Meditation of the Week: Genny Moriarty

By PHIN GIBBS

Q: Can you discuss your inspiration for the meditation and how it took its current form?

A:I had a scene where I was cooking with my son. I actually wrote that a few years ago but then didn’t do anything with it. Pieces of the meditation have been floating around for a while, and I’ve occasionally revisited it, working it into an essay. However, it never quite reached the point I desired. This summer, when Mr. Hearon sent out an invitation to adults in the community to see who might want to give a meditation, I thought it might be a good time for me to use that as motivation to finish it. I had given a meditation a couple of years ago. After signing up, I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, what am I thinking? I just gave one a couple of years ago, and I have all this work to do this fall to get the learning centers launched.’ I second-guessed myself a couple of times, but I kept returning to that material. I think it was timely in many ways. I’ve been thinking about seniors who are getting ready to apply to school, so they were in the back of my mind as I was writing and thinking about what I wanted them to take away from it. You know, the idea that we can be so hard on ourselves and sometimes hard on one another. I wanted to invite them to think about how perfectionism sometimes obstructs things that can be really beautiful or good enough. So, both in connection with the fact that we went through a really challenging year as a school community last year and this year, I wanted to leave students, especially, but also my colleagues and friends, with the understanding that we make mistakes, and hopefully, we grow and learn from them, but we don’t let them paralyze us. The fear of making mistakes sometimes paralyzes us if we’re not careful.

Q: There was this common strand of how you motherhood and talking about your oldest child. Was it difficult to open up about that and show that vulnerability?

A: Absolutely. So I was writing this time about my middle child, actually. And I’ve written about my kids in the past. Because I felt I was kind of approaching this by also reading about his vulnerabilities, I wanted to make sure I got his permission. He was very loving and said I could write about him. But it is hard. It’s hard to look honestly at the way we play into certain dynamics. As a parent, you sometimes find yourselves at a loss for how to help a child. I think that can be true as teachers sometimes too. It did make me feel a little bit vulnerable. I was worried about him feeling vulnerable as well. But I also feel like there’s so much power in sharing that with the community because we all struggle sometimes in different ways.

Q: The part in your meditation where you talked about this anger that you had at yourself for not writing as much as you wanted to or reading as many books as you had scheduled. How have you thought about managing that anger and how did you express that in the meditation?

A: I feel as though I was totally surprised. I didn’t remember feeling that way or writing those words. I do know I’ve occasionally felt like I’ve disappointed myself. When I read them, it made me feel sad because I remembered how much I was juggling then. In hindsight, it’s easy to say I should have been easier on myself. So, seeing that written out was a good reminder to me. I still sometimes am hard on myself, but I’m trying to catch myself now and just be a little gentler when I can.

Q: Was a factor of the meditation creating sympathy with current seniors?

A: Absolutely. It’s such a huge part of it. I feel that when you bring together smart, curious, ambitious, talented kids and adults, part of it is in the water. We all have plans for ourselves. It’s hard to see beyond the bubble or see beyond what’s immediately in front of us. I did have them in mind. I know how hard it is to want to go to this school or want a relationship to work out. So that was really important to me that I at least offer some empathy toward them.

Q: What were some literary devices you used?

A: I think a lot about the sounds of my sentences when I’m writing. There were a couple of metaphors that were floating around in my mind as I was writing, and I worried a little bit that maybe it was too many. I had the cooking metaphor, and then I had the one about the angel eggs, and there was something else that I’m not sure about. What was the other one that I was really into? It was about the eyes, looking at ourselves through different lenses. I was a little worried as I was writing that it was too much. I often write a lot and then have to figure out how to structure it and what to cut back on.

Q: How did you approach structuring your meditation, especially with all of its flashbacks and flash-forwards?

A: That was the hardest part of this piece for me. I started with the scene of cooking with my son, then I flashed back to cooking with my own mom, and then kind of flashed forward. I had some flashbacks and flash-forwards, and I moved stuff around a lot until it flowed the way I wanted it.

Q: Music plays a significant role in setting the mood for meditation. What did you think about your song selection for the opening and closing songs, and how did they complement your meditation’s themes?

A: I tried to find songs that thematically fit, even if they weren’t a complete match. The song I chose for the beginning was a song my brother put on a mixtape for me years ago. The mood of it felt to fit, if that makes sense. The other song my parents used to sing to me when I was little, and I sang it to my kids when they were little. It touched on the parenting aspect of it.