It has been dawning on me lately, how blessed I was to be born to this woman. In Buddhist teachings, we hear of karma. We hear how we planted seeds of actions way back across many past lives and how these now ripen as experiences, as appearances, as the content of our lives. To have appeared in Jenny Tyrrell's life, I had extraordinary karma ripening.
Heading to Hong Kong with my Dad at the age of 32, when my brother and I were two and four respectively, she took on a job as a primary school teacher at Kellet School in Pokfulam on Hong Kong Island.
Here, she began her quiet revolution of sparking the creativity of her students. She made them dream. She encouraged their imaginations. She fed them stories. She revolutionized the reading practices of the entire school, taking away the dreary curriculum and its Roger Red Hat haze and introducing Where the Wilds Things Are, big books that encouraged big minds.
She would come home, and my brother and I would receive her instruction directly. She constantly read us books. She turned me into a writer. How could I not become a writer in her presence?
The Bear Bodhisattva
When we were teenagers, Mum had a breakthrough year.
It began one late summer afternoon when, while preparing for a new school year for a class of six year olds, she made a make believe bear.
Well no, this was partly my fault. I had accompanied her to school that day. I was starting to get bored so she sent me off to the theater cupboards as a distraction.
I came back with a life-sized bear suit and proceeded to fill him with newspaper. At which point, Mum's eyes lit up. We found a pair of tights to turn into a head and stuck on eyes, and then she got some sheets out and started to build a cave.
A week later, the school year started. Six year olds appeared and slowly started to realize that a life-sized bear was living in a cave in a corner of the classroom. They began to befriend the bear and Mum used him as a vehicle to unlock their inherent curiosity.
They studied bear's lives, they made books for the bear to help him to read, they created an entire birthday party for him — and set out on a fieldtrip to the grocery store down the road to research the making of jelly.
As they were doing all this, they were learning math, science, reading — and they were learning fast. Astonishing things began to happen during the course of this bear year. Troubled kids, one who had severe autism, one whose sister had recently died, one whose parents were divorcing, started to turn to the bear.
When no-one was looking, they crawled into the cave and talked to him. They told him about their pain. My Mum would quietly hover near the cave and overhear their words, and know how to help.
Her award-winning thesis became the book, The Power of Fantasy in Early Learning. It was published by the prestigious educational publishers, Routledge Falmer, and is now on the reading lists of teaching degrees around the world.
How imagination builds our world
I have started to realize just how much I have to be thankful for, for having Jenny as my mother. She is a scholar of the imagination - and everything I do is powered by that. These writing jobs that I do, they require the imagination. The entire content marketing work I am engaged in, is a massive bout of education. We learn about our target audience, then we serve them the educational content they need to be even better in their jobs.
Then I go further and think of my entire Buddhist practice: What is our life, other than our imagination? What are our problems, our stresses and our joys, other than our thoughts?
In Buddhism, we learn how to create mandalas with our minds.
We learn to train our powers of imagination so strongly that we start to see the purity in all living beings around us. We learn to see the goodness in others, their pure potential, and focus less on their 'apparent' faults.
To imagine is key: How can we cultivate compassion, if we are not able to imagine the heartache of another? If we are not able to lift our mind off ourself for one moment and into the experience of another? How can we connect to our audience, if we can't imagine their needs?
So as Thanksgiving dawns on America today, I dedicate this post to my Mum. To say thank you. To the power of a great teacher. To the power of a loving parent. May all good come your way.
Photo credits: Top - Wiki Commons; Below - Illustration by David Schofield from 'The Power of Fantasy in Early Learning' by Jenny Tyrrell, Routledge Falmer.