King of the Sky
“Purple” (King of the Sky, 2007-present)
I call him King of the Sky, and he likes that. He stands on the second floor balcony and waves to me whenever I pull up in my truck. Yesterday, he spent ninety minutes putting paint on a canvas. After an hour he asked for purple.
Nevaeh said she is a true artist. She slapped a paintbrush against a two by ten and told me I needed to be wild and free. Wild and free is how to be a true artist. Her little sister said, “You don’t always have to paint wild and free. Sometimes you can paint beautiful.” This after Nevaeh’s wild paint hit her sister’s pants and the little one said, “Oh no you didn’t.”
I often wonder how much potential is lost when adults attempt to control children rather than look inside for the divine. I wonder how to harness the individuality of each spirit, how to foster what exists and act as a conduit between the child and the world. When the kids come to CRISP there is something about their energy that makes creating this space worthwhile, that helps me to believe that anything is possible.
Children see a world of curiosity and wonder. Children want to know the why behind what we as adults do and say. I always had trouble accepting the words because I said so. I heard teachers scream at children watch your tone when I taught in schools. I watched teachers wear busy, overworked, and tired like it was a badge, like this somehow served children.
I think of the kids in the sky and the kids on the ground and all of those that I have met along the way. I think of the imprint of the hands and feet that have made their way into this space that grows much like a jungle, and I think of what I have learned. I know about listening. I know that the older the child the more confusing life becomes. One moment he wants every bit of attention you have and the next to be left alone.
To enter the space of a child requires the memory of what it used to be like. To remember those teachers and adults who ribbed me, but I could tell still loved me. I remember Buggy and Itchy who got their nicknames in the school garden, both because of how bugs had done them wrong. And I remember the way fifth graders used the sawzall to cut up pieces of bamboo and make small cups that they poured water into.
There was a little girl they said shot herself. They said she was bullied and misunderstood. In my memory she stands in the garden with two bamboo cups. And in my memory she is the one who sold them to other students for seventy-five cents each. In my memory I know of walking the halls and listening as she told me how everybody blowing it. And maybe everybody is blowing it. And maybe her death is a testament to this.
Maybe when I ask the kids where away is, there is a part of their heart that gets this, but maybe when they are told to throw plastic forks and plastic trays and plastic wrappers and half-eaten food into a plastic bag daily it is hard for them to believe that there is not a place called away, a place where nobody is hurt, where nothing is wrong, where things disappear.
There are two words on the pergola bare of paint the day before yesterday. Kind and care. And when you give kids the opportunity to be wild and free or beautifully kind and slow, on their own, what happens is this: I ask Nevaeh what colors make purple.
She says, “Red and white.”
It’s my turn to say, “No you didn’t.”
She says, “That’s pink. I meant red and blue.”
And the King of the Sky, in his last twenty minutes of painting, creates a purple like I have never seen, a plum really, and when my friend Michael walks down the path and to the back, this boy says, “Tell him what you call me.”
And I say, “This is the King of the Sky.”
