from sex education to beauty & truth

I asked my high school students to write, "If I ran a school.." Many wrote that sex education should be offered every year, that students should be able to take the classes they want to take, and that the school should be stricter, yet allow students to smoke weed and stand in hallways during class. I next asked why sex education seemed so important to most in the group. Students wrote that it was vital in helping to prevent STD's, to inform about an important subject, and to prevent unwanted pregnancies.

Students in this admittedly very small sampling of high school students wrote as if it was a given that everyone is sexually active. And yes, over the years I've had 8th grade girls who are pregnant in my classes in middle school. Yes, every year at least one of my high school students has been pregnant. But, how true is it that students are all having sex? It's not only about sex, in spite of raging hormones. Everyone wants love.

At our Second Sundays play reading and open mic event this evening, I was reminded of this. A young man dropped in to the open mic portion of the evening, pulled out his guitar and harmonica and stunned us with the sweetest love song imaginable, written by himself. There was nothing in the song resembling the 'between the sheets" attitude of current pop songs, just a longing for a girl "who would stay," and stay until "old and gray." A woman stood up and sang about how life goes on, every muscle expressing the pain of conflict between those who take and those who give. Another woman shared the beginning of a poem about how we treat the Earth: 43,000 tons of non-recyclable trash per day in the U.S. She told us how the facts listed on the web "are a poem," devastating, condemning.

Our Second Sundays experimental event-- a free evening in which any and all arrivals of all ages explore different plays and share poems or songs-- surprises me every month. It's so different from work-a-day ways we communicate, like "hello how are you" and task-oriented email messages. Each person who attends becomes part of a larger play-surrounding-a-play. In this intimate gathering, we each reveal ourselves, become vulnerable. Our poems or songs or our comments in the group's conversation, become beautiful because they ring true. A person may sing who does not have a beautiful, trained voice, but the beauty is this: they sing because they need to sing-- they need to express something in this way, not just to show off a pretty voice. Tonight, each of us in that small circle became breathless and silent in witness to moments of truth. It's timeless-- truth and beauty, beauty and truth.