Substitute Rugby
by Patrick Yurick (2010)

“With screaming vengeance!”
The coach had ordered us.
left foot right foot and steam train ahead
Dainty painted toes covered in bruises.
Grass stains and sweat.
Equity never did taste right, did it?
Falling back with different pressures
I know that pleasure is in the back
No more sour coffee and stomach pains.
No more comfortable embrace.
Two hours ago the woman in the mirror started crying,
“Where are you going?”
She wiped dark mascara stains.
A dark shadow was left in the corner of the room,
an outline smelled of the pacific and blood.
Keep it down, be a man.
Toughen up. Tie the laces.
Today begins with twice as much work
Today is where we all find time to watch
The substitute rugby game is underway.

I want to write this morning. It is Saturday morning. I google the word “Peace” and looked through the images titled under “Labeled for commercial reuse and modification”. This image struck me. I decided to challenge myself to write something about it. This poem came from that. I imagined these women being ones left home during WW2 and starting their own soccer league. (Much in the vain of “A League of their Own“)

The task to make 100 books all by hand using recycled materials whilst working with written reflections on food experimentation is completely fascinating. I advised that they use hand made linoleum stamps and inks, a process I used while in high school many many years ago. What I did not help account for was the length of time it was going to take to create the stamps and this put a huge cramp in the production process. When Wednesday night came along, the night before the exhibition, I found myself wandering down the hall to see how it was going. I found them struggling to finish a book and it was then that I knew I wanted to stay and help. And I did.

I might not have even been much in the way of service - besides going to pick up the few dedicated kids some pizza and attempting to get some carving done myself.  I might not have been much in the way of help - but I got something out of it that was far greater and it was what I like to call the “Project High”. Right before you are about to hit a deadline or a level of accomplishment there comes this frenzified energy that takes you over and allows you to do amazing things. I got to experience this last night.

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1/24/10 - 10:42am

Reading “Deschooling Society” by Ivan Illich. Trying out Ian’s suggestion of a new approach to reading, non-linear. Letting myself see the page as a whole and focus where my attention gets grabbed. It is interesting.

Page 5 - “For instance, the U.S. poor can count on a truant officer to return their children to school until they reach seventeen, or on a doctor to assign them to a hospital bed that costs them sixty dollars a day - the equivalent of three months income to a majority of people in the world. But such care only makes them dependent on more treatment, and renders them increasingly incapable of organizing their own lives around their own experiences and resources within their communities.”

The idea of a system that creates more symptoms. Always creating value structures which inflate and need to be fixed. We are taught that someday we will be ok if we keep moving forward in the system. That the system itself is fine, shit just happens. I see the correlations in health care and schooling. When are we innovating? What is innovation? I believe that innovation can occur alone, but is much more rewarding when shared. I know it is not repetitive. When I learn, when I start to connect things - my head gets a little fuzzy in the front lobe portion of my brain. I am creating connections and I can literally feel it. Learning can be memorization - but what is the good of memorization without application? What is the good of application without meaning?

Understanding seems to be unquantifiable - yet we quantify it. Just how is reality experienced? Ian talking to me about challenging my system of reading is interesting - his approach easily correlates with London’s views in “Drawing Closer to Nature”. There isn’t an exact method to teaching - just the knowing that room needs to be given, space needs to be made, for a method to occur that fits the situation as the situation manifests itself. I cannot teach each group of students the same way. Each group is different and based on those differences each group calls for different needs to be filled. How can I examine those differences if a clinical prescription is given to each group? Workflow needs a change in management when interacting group that has dexterous thumbs versus a group that has none.

On the other hand plans must be made and reflected upon. Reflection during practice is wholly different that reflection through post-practice conversation or journaling. As Ian and London’s logics go though - let the nature of the situation dictate the response. Look at the entire composition as a whole and draw into what grabs. Do (act) as needed, not as prescribed. Use prescribed when it works, reinvent the wheel while using spare parts from the old wheel - if needed. Try and build a new wheel with materials that don’t work sometime. See how that works, compare, blend and there - somewhere in between all that occurrence you find innovation.

To move like a dancer through reality is to experience a reality through joy, determination, concentration, light-heartedness, elation, beauty, peace, chaos, and order.