How rare and powerful is the gift of allowing another to glimpse into our darkest, scariest truths or our beautiful longing for understanding. By showing up as a teacher, I am gifted more often than I can believe – each time the mask is pushed away and truth is sent my way, energy rushes through me and bells go off inside.
Tommy, 2nd desk in the middle row, hair green, then blue, then red, you spoke to me in frustrated tone at the very beginning of the semester and helped me to still myself to not react, but see the pain inside. I knew then you were my teacher, too.
Here is a bit of Tommy’s Credo, labeled in a folder named “Word limits Suck” 🙂
Every night, I write down the things I need to accomplish and do for the next day. However, I tend to try and keep it flexible because my girlfriend is somewhat spontaneous and tends to come over whenever she feels like it. I almost always accomplish the things I write down. Unfortunately, a dramatic event took place to cause me to rethink my approach to living life.
In November of 2013, I got in my car and got onto the Interstate. I made sure to keep my seatbelt off. I got my car up to ninety-five miles per hour, and then jerked the wheel all the way to the right. When I woke up, which I wasn’t expecting to happen, I was in the grass holding one of my headlights. Apparently, my car flipped three times and hit a treewhile I got ejected out the window. I spent a week in the Psychiatric Ward of MUSC with a broken foot and hip.
At the Hospital, the staff and I went over methods of setting goals. Ever since my stay at MUSC, I have written down my goals and gotten very industrious by doing so.
You had the courage to allow seeds of new possibilities to be planted within you while your body brokenness was healing.
I ask everyone to turn in a brief personal credo as prewriting practice for a longer essay; I tell you all that if you can explore real stories that have led you to your wisdom up till now, your writing will be more powerful. Very few have been broken open enough to share in the way you have.
Tommy, I know direct attention will make you shy away, so I write to you here, in a place you that will not see, but I know that you will feel. Thank you for trusting me with your story. Spiral out: Keep going.
And here is Cameron’s Credo, quiet, back-row surprise of a very young mystic and philosopher, well on his way, riding on a spiral:
I believe the Universe exists as an unfathomably massive organism; that consciousness perpetuates the Universe’s mind-bending ability to experience itself.
I believe knowledge drives the power of understanding; that understanding drives consciousness to the edge of the Universe in pursuit of mystifying answers.
I believe time is an intricate illusion maintained by the ageless balance of mass and energy within our field of view and may be interpreted individually.
I believe that everything we perceive surrounding us has originated in the scorching heart of resplendent stars.
I believe religion is the base of ignorance; any religion fabricating arbitrary answers in place of wonder and critical-thinking hinders progress of the species. Incidentally, most politics pave the way for religion to dominate the mind, detrimental to the progress of science.
I believe all life in the Universe is cherished, even extraterrestrials that could exist, waiting to be discovered.
I believe the four fundamental forces of the Universe can be unified to conceptualize the beginning of the Universe; however, I believe humans have a long journey ahead of them to accomplish such a feat.
I don’t believe that an all-knowing Deity exist.
I don’t believe in waging war in an effort to gain depleting resources that exist abundantly in the Universe, because I don’t believe Earth is the only haven in the heavens capable of hosting life.
I wish I could believe in an omnipotent Deity, but I used to believe in an all-powerful being to place the unknowns upon and the belief smothered my hunger for insight, for wisdom.
I wish I could believe humans could exist peacefully amongst ourselves, similarly to how I wish I could believe religion could blissfully coexist with definitive science; because I was naive, I used to believe science was a unified humanistic goal.
The most astonishing idea of all, I believe in the existence of infinite levels of order in the Universe, consequently, absent of chaos throughout.
He used to “believe in an all-powerful being to place the unknowns upon and the belief smothered [his] hunger for insight.” And so he now, at 18, has stepped away from what smothered his hunger, and he carries around a flashlight to illuminate the unknowns in the form of books.
I am coming to see a currency in play in my life that stretches in an unseen realm – that more than sustains, it lavishes buckets of soul dollars upon my head. Daily I receive energetic exchanges that shine in contrast to 3D currency. I see abundance in the soul realm that translates, if I let it, into my daily flow. Supply and demand of a soul dollar economy – it is real!
Life as Improv 