Love is kindness, compassion, long suffering, and patience. Love is ever present. Love is steadfast. Love is kind. Love is fierce . Love is grounded and deep. Love is curious, alert, and wondering. Love celebrates joy and soothes sorrow.
2. Beauty Creation
I am dedicated to the creation of beauty using my discipline of English Language Arts. It is with thoughts and words we create the world. +++ The world is made of stories. We tell stories about ourselves, our families, our circumstances, the world around us, and because of our capacity for story creation and meaning making, we have power to change the world. +++ What would a world where we are all dedicated to creating beauty in the service of the greater good look like? I believe one of the reasons humans exist is to create beauty, and that we are in turn fed by beauty. What place does beauty have this day and age? Could beauty creation be the antidote to the times we live in?
3. Remembering
Where do we come from? On whose land do we live? Where do we live? Whose stories have been lost? Whose stories are needing to be told?
When we re-member, we put back together that which has been dis-membered
the word REMEMBER means: re- "back to the original place; again, anew, once more," also with a sense of "undoing," c. 1200, from Old French and directly from Latin re- "again, back, anew, against," "Latin combining form conceivably from Indo-European *wret-, metathetical variant of *wert- "to turn"
member from Old French membre "part, portion; topic, subject; limb, member of the body; member" (of a group, etc.)," 11c., from Latin membrum "limb, member of the body, part," probably from PIE *mems-ro, from root *mems- "flesh, meat" (source also of Sanskrit mamsam "flesh;" Greek meninx "membrane," mēros "thigh" (the "fleshy part"); Gothic mimz "flesh"). As a descendant of Anglo-Saxon, English, German, Scots-Irish, Eastern and Northern European roots, I have lost all ancestral ways of living in right relationship with the land. I have lost the songs, the recipes and rituals, the stitches, the medicines, the village, the birthing and dying songs of my mother's and father's peoples. I suspect the loss of these things has had a greater consequence on my people's lives than I have yet to unravel. Learning my family history is a continual journey of unraveling, grieving, rejoicing, and remembering.
I am a beneficiary of unearned privilege by virtue of the fact that I am a descendant of settler colonialism. As a daughter of the sand hills, river crossings, and pine woods of South Carolina I was influenced by invasive kudzu, sweltering humidity, religious fervor, southern hospitality, ghost stories about plantation life, and the clear distinction between black and white neighborhoods in certain parts of town. Edisto, Chesnee, Saluda, Waccamaw, Enoree, Congaree, and Kiawah were strange beautiful words I loved to say; they whispered something of the first nations people on whose land my poor farming southern baptist ancestors claimed as their own, but whose faces, stories, songs, and ways of listening and living with the land had all but vanished.
Because of all of this I am dedicated to re-membering....
4. Critical Literacy Students this day and age interact with more kinds of texts than ever before- from blogs, to books, to newspapers, to billboards, to social media apps. It is imperative then that students learn the thinking skills to be able to interpret, decipher, decode texts , and thus, understand the intents of the creators of said texts. Engaged citizenship, social change, love, justice, and freedom thus, rest upon the skill of critical literacy. As Paolo Freire taught us, it is through the world we learn to read the word, and through reading the word, we read the world.
+++
On whose shoulders I stand, on whose labors & love I give thanks:
Anne Burke W. Lewis Burke Warbler Creek Farm Carsten, Cranford, Jess, Christine, Lillian, Weston Susan, Adam, Andrew Joanna, Paul, Charlotte, June, Henry Almskaar kin Entermann kin Lopez Island, WA kin The Majestic Threads A.S. Neill John Taylor Gatto John Holt Maria Montessori Fred Rogers Makiguchi Kanomori Bob Raven Beth Moore Keith Cartwright Paul Handstedt Melanie Almeder Greg Forter Ed Madden Stephen Jenkinson Martin Shaw Brother Blue Ed Sheridan Leonard Cohen Mary Oliver William Stafford Charles Eisenstein Joseph Chilton Pearce Jean Liedloff Ina May Gaskin Penny Simkin Woodring College of Education Secondary Ed department The MIT cohort of Fall 2017 My students
and many more...
Writers, poets, teachers, storytellers, dreamers, singers, philosophers, activists, seed savers, artists, dancers, farmers, secretaries, house cleaners, builders, weavers, line cooks, toilet scrubbers, tree farmers, pilots, welders, oil rig operators, window washers, shepherds, cobblers, sewers, waitresses, truck drivers, mothers, fathers, grandparents, lovers, nurses, doctors, dentists, checkers, tellers, bartenders, salmon, lichens, old growth forests, seals, flickers, stellar jays, fungi, yarrow, nootka roses, cedars, thunderstorm, tornado, flame, corn, wheat, potato, cow, lamb, pig, chicken, rabbit, cats, dogs, parakeet, tick, flea, mosquito, cicada, and all those beings who weave this world...