Dear Teachers

This started as an essay to support my book, Dear Teachers . It’s morphed to be applicable for all my writing interests so I'm posting it on all my blogs. I apologize for any redundancy. I stepped away from writing for a bit.  Truth be told, I needed to work some stuff out. It’s hard to ponder positives when you don’t see many in your life.  Seeing. That’s the overall focus on April’s essays: really seeing. I left March with an essay entitled “The Hum of Life”, with an important quote (which I attributed to Sudanese tradition, but may have come from elsewhere) that relates to vision: “We desire to bequeath two things to our children: the first is roots, the other one is wings.” We have to know where we’ve been in order to see where we are now and to plan for tomorrow. If we want our children to have strong roots, we must really examine ourselves deeply. Faults. Mistakes. Failures. Only then can we move to evolving real wings. I started April with an essay entitled “Hidde...

I’m going to combine the above reference to week 19 of Dear Teachers and my Verbostratis blog essay for this week, Personal and Public Ikigai in the United States , because they dovetail. As I’ve stated before, January’s Dear Teachers essays revolve around “time”, especially “now”. Where I live, we’re expecting some winter storms over the next 48 hours, so the theme is fitting. In Marlene’s photo, her capture of the beautiful colors and textures of a summer storm rushing in reminded me that life is like that: wild stuff rolls in. We all have storms and it feels like they do so when we’re knee-deep in our “stuff”. Can we make it through them? Most likely, yes, if we have firm roots. The ways to form those roots are what I wrote about in the September-December essays. Our roots can also be described as our ikigai - our life-value. If we’re living in our passion and in a mission, AND if we’re within a culture that allows us to do that sustainably as a profession and as a vocation, we h...