Seeking Answers

Good Morning -

Ahh...what a nice, simple, clean and green (as in the color - I can't say with confidence that $2 door and window caulking is an environmentally green material) Virgen we have this morning.

Resting behind her is an image of a butterfly pollinating a...okay, here's my story. Here's what I'm going to write about today. I didn't think I had much to say today (always dangerous and makes for the longest of blogs), so was just going to talk a little here and a little there about transformation, since that's what butterflies are about.

Then - I left blogger after typing "butterfly pollinating a" to try to find the name of the plant the butterfly is pollinating in my image. The phrase "bird of paradise" was in my head, but I also thought that those are the flowers with the fierce beaks like giant toucans.

Google image confirmed the toucan flower, so I started doing general searches under topics such as "flowers of southern arizona", "orange and yellow color flowers southern arizona", "gardens tucson", "garden flowers tucson", etc., etc.

None of these searches were fruitful and, while my partner is sitting right here next to me on her computer and is a good searcher, she has headphones on and is listening to a presentation online, so isn't really interuptable. After 30 minutes of not finding this flower, though, I finally looked over and caught her eye.

Pausing the presentation and removing one ear bud, she looked at me with a raised brow.

Holding up my tile, I asked, "Do you know what flower the butterfly is pollinating?"

"Bird of Paradise."

I sighed - my 30 minutes of frustration spilling over. "No. I thought that too but those are the big, fierce beaked flowers."

"I think it's a bird of paradise."

I kept looking at her, my mouth attempting to form words to create another way to ask the question that would lead to success. This is a strategy she knows, so she smiled and said, "You can keep asking me, but I don't know what it is, if it's not a bird of paradise."


"No. Look." I type in "bird of paradise" in google images and the toucan flower comes up.

"No. See. Isn't this it?"

She had also typed into google images, but her search produced page upon page of the very flower I had been trying to pull out of the dark, black recesses of the web lo these last 30 minutes.

"Yes. (sigh). What did you type in?"

"Bird of paradise Tucson."

I typed the same thing into my google search and there, in front of me were myriad images of the Mexican Bird of Paradise. I should have known here on la frontera that we would have a flower that looks nothing like the other bird of paradise but we add "mexican" to the front to delineate that and then conveniently forget the important mexican aspect of the plant, calling it a bird of paradise like it really is one.

Sigh.

My partner was ready to get back to her presentation, so I said, "thanks" and "see how it's important to keep asking until the information is discovered? I knew you had the information for me."

While it may drive her bonkers, this ongoing question approach is at the root of my teaching style. I believe that people have the answers, they just need to be asked the right questions and I refuse to give up on anyone's intelligence before it's produced results and demonstrated its brilliance. If I haven't come up with the right question to do that, then it's not the fault of the mind that I can't find the right key to open their amazingness.

True, this strategy was better employed on my learning disabled and emotionally disturbed high school students than on my partner, but it still creates room for her brilliance to shine.

Like the pollen dusting the wings of my little butterfly this morning, believing in and refusing to give up on another's brilliance (even if they get frustrated with you) is some of the best transformation around.

Here's to that.