Sita Walker

You know, a wall of sound coming at you.

You do not have to be good.

I'm getting emotional.

I'm getting emotional thinking about it now because it was so affecting to me to see these young people

love what this woman had done.

Mary Oliver is a sublime poet and they loved it so much that I see them.

Sometimes I see them, you know, you see kids, you come across them, they've all long graduated now, and they will come up and they'll say, oh, Miss, I can still say that poem or that is the only poem I know because you made us learn it.

And one girl, her name was Cameron, such a beautiful girl, she embroidered a book bag for me.

But it took her so long that she came back to give it to me the following year.

And the book bag was embroidered with words from the last stanza of the poem, two lines which say, whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination.

And, oh, I just, it just crushed me.

I thought, this is what it means.

This is the reward you get for being a teacher.

I think, strangely, the thing that relieved the anxiety of being good, and it wasn't even the goodness that I had an issue with.

I mean, goodness is very interesting.

I love to see goodness in people and wonder where has that light come from?

it wasn't that I didn't want to be good it's what that I wanted to lose the anxiety surrounding the shoulds you should do this you should be like that you should be like this and I think really that the opposite of anxiety is of that anxiety is not to be bad but to be creative right

So I think that any sort of creativity that I did, and it really came to me.

So it came to me when I was writing the memoir.

It came to me in the classroom.