Hundreds of Windows

The summer has the space and time to work on several projects that I had wanted to do in during the year, but just couldn't organize myself to make happen.  One of them is to do my website.  As I've been working on it, I'm realizing how much organizing the resource that I want it to be for my students is organizing the way that I think about my teaching and my studio.  One of the pages I would like to have is a teaching philosophy.  So that means brainstorming my teaching philosophy and my goals for my students, regardless of age.

Summer also allows for sitting and staring time.  As my dinner cooked, I sat at our dining room table and looked at some of the hundreds of windows that are visible from our own window.  It's a wall of windows.  Most of them were still dark at the dusk hour, but one of them a floor down and a bit to the right was lit and the blinds were open as they usually are with that particular unit.  On the bed, for the first time, I saw a woman playing with a young child, perhaps 12 months old.  She waved a fan over the child and the child reached for it, turned over, crawled around and played with it, stretched its legs and the woman stroked them or played with them.  I got my dinner and they continued to play and interact.

I wondered what that woman's hopes and dreams were for that young body in that moment.  What drove her play, and her touch?  What do we wish for our children or for the children of others?  To see such a young body, so full of potential, stretching and turning as though with limitless possibility, I thought about the ways we train minds and bodies and shape them into societies.  What do we wish for them?  Do we want them to make money, or be sensitive to others, or scholarly, or a good care-giver?   What drives us to engage with them as we do and to shape the world around them as we do?

The blinds to that apartment seem to always be open, maybe they don't even have any.  And while it may seem voyeuristic to look into other people's windows, that's the view from our apartment and the lives that all of us in these buildings live.  If our windows are open we are sharing with others.  I've admittedly even gotten quite lax about what I'm wearing, as do others.  There's the naked man that sometimes appears across the way, and why not?  We're all naked under our clothes.  We all have bodies.  That's the way it is.  We keep them covered or close our windows but sometimes I wonder why.  What a gift it is to see a young child, so undifferentiated, so flexible, so full of everything possible.  Just one of the hundreds of windows outside of mine.