If we were to stop maintaining the highways, stop plowing fields, in time, the land where I live would return to being forest. It would happen by a process of forest succession — first grasses and shrubs would spring up in the fields, wild raspberries and saskatoonberries, milkweed, nettles, and dandelions. Mosses would fill cracks in the asphalt, pushing it apart to let the earth breathe. Roots would aerate the soil and fix nitrogen, bring back the bacterial life, mycelium, earthworms, and Rollie pollies. Animals would come to eat berries, would trample paths. In time, in the shelter and safety of this new community of plants, young saplings would spring up — birch, aster, and poplar, and in that greater shade young evergreen saplings would take hold. These sweet trees would remain small year over year, barely growing at all, until perhaps 30 years later those intrepid birches begin to fall, enriching the soil as they rot and leaving space in the sun for those patient evergreens to grow. Among those evergreens over the next two hundred years or more deciduous trees would start to be able to thrive — maples, oaks, nut trees, cherry, apple. If we stoped working the fields around Toronto, maybe in 300 years, we would have the beginnings of an old growth forest.
In our society the field of a classroom is plowed and seeded, fertilized and sprayed. Each crop of students is pruned and grown in rows. A liberatory learning environment will let the fields go fallow. In a liberatory classroom we do not all have to be corn all the time. We do not have to be knee high by July. One’s sun can be another’s shade — we need both, after all. Our our goal is not only to grow tall and ‘produce’, it is also to fertilize the soil underfoot. To feed each other. To encourage each other’s saplings. To let old, tired parts of us that no longer serve us topple and rest on the ground.
In a liberatory learning environment class doesn’t end — the space is open no matter who and what is growing there. To leave is to make space, to arrive is to celebrate the soil. With that I am thankful for the DLL students who have come before us, in whose dappled shade we can take root with each other and grow another generation of foliage.
What does this have to do with the klein bottle? Not a lot. Just let it be said that the canopy of communion is made possible by refusal, as hard as it is to imagine. We are the space and the structure, the impossible non-intersection of "no", and the fountain of renewal.