When I look at Mark Rothko’s Untitled (Plum and Dark Brown), I see a new moon.
There is no moon in the painting, of course. There is hardly anything recognizable at all. Rothko gives me no landscape, no figure, no horizon, and no narrative. There is only color: an immense field of plum surrounding a dark brown form that nearly disappears into it. One darkness settles inside another.
And yet I feel something there.
That, I think, is what draws me to Rothko at this particular moment.
His paintings resist the easy interpretation of emotion. There is no grieving face to tell me that I am looking at sadness, no gesture that signifies joy, no scene that provides a story. I am left with color, scale, atmosphere, and whatever happens inside me as I stand before them.
I do not simply see this painting.
I feel it.
Perhaps that is why I see the new moon.
The new moon seems to disappear into the night sky, but the moon itself has gone nowhere. It remains completely present even when there is almost nothing for us to see. Its apparent absence is a matter of relationship among light, position, and perspective.
Something can be present without announcing itself.
Something can be real without becoming immediately visible.
Some things are felt before they are seen.
I have been thinking about that because people ask me almost every day how my new position is going. Teachers stop me in the hallway. Administrators check in. People who knew me in my previous role want to know how I am adjusting. More than once, I have been told that I am doing a great job.
I appreciate hearing it. I believe the people who say it.
But I have also discovered how difficult it can be to recognize success while still living inside the work.
From inside my room, I do not experience something called “success.” I experience days.
Students come through the door. Assignments need to be found. Procedures need to be explained. Someone is frustrated. Someone needs redirecting. Someone surprises me. A conversation works better than I expected. Another does not. I reconsider something I thought was settled. I change a procedure. I think about what tomorrow needs to look like.
Other people encounter the effects of the work.
I encounter the labor of it.
Perhaps that is why they can sometimes feel something I cannot yet see.
There is rarely a single moment I can point toward and say, There. That proves this is working. Much of what happens in a classroom, especially one like mine, exists in atmosphere. Students begin to understand the rhythm of the room. Teachers sense that communication is working. Administrators notice changes in how the space functions. Students ask for circle at the end of the day.
None of these things is spectacular.
Together, however, they create a feeling.
Human beings are sensitive to these emotional environments. We enter a room and know when there has been tension. We can often tell when someone we know is carrying something heavy even when that person insists that everything is fine. We know the difference between being merely tolerated and genuinely welcomed, even when the words spoken in both places are equally polite.
That sensitivity is part of empathy.
I once thought empathy meant understanding what another person feels. I am less certain of that now. Another person’s interior life is never completely available to me. I can listen, observe, remember my own experiences, and try to understand, but there will always be some distance between us.
Perhaps empathy begins by respecting that distance.
It is not necessarily saying, “I know how you feel.”
Sometimes it is simply recognizing, “There is more here than I can see.”
That matters in an in-school detention room.
Students generally arrive because something visible has happened. There has been an argument, a violation, a referral, a disruption, or some other behavior significant enough to remove them temporarily from the ordinary rhythm of school. Institutions necessarily respond to what can be observed and documented.
But the visible behavior is never the whole person.
Anger may contain fear. Defiance may conceal embarrassment. Silence may hold grief. Exhaustion may appear as indifference. None of this excuses harmful behavior, nor does empathy require abandoning expectations. It simply asks me to remember that there may be more present than I can see.
Again, I think of the new moon.
It is there precisely when it appears not to be.
Rothko’s painting makes something similar available to me emotionally. The dark brown form initially seems almost empty, but the longer I remain with it, the more presence it acquires. The brown changes because of the plum around it. The plum changes because of the brown within it. Neither exists emotionally in isolation.
Color is relational.
So are people.
We alter the emotional environments we inhabit. A student changes a classroom simply by entering it. A teacher changes a school through the way they occupy a room. A colleague can make a difficult day lighter by stopping at the door. An administrator can alter an entire afternoon with a few sentences of encouragement.
Much of that influence is difficult to quantify.
But it is felt.
This has changed the way I understand the praise I have received. Perhaps when someone tells me I am doing a good job, they are not simply evaluating my performance. They are telling me something about what the work feels like from where they stand.
That requires something from me too.
Empathy usually feels outward-facing. I try to understand students whose experiences I cannot fully know. Yet perhaps I also need enough humility to accept that other people can perceive things about my work that remain difficult for me to perceive from within it.
Their perspective becomes a kind of reflected light.
I know every imperfection because I know where to look for it. I remember every uncertain decision because I was the one making it. I see the scaffolding because I am still building.
Other people may be experiencing the structure.
There is a difference between humility and refusing affirmation. If I am willing to believe people when they tell me something is not working, I should probably be willing to believe them when they tell me something is.
Perhaps that is what I am learning now.
Not certainty.
Trust.
Trust that something is happening.
Trust that atmosphere matters.
Trust that relationships do work that cannot always be observed directly.
Trust that what other people are reflecting back to me deserves to be received.
That is why this Rothko feels right to me now. It does not explain itself. It does not prove what it contains. Its meaning emerges through encounter.
I feel the painting.
I feel the moon even when the sky is dark.
And increasingly, I am learning that the work I am doing can be felt by the people around me even when its consequences cannot yet be clearly seen.
Perhaps education has always worked this way. Some of its most important effects become visible only much later. A conversation acquires meaning years afterward. A boundary once experienced as frustration becomes remembered as care. A teacher’s consistency becomes part of someone’s understanding of what a trustworthy adult can be.
Much of education happens by reflected light.
So I return to Rothko’s dark field.
I still see a new moon.
The moon is there.
The light is there too, even if, from where I am standing, I cannot yet see it.
I am still too close to the beginning of this new chapter to know what the work will become. There is much that remains unfinished.
But I can feel something.
Apparently, others can feel it too.
For now, that may be enough.
Not everything that matters asks to be seen.
Some things ask to be felt.