Communities that Call Us to Ourselves

Live Friday Morning Meditations from the American Academy in Rome

Friday Morning Meditations
Our live meditations are for everyone: please feel free to join us in fall 2025
Fridays at 9am Eastern.

We sit for a half hour with some guided support, and I give a little talk around the poem intermittently. Please keep your microphone off to respect the silence for others.

Dear friends,

Thank you to everyone who joined our sit last Friday. Next week’s meditation will take place on Friday, October 24 at 9 am Eastern Time. Our poem last week was Louise Glück’s, “The School Children.” If you didn’t attend the sit, you can find a recording of it here:

The School Children

By Louise Glück

The children go forward with their little satchels.
And all morning the mothers have labored
to gather the late apples, red and gold,
like words of another language.

And on the other shore
are those who wait behind great desks
to receive these offerings.
How orderly they are — the nails
on which the children hang
their overcoats of blue or yellow wool.

And the teachers shall instruct them in silence
and the mothers shall scour the orchards for a way out,
drawing to themselves the gray limbs of the fruit trees
bearing so little ammunition.

“The School Children” homes in on the image of teachers sitting behind their great desks, while the children with their satchels, like small soldiers, cross from the world of “thou” into the wider world of “it,” offering apples picked by their mothers for protection. The apples are red and gold—the colors of blood and money. But there are not enough apples to go around. There is a definite lack of apples. And the mothers, doomed to repeat the conditioning of the past against their will, scour for a way out, finding little that will protect their children from the cold new world that awaits them.

The last word of “The School Children” may be the most important in the poem. I sometimes use this piece as a sample for a writing prompt, one that asks students to save the most weighty word, the most dynamic, complicated word, for the end. That word will then transform all the rest of the poem, cause it to change before our eyes. Here, a familiar autumn scene is changed into a wasteland by that one word, “ammunition.” The poem is a battlefield, but between whom, under the banner of what?

“The apples are red and gold—the colors of blood and money.”

“The School Children” was a response to the Vietnam war—its imagery rife with ammunition, satchels, line breaks that imply scenes of horror and sacrifice, “the nails/on which the children hang”—but it is also a piece of writing associated with second wave feminism. In the role of these mothers we apprehend the plight of feminist thinkers of the 1960s. Even as social conditioning was being deconstructed, the American patriarchy, unready for radical reprogramming, mostly rejected the movement. It still does today.

Yet from a spiritual point of view, the central focus of this poem falls not upon the children or their mothers, but on the teachers. The teachers model the third “poison” in Buddhism, which is ignorance. Ignorance is related to ignoring: they choose not to speak, choose not to see the toxicity of which they have become a part. They “instruct [the children] in silence,” a beautiful line of poetry that can mean in two ways: the teachers say nothing about the sacrifice of each generation to the machine of the world, while also instructing the children on how to silence themselves and propagate the lie.

Circles of Trust

Glück’s poem gives me pause to remember the classrooms—whether under the roofs of schools or in other settings—where I was first instructed in silence. It was in classrooms that I first experienced the break with belonging. It was there I learned longing.

I was one of these school children in the early 1970s. I remember a life-altering moment. Due to attention deficit and hyperactivity, I was removed from my class in the second grade. Or rather, for some weeks I sat behind a wooden panel in the back of the room, where my teacher had set up a permanent desk for me. I could only see the back of the panel. I performed as class clown from that vantage point, one of Hamlet’s unencumbered grave-diggers on the outskirts of Elsinore. Laughter was my flight response to what was happening. But I remember the feeling of confusion this experience aroused in me. My light was being put under a bushel. I was being told to leave, while made to stay in the room.

So much of the world is telling us to leave, even as we must remain in the room. We must sit calmly sequestered in our corners, behind our panels, now called our screens, in flight from the absurdity of it all. I keep remembering Wordsworth’s well worn diagnosis: “The world is too much with us…/Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—/Little we see in Nature that is ours.”

For all of us, growing up in toxic environments requires a remedy. If we are lucky, we pass through the phase of drug-of-choice and seek a deeper, spiritual medicine for our situation.

In his 2004 book A Hidden Wholeness, community organizer Parker Palmer speaks of another kind of classroom, largely outside of academies and universities. It is a self-governing group, whether or not it is affiliated with an institution or a mission statement. It seeks not to fix or judge but to encourage each member back to their own inner light. He defines such spaces as “circles of trust”:

“[They] are rare form of community—one that supports rather than supplants the individual quest for integrity—that is rooted in two basic beliefs. First, we all have an inner teacher whose guidance is more reliable than anything we can get from a doctrine, ideology, collective belief system, institution or leader. Second, we all need other people to invite, amplify, and help us discern the inner teacher’s voice.”

While Palmer spent ten years leading the Pendle Hill Quaker community in the 1970s and 1980s, his description coincides with the Buddha’s own words. Of the three jewels—the Buddha, the Sangha (community), and the Dharma—he encouraged his disciples to treasure the Sangha most of all. Moreover, he backed softly away from the role of wise instructor. Don’t take my word for it, he insisted, but find out for yourselves. Make of yourselves a light. It is this very light the circle of trust aims to keep alive in us. “Thomas Merton called it the true self,” Palmer writes. “Buddhists call it the original nature or the Big Self. Quakers call it the inner teacher or the inner light. Hasidic Jews call it the spark of the divine.”

Tools for Meditation: Rediscovering the “Still Small Voice”

How do we distinguish this inner teacher, then, from the voices of our outer teachers who may have left a scar or a name which was never our birthright? One way is amplitude. The inner teacher speaks with an insistent, soft voice. Wordsworth wrote that poetry “takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.’” Or you may remember 1 Kings, where Elijah in his cave, after the fire, hears the “still small voice” of God: “And after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a still small voice.” The second indication is that the voice comes after the catastrophe, or reflected in solitude, after the shouting and eruptions.

As encapsulated by Matthew Ginden, Martin Buber said: “….the Voice…is a ‘still small voice’, and easy to drown. So long as this is done, a person’s life will not become a way.” The inner teacher, in Buber’s language, is a thread of awareness you just follow. It pulls you gently back from the world of getting and spending, the “it” world that would use you as its commodity, into the world of “thou” where you are welcomed home.

What is this softest voice of our true teacher, if not the voice of the mother, the calming voice, the voice of the sacred pause, the rest within the crashing cymbals of the world. We were once our mother; we were the egg in its receptivity and quiet. The mother is still in us. We call it Buddha nature, the already-realized Self, which just centers each moment with infinite patience. When we can look from that vantage point, watching all this with engaged compassion and impassive contentment, we can transform the barren landscape of the not-enough—those trees, these classrooms—into abundance again.