Source: Faith
Thich Nhat Hanh writes wonderful and spiritual poetry. Shobna’s post shared a poem about faith and how it evolves daily, perhaps moment-by-moment.
In living with other people we each find faith that is not fixed and set by rigid rules and laws. In this way, we discover “joy, freedom, peace, and love” that is part of living life fully.
When we experience living fully, we engage in conversations that do not answer questions, but raise new questions. We create a dialogic world to share with each other.
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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 
Again, differences of place. In a city you learn to mind your own business. You DON’T look. Minding your own business is how you exist when buildings are close together and you stay out of other peoples lives. You have to live that way. “Nosy” people are scorned. “Nosy” people are those who ask questions and butt into the lives of others. When you grow up, “minding your own business,” you always mind your own business. I mind my own business. That way, you aren’t in trouble and disliked. It’s not that people in the city are cold, they aren’t, but there are 9 and 1/2 million people in Chicago & and Her suburbs and we don’t get too involved. Different groups act differently. I had students in one of the classes I taught at Roosevelt say that everyone on her block was an “auntie,” and if you did anything wrong, your mom knew about it before you got home. In my part of the city, no one did that. EVER. We were very separate and had different rules. It all depends on where you come from. You grow up in those places and you don’t change. We knew someone (adult) who ran to the window whenever she heard a noise…she peeked through the blinds to see what was going on and we were all horrified and. I had a friend who came from a small town and acted completely inappropriate, even her kids were embarrassed. Rules of Place. Make us what we are. And you NEVER ratted anyone out for any reason at all. We all knew that from the age of five. LOL Lips sealed. Mind your own business. So the things you’re talking about are a little foreign to me AGAIN. We we tough, that’s what was important. Not nice, or sweet, just tough and no ratting. Rules. All of us are still the same and our kids are a lot like that too because it’s who we are. Those of us who are left, I should say.
Context has a lot to do with how we experience living. It is hard to shake the traditions and histories that we arrive with.
It’s exciting to meet people who you can have a real conversation that includes an open mind that anything is possible. Treasure them when you find them.
They are treasures.
And isn’t it wonderful to have others with which we share these kinds of dialogues? This is the only downside to our choice of living at the ends of the earth. But oh, when it happens …
Sometimes, just sitting still and being in the world is dialogue.
Thanks for sharing this post. I really appreciate your perspective.
You are welcome Shobna.