I love Hermann Hesse.
Hermann Hesse’s book The Journey to the East set the stage for Robert Greenleaf writing about servant leadership. The quote in the post is about the character that unfolds, revealed in living life, not as a planned, linear project, but a dynamic journey. We do not know what is about to happen and it is in the joy, sadness, exhilaration, and disappointment our humanity is revealed.
We live in a world which is can be paradoxically forgiving and unforgiving. It is the attitude of letting go which helps us overcome, moment-to-moment, the unforgiving part. It is in these challenges that the character lines are revealed in the continuous sculpting of our faces which appear over time.
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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 and its anticipatory relationship with the future, and hope as an essential element in learning.
Teacher as Transformer 
I love Hermann Hesse too! I read a lot of his books in my teens. He was my introduction to asking the bigger questions and had everything to do with revealing to myself a deep love of reading, wisdom, ideas and images.
“It is in these challenges that the character lines are revealed in the continuous sculpting of our faces which appear over time.”
Yes, love how you put this. There’s something about aging, something you can see in the elderly, that reveals the sorrows, the wounds, the joys and all the years of a life lived, that I find beautiful.
Thank you for these wonderful reminders!
You are welcome. I love the second sentence about an introduction to asking bigger questions. I just finished reading James Hillman’s The Force of Character which is about aging and character. He wrote it late in life and it ties in well with the living and character.
Force of Character came to mind reading your post Ivon. Love the book and am beginning to appreciate it more in the last couple of years. 🙂
Siddhartha changed literally and figuratively changed my life…
There are writers who can do that. For me, it is Paulo Coehlo and The Alchemist.
I’ve read every single thing Hesse ever published.
His work remains relevant today and beyond.
I have read Hermann Hesse since I was a teenager, and still do, I posses his full works, some years ago I wrote a post titled An Hour After Midnight (Nov 2009) here is a link if interested: http://goo.gl/6uYms
Martina Ramsauer’s Rivella49’s Blog wrote recently: Hermann Hesse/Ticino/Switzerland on July 30 20014
Thank you for the link. I went over and read the post. You provide considerable insight into Hesse’s work around the time he wrote An Hour After Midnight.
Siddhartha is my favorite book.
I will have to broaden my reading. I have only read small amounts of Hesse’s work. It sounds like I have some catching up to do.