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...

October’s essays all deal with people and how we influence each other. First, ourselves. Week 5 reminded us of all the work we do to prepare our lives, with reminders that things might not go according to our ideals. Week 8 challenges us to really walk our talk, whatever that might be, and encourage the same for others. Let's celebrate our diversity instead of freaking out over whether we're filling some image of "perfection" or not. The photo's quote is pulled from that essay and the image is an early one that inspired me to start writing it. Then, widening circles of influence spreading outward away from us: family, friends, coworkers, students, administrations, local communities, state, national and worldwide. Week 7 asks us to remember our flight crews. Rely on them. Grow them to support you even more. Until now, I’ve skipped over Week 6. We need Week 6 when we find ourselves struggling with the results we’re experiencing in Weeks 5, 7 and 8. Time ...