Allowing the ordinary and overlooked things to be celebrated requires mindfulness to the world, our words, and actions.. Nura Yingling proposes that poems serve as cups of praying where we can hold the silence.
In the margins and spaces I do not visit often, I explore the silence that helps me overcome moments of fear. When I am attentive and mindful, living offers poetic spaces between the lines and stanzas of each moment.
My breath becomes those spaces where I forgive myself and overcome emotions that are as fleeting as each moment. Jacques Derrida proposed how we experience the world is not binary. In one emotion, such as sadness, I discover enfolded inside joy and happiness.
Let me be where I am.
Let this bread, this morning, be their own ceremony.
Let me pass the gilt mirrors without looking.
When the lead mouth of fear clamps onto mine
and blasts her wind of rope and iron filings into me,
let my breath be forgiveness returned for her black sadness.
Let poems be cups of praying
made for holding silence.
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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.
ivonprefontaine
Teacher as Transformer 
Lovely, this is so beautiful. Thank you for sharing.
You are welcome and thank you.
Cups made for holding silence…what a beautiful thought.
It was a powerful way to conclude the poem.
Wow. I’m not one prone to fear, but from time to time it does surprise me. “Lead mouth” is a powerful description! Aloha, Ivon.
Fear can catch us off-guard. We probably protect ourselves from those things that we find fearful. For me, it is heights. I avoid them, but there are other things I cannot avoid.