A Good Sign

Last night I had a dream about my favorite teacher in college, Professor Terri Elliott. His Social and Political Philosophy class was recommended to me by a friend and it became the first step of falling in love with philosophy and eventually getting a degree in it. Terri had a presence, an intense curiosity and sort of a sparkling gleefulness that was contagious- he was someone who inspired respect and the desire to be as earnest and questioning as he was.

I followed him throughout my college career, eating up all his classes. Metaphysics, Symbolic Logic, and a class he invented called World Making and Revisioning, where we would read inspiring works by Martin Luther King, Ghandi, Alice Walker, and Barbara Kingsolver, and sit in a circle outside on the grass, writing.

He tried to fit timed writings into any class he could, and it entailed 10 or 20 minutes of uninterrupted scribbling on a prompt or even without a prompt. After the time was up, we would each read what we had written aloud, without compliment or critique. Just, "Thank you," and move on.

He would hold writing marathons at his house, a group of friends and students sitting in his living room with green tea, no sounds except for the scratch of pen on paper and steady breathing. Twenty minutes, thirty minutes, forty minutes, and breaks in between to read aloud. It wasn't about the end product, it was about the process, the meditation of it. This is something Natalie Goldberg advocates as well. It was the first time I really succumbed to writing and let it engulf me.

The dream I had last night was vague- I only remember Terri and I, sitting facing each other with blank notebooks in our laps and pens in our hands. I sat poised, filled with intense relief and inspiration, thinking, "Finally. Now I can write."