The wind teaches without a syllabus.
It does not pause to explain why it bends the grass.
Or how it carries the scent of sea salt and pine.
It simply moves, and in its moving,
we learn to listen.
Now the child laughs, and the world bends
…not in submission, but in recognition.
I, who never trusted numbers,
find myself counting the seconds
between each burst of joy,
measuring the space where abandon lives.
Finding each child’s laugher is a lesson in geometry as I trace the angles of such wonder.
The old man of the mountain
was never just stone.
He was a question carved into the horizon,
a riddle the wind whispered.
Now, where his face once held the sky,
the air feels lighter,
as if the mountain itself
has learned to breathe.
And the teachers,
they are everywhere, aren’t they?
In the way the river refuses to stop singing,
even when its bed runs dry.
In the way the crow caws at dawn,
not to announce the light,
but to remind us of the dark we’ve left behind.
In the way a stranger’s glance
can feel like a key turning in a lock
you didn’t know was there.
Some teachers arrive like earthquakes.
They do not ask if you are ready.
They split the ground beneath your feet,
and you must decide:
Will you build a new house,
or will you live among the ruins?
Others are like the moon,
their light indirect, their presence steady.
They do not shout, but their pull is undeniable.
They move tides within you,
and you do not even know their names.
The teacher who is a spider,
spinning its thread in the corner of the porch,
says, I am the web and weaver.
There are teachers who do not know they are teaching.
The Tz'utujil Grandmother who looked a hundred a two. She walks with a limp, back strapped with kindling and a hole in her shoe.
The man who hums as he sweeps the sidewalk,
his broom keeping time with some inner song.
And then there are the teachers who are not alive but alive in their teaching.
They do not wear robes or carry books.
They do not stand at podiums or write on boards.
They are the cracks in the sidewalk,
the patina on the gate,
the way the sun slants through the trees
just before it sets.
To all of them
the loud and the quiet,
the seen and the unseen,
the ones who stay and the ones who stray.
we owe a debt we cannot repay.
They do not ask for payment.
They ask only that we learn,
and that we pass it on,
in whatever form we can.
M. Lauze.
Comments