John Gruber
I have been working for the last several months on a long range visioning committee, reflecting on directions for the future, areas for growth, and those existing elements of our school that we most value and want to retain and support. As a learning community, one that is intentionally organized around education, growth and change, we always find it worthwhile to ask deeper questions about how we come together… Read more…
‘Hundreds of thousands of impressions from the invisible world are eagerly wanting to come through you! I get dizzy with the abundance. When life is this dear, it means the source is pulling us.
’Rumi, ‘Husam’
Inquiring
In my botany class, we are completing a six week inquiry into food and agriculture, examining what we eat, what it offers us, where it comes from, how it is grown, who worked to harvest it, and how its production has affected the ecological and socioeconomic systems to which we are all connected. It has been a wonderful place to use an all-quadrant approach to reflect on the many different dimensions and perspectives inherent in that most basic aspect of our own sustenance. During one week, each of us recorded faithfully every item that we ate or drank, Read more…
Thanksgiving
I find myself looking up a lot in these past weeks – walking in to the building where I teach, my gaze lifts to the branches of tulip poplar and oak, the stones and bricks of the rooflines, the copper flashing, the chimneys, the sky and the morning light or the evening light, crows and blackbirds, a crescent moon, clouds, the last few leaves of November. This is the ground of my teaching practice, the world that surrounds our inquiry and our dialogue, the vast space of all that is, that which is possible, that which always has been just as it is. Whatever we take up in our thinking in the teaching space, it is already out there in its fullness: the forces that act on us in the universe, the relatedness and interdependence among living organisms, the energy conversions that take place in every interaction. Read more…
october teaching
Intention
October lets go reluctantly like the remaining few leaves on the sugar maples in a misty drizzle of warm gray light. There is a pause in the season, the weekend of November’s arrival, of returning the clocks to a time where the sun is highest at noon. We finally release the last of remembered summer, bringing in the final three hot peppers from the Bhut Jolokia plants, potting up a cranberry viburnum offshoot to carry off to Vermont hayfields next year, watching the appearance of winter stars on the horizon in the dark, early morning sky. Pausing at this moment, we find another opportunity to renew our commitment to embodiment, to enacting all that is possible, to waking up to our own full consciousness. Read more…
Timelessness
I am just back from the most glorious, deep and inspiring gathering of integral educators on Whidbey Island in Washington. Beneath the cedars and a bright moon, we explored many facets of what it means to bring an integral vision forward into the work of teaching and learning. There were exquisite moments, and so much energy and talent and wisdom present in a group that came from all across the continent and around the world.
center point
Listening
In our teaching practice, we dedicate such energy and time and commitment to our students, to the learning community, to the pursuit of knowing or truth. Perhaps we are quite content to simply rest in the effort, enjoying the journey and paying attention to all that arises in our classrooms, in dialogues, in relationships. Or perhaps we have hopes that something is happening, that through the experiences and the modeling and the inquiry there are in fact changes taking place in our students, in ourselves. During the full, rich busy time of teaching through the academic year, I often find I am quite immersed, up close and deeply into the details of what we are creating. I have come to appreciate more and more the intentional ways that we can listen in to what is taking place in the subtle realms, what is changing, what is happening in the dynamic territory of learning.
reflecting presence
It was the reality of existing things,
It was the consciousness of all that lived
And felt and saw; it was Timelessness and Time,
It was the Bliss of formlessness and form.
It was all Love and the one Beloved’s arms,
It was sight and thought in one all-seeing Mind.
Sri Aurobindo, Savitri; The Book of Yoga; Canto VII The Cosmic Spirit and Cosmic Consciousness
The Reality of Existing Things
There are moments where I sit most fully in the realization and recognition that all of reality is possible in this moment, all of Reality is present in this moment. Right where we are, exactly what we are doing, just as we are, exactly as we are being, Everything is present.
Where I teach, this is a season of great appreciation as we feel the nearing completion of another year of working together. The season itself seems to celebrate the growth and learning; all that has been created, all that has been shared. Students who are preparing to leave us and move on to continue their education in a new setting are particularly engaged in this articulation of what the experiences have meant to them, what they will take with them on the next stage of their journeys. Read more…
What is this…
Considering all of the gifts of this being human, we might hold for a moment the exquisite creativity, the breathtaking compassion, or the intricate intellect that arises alongside and within human consciousness. Yet beneath it all, there is this simple and always present gift of attention, of where we are putting our awareness. Read more…