The Elements of Donna

Donna Rockwell and I attended the same magical graduate program at the Center for Humanistic Studies (CHS). She graduated with her doctoral degree a bit before I did and returned to pair her experiences in journalism and psychology as a dissertation proposal instructor. I’ll be honest, I was jealous. I had already set my sites on teaching at CHS upon graduation, so I vowed to take notes both literal and figurative, in the hope that I too might return as a student-turned teacher.

She probably didn’t share her history in journalism, she was modest that way. I would not have known of her love of words the way I know now.

Two memories of that class stand out to me, and I misunderstood both of them as they were occurring, only appreciating them on this side of age and wisdom.

The textbook assigned to the course was the pithy and succinct “Elements of Style” by Strunk and White (2000). Published in 1920 and assigned by countless writing teachers across decades, Time (2011) declared it one of the 100 best and most influential English books written—a fact that Stephen King (2000) echoed in his own book “On writing” where he proclaimed there to be “little or no detectable bullshit in that book” (p. 16). Eight “elementary rules of usage” clarified possessive apostrophe use, comma placement, and the proper use of participial phrases” (pp. 1–13), while 10 “elementary principles of composition” encouraged the use of the active voice, avoidance of “needless words” and “loose sentences,” and reminded the reader to “place all emphatic words of a sentence at the end” (pp. 18–32).

Donna had us sit in a circle and take turns reading aloud to each other. One person read one paragraph, and then the next read the next, and so on. I was decades away from understanding the ways that my neuroatypical preferences did not lend themselves well to this type of information processing. Firmly planted in the venn-overlap between hungry for knowledge and restless AF, I possessed a significant serving of what Donna referred to as the Yiddish shpilkes, or ants-in-the-pants (one of our early vocabulary words from her).

Reading aloud during my turn was tolerable, but listening to other readers was torturous. I was anxious for them in their mispronunciations and unable to prevent myself from counting ahead in the paragraphs to see which one would be mine so I could scan it for troubling words or phrases needing whispered rehearsal (which—of course—prevented me from truly taking in what I was hearing). I’m not proud of this first memory, but it’s necessary to share for purposes of foreshadowing. I recall that I had a rather bad habit of dividing the number of hours in the class by the amount of tuition, down to the minute, calculating the actual cost of Chapter 5, section 17: “Do not inject opinions” (p. 79). This was about as far from “in-the-moment” as one could be, antithetical to the mindfulness practice that Donna began each class with.

Somehow, despite my complete inability to settle into my seat or skin, Donna coaxed dissertation chapters out of each of us. When it was time to learn Clark Moustakas’ heuristic interview process, she allowed us to practice our interview questions with her, generously sharing personal stories. One afternoon, a classmate was playing the part of the interviewer, and Donna the co-researcher. She shared a concern, and my classmate murmured some words of encouragement. She went a bit deeper and suddenly—to all our surprise—the role-play became real, Donna became vulnerable, and we found ourselves holding a powerful silence as the two of them talked.

My second memory is equally mortifying. I remember being very uncomfortable with the intimacy that had unfolded, thinking it akin to a therapy session disguised as a class exercise. By now Donna had named my unflattering tendency to judge everything that wasn’t nailed down. She called it judging mind. Allegedly by naming it, one could free oneself from it, one could become the name-er rather than the named. “Judging mind” I tagged the thoughts . . . “judging mind.” Donna and the student talked on, he practicing his para-verbals while trying not to lead or problem solve, she—breathing deeply and feeling into the story she was telling—eyes closed at times . . . correcting herself until she found just the right words, until just the right meaning was made.

If we were to thematically analyze these two memories, Donna’s parts would be called “teaching by example,” and my parts would be called “Judgy Mc Judge face.” The existential a priori of the two parts combined is so clear to me now, though I couldn’t see it then. This was experiential teaching at its finest. Twenty years later, I recognize with great pride and admiration the many existential-humanistic skills that Donna snuck into our hearts and minds: presence, authenticity, vulnerability, the importance of “being-with” rather than “telling-to,” the power of sitting still, and the ability to trust a process even when its outcome remained unknown.

A decade later would find me teaching in the same program, only Donna had moved on. I had fully embodied the experiential teaching style she emulated, creating the experience of what was to be learned whenever possible and irritated when material required a straight “boring” lecture. I opened each semester—no matter the course—with a clarification of possessive apostrophe use so that Rogers’ necessary and sufficient conditions could be properly punctuated and cited. It was as if Donna had planted experiential seeds in me, snuck them right past my judging mind and insecure ego, certain they would come to fruition. And they did. Thank you, Donna.

We ran into each another in the humanistic hospitality suite at an American Psychological Association (APA) convention 5–6 year ago. I was new to both the Division 32 board and the parliament of APA, a bit awed by the elders I found myself surrounded by. I gravitated toward the kindness of Donna’s smile and waited for her to finish her conversation with a man I didn’t recognize. “Betz, do you know Scott Churchill? He’s the editor-in-chief of The Humanistic Psychologist journal. Scott, this is Betz King. She’s a phenomenal writer. You should publish her.” (Donna Rockwell, personal conversation with author, August 9, 2019).

(Insert record scratch noise here). Wait, what?!? Phenomenal writer? How on earth was she remembering anything I might have written 10 years prior?!? Surely I had never revealed my heart’s deepest longing to her, the desire to write . . . to someday be called not a psychologist, or a professor, but simply a writer? It was a secret I kept close to the cuff back then, yet Donna somehow knew. She knew, and in a single serendipitous moment, she opened the door for me. I later published my first peer-reviewed article with Scott Churchill’s kind assistance. I’m certain the internalized machinations of Strunk and White had something to do with it as well, so double thanks on this one Donna.

Most people will write about Donna as a mindfulness teacher, a journalist, or a professor. To me, she was a bit of a fairy godmother, working an elemental style of magic I couldn’t recognize until it was long in the rear-view mirror. Not magic that turned me into who she thought I should be, but rather magic that boosted the becoming of who I already was—a writer . . . an experiential teacher able to withstand the rolled eyes of exasperated students in service of the great “ah-ha” moments . . . a much humbler, kinder, and gentler version of myself, able to sit in my seat with a bit less judging mind. For me, this is Donna’s legacy. She embodied Buber’s (1970) “I and thou” with all she encountered, and in the hallowed here-and-now of those encounters (whether in a classroom, a board meeting, or a hospitality suite), her presence allowed, encouraged, and elicited becoming.

So, thank you Donna, for your patience, your grace, and your generosity of wit and wisdom. I’ve learned much from you and will carry it onward. Our shared story ends as it began, with Strunk and White, whose final sentence is just one more bit of magic in that it so beautifully encapsulates my experience of you, er . . . I mean to say my experience with you: “she will live on and on and on.” (p. 85).