Ode to Betsy

Today I gave away my truck...a 1991 Ford Ranger club cab. I didn't imagine when I bought it brand new after I signed my first teaching contract that I would drive it for 17 years. It had more than 327 thousand km's on it and was still going strong. The only problem was that it was getting hard on gas for some reason and we were given a newer vehicle (1992) in much better shape with much lower mileage and it seemed crazy to keep them both.

My truck took me all the way to Inuvik via Vancouver, the Queen Charlotte Islands, the Cassiar Highway and Dawson City in 1992. In 1993 it helped me survive the L.A. Freeway after I drove it all the way to California. In 1995, it took me all the way out to St. John's Newfoundland. It never needed any major repairs, could start at temperatures up to -30C and had room enough in the back for a bed. I once calculated that I spent a total of 7 months sleeping in the back of it.

Part of me is very sad to see it go. I kinda wish I could drive it until it's last breath, when we would slide together to the edge of the highway and I would know it was over. I want to honor the longevity of a vehicle that hasn't self destructed after the warranty ran out, something constructed without built in obsolescence. I traveled with it as it aged from cool to clunker, never needing a new vehicle to replace the one that worked perfectly well despite the gathering blemishes.

It probably wasn't the most environmentally friendly thing to do, driving an old truck, but after 17 years I figure I spent less than $100/month for the privilege of getting from A to B. These days, that's a pretty good deal. I am grateful that Bob, the new owner, can fix it up and use it for a few more miles. (Why is it that the mileage that I got 17 years ago is better than the fantastic mileage that they're offering with new vehicles today?)

Keeping the Faith

There are moments and days that I feel intense despair. I don't know how to explain it other than I shiver to my soul. What brings it on? Maybe it's an election where 7% of the vote doesn't get any seats in the House of Commons, but 10% somehow grab 42. Maybe it's how the looming spectres of peak oil and climate change enter so many of our conversations and news stories yet they doesn't seem to invoke any real commitment to change. Maybe it's how a personal pizza can make a mockery of everything we claim education is about. Maybe it's just about how much I miss the guiding lights that always seemed to know a way out of the darkness.

Do I tilt at windmills or do I dig my hands and feet into the earth and search for that spiritual connection that I know is there? Do I spend the rest of my life playing with extended metaphors or do I give myself over to daily mediations and the present moment? I should be old enough not to mess around with this kind of angst but it's been a helluva year.

Try A Little Kindness

I try not to think in worst case scenarios. I have two beautiful little girls who are full of dreams. I have a beautiful garden and I live in the extraordinary Peace Country of Alberta full of rivers, prairies, forests and creatures. For all of these reasons I must remain optimistic that the will exists to learn to live in a sustainable way. Predictions for my part of the world include more severe weather, drought and more expense for those things brought into our community. While these things are worrisome in themselves, what worries me the most as we consume our way through our resources is how we will behave toward those around us as there is less and less to consume. How will we respond to the parts of the world that are now supplying us with cheap food as their countries suffer the effects of climate change? Who might eye our resources as things become scarcer? It's difficult to answer those questions because I have seen abundance bring out the worst in people, while crises can bring out the best.

I believe kindness is a key element in sustainability. Kindness to ourselves is critical. The kinder I am to myself it seems the less I need from the world and the easier it is to be kind to others. Kindness extended to those around me is reflected back. What is kindness? Seeing, acknowledging and honoring the intrinsic value in someone or something in such a way that they know they've been seen, acknowledged and honored simply because they are.

The Dark (K)night

Last night I went to see the The Dark Knight with Mark. Another Batman movie it explores the fine line between good and evil,asking some interesting questions: Is it easy to be "good" when you haven't experienced the pain of loss? To what extent are we responsible for the actions of others? When given the power to choose, your life or another's, would you end someone else's life? In typical Hollywood style, these questions are imposed on caricatures of people, in extreme situations, so that no one can miss the obvious. We all leave the theatre hoping that we could be the hero required at any particular moment in time.

Well, this is always that moment and it's pretty easy to be a hero...at least it seems as though it should be. At what other point in history are we asked not how could we do more, but how could we live with less? When else instead of trying to fuel our machines with all the energy we can find to go careening into the future, would we be doing more for the world by slowing down? There is a wonderful world waiting to be discovered if we would only slow down and allow our attention to be drawn away from the things that have cluttered our view.

Yesterday I laid on the ground and felt the embrace of gravity as I stared out into the universe. (An exercise taken from Stephan Harding's book, Animate Earth). I wondered what kind of love it takes to not only sustain me with wheat that is grown, sheaved and ground into flour for bread, but the kind of love that would makes something as exquisite as a strawberry or raspberry top it off? It's the kind of love that Batman can't see or feel as he goes flying down the road on his supersonic, highpowered motorbike, through the crime ridden streets of Gotham.

No Heroes
Sometimes the cause gets so big and the issues all get confused,
Sometimes the greater good means that you have to sacrifice the few,
Sometimes the best intentions can create the largest crime,
Nobody gets to be the hero all the time,
Nobody has to be a hero all the time.

Another Breath

So much has happened since I last blogged that I'm not sure where to begin. Perhaps with the meditation that I learned while attending Schumacher College in Totnes,
Devon, England. Close your eyes...relax and still your body...quiet your mind...bring your mind and body together by focusing on your breath...know that this breath connects you to all living things...we all share the same breath.

If you've ever watched the movie "The Matrix" you'll remember the scene where you can see all the naked human bodies are linked up to an enormous machine so that their energy can fuel the machine, while their brains are being fed an entirely different reality. Because we can wander and dream at will and believe that we are "free", this image is terrifying to us. It's a rather graphic, painful scene when the lead character is “freed”.

There is nothing I love better than to wander freely in the forest finding tasty berries to fill my pail. The pleasure of drinking water from a cold spring on a hot day tastes like nothing else in the universe. I need only to look at trees and see the pattern of my lungs in the branches to know that I am intimately connected. And it doesn’t matter what style of clothes I wear, how many degrees or how much money I earn, I am as naked as the next in my need for these basic things: food, water, breath.

And so we are plugged in, not by a prong-like extension cord at the back of our neck, but by something as effortless as breathing, tasting, drinking. And because it is effortless we forget that it is important. And as other things become more important: money, power, status symbols, we forget that tenuous connection, perhaps believing that one day, there will be a machine that can save us.

My Love Song to Gaia

It's hard to know exactly where I end and you begin
I try to focus on each breath, and let the light enter in
There's an ebb and flow between us, sometimes we give, sometimes we take
And in the pushing and the pulling, there's a magic we create.

Reaching in, I find your spirit
Reaching out, I touch my heart
I should have known in all this chaos
We never really came apart
It's the comings and the goings
That sometimes make me feel alone
But I'm learning how to find you
Everywhere I go...

I'll See You In My Dreams

My Dad died on February 29. He was eighty years old. I don't know how to grieve this way so I am simply doing what my body wants to do. Crying and aching and laughing and crying and then going on with my day and then crying some more. I have been known to say that unless you have children you never truly grow up. This loss has made me feel more achingly human than I anticipated. Just when life seems to make sense or become so unbelievably wretched or beautiful that it's almost too much to bear, something happens that tells me I have more to learn. I know how ecosystems work, how death gives birth to new life, how things are so intricately connected that it is impossible for someone to die and not still be embedded in the pattern. I know that every tear that mourns his loss carries the deep healing of his loving spirit. I see my future as never before.

And I'll see you in my dreams
The ones rooted in this land
In the smiles of my children
In the futures that we plan
In the river that flows through us
In the friends that we hold dear
As long as I keep dreaming Dad,
I'll know that you're still here.

What You Wish For

I remember as a kid picking strawberries in the ditch near our farm. Nothing I loved better than the taste of wild strawberries...great on their own, incredible with a little sugar and cream. I had this fantasy that one day I would come across a patch of wild strawberries with berries so big that one would fill my cup unlike the hours it took to get together enough of the tiny things for a batch of jam.

Then there was my fantasy about being able to make all the weeds on the long rows of vegetables in my mother's garden disappear without having to pull them. Sounds like I was a lazy kid doesn't it? Well maybe I was, but on a summer day when there were forests to explore, kittens to play with and dugouts to swim in, weeding the garden felt like purgatory.

And so it isn't hard for me to imagine the creative mind that wants to perfect the strawberry and demolish the weeds. Cross breeding, hydroponic, fertilizing magic and you can grow a strawberry the size of my fist. A drop from a bottle of RoundUp and the dandelion is gone...it seems crazy not to do it.

Why is it that if something is really really good that we assume more of it would be better? How is it that eliminating or simplifying work only seems to create more? As a species are we predisposed to this need for more stuff with less work or is it a function of our conditioning? Where is this leading us?

Davra Davis writes in "The Secret History of the War on Cancer" that information about what causes cancer has been suppressed so we can make money on curing it. One of largest groups of people affected by cancers such as leukemia are farmers. Farmers who in the last 40-50 years have been sold massive amounts of chemicals to fertilize crops and annihilate pests. My Dad is fighting leukemia at this very moment. This is not what imagined as I made my wishes.

What influence do I have on what my children wish for?

My Little Misfit Con't

So I've spent the past few days researching and sorting out what to do about my little misfit when I'm worried that school isn't going quite the way that I had planned. I started first by panicking and calling everyone I knew for advice.

The first was a homeschooling friend, who told me that she had never sent a kid to school who didn't want to go. Then I researched the web to find out all about the types of programs that they were using in my school...handily available in the Three Year Plan they had given me as well as the website. Anne Davies and Carol Ann Tomlinson were two of the authors that I was able to research somewhat online. (I would have needed to spend a few dollars to get my hands on anything in depth.) So then I called my friend, the expert in all things education. After talking with her we agreed that the school was on the right track from a theoretical stand point but the practical applications needed to be explored.

Then I called my mother. She worried about whether I was being firm enough with my little misfit, although she did agree that under no circumstances should the creative, inquisitive light that yearns to learn be compromised. I explored the educational options available and then went to see the teacher.

We had a wonderful meeting and I learned that the teacher really is interested in my little misfit's education. After an hour conversation I realized that we still had a lot of possibilities for engaging my little misfit and her teacher was very open to exploring them. The next day she was back in school and we are sorting it all out...not without a few bumps along the way.

The one thing that I learned through all of this is that what happens here in the home is the most important aspect of my little misfit's education. And while part of me wanted to rip her out of a place that was making her unhappy, another part of me realizes that she needs to grow comfortable with being a misfit. She knows now that I listen and that when things aren't going great I will do whatever I can to make them better. She also learned that even though things aren't as exciting as she'd like all the time, she has been learning a lot. She's also given me some extra responsibilities in her education. The feedback loop has been established and will be utilized over the next few months...years!

My Little Misfit

I used to think that I was a pretty good teacher, but my little girl has helped me uncover all the assumptions that I still have about education. Even though I know that grades don't paint a really good picture of all the things she knows, I still want her to get good grades. Even though I am happy that she is such an independent little soul, I still want her to fit in. Even though I know that children learn at different speeds, I don't want her to fall behind. All of these things fall into the category of a "good student". But what is a "good student"? I've really had to think about this.

For example, she really doesn't like to be told what to do. As a parent, I had a certain amount of expectation that she would do things because I am the parent and I asked. I have spent a lot of time dreaming up fantastic projects for students over the years that have been very successful. But my child doesn't like to be told what to do. She likes coming up with ideas herself. She likes feeling like she has something important to share, and the minute that she loses ownership, she loses interest. So there have been a few things planned at my house that haven't gotten anywhere near completion, mostly because they haven't been her idea.

After more than 20 years in school, I know that the things that were most gratifying for me as a learner were when I had the opportunity to express my own ideas rather than regurgitate information. It was exciting to let people know that my head was full of thoughtful and original ideas. I had so many great ideas of things that she and I were going to do in the name of education and I have had to learn how to let go of many of them and support her in exploring her own ideas. Teaching is about helping her explore the options she has in developing her ideas, and supporting her when she runs into difficulties and dead ends so she doesn't give up. Teaching is about helping her live with her choices, and recognize the opportunities that she might not see present in them. Teaching is about putting myself and my expectations aside to just love her as she is. My little misfit.

Embracing the Misfits: Practical Applications

Every once in a while in a person's lifetime, there are those moments when something shifts and everything comes clear. I've been lucky enough to have a few of those moments. Sometimes it will be something I read or something someone says. It's happened when I've been sitting at a table playing with children or in the middle of writing a song. Now I won't claim that things stay clear...but I know they matter because I remember them, even when life goes on and I forget to do them, the memory is still there, ready to knock me between the eyes...again.

I'm pretty sure that it was David Jardine at the University of Calgary who said, "What if the problem kid isn't the problem, but your classroom that's creating a problem kid?" Suddenly there were a dozen kids flashing through my mind and I knew the truth of the statement. We spend so much time in the education system pathologizing and labeling "problem" kids. New labels are emerging every single year. I firmly believe that it is the limitations of the system (and often the classroom) that create so many misfits. The only problem is, instead of seeing them as creative emergent possibilities and re-examine what we are doing, we pathologize them until they leave the system: psychologically, socially, academically and finally physically. And everyone suffers for it.

In the past years we have discovered much information about brain development, how some learning can't take place until the brain reaches a certain threshold. We know that the clock in each student's body means that these changes don't take place on a specific timetable, yet our curriculum still works on a lock step system, governed by age and monitored by exams that have shackled our students and teachers to expectations that are often unrealistic. I know this because I have read the most recent School Progress Report published at my daughter's school. It reads somewhat like a quarterly report, 81% of students achieving at an acceptable level, the goal to improve on that number for next year. What will have to happen for the results to satisfy the accountants and share...I mean stakeholders? If we can achieve 81% certainly we can manage 82% or even 85%? A study in the Teacher Record Weekly last year concluded that the standardized tests used in the US for certain university programs have eliminated all the talent. What are we prepared to do to make our results look good?

I know that grouping our students by age is probably the most logical way to do it. It's probably the most likely way to get a good grouping of students at a similar stage of development. It's the most efficient way to organize our students to educate them. But what about the misfits? The ones who might not learn well in groups. The ones who might be auditory or kinesthetic learners instead of visual learners? The ones whose numeracy skills might be three levels ahead or behind their verbal skills? The ones who might have far too much happening at home to worry about what is happening at school? The next thing you know, you have a classroom of misfits. Maybe efficiency isn't the right approach. But then again who's to say that another approach, not dependent on numerical outcomes wouldn't be just as or more efficient? How do you teach a misfit let alone a classroom full of them?

Embracing Your Inner Misfit

One of the really interesting things that I have discovered about patterns, particularly those that seem to relate to how people and institutions organize themselves, is that I don't seem to fit into them very well. Perhaps that is why I am so conscious of them. Whatever the case, it seems that despite the fact that I get frustrated with so many aspects of the way things are organized, I can still be hurt when I feel excluded. I think there is a distinct longing to feel like we are a part of something. I believe educating for sustainability is inclusive although some may find it ironic that I would feel better exchanging one pattern for another, which would undoubtedly leave others to feel excluded.

But here is where we need to embrace our inner misfit. While some espouse that human evolution and survival is the result of the "survival of the fittest", others believe that "survival of the anomaly" makes far more sense. It was small adaptations that allowed us to evolve over time and these adaptations were more like the result of "difference" as opposed to strength. Even the largest, most powerful dinosaur could not survive without being able to adapt to a changing environment. In "Guns, Germs and Steel" by Jared Diamond in his chapter entitled "How to Make an Almond" he suggests that the reason that the modern day cultivated almond tastes so sweet compared to its poisonous ancestor is due to careful selection from the occasional appearance of the sweet anomaly for cultivation over many centuries.

But let's get back to feeling like an anomaly in the present. In his article "Creativity and Leadership" Fritjof Capra addresses the importance of emergence which is the creativity that appears when existing structures become unstable. What I learned through the Utopia exercise with my grade nine class is that any system designed by individuals is eventually going to reach its limitations. That is the point at which emergent structures will appear to enable change. Our success as a species has been the result of finding systems that we have put in place that work. Our survival as a species depends on the "misfits" with creative ideas who can point out the instabilities. Either way, misfit or not, we are all an essential part of the equation.

Horton Hears A Who

One of my favorite children's books is Horton Hears A Who by Dr. Seuss. It's a wonderful story poem about an elephant that discovers an entire community of "whos" living on a speck of dust. Though I don't remember reading it as a child, as an adult it brought back a memory of childhood when I finally read it. I distinctly remember staring at my arm as a young child wondering if there was a whole world present on the surface of my skin, and in turn wondering if perhaps I was a flea on the surface of some enormous creature, so enormous I couldn't even see it. When I was introduced to the Gaia Hypothesis, it echoed something that I had sensed all my life: that perhaps the earth itself was an organism. And then it was wonderful to imagine what it might mean if this organism had a consciousness. It was so exciting to think there were worlds within worlds and my "world" was only one of many and that maybe one of the creatures on my skin pondered over the possibility of me having a consciousness. Fractal geometry added to the intrigue and I fell in love with the search for repeating patterns all around me.

I suppose that most children wonder about these things. There was a time that school subjects like chemistry and biology reduced my body to carbon, hydrogen and oxygen or organs, cells and organelles until I could barely remember or recognize the mystique of those worlds around me. But eventually, as time passed and I learned to keep asking questions, until the mystique returned until I couldn't look at a tree without feeling a kinship to the one that not only shares this enormous body we are living on, but is in fact an extension of my own body, my lungs incomplete without its presence. I am not an isolated entity. I belong to something much greater than myself. I am part of an amazing, intricate beautiful evolving pattern and as such a shift in me will shift the entire pattern.

Where to begin Educating for Sustainability

I used to lead a unit in Grade Nine social studies entitled "Utopia" and I asked the students to design their own Utopia. There were some pretty diverse visions of Utopia that were shared with the class, but in the end when I asked the students how they would go about "changing the world" they said it would have to happen in the schools. Apparently adults are too set in their ways, children can still learn. I remember them getting a little annoyed with me when I asked them what they thought I was trying to do as an educator in the system. While I have dreams of how the educational system we have could work differently, I don't believe that sustainability can be taught.

The other day in my Ecological Literacy: Educating Our Children for a Sustainable Future book, I read the chapter entitled Indian Pedagogy. In that chapter Malcolm Margolin writes that to teach someone something robs them of the experience of learning it for themselves. Sustainability must first be experienced, recognized and then celebrated. Pretty simple don't you think? All we have to do is find ways to experience the gifts of the earth in a way that will make us want to cherish them forever.

Sustaining the Notes

I hear songs. I suppose that I write songs since I do write them down, but generally I hear them first. Not sure why although I have noticed that my kids hear them too. I have lots of songs, not sure of the actual number but it's probably well over 100 by now. At first I thought that hearing songs meant that I was supposed to sing them, preferably in front of large audiences for large amounts of money. But over time I've realized that that's not really what they're for.

I was listening to Simon Schneidermann on CBC the other day and I heard him say that we need the arts to make sense of the chaos that we are living in. They're a necessary part of understanding ourselves. I suppose one could extrapolate that having written more than 100 songs, I must have a really good understanding of myself. I suppose I do. Or it means that there is an awful lot of chaos in my life.

In the book, The Turbulent Mirror: An Illustrated Guide to Chaos Theory and the Science of Wholeness, the authors John Briggs and David Peat illuminate the patterns that exist in the chaos, the chaos that for so many years, has been beaten into submission by numbers and mathematical equations. I like to think that the songs I hear lead me to the patterns that anchor me in this world, even when it appears I am floating free or out of control.

Sustainability is about acknowledging and honoring the patterns, and songs help me find them. A pretty good fit I think. And so the songs instead of leading me to enormous audiences and concert stages, have taken me on a journey of heartache, hell raising and healing, a masters degree and several community development projects. That is why I believe that arts are integral in educating for sustainability. They help us see the world in completely different ways.