“Keep close to Nature’s heart… and break clear away, once in awhile, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean.” —John Muir
Source: Thought for Today
This is a wonderful quote. It speaks to slowing down and being mindful of the world as we move through it. When I was teaching, I took a week or so to slow down.
When I was in Spokane, I found the walking I did benefited me, whether it was on campus or along the river which runs right next to the campus.
Nature helps me the space to be quiet. It took me back to other times, when I was a boy growing up in rural Alberta and after we married we lived in small towns in rural British Columbia.
I think, as we grow older, we find anchors that help us pay closer attention to the world, both the inner and outer ones as they continuously converse.
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 
You are so right!
Thank you.
Reblogged this on IdealisticRebel's Daily View of Favorites and commented:
One reason I am enjoying retirement is that I can be busy or contemplative and it is fine. I can meditate and read, write and paint and the hurly-burly is past me. My inner life and outer life are closely connected. Hugs, Barbara
Thank you for the re-blog Barbara.
You are welcome. Thank you for sharing.
Reblogged this on Truth Troubles: Why people hate the truths' of the real world.
Thank you for the re-blog.
I enjoy so many of the things you post but I think a lot depends on where you live and what gender you are. Walking alone for women can be extremely dangerous. So many ideas sound good but they don’t work in reality. Campus is horrifically dangerous place for women. Rape is so common that many colleges are being investigated. Women have to be escorted when they walk across campus, if it’s dark. Campus rape out of control. It’s on the covers of magazines, it’s a scandal. Life is different for women. Things can sound good but they don’t work in the real world. Utopian ideas are just that. By utopian I mean a world where there is no violence against women. Where we aren’t prey and where we don’t risk our lives by walking down the street, getting into our cars, or doing pretty much anything. Stairways, elevators, work, bathrooms, cemeteries, churches, you name it and women have been raped, beaten and killed in those places. So…no, I don’t get to take nice walks while I commune with nature. Women can’t afford to be UNAWARE of what’s going on around them. We can’t commune with anything, we can’t afford to lose focus. It’s just too dangerous.
This is a very powerful comment. I do take things for granted that others might not, as it places them at risk.
I don’t know how anyone can do without dipping toes into the natural world every day. I’ve often said that if I had to live in a city, I would not live long.
Nature is there for us to enjoy and be enthralled in.
Beautiful, insightful! 🙂
Thank you Amy.
Reblogged this on By the Mighty Mumford and commented:
BEAUTIFUL QUOTE…TO DEVOTE ONE’S SELF TO DOING, FROM TIME TO TIME!!!!
Thank you Jonathan.
Just what I needed today!
Thanks Ivon.
I’m off 😎
I am glad you enjoyed. Love the sunglasses.