Skip to content

friends

Old Friends

…sat on a park bench like bookends…

Over the past week I have learned to expand  my understanding of friendship. It took a physical encounter to expand my bubble of understanding, and so many threads came together to be something more. I think, in a profoundly meaningful way I watched myself learn something.

Experience is a wonderful teacher, and cliche as it sounds, I should know how true that phrase rings. All the reading in the world, all the listening, all the watching can inform, but it is not until it is your own that you learn and know. My understanding of friends and friendship expanded and I shed a layer of skin and got closer to myself.Read More »Old Friends

Kith, Kin, and Kindred Spirits

I once had the opportunity to go back to the house where I lived during many happenings – life, death, nearly birth (I left the house 10 days before my first child was born), our wedding, … a lot. When I got there it was all I could do to walk the familiar corridors, feel the bumpy wallpaper, and enjoy the creak of the stairs as a rainbow of emotions welled up inside of me and the water that goes with the rainbow leaked down from my eyes. This was some 10+ years ago and I wasn’t sad. On the contrary it was a privilege to dance with those memories in that space again, and I was lucky that not much had changed yet. That might have been beyond what I could have handled – in that moment.

That story is relevant now, in a different way. It sets a context. As people grow, live, change, return, sometimes they have an urge to search, to seek and this happens in various ways. Through a pilgrimage or retreat. Sometimes people cross continents and oceans, going to far away places to seek a quiet repose, or to get in touch with something…

_____________Read More »Kith, Kin, and Kindred Spirits

Meeting people: On all sorts of levels

I attended #OER17 with many different goals and hopes, but all were surpassed and I came away having learned a most valuable, topical, and poignant lesson about our world and how we interact. I met people. Meeting people is something that we do and teach, or at least teach about, in so many ways. In my Psychology of Learning and Teaching class I even teach about meeting people – the value of social interaction, social context, the self, how children develop, but this day was a landmark revelation for me. I was aware not of teaching through the rear-view mirror of McLuhan but of not realising we are riding bicycles while others are driving on the same road with us. It is challenging to verbalise. This is a personal reflection with pedagogical implications.

Read More »Meeting people: On all sorts of levels