I dressed up for Halloween with my students. Since we were studying bacteria and viruses, I used a red marker to infect my face with chicken pox; it was cheap and easy. Despite being the Friday before a holiday, the school day went smoothly. Sugar-shocked students would be more of a challenge on Monday. After dismissal, as usual, I spent too much time preparing for the next lesson and hurried to the parking lot. My three children and their friends were waiting at home for their ride to Halloween Horror Night at Universal.
My cell phone buzzed before I reached my car door. I held the phone to my ear with one hand and grabbed a tissue to wipe the red dots from my face with the other. I had a stack of papers to grade clenched in my arm, making this a familiar balancing act. I expected to hear the disgruntled voice of my oldest child telling me I was late. Instead, I listened as my sister whispered, "Mom died; she killed herself today."
The busy world around me got suddenly sucked into my center of gravity. I caved forward into the weight of the moment and drove home. I blindly walked past the gang of squawking kids at my door to the phone on the wall. I listened to the blunt message Mom left on my answering machine. I replayed it over and over again. "Dana, I love you." My world got sucked deeper into my core as I glanced at the message's timestamp. I had missed the opportunity to talk with my mother by just an hour that day.
As one can imagine, the minutes, hours, and days blurred ahead. It was too late to book a flight from Florida to New York. Although I numbly escorted my kids and their friends with my husband to Orlando, I would not be dealing with classroom shenanigans on Monday. I joined my sister in Southold, Long Island, to plan Mom's funeral. Through her ups and downs of manic depression, Mom called me her rock. My sister would be the strong one at this moment in time. She forged ahead, securing most of the funeral arrangements as I withdrew into Mom's Hallmark pocket calendar. I looked for clues about what filled my mother's life between doctor's appointments and birthdays. My pensive thoughts wandered from her distinctive cursive writing to the corners of my notebook paper, where I mindlessly doodled spiral after spiral. I felt abandoned and lost. The remnants of the red marker on my face reminded me that my work, once again, got in the way of me being there for Mom when she needed me. All of my anguished feelings channeled into my spiral doodles and eventually spilled out into a convergence of friends and family attending her funeral. Returning to class was hard. In my silent struggle to make sense of life, I spewed myself back into its balancing act. The stagnant spiral doodles scattered on paper merged into one fluid spiral inside me: I propelled forward on its twisting tail.
Naturally, I became fascinated by Fibonacci's Golden Spiral. My students would be, too, as I eagerly integrated his work into a lesson plan connecting a number sequence to spirals in nature. The connections were endless: from DNA to the baby's position in the womb to the umbilical cord connecting the baby to the womb. I pointed to the spiraling array of seeds in a dried sunflower head from our class garden. I peered into our classroom pond tank and unexpectedly spotted it on our tadpole's belly! Fibonacci's spiral popped up everywhere. Of course, the swirly shape would eventually find its way into my signature.
Over the years, my symbol evolved into something more than the doodle at the end of my name. I imagined it as my life's visual timeline. If I placed the moment I was born at the spiral's origin, every moment that followed would rest upon its spiraling tail. One point led to the next and condensed into rings that captured a year full of moments. My life's spiral, in this respect, would extend beyond 50 bands. If I traced back 16 loops, my finger would touch the moment that occurred on the Friday before Halloween. Behind the 16th loop, tight coils held memories of my childhood, adolescence, and motherhood. By moving my finger forward 11 loops, I could pinpoint the moment I became "Grammy". I follow the tail outward and slide my finger over the happy, sad, exciting, and challenging junctures that led to the point where I sit here, sharing my story with you.
My life's spiral became a vessel of everything I know; my Body of Knowledge (BOK). Guided by the choices I've made and will make during my lifetime, all the twisting moments steer my direction moving forward. By definition, most spiral shapes are infinite. Ironically, pieces of my BOK are now part of your BOK because you chose to click a link. Likewise, bits of your BOK become part of your students' BOK when they decide it matters. When BOK spirals collide and fluidly intersect, a coalition of transforming knowledge propels forward on twisting tails into the future.
How Big is your BOK?
Infinite.
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