Still finding the way back.

About twenty years ago, I was sitting in a friend's backyard with my sixty-eight year old mother and her new boyfriend. They were visiting from England, and the man she was with had spent his whole life working inside every level of education.

My son was two, maybe three, playing somewhere near us. We were doing the thing you do in a backyard. Talking about the state of the world. The environment, the systems that do not work, some that do, the list goes on.

And this man, who had given his life to education, said the thing it leaves out. We can keep trying to fix all of it, he said, the social problems, the environmental ones, all the way down the list, but until we learn what love is, none of it fully resolves. And love is the one thing the education system never teaches.

He must have been in his seventies then. He is almost certainly gone now, as my mother has too. But the sentence outlived them both...

It stuck with me, for many reasons. I had a son whose education I was thinking hard about. And I had not had much formal education myself, nothing much past the age of twelve, so I was never far enough inside the system to assume it was the only way. I could see the gap he meant. And my mind gets fixated on gaps, and being a man I try to think of the fix (which is not always helpful).

So Teach Love Today started as a an idea for a curriculum. A way to teach the thing nobody teaches when we're in a learning environment.

The idea lived in my head for years before it ever lived in my body. That part happened, of all places, in a Dollar General.

The first time I felt okay, really okay, I was standing in the middle of this store. Nothing had happened. I just looked up, under the flickering fluorescent lights, in the pungent smell of harsh chemical cleaner and over-scented laundry soap, and noticed there was nothing wrong with me. That whatever came next, out there or in here, I would still be me, and that was more than enough.

It drifted away by the time I was at the checkout counter.

I want to be honest, because that is the whole point of this. I have not figured it out. I felt that okayness once, clearly, and since then it comes and goes, sometimes close, sometimes far, sometimes not at all, even when looking hard to find it.

I am telling you about a place I have felt and seen, not a place I live.

But I have come to think that okayness is what home actually is. Not a place, not a person. The self you are alright being, underneath all the noise. And for many of us, for much of the time, we are a long way from home.

I do not think the way back is the same for everyone. But I think it can be learned, and/or perhaps discovered, the way you learn/uncover anything. Most of us were simply never shown the way.

And I do not think anyone walks it alone. Not because another person completes you, you have to find that part yourself, but because the road is long and dark in places, and it helps to have company. Sometimes someone else needs to hold the flashlight. Sometimes you get to point it.

Ram Dass put it best. "We are all just walking each other home.

I just think home is you.

Teach Love Today is me trying to learn the way, and present it, out loud, with anyone who wants to walk. It started as a curriculum, and it has grown into other things since, but underneath it is all the same idea. It costs us all something and I think that is how you know it is real.

I am still finding my way.
Come with me.

Dickon