisoner, though he is no longer young. It is in the atmosphere. The cell does not feel like a place of sudden catastrophe. It feels accumulated. The bed is worn. The walls are settled. The light enters as though it has done so for years. This is not the drama of a life just derailed. It is the quiet recognition of a life that has, brick by brick, enclosed itself.

What unsettles me is the realization that many of the prisons I inhabit were not imposed. I fashioned them. I set the bars. I laid the mortar. Not maliciously. Not even consciously. Each brick felt prudent at the time.

In youth, the walls are often external: expectations, ambitions, ideals inherited from others. In middle age, the walls are curated. They are the cumulative effect of decisions, fears, loyalties, and compromises. I told myself certain stories because they were stabilizing. I narrowed possibility because expansiveness felt irresponsible. I defined myself in particular ways because definition brings relief.

Erik Erikson described middle adulthood as a tension between generativity and stagnation. That binary feels too simple. What I experience is subtler: the tension between expansion and enclosure. There is a temptation to settle into what has already been constructed. To say, This is the shape of my life now. There is safety in architecture that has stood for years.

Yet safety can become confinement.

The psychological prisons of this season are less about shame and more about direction. I do not wake up haunted by inadequacy as I once did. Instead, I am confronted by a different question: Is this it? That question can become its own cell. It can paralyze rather than provoke. If I cannot see a clear horizon, I may decide not to move at all.

Here the mind engages in a sophisticated form of self-limitation. Catastrophic thinking tells me that deviation would dismantle what stability I have built. Fixed mindset whispers that reinvention belongs to the young. Learned helplessness, accumulated subtly over years of deferred hopes, suggests that large change is improbable. None of these thoughts feel dramatic. They feel reasonable.

That is what makes them dangerous.

Jean-Paul Sartre described “bad faith” as the denial of one’s own freedom. In middle age, bad faith rarely appears as reckless avoidance. It appears as mature resignation. I call it wisdom when it may, in fact, be fear. I tell myself that contentment means desiring nothing beyond the present configuration. I spiritualize smallness.

The painting does not show a young revolutionary rattling the bars. It shows a man who has likely lived long enough to know the weight of them. The bed behind him suggests fatigue. The bucket suggests bodily reality. The cell is not theoretical; it is inhabited.

And yet, he is standing.

That is what unsettles me most. He is not lying down in quiet surrender. He is not pacing in agitation. He is leaning. The movement is small but deliberate. The window is high, requiring effort. The light is thin, requiring attention. Hope here is not exuberance. It is strain.

C. R. Snyder defines hope as agency coupled with pathways. That is, the belief that one can act and that routes forward exist. In middle age, the challenge is often not despair but narrowing imagination. The pathways seem fewer. The costs of change seem greater. The stakes feel heavier because the architecture has been lived in for so long.

But the painting reminds me that even long-standing walls do not determine posture.

The prisons of this season are cumulative narratives: You have already chosen. You are too far in. It would be irresponsible to want differently. Each of these sentences feels adult. Each of them reinforces enclosure. Yet none of them are iron bars. They are interpretations.

Paul Ricoeur argues that identity is narratively constructed; we live storied lives. If that is true, then middle age is not the end of authorship. It is simply a later chapter. The danger lies in mistaking the current plotline for the final draft.

I see in Yaroshenko’s prisoner a man who could have decided that the story was finished. The bed is there for that decision. The walls would support it. The darkness would accommodate it. Instead, he refuses narrative closure. He angles his body toward what little light is available.

That is where I locate hope. It is not in the demolition of the cell, but in the refusal to let it become definitive.

The bars I have set may remain. The bricks I have laid cannot be undone without cost. But the meaning of the structure is not fixed. A cell can become a chapel. A confinement can become a site of reorientation. The difference lies in the gaze.

Middle age is not a single prison. It is a crossroads within architecture already built. The question is not whether walls exist. They do. The question is whether I will lie back upon the bed of what has been constructed, or whether I will rise, again, and lean toward whatever narrow aperture of possibility still admits light.

The painting does not promise escape. It offers movement within limitation.

And perhaps, at this stage of life, that is the more honest form of hope.

They Were Expendable

On Bad Days

Dear journal, 

Some days arrive and leave a residue that lingers long after the sun has gone down. Today was one of those days. Nothing catastrophic. Nothing dramatic enough to name. Just a quiet accumulation of disappointments, of small fractures that, together, felt heavier than they should.

There is a peculiar humility in a day that does not go as planned. It reminds me that effort does not guarantee outcome, that intention does not ensure reception, that hope sometimes collides with reality in ways that bruise rather than break. And yet, perhaps that is precisely the point. If every day unfolded according to design, I would lose my capacity for gratitude. Ease would become invisible. Success would feel deserved rather than gifted.

It takes a difficult day to recalibrate the senses.

On good days, I move easily. Conversations flow. Work feels purposeful. There is a quiet hum beneath everything. A quiet sense that I am aligned with the rhythm of my own life. But on days like today, that rhythm stutters. I second-guess. I replay. I wonder if or how I misstepped, misspoke, misunderstood. Reflection, on such days, can tilt toward rumination if I am not careful.

The discipline, then, is not merely to reflect, but to reflect well.

Good reflection is neither self-indictment nor self-exoneration. It is inquiry without cruelty. It asks: What can be learned here? What was within my control? What was not? Where did I act with integrity? Where might I grow? The value of a hard day is that it strips away illusion. It exposes expectations I did not realize I was carrying. It reveals how deeply I wanted something. Disappointment is often the measure of desire.

And perhaps that is not a weakness.

One of the quiet consolations of today has been the steady presence of others. A message. A conversation. A small check-in that required no explanation. Support does not erase disappointment, but it contextualizes it. It reminds me that my worth is not suspended on the outcome of a single day or decision. That I am seen in more dimensions than the one that faltered.

There is something profoundly stabilizing about that.

I think of how easy it is to mistake productivity for identity or achievement for value. On days when things go well, I am tempted to internalize success as confirmation. On days when they do not, I am tempted to internalize disappointment as correction. Both are distortions. The truth likely resides somewhere steadier, somewhere beneath the fluctuations.

Bad days carve space for that steadiness.

They teach appreciation by contrast. They teach empathy by experience. They teach patience by necessity. A life composed only of victories would be thin, indeed. It would lack texture. The hard edges of a day like today give shape to gratitude. They make the next unburdened morning feel like grace rather than a routine.

I do not need to name what happened. It is enough to acknowledge that it mattered to me. That I cared. That I hoped. That I felt the sting when hope bent toward failure. Caring is still a strength, even when it hurts.

Tonight, I am choosing to see this day not as evidence of inadequacy but as part of a larger rhythm. Some days rise; some days recede. The tide is not a verdict. It is the natural movement of the water.

And movement means I am still in the game.

Tomorrow will come, unburdened by today’s narrative. I will carry the lessons forward but leave the weight behind. I will remember the voices that steadied me. I will allow disappointments to refine rather than define.

It takes bad days to teach the sweetness of good ones.

If that is true, then even this day has given me something worth keeping.

Always, 

Dave

El Olvido

El Olvido
By Judith Ortiz Cofer

It is a dangerous thing
to forget the climate of your birthplace,
to choke out the voices of dead relatives
when in dreams they call you
by your secret name.
It is dangerous
to spurn the clothes you were born to wear
for the sake of fashion; dangerous
to use weapons and sharp instruments
you are not familiar with; dangerous
to disdain the plaster saints
before which your mother kneels
praying with embarrassing fervor
that you survive in the place you have chosen to live:
a bare, cold room with no pictures on the walls,
a forgetting place where she fears you will die
of loneliness and exposure.
Jesús, María, y José, she says,
el olvido is a dangerous thing.

Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes

 

The Yellow Footprints and the Diploma

The Yellow Footprints and the Diploma

On formation, technology, democracy, and the meaning of graduation

It has become almost reflexive to say that education is in crisis.

Test scores dip and the crisis deepens. Graduation rates rise and the crisis shifts form. Special Education budgets expand and the crisis becomes fiscal. Technology proliferates and the crisis becomes cognitive. Political debates intensify and the crisis becomes ideological.

We seem unable to speak about public education without invoking emergency.

The language of crisis has power. It mobilizes reform and attracts attention. But it also flattens complexity. It reduces institutions to metrics. It tempts us toward dramatic solutions for problems that are structural, slow, and philosophical.

And yet, when I stood on the yellow footprints at Marine Corps Recruit Depot San Diego, I felt something entirely different from crisis. I felt clarity.

The yellow footprints are painted on the pavement where recruits first stand at attention. They are instructed not to move. They are instructed to listen. In that moment, civilians begin the transformation into Marines. The shift is not toward specialization but toward formation. Discipline, accountability, shared identity. These are not electives. They are foundational.

Boot camp is not about producing pilots or mechanics. It is about producing a basic Marine.

I left that experience asking a question that has grown more urgent with time:

What is the equivalent in public education?
What is our yellow footprint?

Graduation and Metric Drift

Graduation attainment continues to rise across the country. At the same time, standardized assessments show declines in reading and mathematics. Commentators warn of generational cognitive erosion. Some parents withdraw into homeschooling. Others advocate a return to “basics.” Legislators question the cost and legitimacy of Special Education. Technology becomes both culprit and cure.

The conclusion many draw is blunt: standards have fallen. The diploma has been inflated.

Perhaps.

But it may also be that we have lost clarity about what the diploma signifies.

Graduation measures completion of institutional requirements. Standardized assessments measure performance within specific frameworks. Neither captures the deeper question: What transformation is high school designed to produce?

When that question is unclear, every fluctuation becomes evidence of collapse.

Hannah Arendt once wrote, “The aim of education is not to make them experts but to prepare them for the task of renewing a common world.” If we cannot articulate the world we expect our graduates to renew, then no metric will stabilize public trust.

Portraits Without Architecture

In response to this uncertainty, many districts have adopted “Portrait of a Graduate” frameworks emphasizing traits such as integrity, collaboration, grit, communication, and problem-solving. These are admirable goals. They resist the reduction of schooling to test preparation and signal that character matters.

But portraits name dispositions. They do not describe intellectual architecture.

Communication is admirable, but communication of what?
Problem-solving is valuable, but grounded in what habits of reasoning?

If we do not define the intellectual scaffolding beneath these virtues, they risk becoming slogans.

A society can affirm collaboration while neglecting logic. It can praise grit while ignoring clarity of thought. It can celebrate communication while eroding grammar.

Virtue without structure becomes sentiment.

Education for Freedom

My own intellectual commitments lean toward a classical liberal arts model, not from nostalgia, but from conviction.

The purpose of education is to be educated.

Not merely trained.
Not merely credentialed.
Educated.

The Trivium—grammar, logic, rhetoric—was designed to cultivate disciplined thought. Grammar disciplined attention to language. Logic cultivated coherence and non-contradiction. Rhetoric trained persuasive clarity anchored in truth rather than manipulation.

The Quadrivium extended that formation into numerical and structural reasoning.

These were not career tracks. They were foundations for intellectual freedom.

John Dewey warned that when education becomes subordinate to narrow economic ends, “we are likely to conceive of it as a means of procuring a livelihood rather than as a means of life.” A democracy cannot afford that narrowing.

A free society requires citizens capable of reading complex arguments, evaluating evidence, understanding constitutional structure, interpreting both qualitative and quantitative claims, and recognizing rhetorical manipulation.

These are not workforce competencies. They are civic foundations.

If the diploma does not signify some version of this formation, it risks becoming procedural rather than transformational.

Technology and the Illusion of Repair

In the midst of this confusion, technology has become both scapegoat and savior.

Some argue that smartphones and laptops have hollowed out attention. That constant notification and digital fragmentation have eroded deep reading and sustained thought. The proposed remedy is simple: return to pencil and paper. Restore blue books. Assign physical texts. Remove screens.

There is wisdom here.

Nicholas Carr, in The Shallows, observed that “what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation.” Attention is not infinite. It must be cultivated.

Even the presence of a smartphone, silent and unused, can diminish cognitive capacity. The device need not ring to exert influence. It invites possibility. It fragments focus.

But returning to paper alone will not restore formation.

Marshall McLuhan warned that “we shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.” Technology shapes habits, but habits are guided by purpose.

If education is unclear about what intellectual habits it seeks to cultivate, removing devices will not restore depth. It will merely change the medium of distraction.

The question is not paper versus screen.

The question is whether we are forming minds capable of sustained thought at all.

Technology magnifies confusion. It does not create it.

Formation, Participation, and Democratic Honesty

A classical ideal confronts a democratic reality: not every student will reach intellectual formation in identical form.

Special Education forces us to acknowledge variance: cognitive, neurological, and developmental. Some students, even with extraordinary support, will not independently master abstract reasoning or complex texts.

To say this is not to diminish their worth. It is to describe the world honestly.

The moral temptation in democratic systems is to blur this distinction. When outcomes diverge, institutions quietly redefine success. Graduation rates rise. Language softens. Legitimacy erodes.

Perhaps the answer is differentiation of purpose without differentiation of dignity.

For some students, education centers on intellectual formation toward independence. For others, it centers on supported participation: communication, practical reasoning, social regulation, civic belonging within assistance structures.

Inclusion cannot mean pretending that thresholds do not exist. But thresholds must not become gates that deny worth.

A democracy cannot adopt the exclusivity of the Marine Corps. It must remain universal.

But universality without clarity becomes drift.

Withdrawal and the Fracturing of the Common World

When public education loses clarity, families withdraw.

Homeschooling increases. Private alternatives expand. Charter systems grow. Parents, wary of politicization or academic dilution, seek environments that feel coherent.

I understand this instinct.

But withdrawal carries a cost.

Public education has always been more than academic training. It is one of the few remaining institutions where children from diverse backgrounds encounter one another within a shared civic structure. It is imperfect. It is often strained. But it remains a common space.

If families retreat into ideologically curated environments, the shared civic world fragments. Exposure to difference diminishes. The habits of democratic disagreement weaken.

Homeschooling is not inherently anti-democratic. Many families pursue it thoughtfully and responsibly. But the broader trend of withdrawal often signals eroding trust in shared institutions.

When trust erodes, crisis rhetoric fills the vacuum.

The question is not whether public education is flawless. It is whether we are willing to repair its clarity rather than abandon its universality.

The Practice Field

Early in my teaching career, I coached seventh-grade football. On the first day of practice, I ran my boys to exhaustion. I believed discipline was forged in strain.

Afterward, my mentor pulled me aside.

“You don’t know what they’re going to become.”

He reminded me that adolescence is not destiny. Potential unfolds unevenly. The awkward seventh grader may flourish at seventeen. The distracted sophomore may mature at twenty-five.

That lesson reshaped my teaching.

Rigor without patience becomes cruelty.
Patience without rigor becomes drift.

Education must hold both.

The Threshold That Cannot Be Repeated

I often tell my students that there are very few moments in life that can only happen once. High school graduation is one of them.

You walk across that stage once.

You can earn an equivalency later. You can build a life without the ceremony. But you cannot reclaim that threshold.

Rites of passage matter because they signal transformation.

If graduation becomes procedural, it loses gravity. If it becomes unattainable, it loses justice.

It must mark readiness, not perfection or specialization, but foundational capacity for freedom.

Immanuel Kant described enlightenment as “man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity.” Education prepares students for that emergence.

A diploma should signify that a young person stands at a civic threshold equipped with foundational habits of thought: capable of reading critically, reasoning coherently, communicating responsibly, and choosing deliberately.

The Marine Corps can define itself through selectivity. Public education cannot. Its legitimacy lies in universality.

But universality requires clarity.

Without clarity, we will continue oscillating between crisis and nostalgia, between blaming technology and inflating credentials, between retreat and reform.

The problem is not that too many students are graduating.

The problem is that we have not clearly said what graduation means.

Until we do, no ban on smartphones, no reform of standards, no new portrait, and no rise in metrics will restore trust.

A free society does not merely need workers.

It needs citizens.

And citizenship requires formation.

Trees (1961)

Standing before Trees, I experience first a kind of visual hush. The image is spare in palette, black branches against a pale, almost luminous sky, yet it is dense with articulation. The trunks rise vertically from the lower register, evenly spaced but not mechanically so, and then, above eye level, dissolve into a lacework of interlacing lines. The upper half of the composition becomes nearly all branch, an intricate filigree that both reveals and conceals the white ground behind it. The sky is not painted so much as it is allowed to remain. It is negative space as presence.

Martin Heidegger once wrote that “the work of art sets up a world and sets forth the earth.” In Tomioka’s print, I sense precisely this tension. The black carved lines “set up a world,” a forest, a rhythm of trunks, an architectural canopy, while the untouched white of the paper “sets forth the earth,” that which withdraws even as it grounds the image. The white sky is not empty; it is what resists capture. It is what remains uncarved. I find myself drawn to that resistance.

What arrests me most is the tension between individuality and collectivity. Each tree is distinct in trunk and primary branching, yet at a certain height the forms entangle becoming a single image. Identity gives way to network. I cannot easily trace a single branch from root to tip without losing it in the thicket of lines. The self becomes porous. In psychological terms, I am reminded of object relations theory and the idea that the self is never fully discrete but always constituted in relation. The trees, though standing apart at their bases, participate in a shared canopy that dissolves strict boundaries.

Here I hear an echo of Hegel’s insistence that “self-consciousness exists in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it so exists for another.” Recognition is mutual; identity is relational. These trees, taken together, form something like a visual dialectic. Thesis: the solitary trunk. Antithesis: the encroaching branch of another. Synthesis: the canopy in which separation becomes interdependence. The forest is not a collection of isolated beings but a system of reciprocal acknowledgment.

The work’s medium intensifies this meditation. The woodblock print demands decisiveness. The carved line cannot be endlessly revised; it is committed, cut into the matrix. There is an austerity here that aligns with Japanese aesthetic principles such as ma, the generative power of interval. The white is not background; it is pause. It is breath. The trees stand within silence rather than upon it.

This silence recalls Ludwig Wittgenstein’s famous closing proposition in the Tractatus: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” The print does not attempt to narrate. It does not moralize. It simply presents. In that restraint, it achieves philosophical force. The image feels less like an argument and more like a clearing. What Heidegger might call a Lichtung, a space in which beings can appear. The narrow vertical opening in the sky becomes, for me, precisely such a clearing. It is tempting to read it symbolically, as transcendence, as an axis mundi, but the work resists overt allegory. The opening is restrained. The sky does not blaze; it breathes.

There is also an unmistakable existential undertone. The trees are bare. No leaves soften the network. We are placed in winter, or perhaps in an eternal late autumn. Albert Camus observed, “In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.” Tomioka’s forest embodies this paradox. The apparent barrenness reveals not lifelessness but structure. The absence of foliage exposes complexity. The winter forest is not dead; it is waiting.

In my own life, particularly as I continue to negotiate the tension of being religious but not spiritual, I often feel this stripping away. What remains when the leaves of inherited certainty fall? What is the skeleton of belief once ornament dissolves? Søren Kierkegaard wrote that “the task must be made difficult, for only the difficult inspires the noble-hearted.” The naked branches feel like that difficulty. They refuse easy comfort. They demand endurance. Yet they also reveal the intricate architecture that was always there beneath the lushness.

Phenomenologically, the image de-centers me. The repetition of trunks stretches laterally beyond the frame, suggesting continuation. I am not positioned as master of the scene but as participant within it. Maurice Merleau-Ponty describes perception as an intertwining, a “flesh” shared between seer and seen. In Tomioka’s forest, the intertwining is literalized. Branch touches branch; line answers line. I become aware of my own thoughts branching in sympathy. The work does not stand opposite me as object; it envelops me as field.

There is something quietly democratic about the composition. No single tree dominates. The rhythm is steady, almost liturgical. The vertical trunks evoke the columns of a nave; the branches form vaulting ribs overhead. Nature becomes architecture; architecture becomes sanctuary. Blaise Pascal wrote, “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.” Yet the silence here does not terrify. It steadies. The forest’s repetition creates not dread but humility.

Historically situated in 1961, amid Cold War anxieties and accelerating technological modernity, Trees feels almost monastic in its restraint. It neither rejects modernism nor indulges spectacle. Its modernity lies in reduction: flattened depth, graphic starkness, emphasis on line as structure. Yet its sensibility is ancient. The forest as motif runs through East Asian ink traditions as meditation on impermanence. Here, impermanence is not sentimentalized; it is rendered structural.

What ultimately lingers is the sense that complexity need not be chaotic. The branches interweave without collapsing into disorder. There is hidden coherence. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari famously contrasted the “arborescent” model of hierarchy with the “rhizomatic” model of multiplicity. Tomioka’s forest intriguingly resists easy categorization. The trunks suggest hierarchy and rootedness; the canopy suggests network and rhizome. The image holds both logics in tension.

As I dwell with the print, I feel less compelled to decode it and more inclined to inhabit it. The trees do not ask to be solved; they ask to be seen. They invite a slowness that is increasingly rare. In that sustained looking, I become aware of my own branching questions, my own entanglements, my own desire for a clearing of white sky at the center of things.

Perhaps that is the quiet philosophical achievement of Tomioka’s Trees: it reveals that the clearing is not elsewhere. It is already within the forest. It appears not by escaping entanglement but by attending to it. The white sky is not the negation of the branches; it is their condition. And so I stand before the image, held between trunk and canopy, solitude and network, winter and promise, aware that what appears spare is in fact inexhaustibly intricate.

ART IV: Remembering Gwendolyn Brooks

ART IV: Remembering Gwendolyn Brooks

By Haki R. Madhubuti

For David  J. Steiner, artist and filmmaker, December 26, 2016

art has its own language, name, and questions,

   has clear talk, justice, and motivation.

art does not create itself,

   does not escape the daily windstorms,

   fires, gun blasts, ignorant mumblings,

   or cruel misrepresentations of the

   rulers and their gatekeepers.

artists and their art are liberated souls

forever sprinting and searching in the world.

they do not see borders, walls, or can’t do possibilities,

and when confronted with such,

they quietly and questionably,

loudly and deliberately—with

pens, paper, computers, film, cameras, paint,

canvas, phones, creative ideas, and feet—

run toward fear

without hesitation or limiting doubts,

with good and loving intentions, struggle

to move all of us into the yes community of

life-centered people

as directed by their art, conscience, and culture

while intentionally

advancing quality definitions of a

kind-based civilization and world.

A Vision of Vygotsky

Monty Python and the Holy Grail

Holly

No Time to Die

How to Win an Election: An Ancient Guide for Modern Politicians

Spectre

Baseball is Back!

Stare Down

Sleepy Kitties

The Professor

How to Read a Book

Two Large Parallel Lines Supported by Simple Curve (1925)

Overture: The Quiet Before the Curtain

Tendu

There is almost always music playing when I draw. Not loudly, not ceremonially, just enough to soften the edges of the room. Sometimes it is orchestral, something with the lift of strings that suggests a stage before it is seen. Sometimes it is ambient, nearly invisible, like breath beneath thought. I sit at my desk in the threshold hours before the machinery of the day begins or after it winds down. These are not productive hours in the institutional sense. They are liminal. Transitional. The curtain has not yet risen, or it has just fallen.

In ballet, tendu is the extension of the foot along the floor, a reaching outward without yet leaving contact. It is preparation. It is line before elevation. The body lengthens but does not leap.

When I place pen to paper, I am in tendu. The line extends outward from me, but I do not depart from myself. There is no ambition in the movement. No announcement. The figure begins as suggestion. It begins as an arc, a slender vertical, the hint of spine or arm. It is often a dancer, though I resist that word. I do not want to know what it is yet. I want to discover it as it unfolds.

The unnamed form carries possibility. Naming feels like departure from contact. Once labeled, the movement lifts prematurely into category. I want the foot still touching the floor.

In these first lines, I am not trying to be good. I have learned that the attempt to be good fractures the experience. The evaluative self intrudes. The movement stiffens. I become both actor and critic, and the unity dissolves. Flow cannot survive self-surveillance.

So I extend, but I do not leap.

Plié

If tendu is extension, plié is yielding. The knees bend. The body lowers. It is not collapse; it is humility within strength. Every leap in ballet begins in plié. Without bending, there is no lift.

Picasso once said, “It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.” I have carried that sentence for years, but only recently have I understood its plié. To paint like a child after mastery is not regression. It is surrender. It is bending beneath accumulated knowledge. It is releasing the need to display competence.

I have amassed knowledge: degrees, certifications, books, frameworks. I have learned to navigate systems, to speak their language, to meet their expectations. And yet, like Socrates, I find myself increasingly aware that I know only that I know nothing. Knowledge expands until it humbles. The deeper one studies, the less one can cling to certainty.

Plié is that humility.

When I draw the simplified figure, I bend. I allow the body to be gesture rather than anatomy, motion rather than musculature. The childlike line is not ignorant. It is unpretentious. It refuses to perform mastery. It refuses spectacle.

This bending is not weakness. It is preparation for alignment.

Relevé

Relevé is the rising. The body lifts onto the balls of the feet. The dancer ascends without leaving the ground entirely. There is elevation, but it is controlled. It is poised.

When I look at the unnamed form on the page and feel that quiet consonance, that moment where perception and being are not at odds, I experience something I can only call Tao. Not excitement. Not triumph. Not achievement. Alignment.

In the Tao Te Ching, we are told that the Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao. The named dancer is no longer pure movement. It has been interpreted before it has been encountered. But the simplified form, unnamed, allows me to participate in its becoming. I discover the dancer rather than receive it.

Wu Wei is often translated as “doing nothing,” but this is imprecise. It is action without forcing. It is effort aligned with nature. It is the dancer whose discipline has dissolved into grace. It is the teacher who moves between subjects without feeling the artificial borders of curriculum. It is the driver who arrives without recalling the miles.

Relevé is that rise into alignment.

The line on the page does not strain. It does not attempt to impress. It simply moves. And in that movement, I am neither outsider nor performer. I am participant.

The curtain has not yet risen fully. The stage is still dim. But already there is motion: quiet, grounded,  and unannounced.

Movement I: Adagio

Arabesque

In ballet, the arabesque is extension held in suspension. One leg lengthens behind, the torso inclines forward, the arms reach outward. It is not motion for its own sake; it is motion arrested. It is balance in elongation. The body becomes linear.

This is where Kandinsky enters.

In Two Large Parallel Lines Supported by Simple Curve, there is no dancer in the conventional sense. No anatomy. No face. No narrative. There are only lines. Two dark diagonals descending, a gentle arc rising beneath them, and a small angular which interrupts at the periphery. And yet, when I look at it, I feel the body.

Kandinsky once wrote in Point and Line to Plane that the line is “the trace of the moving point.” Even at its most abstract, line carries within it the residue of gesture. A straight line is not inert; it is direction. A curve is not decoration; it is tension softened. Geometry is not cold; it is condensed movement.

In Kandinsky’s composition, the two parallel lines descend with weight, like limbs extended beyond equilibrium. Beneath them, the curve does not compete; it supports. It lifts without announcing its labor. The image becomes an arabesque of forces, an extension held in balance.

What transfixes me is not the geometry itself, but the sensation that something is being carried without strain. The work is disciplined. Bauhaus clarity. No excess. And yet it hums. It sings. It dances. 

When I draw the simplified dancer, I am not attempting to render anatomy. I am searching for that suspended elongation. I am searching for movement distilled to its necessity. The body becomes suggestion. Gesture becomes essence.

The arabesque is not spectacle. It is alignment sustained.

Attitude

The term attitude in ballet refers to a pose in which one leg is lifted and bent, the body poised between motion and stillness. It is neither fully extended nor relaxed. It is readiness without tension.

Wu Wei lives here.

There is a misconception that flow is spontaneity untrained. That effortless action requires absence of discipline. But ballet contradicts this. Grace is not accidental. It is rehearsed into invisibility. Practice accumulates until it disappears.

It was difficult for Picasso to “paint like a child” not because he lacked skill, but because skill had hardened into habit. To recover childlike expression required unlearning. It required bending without losing strength.

Similarly, Wu Wei is not laziness. It is effort applied without inner violence. The motive shifts from performance to participation. The body moves as though it were always meant to move that way.

In Kandinsky’s lines, I see discipline softened into inevitability. Nothing feels forced. Nothing advertises its complexity. The simplicity is earned.

When I am with my students in our off-site space, I sometimes experience this attitude. I experience it not as posture, but as orientation. I move from subject to subject without feeling their artificial separation. History blends into literature, psychology into civics, economics into ethics. The categories dissolve. Knowledge becomes knowledge.

This is not because I reject structure. It is because I experience structure as provisional.

Flow is fragile. The awareness of flow can shatter it. The moment I think, “This is going well,” the movement tightens. The body becomes self-conscious. Tao retreats.

Attitude, then, is balance within awareness. Presence without commentary.

Port de Bras

Port de bras refers to the carriage of the arms, the way they travel through space and the transitions between positions. It is not the leap that defines the dance, but the connective motion.

This is where my alienation surfaces.

In a recent coaching session, an administrator observed that my many certifications were a weakness. “No one can be good at everything,” she said. The implication was clear: breadth dilutes depth. Integration suggests superficiality. To be specialist is to be legitimate.

I felt deeply misunderstood, not merely professionally but philosophically. I do not experience disciplines as isolated domains. I do not see Language Arts, Science, Math, or Social Studies as separate ontologies. I see them as lenses upon a single unfolding reality.

History, which I love, is holistic by nature. It refuses containment. It demands that economics converse with theology, that art converse with politics, that geography converse with power. It is the study of everything at once.

Specialization, while efficient, feels like naming the dancer before I have seen her move.

In Kandinsky’s work, line and curve are not disciplines competing; they are relational. The straight line gains meaning in tension with the arc. The arc supports without erasing the line. The composition is unified, not fragmented.

When knowledge is fragmented into silos, I feel displaced. When the form is reduced to its integrative gesture, I feel at home.

Port de bras is about transition. About connection. About the invisible movements that make the visible possible.

Perhaps I have always been more interested in the connective tissue than the isolated muscle.

Movement II: Allegro

Jeté

A jeté is a leap. One leg brushes outward and the body leaves the ground, suspended for a moment before landing. It is brief. It is exposed. It requires commitment. There is no half-leap.

Aspiration feels like jeté.

There have been moments when I have considered stepping fully into administration. Stepping into the structured center of educational systems. I have prepared. Reflected. Gathered credentials. I have not lacked effort. If anything, my preparation has been expansive.

Yet the leap requires more than readiness. It requires landing.

In that coaching session, when I was told that my breadth was a weakness, that my multiple certifications signaled lack of specialization, I felt the air thin beneath me. Not because I believed the statement, but because I recognized its logic within the system. Vertical depth is visible. Lateral integration is harder to quantify.

The leap felt possible.
The landing felt uncertain.

There was no anger in me. Only confusion, then sorrow. A quiet realization that my way of seeing might never align neatly with the evaluative frameworks of leadership pathways.

Jeté is beautiful, but gravity remains.

Pirouette

A pirouette is a turn, a rotation around a fixed point. When executed cleanly, it appears effortless. When slightly off-center, it disorients.

Evaluation is a kind of pirouette.

The modern educational system rotates around measurable specialization. Expertise must be legible. Competence must be categorized. Titles must correspond to defined domains. The turn is precise. The axis is clear.

When one does not align exactly with that axis, dizziness follows.

I do not reject specialization. I understand its necessity. But I experience knowledge as unified before it is divided. To be told that integration signals dilution is to feel slightly off-balance in a room where everyone else appears steady.

The awareness of that difference can itself disrupt flow. Much like Wu Wei dissolves under self-consciousness, confidence dissolves under misrecognition.

The pirouette is not violent. It is simply disorienting.

And disorientation, when sustained, becomes alienation.

Assemblé

An assemblé gathers. One foot brushes out and then joins the other in midair before landing together. Separation followed by union.

This is where I began to understand something essential.

I do not need to be fully inside the central structure to participate meaningfully in it. Working in an off-site location, just outside the conventional building, just beyond the standardized rhythm, I have found a different kind of landing.

Here, I can move from subject to subject without apology. I can integrate without having to defend integration. I can teach history as intersection, not silo. I can allow conversation to travel where it needs to travel. The boundaries soften.

In this space, my orientation is not liability.

I began to see that perhaps my place is not at the geometric center of institutional design, but at its margin where lines bend and curves support.

Assemblé is not fragmentation. It is rejoining after separation.

The sorrow of misunderstanding has not vanished. But it has transformed. It no longer feels like exclusion. It feels like clarification.

Perhaps I will always be an outsider in certain rooms.

But perhaps there are rooms where outsider is precisely what is needed.

Movement III: Pas de Deux

Promenade

In ballet, a promenade is a slow turn executed with assistance. One partner supports while the other rotates, maintaining form. The movement appears singular, but it is relational.

When I am with my students, I do not feel myself performing integration. I do not narrate to myself that I am embodying Tao. I do not consciously move between disciplines as though crossing borders. It simply happens.

We might begin discussing an historical event and find ourselves in psychology. We might start with literature and end in economics. A question about civic responsibility becomes a meditation on ethics. The boundaries are porous. The conversation turns slowly, supported by trust rather than agenda.

It is only afterward, when the day ends, when the room empties, when the music returns at my desk, that I recognize the quality of what occurred. There was no forcing. No rigid adherence to artificial partitions. The movement felt natural.

Promenade is not dramatic. It is sustained presence.

In these rotations, I am not leading so much as accompanying. The students who arrive in this space have often felt misaligned within conventional structures. They have been labeled: at risk, alternative, behind, even special. Here, the labels soften. The dancer is not named before the movement.

We turn together.

Lift

A lift in ballet appears to defy gravity. One body rises because another supports. But the lift is never singular. It is mutual trust, mutual strength.

In Kandinsky’s composition, the curve beneath the parallel lines does not announce itself as savior. It simply supports. Without it, the descending lines would fall beyond equilibrium.

I have come to see the off-site classroom as that curve. It exists within the system, but not fully constrained by its central rigidity. It holds tension without collapse. It allows those who did not fit the dominant geometry to find balance.

Flow in this space is not spectacle. It is subtle. It is the moment when a student who has struggled to pass a standardized assessment begins to see a concept connect. It is the shift from despair to possibility. It is the quiet recognition that knowledge is not fragmented but woven.

And yet, like Wu Wei, it is not sustainable as a constant state. There are days of friction. There are moments of fatigue. Flow is fragile. It can be disrupted by awareness, by policy, by exhaustion, by expectation.

But when it happens, it feels like the answer to a koan. Something clicks. Not loudly. Not theatrically. Simply and completely.

Counterbalance

Every pas de deux depends on counterbalance. Each body leans because the other leans back. Stability emerges from tension.

I have come to accept that I will always stand slightly outside certain structures. The earlier sorrow of misunderstanding has not vanished, but it has softened into clarity. I do not need to occupy the center to contribute meaningfully.

The outside-insider position is not exile. It is vantage.

From here, I can see the fragmentation of specialization without being consumed by it. I can integrate without being required to justify integration. I can teach as I draw moving fluidly, connecting forms, allowing meaning to emerge rather than imposing it.

In this counterbalance, I find peace.

Not because the system has changed.
Not because the fragmentation has disappeared.
But because I no longer measure myself against a geometry that does not match my own.

Finale: Coda

Enveloppé

Enveloppé is a wrapping motion. The leg draws inward before extending outward again. It gathers before it releases.

When I return to my desk in the quiet hours, music low, light softened, I often draw again. The day folds inward. Conversations settle. The movement of the classroom becomes memory rather than immediacy.

It is only then that I recognize when flow occurred. Not while it was happening. Not in the midst of conversation or instruction. Only afterward, in recollection, like noticing breath after exertion.

The dance had been present.

Enveloppé gathers the fragments, the lines of Kandinsky, the sorrow of misunderstanding, the porous boundaries of subjects, the unnamed dancer on the page, and holds them briefly together.

Not to freeze them.
Not to master them.
But to feel their coherence.

Révérence

At the end of a ballet class, dancers perform a révérence, a bow of gratitude. Not to perfection. Not to achievement. But to the shared labor of movement.

I no longer feel the need to force my way into rooms that require me to fragment myself in order to belong. That recognition did not arrive in anger. It arrived first in sorrow and then in peace.

I am at home at the margins.

The off-site classroom, the integrated lesson, the quiet drawing at my desk, these are not second choices. They are aligned spaces. They allow me to move as I am wired to move. To see knowledge as unified. To let conversations wander without apology. To teach as though history, literature, psychology, and ethics were simply different inflections of the same human question.

If I remain somewhat outsider in certain professional geometries, so be it. Kandinsky’s curve is not less important because it does not dominate the canvas. It supports what appears heavier.

Révérence is gratitude for that position.

Stillness

And yet, there is no final pose.

The dance continues.

Sometimes I participate: teaching, drawing, moving fluidly across disciplines, inhabiting Tao without naming it. Sometimes I sit one out: observing, reflecting, questioning my place. Sometimes I leap. Sometimes I remain grounded in tendu.

But always, the movement goes on.

The dancer is never fully named.
The line is never final.
The curve continues to support unseen weight.

Wu Wei is not a destination. It is a moment of alignment within ongoing motion. Self-actualization is not residence; it is visitation. Integration is not institutionalized; it is practiced.

The music does not stop simply because I step aside.

And that, perhaps, is the deepest comfort.

The dance was here before me.
It will continue after me.

My task is not to control it.
Only to enter when the movement aligns,
and to recognize, afterward,
that for a time,
I was part of it.