Nat

Another inspiring story from USA Today this morning. Nancy Berry teaches first grade in Fort Walton Beach, Florida, and she draws on unusual, experiential learning techniques to instill love of learning, good manners, and curiosity in her pupils. She has an entire area of the classroom devoted to milkweed plants, which free roaming catapillars in the room eat. They eventually become free-flying butterflies.

Her classroom sounds like a thrilling discovery. I loved that she places equal weight on science and writing, and I really loved that she says of her teaching approach that she tries to give five minutes of praise each day to each student. She uses imaginary friends to help teach manners and classroom behavior.

USA Today runs a series on All-USA Teachers, and Ms. Berry certainly stands out as an innovative, loving teacher. Children fortunate enough to have this kind of teacher early (and I had many of them) start life with a great advantage: they tend to see the world as a long series of promising discoveries.

What a way to want to engage with the world. Hats off to Nancy Berry and her “berries.”

(Red Sox win Game 2 in a nail-biter, 2-1. Woo hoo.)

Today’s Boston Globe carries an AP article about a program for inmates in Missouri prisons to cultivate vegetable gardens. The produce from these gardens is donated to food pantries for the elderly poor in the state. The activity is one of the elements of a program called “restorative justice.” Under this label, which was developed in the 1970s, prisons offer inmates the chance to study the impact of their crimes on crime victims and to find ways to make amends.

In Missouri, several participants grew up on farms, and they are now teaching skills to inner city prisoners while reviving their own interest in producing food. One of the prisoners, James Burton Jr., says of the restorative justice garden, “This is almost like being free here. I like knowing I’m giving to the elderly.” The article goes on to quote a cook at one of the food banks, who says that the produce donation has cut her food costs by a third.

I love projects like these, which encourage people to make amends by doing something good. This program is so practical in meeting two needs at once. It was very inspiring.

My father-in-law sent me a great link to a video clip of a guy who has what looks like the most frightening job possible. You have to see the clip to appreciate it, and what I love is the subject’s description at the end of what fears he has overcome in life.

Years ago, my friend Ted took me camping in Baxter State Park in Maine. We did a 4-5 day trip, ending by hiking the Razor’s Edge down from Mount Katahdin. As you would expect, the trail is exceptionally narrow and plunges several hundred feet down on both sides. What’s even more nerve-wracking is that it is a prime spot for lightning strikes, and that day, we seemed to be just a few hours ahead of a storm.

Prior to that trip, I had struggled with a sort of low-grade but annoying fear of heights, but once you are there, you really have no alternative but to walk across it. We were both pretty ragged by that point–Ted had had to talk me up a mountain face on our first day, which I really didn’t think I had the strength to manage.

Still, needing to cross over, and with the scenery spectacular down to lakes and forests, we pressed ahead. I can’t remember for sure if we saw other hikers while we were out on the trail, but we knew that others had crossed ahead of us all summer. Knowing that it is possible, we just did what all the books tell you to do: one step at a time.

Usually I am only happy with overcoming a challenge after it’s done. This time, though, I was conscious all the way across of walking past my fears.

So watch the video clip and ask yourself what you fear that you could confront. There’s no better feeling.

My family and I leave for a week’s vacation on Friday. We go to the same place in Carefree, Arizona, each April school vacation. The weather is great. We rent a nice little house on the golf course, and we play a lot of tennis.

Then, when we’re tired, we sit by one of the five pools and read our books. My wife and stepdaughter love to read, and every time I watch them, it makes me happy to share a love of reading with them.

Another reason I look forward to this trip is that usually the cacti are in full bloom this time of the year. Two years ago, on our first trip, the desert bloom was the best in 30 years because of unusual, sustained rains in March. There is nothing more spectacular than brilliantly colored flowers on rough, prickly cacti. The flowers are coral, pale yellow, lilac, magenta, even Key lime.

What a metaphor for finding joy after struggle, I always think. But mostly I think that what is beautiful is always striking for its beauty. I’ll think that as I walk to the gym in the morning and to the pool in the afternoon. It will make me happy all week.

It’s my last morning on Amelia Island, so rather than go to the gym, I walked on the beach. The sun rises very late here at this point, so I walked from dawn until the sun was fully up. There were a few dog walkers and joggers on the beach, but not many. The tide was coming in from just past low tide, and I stuck close to the water line.

Before I turned to come back toward my hotel room, I saw a line of birds, large ones, not seagulls. I’ll have to look up the name. The flew one after the other and dropped down from the sky, parallel to the shore. They were flying away from me, and the dropped like a heavy thread until they skimmed the crest of one curling wave, the way a surfer rides it inside the curl, but working less obviously.

Mankind has watched birds like this for tens of thousands of years, I’m sure. Yet it’s surprising and breathtaking every time. Beauty is, in some of its forms, inarguable.

It reminded me that there are simple routines I have that can make me feel fortunate to be who and where I am.

Amelia Island, Florida, where I arrived this afternoon, has my favorite kind of beach. The beach here is wide with 15 yards of hard sand exposed at low tide, and it’s several miles long in front of our resort. I went for a walk before dinner, up the beach for 15 minutes and then back. A woman was walking her golden retriever. He was a large male with a thick coat and a tennis ball.

I rolled up my jeans and walked just at the water line. A family of sandpipers scampered about in the very shallow water, poking in the sand with their beaks. Flecks of sea foam covered the wet sand up and down the beach. I thought I would walk to the end of the beach and then turn around, but it didn’t end.

As I said, it’s my favorite kind of beach, the kind you can walk up and down until you’re tired, before you’ve run out of beach. There’s a beach like this at the Cape Cod National Sea Shore, and another like it at Hilton Head, South Carolina. There is nothing like the open space, which you can share with wild animals and young families. What a reminder that the world is beautiful.

I fly to Amelia Island, Florida, tomorrow morning for a business conference. I hope I will have just a little time off the clock to walk the beach. The weather forecast calls for sunny, highs in the 70s, which is heaven since it’s snowing here, again.

There is nothing like a trip to a nice place I’ve never been to make me hopeful. Just a simple change of routine helps me appreciate the simple pleasures of fresh air, sunshine, and listening to the birds singing in the morning.

My new job has me traveling more than I have in a few years, and it’s invigorating to visit new places again. I think it’s that any new scenery reminds to look at the world and really pay attention. I’ll be on the lookout for anything new. Stay posted.

My not-so-secret guilty pleasure is that I love lots of mediocre TV. Tonight’s rerun of “Men in Trees” has a great bit of dialogue. Anne Heche’s character tells how troubled she is by small, short earthquakes in Alaska, and she asks on her character’s radio show, “How do you people deal with living on shaky ground?”

It’s an absolutely great question, since that’s what we all have to do eventually. Or always. When I lived through two very large earthquakes in California in 1987 and 1989, I found the experience very odd and unsettling. For starters, all of the car alarms go off at once.

But metaphorically, it’s an even harder question. How do you learn to handle finding out that things in life are not as durable or solid as they appear to be?

So tell me, How do you deal with living on shaky ground?

My favorite of Gary Larsen’s Far Side cartoons shows several hawks, eagles, owls, and vultures in the branches of a large tree. It’s winter, so there aren’t leaves, and the birds are wearing James Dean-style leather jackets, sunglasses, and Walkman headphones. Most are smoking cigarettes. The caption reads, “Birds of Prey Know They’re Cool.”

The great thing about raptors is that they are hard to anthropomorphize. They are clearly just what they are. Perfectly designed for the way they live. Lethal. Graceful. I think of Blake’s line , “fearful symmetry.”

In winter, the highway I drive to work attracts many red shouldered hawks. They cruise the median, which is lush and wide, to hunt the many small animals that live there, undisturbed by predators from outside the highway. Mostly I see the hawks perched high in trees, but last week, one flew alongside my car, gliding over the shrubs looking for prey. It kept pace with me for several yards at 65 miles per hour, or it seemed to.

What eerie beauty in that bird. It made no sound, barely flapped its wings. It was speed and economy of motion. These birds are the only wildness I see on a workday. They remind me how much there is outside. Outside of my office building. Outside of my career, my species, my civilization.

I’m still waiting to see an eagle in the wild.

I only regret one life decision that I made while I was in college. I never went to study penguins in Chile or Antarctica. Tonight over coffee, I told my friend Brendan that in the mid-80s there was a lot of publicity about penguin research. El nino was a huge weather problem, and someone figured out that penguins were the only animal to adjust their behvior before an el nino pattern began. Soon, lots of organizations were offering grant money to determine how and why they did it.

To make a long story short, I could have applied to join researchers on a 6-month trip to live among the penguins at their nesting grounds in southern Chile. The most charming story I read about these penguins concerns their nighttime game playing. Because they had to sit on the eggs for so long to hatch them, the penguins had developed a game to entertain themselves. Each nesting pair built a small cairn in front of their nest with stones, and at night, the penguins raced around stealing rocks from other birds’ piles and bringing them back to their own piles.

After several weeks in tents in the fields, the researchers were able to join the game. One young scientist wrote about the poetic rush when she was finally in the game herself and she would race toward a bird’s pile, only to feel, literally, a penguin brush her leg as he raced by her on the way to steal her rocks.

I was desperate to do this, but I didn’t. “As charming as that sounds,”Brendan said tonight, “she was living in a tent without cooked food for weeks to get to those evenings. A lot of that life was just tedium, discomfort, and work.”

While I agreed, I still wish that I had played steal the rock from the penguins at night. But Brendan’s point is well taken: what we envy is sometimes just the best part of another person’s experience. And the rest of it may be nothing special.

I told him I envied two types of lives: those where the person races from one true adventure experience to the next and another where the person creates something of consequence for others to use or benefit from. He said that ordinary lives can be happy too.

I still wish I had played with the penguins when I had the chance.