Wendell Berry is one of my favourite poems. Today, I began reading Alan Watts’ The Wisdom of Insecurity, which was published in 1951. It could just have easily been published today and for today’s world. In the poem, Berry suggests nature is a place where we can find some solace. Here, we can live in the moment and find peace. Watts makes a similar case for living in the moment. It is there we fcan discover wisdom and insights into the world.
Wendell Berry, as do many other poets, understand nature as a place to dwell and be. This does not mean we have to leave in the country. There is beauty that surrounds us in large cities. Sometimes, we take that beauty for granted, but it is in the ordinary we discover the extraordinary.
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 ResearchGate
ivonprefontaine
Teacher as Transformer 
Thank you so much for reblogging this. I appreciate your insights into the poet and the poem.
You are welcome and thank you.
Beautiful.
Thank you David.
One of my favorites of his.
It is one of mine, as well.
I really like this, Ivon. I think I also saw this poem on your blog before, but I could be wrong.
Thank you Cynthia. You did, but I like it so much I shared it again.
Such places are evaporating at an astonishing rate.
Sadly, they are.
Almost everywhere there is a small park or a box of flowers to keep us in touch with nature.
There is and a park bench to sit and be part of that corner.
Want you to know how much I enjoy your posts and certainly appreciate you being a faithful follower of my Gypsy Road Trip blog. Thanks!
You are welcome. One cannot travel to all the places on earth, so a wonderful alternative is to follow blogs like yours that add to where I have been and not been. Thank you for your following and comments.
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