I am bigger than this! And may I be helped to grow to my full size.*
(M. C. Richards)

Growing up is not a linear thing. It’s why we can be ninety and still have plenty of growing up to do. We can go back to places and subjects and challenges and possibilities we had thought far behind us and take them into our becoming the fullness of who we can be as we travel to our limits.

When we get out of the way of ourselves and others growing up, we become teachers of one another in the way M. C. Richards describes here:

a good teacher is taught by her students. For she is not to teach them merely what she knows but to help to bring to maturity what is already in them. It takes, of course, a very good ear, to hear what is present in a child, or an adult.**

This thought transports me to the gallery in Florence inhabited by Michelangelo’s unfinished sculptures: four figures escaping their stone prisons, as it were. We are teachers when we help free the person who is within each other.

(*From M. C. Richards’ Centering.)