Category Archives: Mindful Life

What Was Told, That

Posted on April 30, 2014 by ivonprefontaine

Rumi wrote poetry 900 years ago and it still resonates in the 21st Century. We see the world change and live in its busyness trying to keep pace with the change. It is hard to turn inwards, see the beauty that exists within, and acknowledging its importance in helping us keep pace.

Regardless of faith and even when we do not have it, there still exists a source deep within each of us that when we touch it and let it speak to us is able to guide us in wonderful and amazing ways. I found the peaceful drive today in the lee of the Rocky Mountains inspirational and something that I share with the world and with each person in the world.

What was said to the rose that made it open was said

to me here in my chest.

What was told the cypress that made it strong

and straight, what was

whispered the jasmine so it is what it is, whatever made

sugarcane sweet, whatever

was said to the inhabitants of the town of Chigil in

Turkestan that makes them

so handsome, whatever lets the pomegranate flower blush

like a human face, that is

being said to me now. I blush. Whatever put eloquence in

language, that’s happening here.

The great warehouse doors open; I fill with gratitude,

chewing a piece of sugarcane,

in love with the one to whom every that belongs!

10 Comments

Posted in Mindful Life, Poetry, Reflective Moments and tagged creativity, Mindful Practice, mindfulness, nature, poetry, Rumi, teacher as transformer, What Was Told That. Bookmark the permalink.

Walking

Posted on April 26, 2014 by ivonprefontaine

I finished my course work last night and head home Monday where I will continue the dissertation process. What is ahead is as uncertain as what I faced when I arrived at Gonzaga in June 2008. At the time, I envisioned me in a classroom, teaching and finishing this work during summer months.

I cannot predict what lies ahead and even the most immediate step tests new ground. When I look back, there is no going back. I see memories, frail and wispy, more distant in each ensuing moment.

Antonio Machado reminds me the journey is not planned with absolutism. It emerges anew in each step which is never re-traceable. I used the line “walking you make the road” in my last course paper describing teaching not as planned, mandated work, but as in-between spaces, ecotones, Teachers and student live those plans out in their real lives.

I look forward to going home, but know this place and these people, after 10 months living here, leave imprints. They offer spaces ‘regular’ life does not always. There is no going back on what I learned, knowing it shapes my path.

Walker, your footsteps

are the road, and nothing more.

Walker, there is no road,

the road is made by walking.

Walking you make the road,

and turning to look behind

you see the path you never

again will step upon.

Walker, there is no road,

only foam trails on the sea.

16 Comments

Posted in Community, Education, Leadership, Mindful Life. Bookmark the permalink.

Initiation Song from the Finders Lodge

Posted on April 25, 2014 by ivonprefontaine

I did not realize Ursula LeGuin wrote poetry I knew she wrote prose and the poetry was a pleasant surprise.

Besides the last line about always coming home, two other lines stood out. The first was letting my fingertips be my maps. This suggested being in touch with the world I live in; feeling it in a visceral way. When I close my eyes, the world reaches into me through my body. In there, the world lives in my soul which is house which is not a house. That feels Zen-like.

Ted Aoki wrote about bridges which were not bridges. Teachers invite students into learning. In those spaces, anything happens and teachers intuit their way around.

Please bring strange things.
Please come bringing new things.
Let very old things come into your hands.
Let what you do not know come into your eyes.
Let desert sand harden your feet.
Let the arch of your feet be the mountains.
Let the paths of your fingertips be your maps
and the ways you go be the lines on your palms.
Let there be deep snow in your inbreathing
and your outbreath be the shining of ice.
May your mouth contain the shapes of strange words.
May you smell food cooking you have not eaten.
May the spring of a foreign river be your navel.
May your soul be at home where there are no houses.
Walk carefully, well-loved one,
walk mindfully, well-loved one,
walk fearlessly, well-loved one.
Return with us, return to us,
be always coming home.

12 Comments

Posted in 21st Century Education, Community, Education, Leadership, Mindful Life, Poetry, Reflective Moments and tagged community, education, Initiation Song from the Finders Lodge, Mindful Practice, mindfulness, poetry, servant-leadership, spirituality, stewardship, teacher as transformer, Ted Aoki, Ursuala K. LeGuin. Bookmark the permalink.

Back from the Fields

Posted on April 23, 2014 by ivonprefontaine

When we are children, we are free to just be. Somehow, we lose this being as we mature. We are serious, but it is fun, fantastic, and ordinary things that make a good day.

Peter Everwine reminds me when returning from the fields it is important to remember visible and invisible reminders of what makes a good day. Sometimes, it is barbs, snaggle-teeth, and grinning ones that are easily overlooked. I don’t notice what attached as I ran in the fields. I recall them later as literal and figurative reminders of my adventures.

Until nightfall my son ran in the fields,

looking for God knows what.

Flowers, perhaps. Odd birds on the wing.

Something to fill an empty spot.

Maybe a luminous angel

or a country girl with a secret dark.

He came back empty-handed,

or so I thought.

Now I find them:

thistles, goatheads,

the barbed weeds

all those with hooks or horns

the snaggle-toothed, the grinning ones

those wearing lantern jaws,

old ones in beards, leapers

in silk leggings, the multiple

pocked moons and spiny satellites, all those

with juices and saps

like the fingers of thieves

nation after nation of grasses

that dig in, that burrow, that hug winds

and grab handholds

in whatever lean place.

It’s been a good day.

44 Comments

Posted in Mindful Life, Poetry, Reflective Moments and tagged Back from the Fields, creativity, Mindful Practice, mindfulness, Peter Everwine, poetry, teacher as transformer. Bookmark the permalink.

Lie Down

Posted on April 19, 2014 by ivonprefontaine

Nancy Paddock wrote this wonderful poem about letting go and just being in the world and not separate from it. I loved her imagery created in getting me down to ground level where we can live differently.

When I am at ground level, I am in the world and not outside and over it. I spend time in sabbatical wandering uncharted territory. This theme is emerging in my dissertation where I compare teaching to a hermeneutic exploration of the classroom, it participants, and living topics like a rich, textured landscape we navigate relationally. At ground level, teachers encounter, interpret, and understand a particular world that is their teaching and no one else’s teaching.

Parker Palmer has a quote about teachers using technique until the real teacher shows up. It takes time and patience; togetherness and solitude to bring this about. As I write and read, I think about what that meant and means to me as a particular teacher who is still coming to be in new ways particular to me.

Lie down with your belly to the ground,
like an old dog in the sun. Smell
the greenness of the cloverleaf, feel the damp
earth through your clothes, let an ant
wander the uncharted territory
of your skin. Lie down
with your belly to the ground. Melt into
the earth’s contours like a harmless snake.
All else is mere bravado.
Let your mind resolve itself
in a tangle of grass.
Lie down with your belly
to the ground, flat out, on ground level.
Prostrate yourself before the soil
you will someday enter.
Stop doing.
Stop judging, fearing, trying.
This is not dying, but the way to live
in a world of change and gravity.
Let go. Let your burdens drop.
Let your grief-charge bleed off
into the ground.
Lie down with your belly to the ground
and then rise up
with the earth still in you.

27 Comments

Posted in Mindful Life, Poetry, Reflective Moments, Sabbath, Writing and tagged community, education, hermeneutics, Lie Down, Mindful Practice, Nancy Paddock, Parker Palmer, poetry, sabbath, servant-leadership, teacher as transformer, teaching. Bookmark the permalink.

What is Life?

Posted on April 17, 2014 by ivonprefontaine

I don’t know the title of this Gregory Orr poem is so I used the opening line. This is a great question which brings up many other questions. What are the roles that we are each cast in? It is not so much the answers that are important, but the new questions and the searching, the questing that makes life what it is.

“What is life?”

When you first

Hear that question

It echoes in your skull

As if someone shouted

In an empty cave.

The same answer each time:

The resurrection of the body

Of the beloved, which is

The world.

Every poem different, but

Telling the same story.

And we’ve been gathering

Them in a book

Since writing began

And before that as songs

Or poems people memorized

And recited aloud

When someone asked: “What is life?”

8 Comments

Posted in Mindful Life, Poetry, Reflective Moments and tagged creativity, Gregory Orr, Mindful Practice, poetry, spirituality, teacher as transformer, What is Life. Bookmark the permalink.

Meditation on a Grapefruit

Posted on April 16, 2014 by ivonprefontaine

Craig Arnold wrote this poem that reminds us being awake is not just an early morning event. When we engage in ordinary, daily tasks we have opportunties to see them as extraordinary and sacred. Thich Nhat Hanh counsels this gives life fuller meaning. It is encountering the little things in each waking moment that bring deeper, richer living.

To wake when all is possible

before the agitations of the day

have gripped you

To come to the kitchen

and peel a little basketball

for breakfast

To tear the husk

like cotton padding a cloud of oil

misting out of its pinprick pores

clean and sharp as pepper

To ease

each pale pink section out of its case

so carefully without breaking

a single pearly cell

To slide each piece

into a cold blue china bowl

the juice pooling until the whole

fruit is divided from its skin

and only then to eat

so sweet

a discipline

precisely pointless a devout

involvement of the hands and senses

a pause a little emptiness

each year harder to live within

each year harder to live without

6 Comments

Posted in Mindful Life, Poetry, Reflective Moments and tagged Craig Arnold, creativity, Meditation on a Grapefruit, Mindful Practice, poetry, spirituality, teacher as transformer. Bookmark the permalink.

Faith

Posted on April 12, 2014 by ivonprefontaine

Today, was the last full weekend of classes for me. I have one more class to go and I need to finish the preliminary document for my dissertation proposal which is this weekend’s job. There is a faith that comes with this latter effort. When I began, it seemed daunting, but with over 100 pages for the first three sections in place it is more manageable looking.

Along with finishing classes, I will go home and the bulk of my work will be done there. There are challenges in that, as at Gonzaga, I had a particular discipline which was not the case at home before I retired from the classroom. Working full-time and all the other things that life brings, did not always provide time to work at the necessary routine in a disciplined way. Having said this, the shadow of newly found discipline casts a shadow which gives life to it.

Czeslaw Milosz suggested a shadow is what gives something strength to live and I am thinking of discipline and routine that way today as I ready myself for my Sabbath.

The word Faith means when someone sees
A dew-drop or a floating leaf, and knows
That they are, because they have to be.
And even if you dreamed, or closed your eyes
And wished, the world would still be what it was,
And the leaf would still be carried down the river.

It means that when someone’s foot is hurt
By a sharp rock, he also knows that rocks
Are here so they can hurt our feet.
Look, see the long shadow cast by the trees;
And flowers and people throw shadows on the earth:
What has no shadow has no strength to live.

8 Comments

Posted in Mindful Life, Poetry, Reflective Moments and tagged creativity, Czeslaw Milosz, faith, Mindful Practice, poetry, servant-leadership, teacher as transformer. Bookmark the permalink.

Mindful

Posted on April 11, 2014 by ivonprefontaine

Mary Oliver is one of my favourite poets and this is likely my favourite poem that she wrote.

Whenever, I get stuck this is a poem I turn to and get unstuck. I had bogged down in my writing and it simply was not moving. This morning, as l listened, ideas flowed into my conscious view. Most of what I was looking for was waiting to be seen.

Interestingly, I did not rush and write things down. I took time, finished sitting, and by the time I wrote things down more appeared. I often look for things in places they are not and they appear as part of what is waiting to be seen.

Poetry’s beauty is it does not always speak directly to what I am looking for, but approaches me in different ways and I encounter it afresh in those moments.

Every day
I see or hear
something
that more or less

kills me
with delight,
that leaves me
like a needle

in the haystack
of light.
It was what I was born for –
to look, to listen,

to lose myself
inside this soft world –
to instruct myself
over and over

in joy,
and acclamation.
Nor am I talking
about the exceptional,

the fearful, the dreadful,
the very extravagant –
but of the ordinary,
the common, the very drab,

the daily presentations.
Oh, good scholar,
I say to myself,
how can you help

but grow wise
with such teachings
as these –
the untrimmable light

of the world,
the ocean’s shine,
the prayers that are made
out of grass?

6 Comments

Posted in Mindful Life, Poetry, Reflective Moments and tagged creativity, Mary Oliver, Mindful, Mindful Practice, teacher as transformer, writing. Bookmark the permalink.

136 Syllables at Rocky Mountain Dharma Center

Posted on April 9, 2014 by ivonprefontaine

Each morning, I sit in the little chapel that is on-site. It is a daily Sabbath I keep up. While in Spokane, I stay in a building that was once a convent and it retained some of convent-like features. I retreat each morning and try to quiet my mind in readiness for entry into the day.

It is interesting to notice what shares the space with me. Sounds come from outside. Crows are cawing and smaller birds cheep. The sunlight casts a finger through windows brightening the space.

Allen Ginsberg captured the essentialquiet and solitude where I am never alone. People visit as thoughts flow. It is a simultaneous opening up to what is around and what is inside .

When I began sitting in the chapel, I brought my cell phone and checked time. Now, I leave it in the room and my practice suggests when it is appropriate to begin the day.

Tail turned to red sunset on a juniper crown a lone magpie cawks.

Mad at Oryoki in the shrine-room — Thistles blossomed late afternoon.

Put on my shirt and took it off in the sun walking the path to lunch.

A dandelion seed floats above the marsh grass with the mosquitoes.

At 4 A.M. the two middle-aged men sleeping together holding hands.

In the half-light of dawn a few birds warble under the Pleiades.

Sky reddens behind fir trees, larks twitter, sparrows cheep cheep cheep
cheep cheep.