Many ways to be a log
Field notes from Log Girl Summer
Dear beloved readers,
In all of my states in these early days of Log Girl Summer, I have never felt more alive. As I decompose and recompose in the wake of termination/liberation, I feel like the luckiest person on earth, because I get to do this here, in the forest, near volcanoes and rivers, and in the deeply cleansing rain of the tropical rainy season.
My days since termination/liberation have been spent frolicking around Costa Rica with my daughter and my friend Amanda, first to Rancho Margot, then a few days back home, then to La Carolina Lodge, both regenerative farms. Fortuitously, these trips were planned long before I knew what was coming (there wasn’t time to know, as it happened so fast), and there’s nothing I’d rather be doing right now than this- nothing more fun, deeply healing, restful, and nourishing. These are two places we visited before that I had been wanting to return to, some of my favorite places I have visited in Costa Rica. What follows are my field notes on decomposing and recomposing in the wake of termination/liberation, notes on rest and recovery and forest frolicking, and the earth’s abundant support in all of this.
Field Note #1: There are many ways to be a log
As I lean into Log Girl Summer, I am learning there are many ways to be a log. For example, one can decompose in the forest, becoming habitat, mushroom fodder, and soil enrichment. Nurse logs are decomposing logs that provide nourishment to the life around them. “Even though they’re dead, they are not gone — trees find a way to help each other out postmortem,” opens the description on nurse logs from American Forests. Thankfully, I am not dead - but I am gone from UPEACE, and I wonder, how might my absence be a nurse log for that community? How might what I left behind serve as nourishment and sustenance? What might make a home in the hole of my absence? How might the soil be left richer from my departure? While I have long let go of the fruits of my actions there1, this is my hope: that what I left behind might be a nurse log of some sort for that place and its inhabitants.
Field note #2: Unfurling like a fern
Our first adventure was to Rancho Margot, just days after my last day of work, and as we drove through the winding hills and valleys on the way to the base of Volcán Arenal, I felt less like a log and more like a fern. Unfurling. Like my leaves had been crumpled up in storage, and they were being released to their full capacity. With each bend in the road as we swayed down to the valley, I felt my leaves unclench from all I had been holding so tightly. Little by little, I expanded with each breath of thick rainforest air.
Field note #3: The cleansing power of rain
Between trips, we stopped home, and during that stop, we visited Tulsi Cafe y Plantas, one of my happy places, the vegetarian restaurant right across from my old office at the University for Peace. It was my first time back after my last day on June 30, and it was strange. Like running into an ex at the grocery store, it’s something I knew I needed to do, and I didn’t want to let my lack of employment at the U keep me from visiting one of my favorite cafes, a place I find nourishing on many levels.
But I didn’t run into it. I chose to return. On our last day, the energy on campus was so heavy in the wake of our terminations, and since then, there has been at least one more. I picked up on this heaviness. While my predominant feeling since termination has been liberation and relief, returning to this place touched the grief of what had happened and what had been lost.
Later that night, Amanda and I enacted a ritual with the intention of releasing (there is always more to let go) and expressing gratitude. During the ritual, after I smashed a mug that I had kept at work, the rains arrived. I wrote a little about this ritual on my dreamwork Substack. Here is an excerpt:
About a week later, I was doing a ritual to release, express gratitude, and call in support for my next steps. I decided to smash the mug. In the ritual, I spoke words into the mug of what I was releasing- the grief, heaviness, and resentment that was not mine to carry. I raised my arm and smashed the mug into the pavement. It shattered into a thousand pieces, constellating the concrete and grass. Almost immediately after smashing the mug, the sky opened up, and it started to rain, washing away the fragments that remained and residual pain.
To have had this happen during rainy season, I am constantly being supported by the rain, a daily and ongoing washing away. The rain is a condition of support for release and renewal, and I am grateful.
Field note #3: Another way to be a log is to burst into flames
When we arrived to La Carolina Lodge, I remembered how I felt the first time we visited here. It was March 2023, Semana Santa (Holy Week/Spring Break) during my first year of teaching at UPEACE. I had just finished back-to-back intensives (which amounts to teaching nonstop for 6 weeks straight) and was about to teach another right after the break. I was fried, as I knew I’d be going into it. After four years of teaching in the intensive block format, I never figured out a way to not feel fried at the end. Cooked. Overdone. The only end to this cycle was being terminated.
When I arrived here in 2023 feeling depleted, the three days we spent in this forest were a total reset. My nervous system felt recalibrated by the riversong and birds and bugs and fresh food. I yearned to come back, and when I realized we had vacation days and no plans (this was before termination/liberation), and in my state of utter cumulative burnout and exhaustion, I decided it was time to come back.
On our first night, I threw a log on the fire and watched it burn, mesmerized as our ancestors had done for millennia. There were so many times this academic year when I felt like I might burst into flames- when boundaries were crossed, when harm was perpetrated. Many times, I felt I might combust, be left to ashes, scorch everything around me. But I kept my cool, I kept it in, I did not burst.
Is this what left me feeling so burnt at the end of the year, though, I wonder?
Field Note #4: Re-enchanting Education Revisited
Three years ago, while next to the same river where I sit now, I recorded this spell:
I had already written the article Re-enchanting Education: Teaching as Magical Praxis that it is a part of, and was asked by the editor to make an audio recording. I happened to be here when I received the message, so I recorded it on the banks of the Rio Chimuria.
One of my plans in the coming weeks is to revisit that article and write a follow-up to this piece. After all, the question I asked, “Is the academy enchantable?” is how this Substack was born and got its name. Soon, dear reader, we will return to these roots, about which there is so much more to say in light of termination/liberation.
Field Note #5: Accompaniment
Lots of people have been asking lately what I am reading, and what thinkers are accompanying me in this process. I’ll have a longer summer reading list coming out soon (which I realize will be late summer, but you can thank my teaching schedule for that!) ahead of my upcoming live conversation with Kati Standefer (details below). Here’s who is with me on this journey:
Field Note #6: New Beginnings as an Acosta Institute Fellow
On Sunday, I started my fellowship with the Acosta Institute (I wrote about the incredibly fortuitous timing of this on the termination/liberation post). This is a chance for me to receive support in this next chapter, and to expand and grow myself and my work in the ways this moment is calling me towards. Our first orientation call far exceeded my expectations, and I was blown away by the caliber of humans that have been brought together in the fellowship community. I am humbled, grateful, and so excited to have begun this journey of personal and professional transformation together.
Next stop: Spain for IIPE
My last trip for July (there are two more planned in August) is to Granada, Spain for the International Institute on Peace Education, a week-long gathering of peace educators. My first IIPE was in 2022 in Mexico City, around which time I had applied to the position at UPEACE, but had not yet heard back. Going to Spain for my third IIPE, it becomes the bookends of my UPEACE experience. There is no place I would rather be than a global gathering of colleagues in the field, plotting and scheming about what comes next, and fostering relationships and collaborative possibilities.
More notes to come, dear reader. Thank you for accompanying me on this journey. If there are things you want me to write about from the liminal space, please let me know in the comments!
With love and infinite care,
Stephanie
Join me and Katherine E. Standefer for a live conversation on Substack. Mark your calendars - here are the details!
The Wild Edge: On Building a New World From Within the Structure of the Old with peace educator, writer, and facilitator Dr. Stephanie Knox Steiner (she/her). Join the live Substack conversation on Monday, July 27 at 12:00pm ET/ 9:00am PT.
The collaborative peace poem that we wrote on campus in 2024 was finally published online in the anthology Doves Born of Flames! There is a beautiful audio version of it as well. Check it out here, as well as the other poems in the compilation. It is an honor to be a part of it and to have this work living in the world in this way.
I wrote more about this in my last post:
Congratulations on the fellowship and Spain! The timing is so synchronistic... I love all the ways to be a log. Trees continue to teach us about regenerative medicine even in their diverse death. Impeccable. Your termination/Liberation is a beautiful thing to witness from afar!