I spend time in the local coffee shops, read, and write. I did a lot of my blogging in that venue; however this summer I rearranged my schedule and blog at home. I notice a gentle energy in these settings and in a busy world it is a place to take time and just be.
The coffee shop;
Misnamed I think–
I sip tea
I try just be present.
We gather;
It is about talk–
A communal space,
Congregate and converse.
Companionship’s richness;
Found in quality
I cannot assign a number
It is a fool’s errand.
It is in laughter,
The reminiscing,
The sharing,
We find ourselves.
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 
About the “misname” – I also always say “Let’s go have coffee”, but I actually drink tea 🙂
I am the same. I have not drank coffee for close to 30 years. It is still a coffee shop most of the time.
I’m much more of a loner than you, plus I get distracted with so much going on around me. I’m jealous!
I blog at home now and the free hand writing is done anywhere. I tend to be a scribbler and just write randomly.
I like to think I’m at home wherever I find myself, but the truth is that I find only at home in the stillness of my flat, that I can write, think & be truly creative.
My blogging is helped with that quiet. I find I can write free-hand in the coffee shop and soak things in differently.
Awesome! When are we meeting again, at the Coffee Shop? 🙂 Missed and thought a considerable amount about both you and Ruth again this week, 🙂 especially at this particular time of the year ~ but neither of you missed much …. the kids sure will ….
I am away until October, but we can meet then and catch up with each other.
“It is in the laughter/The reminiscing/The sharing/We find ourselves” – this just feels as beautiful to me as it is true.
Thank you Mimi.
The idea of meeting friends at a coffee shop sounds so exciting. Every time I plan to go to a coffee shop and have a hot cup of coffee, I land up ordering an iced tea or a cold coffee!!! Weird, I know. But, that’s how it is, always.
On a serious note: I enjoyed reading this poem – i could visualize things happening.
We have just come to use the term coffee shop. It is like the Ancient Greek agora. I wonder what gets accomplished in this setting.
Reblogged this on By the Mighty Mumford.
Thank you Jonathan
VVEERRY WWELCOME YOU ARE!