Notice the metaphors all around you
I wonder sometimes if sprinklers are a metaphor for something.
I’m teaching this month at an Institute that is housed on the campus of Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Once the 102 degree nonairconditioned temperatures of last week subsided and I escaped to the beach for a weekend, I have been considerably less grumpy – and more observant.
The construction of a new dormitory just outside my window begins at 5:56 a.m. each morning with one lone worker giving in to his penchant for syncopated hammering on a solitary steel spike. I’m determined to find cultural significance in the cadence and Spiky appears determined to give me adequate exposure to make my findings statistically significant.
Sometimes the cadence of the day bears messages – are we listening?
When I returned home from class late Monday afternoon, I realized as I approached the dorm that there was red "caution" police tape at the bottom and top of my stairway. Stairs were being replaced, wide gaping holes where I needed to step up to the second floor. "What keeps us from getting home?" I thought to myself.
When we tried to park the next morning near class, more than half of the parking lot was cordoned off so they could paint the lines again, akin to highway crews who repave roads at rush hour in high season. "What obstacles are appearing in front of me? What do they mean?"
We drove to another lot where orange cones blocked half the spaces so a team of workers could prune bushes. We walked to class, tree limbs being sheared from a tree blocking the path. And last night, leaving, the sprinkler system was set on "aggressive," wildly creating an obstacle course of water, creating instant strategists trying to time their movement past the water outbursts by counting the patterns of flip and spin and dashing out between rotations.
It was two full days of obstacles, clear and cumulative. I wonder what they were telling me? Go back? Don’t go? Stop? Run past? Play in the water?
