We Are All the Same on the Inside
So much has been written about the recent presidential election there is little, if anything, that hasn’t been said. However, when you live in Manhattan you cannot avoid being involved. The fact that the President-elect lives in Trump Tower, just at the top of Fifth Avenue near Central Park, means street closings and barricades that are making it even more difficult to maneuver around our already crowded city. Especially during the Christmas season. We expect demonstrations in Manhattan, now there are almost daily marches up Fifth Avenue causing traffic delays. Hopefully in January the transportation problems will be resolved when President-elect Donald Trump moves to Washington.
What the presidential campaign did reveal, and it had nothing to do with whether or not you are a Democrat, Independent, Libertarian or Republican, is how divided America is at this moment. We are not a “United” States of America; we are defined and divided by words and categories created by pollsters.
Two years ago I met Timothy Bellavia at an afternoon reading event in Brooklyn. I had been invited to read from A Day with Bonefish Joe and he was presenting and reading from his book, We Are All the Same Inside. Timothy’s energy and warm spirit are apparent from the moment you meet him and we soon became friends.
Timothy grew up in Buffalo, NY, the son of a dentist. He remembers making things, even using some materials from his father’s office, from the time he was a small child. He always felt different from his parents and siblings because with their Italian heritage they had olive colored skin. Timothy’s is white. His solution was to begin worshipping the sun and working to stay as tan as possible. Until he developed skin cancer. That’s when he came up with the idea of making dolls that would demonstrate that “we are all the same on the inside.”
Timothy is an Assistant Professor and social studies and arts instructor at Touro College and University System’s Graduate School of Education in New York. He teaches his students how they can integrate the arts into their future elementary school curricula,
primarily, using doll-making projects he conducts with children as a tool to demonstrate the power of the arts in teaching.
“As a society, we are divided by our skin and the Sage doll was invented to help children understand and celebrate what they have in common. I hope I can create a new standard for self esteem and self perception.” Last year, Timothy was presented with the 2016 Outstanding Educator of the Year at the Harvard Club of New York.
Thanksgiving is a holiday that was designed to bring Americans together. To gather families together. It is also a time when we can think about nature and our relationship to the natural world. With all that is going on in the this is perhaps the moment to return to our childhood books: A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh; E.B. White’s, Charlotte’s Web and Kenneth Grahame’s, The Wind in the Willows. These stories offer us insights into how to live.
The poet, Wendell Berry, in A Small Porch, Sabbath Poems 2014 – 2015
(Counterpoint Press, 2014) included an essay entitled: “The Presence of Nature in the Natural World: A Long Conversation.” He writes: “We seem to have forgotten that there might be, or that there ever were, mutually sustaining relationships between resident humans and their home places in the world of Nature.”
I wish you a lovely Thanksgiving with your families. Turkey or tofu, we are all the same on the inside.