Lines

When you pick up one end of a stick, you also retrieve the other end.

I don't remember who said that, but I'm finding it to be true.

I've been a student for a really long time.  I've also been a teacher for a really long time.  In an academic context--which is where I'm living now--I've been a student more.  In the kinky world, I've been a teacher more.  Still--it's only one stick.

There's an invisible line that separates a teacher from a student.  It has traits and characteristics; while being non-physical, it is observable through its traits.  The line doesn't separate the 2 conditions, though.  It unifies them.  And I'm straddling that line right now.  The line is that invisible in betweenness, like the space in between the curly and prickly parts of velcro, that holds the bond and it components in place.

A student without a teachers is hungry.  A teacher without students is a boring pedant with no friends.  Students and teachers are interdependent, one upon the other, for the fullness of experience on either end of the stick.

I'm not an academic student anymore.  Nor am I an academic teacher.  I'm in this in between place of being a teaching assistant.  I do some gruntwork, make the prof's job easier, do a lecture section or two, and mostly, I just show up and hold space.  I don't have homework anymore; now, I just have work to do at home related to the courses I'm helping with.  :)

This feels funny.  It's perfectly appropriate, though.  I'm in the middle of figuring out who I am now, so this seems like the ideal ground of discovery, the in-betweenness.  I love to teach.  It's one of those states of grace for me.  It isn't work.  It's sheer bliss.  I call that guidance.  But my saboteur keeps trying to tell me that I'm going to be in limbo (and the financial limbo that goes with this state of flux) forever.  It' always going to be like this, where I'm poor and working my ass off "for nothing."

My saboteur is not half as smart as it pretends to be.  It fails to be present to this moment, in which I am both student and teacher.  The payoff might not be in dollars, but the payoff is huge, and I miss it if all I'm looking for is dollar signs.  I figure that once I have a better idea of who I am in this place, the how and what of doing will unfold, and I have no doubt that the resources to move me along are right there, too.