I’m delighted to introduce to you David Grant Smith. This is the first in a series of blogs that we’re excited to publish over the next several months.
Here’s to the joy and pleasure in getting lost, in feeling found, and in taking the long way home, especially after the Leadership Lab.
Emily Tymus Ihrke
Editor, gcLi
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#1 Listening and Attention
by David Grant Smith, Dean of Students at The Roxbury Latin School in Boston, MA
There is a grove of aspen trees in central Utah called Pando, the “Trembling Giant.” Scientists believe it to be among the oldest and heaviest organisms in the world. You see, Pando is not simply a 108-acre grove of aspen trees. It is one tree. One six-thousand-ton tree. It is a cluster of interconnected, genetically identical trees that share a common root system. Each “stem” that we see above ground is simply one more branch, one arm reaching out from this sprawling underground mammoth toward the energy of the sun. Pando has gained some small notoriety in recent years as we’ve come to learn more about tree colonies, about how they communicate with and protect one another. A forest of metaphors about community and connectivity, Pando has lingered in my imagination for years as a pilgrimage destination, a place of genius, awe, mystery, and wisdom. A place with lessons to share.
In early June, Binx (my dog) and I jumped into my truck and headed out west for the summer. I wanted to drive through the vast expanses of the West; there is something deeply healing about the distant gaze, I find––the “solace of empty spaces,” as Gretel Ehrlich describes this. I planned to wind through Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, and Utah, hoping the solitude, silence, and my own experience of the sublime would speak to me. Trite as it may seem, I went to the West for discernment. I went for answers. I went, with the best of intentions, to listen. And so, after my week at gcLi in Colorado Springs, Binx and I headed to the Fishlake National Forest of Utah to sit among the aspen trees. To listen to Pando.
You may not be surprised to hear that trees don’t say much.
I told myself I wasn’t disappointed when I arrived. It doesn’t take long to drive through the aspen cluster on the main road through Fishlake. One sign welcomes you to the Pando grove; a third of a mile later, another wishes you farewell: “Leaving the Pando Aspen Clone.” And that’s it. Arches or Zion, Pando is not. It barely registers. But I was going to give this place time. I had come all this way. I had come to Pando. I was going to give the trees my attention. So I walked. And I sat. I looked and touched and listened my way through this ancient giant, straining to hear what the trees had to say. Surely the universe has always spoken through the forest, right? Burning bushes and bodhi trees and all that.
But instead, after two and a half days: silence. Yes, the delicate rustling of the quaking leaves, their applause to the wind twisting through the valley, offers a spiritual soundscape if you want it. The trees were constantly speaking to each other. But never to me. I passed through unnoticed. Sitting on the grassy floor, I gave them my attention. And still, nothing.
At some point on the third day in Pando, something started to shift. As I watched Binx prancing and sniffing around, enjoying his liberation from the confines of the city, saluting these sacred trunks, hind leg raised high, I started to smile and chuckle. Although his own adventures through the aspen clone disturbed my meditation, Binx got Pando. Binx understood. Binx didn’t come here to listen for ancient wisdom or truth or discern his life pathway. He just played with the trees. He jumped over logs and chased deer and squirrels, got confused by the flies circling his head, and found cool shelter in the shade of large rocks. When he needed, he cantered down to the edge of the lake and plopped down into the cool, fresh, blue waters.
This was the first lesson of Pando.
Pando has never looked for anything. Pando has never sought truth or strained to listen to the universe. Pando is simply there. Pando endures violent, harsh winters and natural ravages from the pests and parasites that gnaw at its bark. But it shimmers, shakes, and claps in the summertime winds. Each fall, Pando ignites into a radiant flame of yellow before turning in for the long night, slumbering through each winter. Pando has no sense of urgency. No agenda. Pando simply lives.
“It will help if you do not expect God to speak to you,” writes Barbara Brown Taylor in an essay on walking the earth. “Just give your full attention to where you are, for once.”
Your full attention. For once.
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In the 1940s, the French mystic Simone Weil spoke to this. In a beautiful essay on education, she wrote that the purpose of this work – the teaching and learning, all of it – is to learn to pay attention.
“The capacity to give one’s attention,” she writes, “is a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle.” For true attention, she offers, is no small thing, no mere kindness in a moment of need. It is the substance of love of neighbor. Of love beyond desire.
And it starts with this simple question: “What are you going through?”
This is the question of full attention. This is the question that recognizes the deep humanity of the soul in front of you. It is a question that listens, believes, and honors. A question that receives.
For Weil, true attention is a way of being with, a “way of looking” at another person. In a moment of true attention, Weil writes, “the soul empties itself of all its own contents in order to receive into itself the being it is looking at, just as [they are], in all [their] truth.” This is a life-giving, restorative attention. It is the fullness of love.
I went to Pando and what I found was that Pando listened to me. Pando received me. Just as I was. In all my messy truth.
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David Grant Smith serves as Dean of Students at The Roxbury Latin School in Boston, Massachusetts where he teaches courses in history, English, and health and wellness, and coaches in the lacrosse program. Prior to his time at RL, David taught at Woodberry Forest School in Orange, Virginia, and at St. Anne’s-Belfield School in Charlottesville, Virginia, where he served as Dean of Students and a Grade Level Dean. He participated in the gcLi Leadership Lab in June 2023. Whether whitewater kayaking or fly fishing, David prefers mountain streams to the beach. His Portuguese Water Dog, Binx, doesn’t discriminate, and will splash around blithely in rivers, oceans, lakes, and puddles on city streets, living into his breed. David has given up on trying to keep his truck clean.