Last summer, I attended a retreat in Wisconsin. Each morning, I went for a walk on the wonderful paths they had at the retreat centre. One morning, I felt I was being watched. I tried to only use my peripheral vision and not change my pace and gait.
After the rabbit slipped into the underbrush, I wondered what else I might miss in the hubbub of daily living. When I returned to the retreat centre, I jotted thoughts down and this is the result, several months later.
On my morning walk,
A slight movement on my periphery
I am being watched.
I move my eyes;
I try keeping my pace
I don’t.
I see it,
A rabbit
I am not on its periphery.
As it slips away,
I wonder
What do I miss in what I call living?
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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 
Loved it. I miss much…
Thank you David.
A rabbit – ora – and also a bird – silent bird ? What a beautiful post ! Thank you – amitiés – france 🙂
Merci France. There were likely birds in the area and I missed them.
Ahhh….a hare-raising experience? ~ヾ(＾∇＾)
Yes, it was.
Seeking more.. I understand this.. beautiful writing
Thank you Christy.
Today if I’d had my head down weeding as I had been doing – took a break to sit with one of the dogs – I heard a plop! and the two Francolins who hang sometimes in our yard jumped over the fence, one by one. Plop! Plop! Look around – we are wild, after all – and begin pecking about in the leaves and macnut husk mulch. Too fun.
So much activity just in the bird kingdom in our yard. I keep the bird bath clean every morning, and various species, from the tiny Mejiro to the dove, show up for their morning ablutions.
We are in nature, not outside it as your activities reflect.
I belong to a local Camera Club and each month we have a list of ten things to photograph. It amazed me how much I saw along my daily path as I began looking for these ten items. It’s an exciting world out there.
It can be. I suspect that artists, such as photographers, see more than the average person. It is part of their way of being in the world.
This is an awesome observation. I have similar reflections about life on my walks in nature.
There is no place like nature to find one’s self.