WHEN IS A BASKET NOT A BASKET?
© Shawn Bird November 13, 2019
Often, when we work side by side with someone, our learning comes not from the task occupying our hands, but with the stories that come along side.
On Indigenous Learning Professional Development Day, the creation of a lovely small pine needle basket was the least of what I took away.
The elder teaching our class told of gathering the pine needles. How she wept to discover a clear cut where her favourite trees had been. She told of saying a prayer during the gathering in respect to earth, and how when we were finished with our baskets, the needles left behind should not go to the garbage, as that impacts our own healing, but that they should be given back to earth, with thanks.
Quietly, at our table, she told our group that what one saw as a mistake, was not. The elder who’d taught her when she was seventeen had explained they were meant to be there. I found a connection in that statement, “Oh!” I said, “Like I tell my English students: it’s about the process. There are going to be mistakes, and that’s good, because it’s part of the learning.”
Her eyes down on her basket flashed. “English!” she exclaimed. “I tried and I tried and I tried. But everything was always wrong, wrong, wrong. Finally, I told them what they could do with their English!”
Then she glanced up, alarmed, concerned to have caused offense. “Oh. But not like that!”
“I understand,” I said. “Your stories are in your baskets. Not in English.”
She stitched her basket, silently.
And I saw.
I saw a school system that scarred her papers and her soul. I saw a sense of never measuring up. I saw frustration growing until giving up was the best decision to preserve self.
I saw how profound it was that she was in our building teaching us her talent and skill, sharing her art, her values, and her stories with us.
I saw that there are many others in my classroom who share her experience.
I am humbled and very grateful for her teaching.
A small pine needle basket on my shelf is full of new, poignant understandings.
Here is the Word Document version for easy printing.
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Shawn L. Bird 
Opinion-Waiting for retirement January 16, 2020
Tags: brain injury, carpe diem, change, concussion, dreams, goals, opinion, plans, retirement
I keep running into people who have big plans for their retirement. They’re going to move somewhere with less snow. They’re going to get serious about that hobby. They’re going to start writing that book.
I ask them what I asked myself in 1998: Why wait?
One Spring Break when I was in my thirties with two pre-teen kids, I’d driven south with the kids to see my parents. I went to Vancouver, and sitting in the Water Street station, I looked around at the blooming tulips and plum trees and pondered the foot of snow in my yard back home.
On our 800 km journey back home, we drove past lots of schools. I looked at those schools and had an epiphany. There are teachers working here. Why wait thirty years to move? Why not have the life we want to have NOW?
I returned home and had a chat with my husband. I sent out applications. He interviewed for a transfer in his government job. He had a few offers around the province that he turned down. I was called to an interview in Salmon Arm and subsequently accepted a position. Two days later he was offered a position in Salmon Arm, too. Serendipity and synchronicity. Two months later we were living in a beautiful community that actually had four seasons that appeared when they were supposed to on the calendar (instead of two seasons: ‘winter’ and ‘bugs’). That was twenty years ago.
I dreamed of being a writer, but thought that in my forties, it was too late to start. Then my school hosted the BC Book Prize tour, and I discovered that every author visiting us had written their first book after fifty.
I started writing just after Thanksgiving and the week before Easter I finished Grace Awakening. The week after the following Thanksgiving at the Surrey Writing Conference I pitched it to a small publisher, which subsequently offered me a contract. A dream come true.
This October was ten years after I pitched that first book. I was offered a table to sell my books at a signing event at the Surrey Writers Conference, alongside some of my author idols. I am working in my dream job, teaching English & Creative Writing in an amazing school in a beautiful place, WHILE writing books! It couldn’t be more perfect!
I still have a few years before retirement.
I have retirement plans. When I retire, I plan to write a lot more books, and visit schools to teach a lot more teens and adults how to bring their dream stories to life. I will travel and write and read. It will be awesome.
But.
A year and a half ago, I received a brain injury. Out of no where, in my own home, BAM: Life changed.
Words swam on a page. I couldn’t decipher hand-writing. The computer screen hurt. Crowds hurt my ears. Lights hurt my eyes. I had head-aches and eye-aches. I was dizzy. I was nauseous. For MONTHS.
I told my doctor that he needed to figure out healing quickly, because I needed to go back to my dream job and keep working on my books! He said, “Shawn, you might be retired now.”
That scared me. The idea that I might enter retirement unable to read, unable to write, and unable to teach or travel was horrifying. What a bleak picture! On the bright side, I thought, at least I have been able to have this wonderful job, teaching teens to write, and to inspire them. At least, I have published nine books.
Thankfully, I had excellent concussion therapy and I have recovered enough from my brain injury to work part-time again. Despite my injury, 6 pieces were published last year. Some had been written years ago, some were short articles or stories that took me weeks instead of a day to write. Slow progress is still progress.
My injury wasn’t the end of my dreams, but it could have been.
Wouldn’t it have been horrible to have all my plans completely unreachable due to poor health? Wouldn’t it have been a hundred times worse if I had saved all my dreams for retirement, and not have the health to attempt them? I had two colleagues who were in good health when they retired, but were dead six months later.
If you have a dream, don’t wait for retirement.
We only have today.
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