Tag Archives: teacher as transformer

When Someone Deeply Listens To You

Posted on May 3, 2014 by ivonprefontaine

When we listen to our self closely and deeply, we open our self up to listening to others and the world deeply. In turn, the world and others are able to listen to us deeply as we create vulnerable spaces exposing ourselves and holding that dented cup out with certainty that others will respond.

John Fox wrote this poem about others listening to us. The process begins within us and moves out. When we are unable to listen to our self, we should not expect others can listen to the person we are unable to listen to, our self. Spending time in meditation, taking Sabbath breaks makes this possible.

When someone deeply listens to you
it is like holding out a dented cup
you’ve had since childhood
and watching it fill up with
cold, fresh water.
When it balances on top of the brim,
you are understood.
When it overflows and touches your skin,
you are loved.

When someone deeply listens to you
the room where you stay
starts a new life
and the place where you wrote
your first poem
begins to glow in your mind’s eye.
It is as if gold has been discovered!

When someone deeply listens to you
your barefeet are on the earth
and a beloved land that seemed distant
is now at home within you.

40 Comments

Posted in Mindful Life, Poetry, Reflective Moments, Sabbath and tagged community, creativity, John Fox, leadership, Mindful Practice, mindfulness, poetry, teacher as transformer, When Someone Deeply Listens To You. Bookmark the permalink.

Elegance

Posted on May 3, 2014 by ivonprefontaine

Kathy and I drove to British Columbia today. It is about an eight-hour drive so lots of time for quiet and conversation. Driving through mountains there is a lot to behold in the pure silence married to nature’s stillness.

At one point, Kathy commented how at this time of year the mountains in the distant seem closer with snow coming down further. During the summer, the mountains are snow-free and do not stand out the same way. Today, it looked like there had been snow in the past couple of days contrasting the darkness.

Linda Gregg’s poem captures how human silence provides humans with opportunities to witness nature’s pure stillness. In moments of pure silence, we feel ourselves embedded in something larger containing us and everything else. There is a sense of smallness and, yet, a sense of largeness in this exquisite elegance. In these moments, we feel a deep sense of caring from the world and towards the world.

All that is uncared for.

Left alone in the stillness

in that pure silence married

to the stillness of nature.

A door off its hinges,

shade and shadows in an empty room.

Leaks for light. Raw where

the tin roof rusted through.

The rustle of weeds in their

different kinds of air in the mornings,

year after year.

A pecan tree, and the house

made out of mud bricks. Accurate

and unexpected beauty, rattling

and singing. If not to the sun,

then to nothing and to no one.

11 Comments

Posted in Mindful Life, Poetry, Reflective Moments and tagged creativity, Elegance, Linda Gregg, Mindful Practice, nature, poetry, teacher as transformer. Bookmark the permalink.

Afternoon on a Hill

Posted on May 1, 2014 by ivonprefontaine

Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote this beautiful poem which reminded me about how the greatest things are sometimes about those things which touch us, but we do not necessarily touch them. The world greets us in the form of the sun, flowers, its geology, sky, etc. We sense these things in the fullest way. They reach into us and touch us deeply in a spiritual way.

When we are present in the world, it makes the world come alive, we only need to sit, and it makes us feel fully we are part of it and not outside it.

I will be the gladdest thing

Under the sun!

I will touch a hundred flowers

And not pick one.

I will look at cliffs and clouds

With quiet eyes,

Watch the wind bow down the grass,

And the grass rise.

And when lights begin to show

Up from the town,

I will mark which must be mine,

And then start down!

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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.

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.