Kathy and I made it to Phoenix, but it was quite a day. The flight was delayed for four hours due to mechanical problems. Considering the alternative, I am grateful, but it made for an incredibly long day including a time change. I leave you with a short, poignant John O’Donohue poem which echoes Life is a River.
I would love to live
Like a river flows,
Carried by the surprise
Of its own unfolding.
It was a day full of surprise. I look forward to my weekly digital sabbatical and the unfolding that I will witness.
About ivonprefontaine
In keeping with bell hooks and Noam Chomsky, I consider myself a public and dissident intellectual. Part of my work is to move beyond (transcend) institutional dogmas that bind me to defend freedom, raising my voice to be heard on behalf of those who seek equity and justice in all their forms.
I completed my PhD in Philosophy of Leadership Studies at Gonzaga University, Spokane, WA. My dissertation and research was how teachers experience becoming teachers and their role as leaders.
I focus on leading, communicating, and innovating in organizations. This includes mindfuful servant-leadership, World Cafe events, Appreciative Inquiry, and expressing one's self through creativity. I offer retreats, workshops, and presentations that can be tailored to your organzations specific needs.
I published peer reviewed articles about schools as learning organizations, currere as an ethical pursuit, and hope as an essential element of adult eductaion. I published three poems and am currently preparing my poetry to publish as an anthology of poetry.
I present on mindful leadership, servant leadership, schools as learning organizations, how teachers experience becoming teachers, assessement, and critical thinking. I facilitate mindfulness, hospitality retreats. and World Cafe Events using Appreciative Inquiry.
I am writing and researching about various forms of leadership, how teachers inform and form their identity as a particular teacher, schools as learning organizations, hope, nonviolence and its anticipatory relationship with the future, as essential elements to teaching and learning.
Academic publications can be found at Ivon Gile Prefontaine on ResearchGate
ivonprefontaine
Teacher as Transformer 
‘carried by the surprise of its own unfolding’… great introspect inducing…
It is lovely Jay and take me inward.
Life as a River suggests a life full of insight and creativity and as a metaphor works as well of not better than Shakespeare’s Seven Stages of Man. With a river life starts as a droplet of water at conception, falling from a cloud on how ground, then during development makes its way to the water course. The tumbling brook as infant and child, the tributary as a teenager and young adult, the main river as a adult and older and old age in the ocean currents. To die, to return to ocean and at some stage through convection taken up once more in cloud.
This is a great analogy. The return to the ocean is the reverse of the spawning salmon. Thank you for the wonderful commentary Jonathan.
Everyone that has not lived on a river should go to one and spend at least a day doing nothing but watch it go by:
Always the same river, always changing waters.
It is a moment never repeated, but always there,
An anomaly of geography unstable by its nature
And yet, in histories, in fiction, just the thought
Of them stirs something magical, a gathered mythos,
Or our collective need to be at, set down, but moving
At least around a bend into the next day if we can.
All the places I have loved to live are by water with rivers above the sea, so I suppose at the mouth of a river best of all. I love to walk upstream until somewhere in the English fells it is nothing but a spring. The Rivers Cuckmere and Ouse, the Eden and Lune …
It is always wonderful to find the source of something. It is the the purest form of the river.
Thank you for the wonderful commentary.
I only fly as long as I can keep at least one foot on the ground. 🙂
I am not a great flyer either, although I have gotten better over the last couple of years.
Well back a million years ago when I was 12 🙂
My brothers “Best Friend” took me for a plane ride and flue under a bridge over our Pequot river just inches from the water, he got arrested I got fright of planes! Time to get drafted, 1961 so I joined the navy. To get to boot camp I had to go on a plane, the name on the plane was M A T E! and it had duck tape around the windows. You know the old saying three strikes and you are out? No need to test that old saying?
No there is not a need for that.
Good and interesting subject of comparison of life like a river flows.
A river is like life because it flows, and in life a lot of the time we have to go with the flow, Life can be smooth, rocky, or wavy, it has many interesting things, it has different moods depending on what happened that day. All these things are exactly like a river.
Life is a river in the sense that a river is so easily compared to life. A river is never all straight it can be straight sometimes but then it starts to bend and curve. This is just like a life because we may think we are on a straight path and then life passes like a curve.
Life passes like a river flows.
Life is the most like and easiest way to compare to river.
Thank you for the wonderful comments Lvsrao.
It is well known that rivers are said to be Pious shedding the immunities of creatures including human beings in the generation. So also human life must be led as Pious as that of rivers inspite of taking different curves as that of rivers flows in curves.
Happy travels. This is enjoyable post.
Thank you on both points.
what amagical little poem beebeesworld
John O’Donohue has a way with words.
May your life unfold in glorious ways, my friend.
Russ
We are hoping. Thank you Russ.