We made home safe and sound. It was tiring, but we visited and shared with family, old friends, and made new friends. I looked through my volumes of poetry books today and came across this one which, for some reason, spoke to me today. I think it was the title. We share our gifts with each other in ways that can help us through each day. We need to be open and heartfelt in giving and receiving.
Nature offers us gifts and when we open our senses and heart we receive them. We saw the first real hints of spring on the drive home, despite the snowfall in places. Yes, it did snow on April 14th. In similar ways we live in relationship with humans, we live in relationship with the world, the universe and their gifts. We learn from the constancy, the peace, and the fortitude of nature. We only need be compassionate and patient.
John Drinkwater wrote this wonderful poem about this constancy, this peace, and this strength that is always around us and with us in the form of the universe, our family, our friends, and a Creator.
I do not think that skies and meadows are
Moral, or that the fixture of a star
Comes of a quiet spirit, or that trees
Have wisdom in their windless silences.
Yet these are things invested in my mood
With constancy, and peace, and fortitude;
That in my troubled season I can cry
Upon the wide composure of the sky,
And envy fields, and wish that I might be
As little daunted as a star or tree.
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
Teacher as Transformer 
Reciprocity is one of my favourite words and notions.
It is one of mine as well Niamh. It suggests giving and receiving in the right ways.
aloha Ivon. i’m wow-ed today again. at the sound of poetry in my skull and this one too, has to be more when read aloud. amazing. aloha.
Thank you Rick and Aloha to you as well.
Spring came to the UK today, and I was able to go out in a t-shirt. Someone who passed me greeted me with “Happy Day!” it was a happy day.
We are getting closer here as well.
you Ivan for reminding us of the ebb and flow of our personal energy. From me to you. From me to the tree. From the tree to you, to me. Like breathing in and out, sharing our gifts with one another and all of life, is a natural process. The poem is also lovely. Blessings to you, Alia
You are welcome Alia and thank you for stopping and leaving such a lovely comment. It is an aspect of the poem’s theme as well.