Given and received

A roundup of this month’s offerings

Nov 03, 2024

Dearly beloved Enchantable readers,

I am so happy to be back here with you in this space. I have missed writing to you! It has been a few weeks since my last missive, which is unusual for me. It has been a time of intense output, which has been such a blessing as I look at what I have been able to share out into the world the past few weeks, the topics and themes that I get to contribute to, the conversations I have been a part of, which I would like to share with you here today.

I paused my writing here because I always want to feel like my writing is coming from overflow, not dregs. I have written before about writing as reciprocity (Robin Wall Kimmerer) and cycles of regeneration, and I needed to pull back into the balance of input and output before I could share something with you. So here we are, flowing, like the Rio Virilla1 below me. I have put a lot out, and I have also taken a lot in through these experiences. As I am digesting this delicious feast through writing, I invite you to grab a digestif of your choosing and settle in with the bounty of what has been given and received these past two weeks.

These offerings are prayers for the pluriverse, a world where many worlds fit.
Prayers for an earth we are held by and holding us, in right relationship, an earth we are healing as it heals us, an earth we are re-imagining with.
Prayers for peace as every step we take and every choice we make.
Prayers for liberated imaginations that can carry us there, dreams made real.

Community dreamwork as pluriversal practice

My dear friend Minna and I offered a session at the Courage of Care Symposium on Practicing for the Pluriverse. I wrote about dreamwork as a pluriversal practice in a recent

Prism of Wisdom

post, and one of my key takeaways from our session was the power of dreamwork to weave community. You can watch our session and experience dreamwork as pluriversal practice in the session recording:

Re-Imagining Education 4.0

What a joy to participate in the Re-imagining Education Conference 4.0, organized by friends in the Ecoversities Alliance! RECs have been an integral part of my life since they started 3 years ago, and they have moved me in countless ways and brought me into relationships that I treasure, a global community that feels like home. We practice as we re-imagine together, and I just love being in a space with friends around the world who hold diverse-yet-similar visions of education that is relational, transformational, heart-and-earth-centered.

Along with some of my students from last year, we hosted an open dialogue session called A Pedagogy of Howling: The Pains and Possibilities of Re-imagining (higher) Education from Within, based on our experience as expressed in the article we co-authored (it is awaiting publication but you can find the full manuscript here). It was a joy to share with our “author squad,” and it was beautiful to see the group’s enthusiasm for howling (which we mean quite literally, as a healing, disruptive, cathartic act of release and reclamation). We talked about things like the important role that ritual can play in re-imagining higher ed from within (“rituals are a space beyond hierarchy” - Yeyo) and yawning as resistance.

Photo credit Dhvani, who managed to get a screenshot and howl at the same time!

The thread I followed through the conference was the higher education track, as I mainly attended sessions held by others who are working in higher ed and bringing ecoversal approaches and spirit to their work. We talked about the pain, possibilities, challenges, tensions, contradictions, and gifts. It was therapeuatic to be in dialogue with others in this work, in the dance between feeling crushed and thriving, between being victims of the system and reproducing it, critiquing it while receiving salaries from it. We talked about finding people who have our backs, and it was nice to be in a space where that felt like the case.

In one session entitled “We are the University,”, a group of friends from Ireland asked the question, “What can an international alliance of higher education staff, students and activists do about the planetary crisis?” One answer we gave was to use the resources we have at our disposal to these ends. Initially, I thought, “I don’t have many resources!” I don’t have a research budget or other funds that I can allocate elsewhere. However, I have time, and I manage a curriculum, and these are actually substantial resources that can be dedicated to these ends. Sometimes we need to think about the resources we have differently, and sometimes we need to realize just how resourced we actually are, and how we can intentionally direct these resources with these goals in mind.

This discussion also reminded me of the book A Third University is Possible by LA Paperson, one of my favorite things I read during my dissertation phase. In it, paperson talks about how we can hijack the infrastructure of the university to decolonizing ends. We also asked “what are the leverage points?” and “How do we create accountaibility to something beyond ourselves?”

Another favorite session was held by the brilliant beings of Weaving Earth, a California-based organization (that, in addition to their place-based programs, also has a wide range of virtual offerings) rooted in relational education. In that session, bronte velez said, “I am exercising the musculature of my awareness,” and “be willing to be interrupted by something beautiful,” phrases I loved. Will Scott talked about learning from the body-up rather than the top-down, and Lauren Hage talked about how asking, “How’s the weather?” in times of the climate crisis is a powerful and necessary question, not the light, fluffy small talk it is often thought to be.

You can watch the recording of our session here, and find many others on the Ecoversities YouTube channel:

Abrazadores de la Tierra – COP-16 Biodiversity practice gathering

My dear friends of Abrazadores de la Tierra have organized a beautiful practice space in alignment with the COP-16 biodiversity conference in Cali, Colombia this month. I was invited to offer a talk in Spanish about peace education and interbeing, and it was a gift to be offered this space to share from my heart. The organizers also translated my recent Mindfulness Bell article on peace education into Spanish and read it aloud, a practice that really moved me. I feel deeply honored to have my words move in the world in this way.

Pedagogies for Peace: Weaving peace into community college classrooms

On Friday I gave a presentation for the National Community College Peacebuilding Seminar on this topic, and while I don’t have a recording of the event, you can view my slides here. At the heart of the talk was the question, “How can every aspect of my pedagogy contribute to and be an expression of peace at all levels?” I talked a lot about habits, practices, rituals, and the small choices we can make in the classroom to contribute to peace. My UPEACE students were with me and it was a joy to reconnect with my community college teaching roots.

Peace Education Class

Then there has been class, which has been so rich! I have adored being with this year’s group of peace education students, and I am so moved by our time together so far and how this work is moving through them. There are so many things I could share with you, the activities we’ve done and learnings we’ve had, but one thing I’d like to offer is a poem adaptation of my invitations piece – I turned it into a poem and combined it with my welcome blessing for Enchantable, both of which you can find on the Spells tab. I shared this on the first day of class to frame the class.

A highlight of the class has been two field trips – one to the Montessori school Daphne will be going to next year, who invited us to join for United Nations Day, and the other a field trip to us from her current school. We loved both days, and there is a way that being with kids just makes all the theory real, and drives home how much education is simply an exchange of presence, relationships, care, and heart.

A really fun collective tree art piece organized by two of our students on our field trip to Kreative School

The Dengue Diaries

Just when you thought we might be done talking about dengue…it has been just over three months since I got ill, and the latest bizarre symptom is hair loss! With the massive shedding of skin that I experienced, this doesn’t seem enirely surprising, though I thought I was over it, so this latest symptom came as a surprise. According to the internet, this is actually pretty common at around 2-4 months after the initial illness, so here we are. I am happy to report that other symptoms like joint pain and swelling seem to have resolved, but dengue is decidedly not done with me yet.

We have arrived, we are home

We are fully moved into our new place now. The view is absolutely mesmerizing and changes all the time. The river runs through me. I have come to appreciate a pool baptism towards the end of each day. I am so curious about what possibilities lie ahead to collaborate with this new landscape, what the river and toucans and monkeys and mountains and volcanos will ask of and add to my writing, how this new view will shape me. As I write, a heavy fog has rolled in and the rain gently drips off the roof. The river roars in the background.

As I write, the rain pours. We are in the storm.
Let yourself be interrupted by something beautiful.
I am consumed by the aguacero, and it feels like the rainstorm offers me a reiki treatment. Refreshed, realigned.
The river roars louder after the rain passes.
Full, like me.
Together, we flow.

What lies ahead

It’s November. One more week of teaching, then accreditation, then another class, then holiday break. It will continue to be a full time until then.

Starting soon, I teach an asynchronous version of my peace education class, called Transformative Education in Precarious Times: Educational and Pedagogical Possibilities through UPEACE’s Distance Education Programme. You can still join us!

It will soon be time to make December magic again. I have long dreamed about holding some kind of workshop or sharing space around this. If this would be of interest to you, drop me a message (and let me know what you’d be up for – a series, a one-off workshop, etc.), and I will see what we can cook up 😊

Enchantable