On Colleagues

I'm in the strange position, this semester, of serving as TA for a class full of my peers. Basically, I needed a TA-ship, so one was invented -- TAing Dietz's graduate "Collaboration" class. I've talked about it before.

I'm on the sidelines for the work of the class, which has consisted, to this point, of creating and showing small "vignettes" within small groups. But I've been privy to the written responses of all the students in the class -- of the semi-private reflections of my peers.

What a smart, thoughtful, talented group they are. I'm struck, over and over, by how privileged I am to count them as friends and collaborators. Even in the hard moments. Especially in the hard moments.

From one:
Storytelling is a strange paradox. The stories we most want to tell . . . the one's we'd die to speak truthfully. . . are the hardest to say . . . and take the most guts. But, fortune truly favors the brave.

So often, the small lessons of art-making are the big lessons of life, no?

I think back to Soo-Jin Lee, explaining the idea of "jeong" to us -- the idea that a plot of land, once plowed, will never be virgin land again -- even if the earth is then leveled, we can never UNMAKE change. That "jeong" can be translated as "love" or "connection," but that it is something deeper than that, something about what changes us. I think the study of playwriting, and three years of graduate school, have changed me, and I watch it change my friends. We are the plow AND the field.

I think about this, in collaboration class, as I watch friends struggle to make small, memorable moments -- to do, in miniature, what we are always trying to do.

I don't know if I'm celebrating change or mourning it -- there's room for both -- but I want to notice it, and mark it. We are not who we were.