The person who looks back at us is the person we are. The questions in the post are so much better than answers. We can live into the questions as Rilke would say.
Accept that person looking back in the mirror, first!
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 ResearchGate5 responses »
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Teacher as Transformer 
If there’s a message here in poem, I’m not getting it. There’s no closure that
connects the disparate elements.
The beauty of questions is they can hold open the space which answers foreclose.
Let me share my opinion:
Life, the journey toward happiness, for buddhist, for neuroscientist and avid mindfulness practitioners is the pursuit of happiness.
All of those can you’s have to do with our mind and freedom.
If you can not let go, accept, let judgment fade happiness will never be your companion.
Happiness is beyond a simple short emotion, real lasting happy we carry with us, it endures when life gets tough.
This poem as you label it is seemless for me and for any current neuroscientist.
I have lived this path and maybe what you miss is how deep the word acceptance is.
Is carries a lifetime of effort to play.. Mthis poem is self exploration of our inner world. All of Ot is connected like body, mind and soul
My opinion not edit though.
So Ivon, thank you.
I did not realize the power, the difference of writing with facts or with questions.
Saying, we must let go of judgment to find happiness or Can you let go of judgment, is a world apart.
One is almost passive, the other, the question has the potential of placing the person in the midst of deciding, seeing himself/herself letting go.
If I were a sales person in a golf shop. My job is to place that guy with the driver in his hands, on a beautiful golf course. My job is to bring the smells, the shapes of the greens, the feeling, the confidence a driver like that could bring you. Emotions are my tools to enhance the benefits my product offers you.
Stroking your ego with a promise of greater performance is hard to resist delivered from a great salesperson.
If I can place you and letting go in the same breath, many good things, like action can happen.
I post everyday multiple ideas. It is a monologue,,it’s impact, who knows. Mir someone asked a question, attention skyrockets. A stage with interest has been prepared. A question also inspires this situation.
Thank you, I will use this in my mindfulness group.
Questions are a questing into living. Answers bring us up short. You are welcome Marty and thank you. It is a wonderful post.