How do you end things?
On the importance of endings, beginnings, and alliances
Dear beloved readers,
How is your heart today? How is your mind, body, and spirit as you meet these words?
On Friday we ended our three-week intensive class on gender and media. By the end of three weeks, there is an inevitable exhaustion present for all of us- so much doing, so much to take in. Alongside the exhaustion, there is happiness, a sense of accomplishment, that we did it and made it through, and created some beauty together.
I always tell my students (and have written about here before) that beginnings and endings are important. How we begin something matters. How we open and close matters. How we honor our time together matters.
The last session of class is our Celebration of Learning. This often involves student student presentations on their culminating work for the class.
I shared about how I begin a class in my recent post on tools of the trade. This is how we end.
We end with gratitude, love, and appreciation. I open a Jamboard with everyone’s name on a slide, and we spend about ten minutes (or two songs from my gratitude playlist) sharing notes of appreciation for everyone. It is a beautiful process that allows people to feel seen and heard. It helps is all feel like our participation mattered, that we matter. That without each of us and our presence and contributions, the learning community wouldn’t have been the same.
Then, we reweave and rewind our learning community. Reravel the ball of string. We remember where we were three weeks ago when we began, and trace the journey of where we have been. We return to our community agreements and reflect on the leaning community we have become, how we have grown together, all that has been shared. And that although we release the particular container that day, we remain connected. We honor the very special and unique container that we have been together, and that even if we came together in the future, we would be different, so it would be different.
We began three weeks ago with the prompt, “What are you arriving with?” We end with, “What are you taking away with you? What are you leaving with?”
Sense of accomplishment.
Pride.
Exhaustion. Satisfaction.
We make offerings- songs, poems, food, flowers. We celebrate.
We close. We release. Throughout our time together, we end each class with a breath to soak in what we want to take with us, and release the class and what we don’t want to carry. We do this one last time together, and then take three breaths and three bells1: the first breath with love and appreciation for ourselves and how we showed up, the second breath for each other and our learning community, and the third breath for the wider campus community, earth community, and other relational webs we are a part of.
How do you end things, dear reader? What are the ways you mark endings, releasing, closures?
After class ended, I walked to the forest to make an offering to the pedestal altar2, in gratitude for the happy completion of the course and all the benefits we received. Also, to let it go. To release.
When I arrived, it was missing!
I looked around, and saw not far off in the distance, someone had moved it to the nearby pavilion to use as a barbecue stand.
It looked heavy. I wondered if I could move it myself. I decided to try.
I twirled and rolled the pedestal back to its spot, successfully. I left an offering of the bougainvillea flowers I had picked for my students. I said my thanks and made my offerings. I left with sore hands, and later, a slightly sore back, and satisfaction that, however momentarily, things were in their rightful places.
Every ending is also a beginning, and as I returned to campus to greet my friends from the Ecoversities Alliance who are visiting Costa Rica. After years of meeting each other on zoom, we got to meet in person for the first time. I am guessing many of you have had this experience, which seems to be even more common since the pandemic. As class ended, we began our microgathering together, which continued through the weekend at the beautiful Casa de la Luna Feliz near Puriscal, stewarded by our friends Maura and George, up in the mountains above where I live in Ciudad Colon.
Tomorrow we will close our time together, which I sense will be another beginning that I cannot fully see yet. Planting seeds of ecoversal space at UPEACE, seeds for unschooling and self-directed learning in Costa Rica, seeds of friendship and relationship that we will continue to water and grow, like the unwieldy tropical vegetation we are surrounded by and breathing with. As one of our friends said yesterday, “Ecoversities is an excuse for us to get together,” and I love this excuse, and am so grateful for the Alliance for having brought us together.
In a lot of my day-to-day work, I can feel like I am rubbing against the grain of dominant culture (while also inextricably a part of and perpetuating that culture - this is not to say I am immune to it or above it, in the slightest. I say this with great humility and hilarity). But my heart-of-hearts yearns for other ways of being, and I am reaching for them, and this is perhaps what Ecoversities is about at its heart, its core (though if you asked each member that question, they would undoubtedly give a unique response) and to be with this group of people feels like we hold similar aspirations and yearnings even though they can look different and in different places…there is an energy to that that is indescribable and beyond words.
The energy of love.
For each other.
For the world.
The energy of collective learning and unlearning for the love and care of life.
I leave this weekend tired and full, restored and renewed by the beautiful hospitality of George and Maura, reminded of how lucky I am to be here in this place, doing the work I get to do, grateful for the friends on the path I get to walk alongside. I leave, end, ready to begin again, with a sense of alliance.
With love and care,
Stephanie
The three breath beginning and ending I learned from my dear friend Minna Kim.
If you are new to Enchantable, welcome! I have written about the pedestal altar often, and if you search on the site, you can find previous entries about it.