Poulsbo College Prep

I’m excited to be teaching World History to 10th graders at West Sound Academy this year.

High School History Teacher at West Sound Academy

Yes, that’s me!

My new form of bungee jumping… learning to teach World History (India, China, Middle East, and Africa) to 14-16 year olds at West Sound Academy.

I started last week and I love it!  The thing I love best is sharing my love of history with the students who have much more important things on their minds.  I remember that time of life with some fondness.  Feeling fully capable, but carefree.

I’ve been impressed with some of the deep thinkers I’ve got in class and by the fantastic group of teachers I get to call collegues.

Of course, I am still offering consulting work and tutoring.  See more on those subjects at right.

History, Place, and Photos

In conversation yesterday with community leader Sallie Maron we touched upon an interesting insight.

Bainbridge Island, like so many small towns, has recently seen a building boom seemingly without end.

Buildings and angst rising

As the new homes, shops, and condos went up, so did our level of angst. The “place” we moved to was being altered and, in some cases, unceremoniously destroyed by heavy equipment.

We felt the anguish of loss, but also found ourselves fairly inarticulate when it came to expressing what we’d lost.

I’ve been thinking about this situation for years now (with my friend Dennis Vogt and others) and realized that it’s hard to protect what we can’t articulate. We also realize that a picture is worth… well, you know.

A community photo album

In a recent meeting with Barry Peters about what we might do to help preserve our sense of place, we discussed a community project to begin defining what we love about our place, this island.

Many of us now have digital cameras. As we stroll, bike or paddle, we could snap images of what we love as we notice it. Here are some shots I took on a walk in the Grand Forest in 2006.

The images we take could be collected and posted on-line, maybe even on a map like the Sound Foods site, so they were available, and accessible, to all.

Gradually, we would build a library of the images that we can use in future discussions about proposed changes to our place.

What if the architectural review board had a library of what we love about our island home? The folks who designed Harbor Square would have had an easy reference for the community and context in which they were working. Might the result have been different, maybe even better; more alive?

This community photo album might create a reference tool for us to use when talking about place. Wouldn’t the thinking about Winslow way, or Kallgren, Grow, or North Madison have been a bit easier if we were working from a set of shared, loved images?

Is our place history or is history our place?
The other day, when I realized that the Historical Society was looking for ways to increase it’s fund raising abilities it became clear that relevance and visibility would be the keys to their success. It’s a lot easier to ask for money when you’ve got your finger on the button that gives (or protects) what potential donors value.

I thought, “Who better to host a community conversation about this place than the Historical Society?”

History is the story of how we became this place. What we love and don’t about the island is simply the sum total of all the outcomes of prior events… history

• We need to collect and catalog what we want to protect. Isn’t that what museums do well?
• We need to teach our community about this place; what made it and what makes it unique. Don’t museums have an education role too?
• We need to tie stories to these places. Couldn’t we link oral histories to the photos and the map, yielding a deep, rich source of connection to the the unique place we live? Museums often do this work too.

I know the Historical Society has a lot on it’s plate already. But, it seems to me, the top priority remains increasing relevance and visibility.

A deeper connection

We all want to feel more connected to our homes, our neighborhoods, and to something longer and deeper than our daily bustle through life.

This is the promise of history… a deeper connection to the time and space we live in. History gives current events context and richness, it gives that funny tree on Eriksen, a story with a beginning, a middle, and a sad end. But, it’s an end that teaches, that warns, that inspires new actions tomorrow. It all starts with the connection, the re-weaving across time and space that seem to separate us.

As Emerson says, in his essay “History”,

In reading those fine apostrophes to sleep, to the stars, rocks, mountains, and waves, I feel time passing away as an ebbing sea. I feel the eternity of man, the identity of his thought.

The Greek had, it seems, the same fellow–beings as I. The sun and moon, water and fire, met his heart precisely as they meet mine. Then the vaunted distinction between Greek and English, between Classic and Romantic schools, seems superficial and pedantic.

When a thought of Plato becomes a thought to me, — when a truth that fired the soul of Pindar fires mine, time is no more. When I feel that we two meet in a perception, that our two souls are tinged with the same hue, and do, as it were, run into one, why should I measure degrees of latitude, why should I count Egyptian years?”

Most of us who move to Bainbridge Island seek a deeper connection with a mysterious unity; call it Nature, call it community, call it what you will, but you know the feeling.

As we begin to notice, collect and catalog those reminders of unity we’ve found here on the island we will increasingly appreciate all that we’ve found.

Of course, appreciate has two meanings:

1 a: to grasp the nature, worth, quality, or significance of

2: to increase the value of

I’ll see you on the path toward appreciation, camera in hand.

Do you know anyone with a story to tell?

Now that I’ve been capturing my own family history for the past few years, I’m happy to help you capture yours.

As our parents and grandparents age, we run the risk of losing all the stories they have…

• The stories of what we were like when we were kids
• Of their own childhoods in a world very different from our own
• Who is that in this old photograph, what was the event?
• What have the years taught?

I love talking with folks and drawing out their stories. I understand capturing stories in audio and video recordings and publishing them in a variety of formats- print, web,audio, photo, and video.

If you know of anyone with a story to tell, please let them know I’m here to help.

More information here

Today.

I tighten the tarp; Maxi stomps and rustles her bridal.
Cool morning, nice for driving.
Our eyes meet, welling, there’s far too much to say;
Just another turn of history’s wheel, I’ve left before, ahead of fevers and hot rebellions.

Today, harvest in, house ready for destruction, Anni and the girls safely ahead.
If I don’t turn and go now, the centuries of stories
And now Jóska’s embrace will hold me here forever,
Until my life hangs at the end of a red-eyed, young peasant’s barrel, or a revenge court’s decision that I am an enemy of the people.

I flick the reins, the horses strength creaks the leather, the tongue, the wagon,
Onto the road and turn east, facing the red masses over the Tisza river who are starting west this morning; killing this way for another day.

By noon, I’ll be turning west, toward the Duna, my first watery protector, and a future anywhere but here.

Today, I write, at my grandfather’s age that day, trying to unravel the darkly poetic forces driving his story and mine, knowing

“that the dead can live only with the exact intensity and quality of life imparted to them by the living.”*

Can the living live with anything but the exact intensity and quality of life imparted to them by the dead?

Today, I wonder.

In the first days of October 1944, as the Russian army approached, my grandfather Zoltan Bárczay packed what he could into a horse-drawn wagon and left the family farm in the Hernad Valley, family seat for the last 800 years. He had sent his wife and daughters ahead towards safety the day before.

*Quote from Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

The machete

I have found, in any project that is important, but not urgent (meaning any project that really moves the action forward in a creative way rather than just being reactive) requires an almost brutal hacking out of time for its pursuit.

Mom is writing her memoirs, in a space I have hacked out for her.

We are encouraging her to keep writing in her own, quirky, exactingly-detailed way and she is worried about making it palatable to a general audience. Her writing style captures so much of her personality it would be unthinkable to wash HER out of the writing by watering it down.

Given that the time is precious (as all our time is) and she is unique in her experience and personality, I think a machete might be needed for both the time and the emotional space, the self-trust, to say what only she can say, exactly as she would naturally, whimsically, say it.

I was reminded of some lines in Emerson’s Self-Reliance:

• Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men have always done so, and confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age, betraying their perception that the absolutely trustworthy was seated at their heart, working through their hands, predominating in all their being. And we are now men, and must accept in the highest mind the same transcendent destiny; and not minors and invalids in a protected corner, not cowards fleeing before a revolution, but guides, redeemers, and benefactors, obeying the Almighty effort, and advancing on Chaos and the Dark.
• Your goodness must have some edge to it, — else it is none. The doctrine of hatred must be preached as the counteraction of the doctrine of love when that pules and whines. I shun father and mother and wife and brother, when my genius calls me. I would write on the lintels of the door-post, Whim.

Maybe we are all more like Mom than we realize.Go forth, hack out a place for your Whim.

Peter’s First Art Post

Here is a drawing from this morning. It is of a little house with someone standing outside holding a butterfly with a bird flying overhead. What about the cats? They are just up there for decoration.

Peter says, “This is just a little website to make people want to draw more.”

Things I wonder about

• How to find right livelihood after selling a 12 year business.
• Is Emerson right about history? “… there is properly no history; only biography.” “All that Shakespeare says of the King, yonder slip of a boy that reads in the corner feels to be true of himself. We sympathize and the great moments of history, in the great discoveries, the great resistances, the great propensities of man; — because there law was enacted, the sea was searched, the land was found, or the blow was struck for us, as we ourselves in that place would have done or applauded.”
• How ideas roll and distort across geography and time. I’m especially interested in how the ideas of the Enlightenment, Nietzsche, and Karl Marx rolled across Europe into Hungary, forcing my family from the Hernad valley, near Miskolc, Hungary, in which they had lived for over 800 years.
• I’m curious about democracy and education and the manipulation of masses that has led to so much destruction and waste in the last hundred years. Even longer if you count the Crusades. Of course, the subject is extremely timely both here in the United States with so much manipulation apparent from the current administration and in Hungary with the recent admissions of manipulation of the elections and lies.
• How do mass movements start? Eric Hoffer says lack of self respect is a contributing factor.
• Reading the tea leaves of current events and the swirling historical forces arranging them to see if we are going to be engulfed by another era of tragedy as our grandparents were. Fanaticism unleashed by inequality and systemic failure in the age of Revolution and the Great Depression.

What I’m reading now

Emerson, Self-Reliance

Emerson, History

Tuchman, The Guns of August

Fermore, A Time of Gifts

Lendvai, The Hungarians

Jefferson, Letters

Nietzsche, on the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life