One of the students in my short story workshop is a teacher herself, recently retired. I have met several of her former students who talk about what a wonderful teacher she was, how safe, warm, supportive and creative.
We were talking on the phone tonight about her piece, a beautiful essay on the love she shared with her late husband, and she paid me one of the great compliments I have ever received: she said I was a great teacher, because I cared, knew the subject well and also, because I created a safe environment in which to grow and learn.
She could not have known, although perhaps she sensed, how much this meant to me. I have never had a safe environment in my life, not at home, in school, in my neighborhood until just a few years ago, when I met and married Maria. School was always a nightmare to me, a dangerous and fearful place, never a place of affirmation and safety. The same was true of work and much of my life.
Maria understands what it is to feel unsafe, and what it is to feel safe. It is the cornerstone of our connection. We have created safe environments together, we do it whenever we can.
I learned little in school and I know most of this was because of my own problems – few teachers could have penetrated the wall around me. I dropped out of two colleges, there was never a classroom in my life in which I felt safe.
I resolved some years ago to try and create safe environments whenever I could – different digital communities, workplaces, the creative group and open house at Bedlam Farm, in my daughter’s life, in my home, in my first marriage. Mostly, I was not able to do it, I was just too damaged and frightened myself. You can’t teach what you don’t know or haven’t lived, it is just hollow talk, more bullshit thrown into the ether, another false promise.
In recent years, through life, work, love, a spiritual life and therapy, it has begun to happen around me. Maria told me after we met that she felt safe with me for the first time in her life, and I realized the same was true of me. The Creative Group At Bedlam Farm – a creativity-sharing group on my Facebook site – became a safe place that took off around me and beyond me with the creative and honest offerings of disparate people looking for a place to share their work and be encouraged and safe.
I believe Bedlam Farm became such a place, for the animals here, for Maria and I, for the people who read about it and see it. And I have found this in my teaching, my writing classes at Hubbard Hall have become places of encouragement, a safe environment. Half of the class has returned for the second or third time.
I believe true love opened the gate for me. Feeling safe is essential to creating and finding a safe environment. You have to know what it is, and the experience of living in a safe environment has profoundly altered my life and my humanity. My creativity as well. My students teach me and one another, we encourage one another and are honest with each other. An incredible gift to me as I begin to get older.
I am grateful for the great compliment paid to me tonight, I will work hard to live up to it. My student asked me if I would teach this course in the Spring, and I said of course, of course. We are just getting started.
