Dearly beloveds,
We’re at the end of our US travels, bookended by a wedding and a funeral, Circle of Life Tour 2024, as I called it last week.
The throughline is love.
Celebrating the love of a couple, held by their community, dwelling in the ocean of their love for each other and the love of their community that was felt and held by all of us.
Love of life and learning as shared by the Springhouse Community School.
Love of people and places I’ve known forever, that have shaped and raised me.
Celebrating the love expressed through a life, a family matriarch, love multiplied, intergenerational love expressed as grief.
Love, love, and only love, even amidst the pain of the moment.
After the wedding, our first stop was Floyd, Virginia, to visit our friends at Springhouse Community School, who I spoke with as part of my doctoral dissertation. It was my first chance to visit since the conversations took place in the depth of the pandemic in 2021, and it was such a gift to finally physically land in a place that I had heard so much about, listened to, and followed closely from afar, studied and learned from and with. It was more beautiful and meaningful than words can convey.
Springhouse roots its vision of education in a world where all life thrives. This is evident and expressed in the basic functioning of the school. We were lucky to arrive on a Monday morning, just in time for their community singing and all-community check-in. This year, Springhouse became a bilingual school (English-Spanish) to better serve the local community, particularly asylum seekers whose needs were not being met in the public system. It was beautiful to see the first glimpses of their experiment in bilingual education and to get to participate in the schedule for the day, which included songs and time spent by the creek and the print shop.
After Springhouse we took the long way back to Pittsburgh, stopping at Mountain Lake Resort, where Dirty Dancing was filmed, where we went once on a family trip in the late 80s after the film came out.
Except, there is no longer a lake. The earth swallowed it.
The lake sits on a fault line, causing the lake water level to fluctuate, and it is suspected that tectonic activity caused the lake to disappear in 2005, not having returned since then. It is now a beautiful meadow and a living example of how life regenerates, but it is bittersweet that the lake is no longer there, that Mountain Lake has become Mountain Meadow.
A reminder that changes, everything is impermanent, and even lakes have lifespans.
Continuing last week’s theme of shine and shadow, disturbance and enchantment…in a store bathroom as we left Mountain Lake, I saw this active shooter sign:
Disturbing to encounter on a quick trip to the bathroom before hitting the road. This is not normal or acceptable, and other worlds are possible.
One of the guiding lines of my life comes from the foreword to Pedagogy of the Oppressed, in which Paulo Freire says that he hopes his work contributes to “a world where it is easier to love.”
We have created a world in which active shooter guidance is found on public bathroom walls - and where this is needed. This is not a world where it is easier to love- it is a world where it is easier to fear, to hate.
My hope for us is that we stop accepting this as normal. That we stop accepting this, period. That we can see things as they are in this moment, to accept them- but to know that we can change them through our ways of being and our actions, individually and collectively.
It is not easy to love in our world as it is, but we must try anyway.
In an interview with For the Wild, Dr. Larry Ward, spoke of decolonizing our minds by rewiring our brains through “consciously choosing to activate our neuroplasticity toward wellness, justice, and harmony rather than conditioning our neuroplasticity for cruelty, abuse, and negligence.” The culture of violence of modernity conditions us towards the latter; yet other ways are possible: other worlds, other ways of being. And while I strongly believe in always working on both the inner and the outer simultaneously, the personal and the systemic, we can always work on ourselves, as Thich Nhat Hanh1 and Grace Lee Boggs2 have taught.
There are ways we can choose to activate our neuroplasticity towards wellness, justice, and harmony, which seems to me what our friends at Springhouse are doing through their learning community. The guiding philosophy of Springhouse is called Sourced Design3, which they articulate in the following principles:
Take care of vulnerability
Cultivate personhood
Build beloved community
Learn from the Earth
Love and serve others.
These principles are embodied and embedded in the design of the school and the practices are woven throughout. These are the kinds of values we need to hold and practice towards for a vision of a world in which all life thrives.
For the moment, maybe we need both (threat preparation and rewiring- or as Joanna Macy frames it in the Work that Reconnects4: holding actions, structural change, and shifts in consciousness). Active shooter threats are real in the USA, and being prepared for them is a necessary part of this moment. But we can also focus our attention on ourselves and our communities and creating thriving and care in the smallest interactions of our daily lives, and in designing structures that love and care can flow through. Together, we can create a world where it’s easier to love.
Along our path, from VA to western PA, we have gotten to see the first glimpses of fall, my favorite season and one that I have missed while living in the tropics. Being here in early-to-mid September, I thought we’d be too early, but you could see it and feel it in the shifting color, light, and temperature even though it was still quite warm. The bursts of color on the trees brought me endless delight.
Another favorite line about love comes from Mary Oliver in her poem, The Messenger:
“My work is loving the world.”
(It’s in my email signature, as some of you already know!).
Autumn makes it easy to love the world.
Fall reminds us of how beautiful letting go can be.
As we lay my grandma to rest in the earth, my cousin recited another Mary Oliver poem, The Summer Day5. It was a perfect offering to honor a long life well-lived, a throughline of love that extends beyond her 97 years, forward and back through generations.
With love and care,
Stephanie
“Peace in ourselves, peace in the world”
We have to transform ourselves to transform the world.
More can be found on the Springhouse web site, but I also recommend purchasing the books they have available from their print shop.
https://workthatreconnects.org/
https://www.loc.gov/programs/poetry-and-literature/poet-laureate/poet-laureate-projects/poetry-180/all-poems/item/poetry-180-133/the-summer-day/