Grateful for the Unexpected

April, 2020, Cadwell Farm

Here we are on Thanksgiving weekend.  In the middle of a pandemic, as the days grow darker and shorter, and real winter is not far away.  And yet, this Thanksgiving, I think many of us feel a heightened awareness of our blessings and our good fortune.  Even if we can’t be with our families, we treasure them all the more now, with a new understanding of the preciousness of togetherness and close connections in this world.  I doubt any of us will ever take that for granted again.  

We were so lucky to be with our son, Chris, our daughter-in-law, Lei, and our grandson, Jack for the last couple of days.  They are the ones who moved up to Vermont from Brooklyn to escape the pandemic and decided to stay in the farmhouse where Ashley grew up, 20 miles south of us, for a year.  We are a close pod and don’t really see anyone else now.  Especially now that Governor Phil Scott has issued guidelines that do not allow multi-family gatherings, even outside.  

April, 2020, Cadwell Farm, Lei, Chris, and Jack

So, we are all restricted, everywhere around the globe, and have been for a long time.  Being with dear friends and family, even on Zoom, even on the phone for a catch-up chat seems so heartwarming.  I talk often with my siblings and that is a blessing.  We read regularly to our grandchildren in Boston and that has been so much fun for all of us.  And we are Jack’s caregivers two days a week. 

I am learning so much about being a toddler’s companion every week.  It is a timeless time of entering Jack’s world and seeing things from his perspective.  I have happily left all worries and to do lists behind and lived with him in the present.  We have moved through three seasons now.  Starting in the spring, we walked around the Cadwell farm as the world grew from brown and gray to spring green. We awaited with excitement for the arrival of chicks his father ordered and goats on loan from a farm in Shelburne. The goats lived on the farm for several months and became our friends.  

June, 2020, Cadwell Farm

The summer was full of wanderings, planting, harvesting tomatoes and green beans and eating them warm and on the spot. We swam at the local recreation area, and in our local lakes and reservoirs.  Sometimes, Jack would glide with me in the Hornbeck boat I purchased early in the summer, an open kayak that looks like a canoe.  

We have savored the fall, in the midst of the blaze of color of the maples and birches that cover the landscape, the falling acorns, and circling hawks.  We have made peanut butter pinecones for the birds, and cornbread muffins for us.  Throughout, we have read so many books, at our house and at the famrhouse.  

Picking crab apples for jelly

We began to draw every week in the beginning of September.  I cover his small table with paper and we get out the chalks, or the crayons, or the Mod Paint Sticks, and sometimes gouache with colors in a small round pallet.  Repetition and variation, theme and variation, careful preparation, and then, observation and play, “tossing the ball” as Loris Malaguzzi, the founder of the Reggio Emilia Approach, always called it, between the adult and the child…seeing what happens, and then, making the next move, supporting the child’s curiosity and lead.  

Jack started to put sentences together at the end of September.  Now, he can’t stop talking and picks up words and doesn’t forget them.  His favorite question is, “What is (fill in the blank) doing?” On Thanksgiving, he wanted to see the Tibetan Buddha statue that I inherited from my mother, so I brought it down from the shelf where it lives, and we investigated.  Jack asked, “What is Buddha doing?” I said, “Buddha is sitting.” Chris asked, “Jack, what is Buddha doing with his hands?” Jack said, “Singing ‘Itsy Bitsy Spider.’” (My older sister explained to me later that the figure is a Bodhisattva, an enlightened being, rather than a Buddha figure. The jewelry is the clue. Thank you Sally!)

In October, I participated in three webinars on The Hundred Language of Children through offerings from Reggio Children… “Children and Nature,” “Children and Clay,” and “Children and Numbers.”  I was pleased to listen to Reggio educators, many of whom I know, live.  I was thrilled to see and hear about resent work shared both from Infant Toddler Centers and Pre Schools.  I became more excited and curious about what Jack and I might do with, among other things, stones and pebbles outside, movement, and climbing, and clay! Reggio Children continues to offer webinars for individuals and schools that are open for anyone who is interested. This month they are focusing on documentation and making learning visible.

This year, we are working closely with the toddler teachers at Principia Early Childhood Center in St. Louis, and with Louise Elmgren, a studio teacher who has taught elementary and middle school age students and is now in the middle of her second year working with the youngest children.  This partnership has helped ground me in the practice of organizing rich learning experiences for toddlers.  I have learned from Louise to jump in, with the knowledge and love of materials that I have, to explore, play, and enter into a kind of dance with all of it, the child, the materials, the present moment, and curiosity and wonder at what unfolds.  

We have worked with teachers of toddlers for some years now and they always ask…“How does this apply to me, to us, to the toddlers we teach…this Reggio inspired way of being with children?”  My experience, so close to Jack, being his one companion for full days, and being in love with materials myself has led us to beautiful explorations that have helped me to consider these questions with new understanding.   

Jack and the goats, Remy and Ramerthorn

In our last blog post, Learning Outside, I referenced The Goodness of Rain, by Ann Pelo, who tells the story of being a caregiver for a baby during her first year of life, when most of their time together was outside.   My son jokes with me that I should write a book about being with Jack for a year because I have learned so much from and alongside him…one child and one adult, building relationship through experience and trust, joy and exploration, repetition and novelty, growth and change.  I am an educator and I have spent a great deal of time with young children, my own, my other two grand children, and those I have taught.  However, not every week, one-on-one with a toddler since my first child was this age, and I have learned so much since then!  

Jack’s family is experiencing displacement and uncertainty, and at the same time, a safe place to live and to be for this period of time.  In spite of all the sadness and loss, believe it or not, I have the pandemic to thank for this lifeline for me during the Covid-19 pandemic.  Jack would not be so close otherwise.  I would not have had the opportunity to grow and learn alongside him.  Sometimes things that happen to us that are completely unexpected turn out to offer countless blessings.  This is one of those times.  

Learning Outdoors

Walking the land…Bristol, NH

I remember several years ago when my dear friend, Jeanne Goldhaber, asked me, “Do you know the book, The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate-Discoveries from a Secret World ? It has all my attention these days.  Please read it!”  

This book, by Peter Wohlleben, was the impetus for Jeanne and her colleagues at the Reggio Inspired Vermont Early Education Team (RIVET) to consider the perspective of trees as “active social life forms” in their observations of children’s interactions with trees, and also to invite other colleagues to share their work and insights about children and trees in the Spring 2000 issue of the quarterly periodical, Innovations.  In this book, Peter Wohlleben, a German forester, takes the perspective of the trees much as Jacques Cousteau took the perspective of the creatures of the oceans in his writing.  In The Hidden Life of Trees, we hear many stories and case studies that reveal the “wood wide web,” the biological structures that allows trees to exchange signals of danger, share nutrition, and work together in many ways. 

Jeanne asked me to share reflections and thoughts in response to the Innovations article and the work focused on children and trees that was collected from many schools, teachers, and children including Taos, New Mexico; Boulder, Colorado; Winnetka Illinois; Belingham, Washington; Casper, Wyoming; Washington D.C.; and Baisha, China. The reflections in this blog post will be shared in the Winter 202 issue of Innovations.

Happy Valley Orchards, Middlebury, VT

Let me start by acknowledging the big world picture of where we are right now.  What strikes me today, as we live into our 7th month of a global pandemic, that was not foreseen as the spring issue of Innovations went to press, is what a different world we are living in, all of us, perhaps most especially teachers and children.  As Cadwell Collaborative, we work with a school in St. Louis, Missouri where teachers have been mandated to spend 80-90% of their time in school out-of-doors.  Learning outside is recognized as one of the safest ways to be in school right now, not only in North America, but worldwide.  

What happens when we, teachers and children, move our learning outside? What happens when we are almost always surrounded by trees and plants, sky and clouds, weather and wind? In many schools, being in relationship with the natural world is no longer taking place only during recess or on special expeditions, but as the norm, as the everyday way of being in school.  

Many of us have been fascinated with the Forest School Movement where small children in Germany and Scandinavia spend all their time outdoors, even in the winter.  Now, there is a resurgence of interest because, out of necessity, many students and teachers are going outside to learn. 

In many ways, this is a big silver lining to the pandemic.  There is ample research on the benefits of being outside and spending time in the natural world for all of us and especially children.  Learning outside reduces stress and anxiety, increases attention, engagement, motivation, and increases memory and retention. 

Sharon Danks, author of From Asphalt to Ecosystems and CEO of Green Schoolyards America, and co-founder of the National COVID-19 Outdoor Learning Initiative, is helping schools and districts across the country use outdoor spaces as essential assets as they reopen with physical distancing measures in place.  

Children’s tree portraits, The University School, Milwaukee, WI

Returning to the Innovations article, how do projects that focus on children and trees fit into this new picture?  I was touched by all of the children’s words that were quoted in the Innovations article…words of noticing, in metaphors, and full of tenderness toward the trees that surround their schools.  

Consider these ideas and theories of the children quoted:

There are baby trees, and momma trees.

Roots go to the center of the world and drink together.

She is cold because she’s outside and the snow lands on her branches.  

I am struck that children most naturally identify with trees as themselves…a tree’s parts as body parts, the trees’ processes as cycles, the trees’ lives as close to their lives. 

Since I lived in Reggio Emilia and worked at the Diana School 30 years ago, I have learned that this is true of Italian children, North American children, Chinese children, all children.  It is a universal response of children to the trees, if we ask, and notice, and listen.  

One of my favorite books is The Goodness of Rain, by Ann Pelo.  Ann chronicles a year when she was asked to care for a toddler of a friend of hers.  She dedicates herself to nurturing her companion’s and her own ecological identity and kinship with the natural world. I recommend this book far and wide for it is the record of an intimate journey of an adult’s and a child’s growing love of and strong sense of place in the natural world. 

Another favorite is The Geography of Childhood: Why Children Need Wild Places, where authors and naturalists, Gary Nabhan and Stephen Trimble investigate how children come to care deeply about and identify with the natural world and how human growth remains rooted, as it always has, both in childhood and in wild landscapes.  

View from Bliss Ridge Farm, Vermont

Both of the books, beautifully written, tell story after story of children in the natural world, of children and stones, gardens, rain, mountains, ponds, creatures, and trees. The authors tell us stories that are compelling and convincing…that we are all a part of this magnificent natural world. That we are nature. That we belong to the trees and they belong to us. That we are intimately, really and truly, connected and in a symbiotic relationship. True also of the air, water, earth, plants, insects, sky, wind, and sun.

As I write today, I am looking out on a sparkling, crisp October day, where the leaves of the birches and the crowns of the white pines are waving and shimmering in the morning light.  These trees that circle our property are our constant companions in all weather and through all the seasons. This natural world that we inhabit, it is calling us.  We have an opportunity to make it our classroom now and to learn close at hand what it has to teach us.  May we all find time to listen to the trees, the sky, the stars, and to the children. May we listen and learn together.  

When I Am Among the Trees 

 Mary Oliver

When I am among the trees, 
especially the willows and the honey locust,
equally the beech, the oaks and the pines,
they give off such hints of gladness.
I would almost say that they save me, and daily.

I am so distant from the hope of myself,
in which I have goodness, and discernment,
and never hurry through the world
but walk slowly, and bow often.

Around me the trees stir in their leaves
and call out, “Stay awhile.”
The light flows from their branches.

And they call again, “It’s simple,” they say,
“and you too have come
into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled
with light, and to shine.”

Our circle of trees

Remembering Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Ruth Bader Ginsburg was a force, an inspiration, and an extraordinary agent of change.  I know that many of us were taken by surprise and filled with sadness and even despair at her passing.  

Maria Shriver wrote, I depended on her voice, her judgment, and her guidance in the public square. Her death left me feeling down, really down. Who will ever replace her? Who has her character, her fierceness, her ability to work across the aisle? Who will be the beacon of hope that she was? 

There is so much sadness and grief in our world! Wildfires burning millions of acres and displacing and harming so many people on the west coast.  I read that last week that the air quality in Portland, Oregon was the worst in the world! Covid-19 still rampant. Death, illness, fear, uncertainty.   Police brutality and our national reckoning with racial injustice.  The country divided.  Our democracy seriously threatened.  It seems to us like a fight over values and that is deeply disturbing.  Values of decency, honesty, integrity, fairness, and equality.  It feels to many that the values that our country was founded on are being pushed out.  How is this possible? What will become of us? Our planet? Our country? 

And then, one of the people who has done the most to uphold those values and transform the way women can move forward to live full, powerful lives passes from this world and leaves a vacant seat on the highest court.  

 Yesterday I read Jill Lepore’s piece in the New Yorker.  She ends it this way: 

Preserving the Court’s independence will require courage and conviction of Ginsburgian force. And there are changes, too, that most of us would never want undone. A century after the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s pioneering career as a scholar, advocate, and judge stands as a monument to the power of dissent. “The natural and proper timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex evidently unfits it for many of the occupations of civil life.” (quote from Supreme Court Justice in 1873) It took centuries, and tens of millions of women, to dismantle that nonsense. And no single one of them was more important than Ginsburg, warm-hearted, razor-sharp, and dauntless.

So, right now, as never before, we are called to be dauntless and warm-hearted, even though we are not all lawyers, in positions of power, or as razor-sharp as Ruth Bader Ginsburg.  After her death. I read and reposted a quote that I found inspiring.

You have been our hero and our North Star.  We will not let you down.  Rest in peace. 

These sentences gave me some reason to get up and keep at it, keep writing post cards to get out the early vote, keep being kind, keep sitting on the meditation cushion and steadying my mind and opening my heart.  To keep believing in, imagining, and working for the future of our strong democracy, our beautiful planet, and our vibrant, hopeful children and grandchildren.

Another thing that has helped me in the midst of all this chaos… I have been following what is called a Meditation Practice Intensive with the Bread Loaf Mountain Zen Community.  I meditate with them through Zoom twice a day and attend talks every week.  I am also reading Instructions to the Cook: A Zen Master’s Lessons in Living a Life that Matters, written in the thirteenth century by Dogen, a Zen priest and founder of the Soto school of Zen in Japan.  This is the guiding text for this month’s practice.  Among other things, Bread Loaf Mountain is a community that is friendly, welcoming, steady, and dedicated to relieving suffering in the world.  Listening, reading, and being quiet has helped me take a long view, and to get out of the ruminations of my mind.   

And then, there are the grandchildren who live in the present and live in joy.  When they were here with us in August, I remember the two oldest kneeling side by side on one of the twin beds in the room where they sleep, glued to the window looking at the full moon rising. Asher said excitedly, “I can’t believe we get to see a yellow moon!” 

And then, the evening when Delilah looked out the kitchen window, gasped, and pointed at the flush pink sky. “Look! We have to go outside,” as she grabbed my hand and pulled me out the door. “Look at the sunset, Lulu! I am so good at spotting things in Vermont. Better than in Boston….the stars, the moon, the sunset.”

Just before they left, Delilah pressed a stone into my hand.  “It is the shape of a heart and it has a heart on it (which it did, in a fossil like form). You can have it.” 

I put Delilah’s stone by my bedside alongside two white stones that my brother-in-law, Steve Cadwell picked up somewhere on the beach and saved in a collection.  Steve died of brain cancer last year, in August, 2019.  Steve’s two stones, and now Delilah’s, remind me of the last words said every evening after the Zen meditation.  

Let me respectfully remind you.  Life and death are of supreme importance.  Time passes swiftly and opportunity is lost. Awaken! Take heed! Do not squander your life. 

The stones remind me that life is short and we must live it now, fully, awake, doing our best to give it our all in each moment, for the sake of the world, for the sake of others, to create a hopeful future.  

May we remember Ruth Bader Ginsburg and may her memory be a blessing, and as I read tonight, a revolution. May we live fiercely and with a warm heart.  May we give it our all. 

Finding Refuge

Von Trapp Greenhouse display gardens

Finally, a cool, steady rain is falling and the mountains and hills are enveloped in gray mist.  It has been a hot, dry summer in central Vermont and the earth, trees, and gardens are soaking up the welcome water.  Earlier today, the fields across the road were mowed for their second hay cut.  Our 20-month-old grandson, Jack, is so in love with tractors that this is a celebratory kind of day.  Jack gets to walk out and around the enormous, parked John Deere machine, with wheels that are impossibly huge and a cab and steering wheel that are high off the ground.  He is captivated by the steady throb of the tractor engine.  He watches the back and forth path of both tractors as one pulls the mower, and the other, the tedder, fluffs up or wuffles the hay before bailing.  Wuffle, a new word for all of us! 

Jack and his goats on the farm

Jack moved up to Vermont from Brooklyn with his parents in mid-March to settle into the farmhouse where Jack’s great-grandmother and great-grandfather lived most of their lives, and a farmstead that has been in this family for 6 generations.  Before March, Jack was very familiar with the squirrels and crows, oak trees, puddles and dog parks in the park across the street from his apartment.  Jack had mostly encountered tractors and hay fields in books about farms. 

To have Jack and his parents so nearby and to be a part of their “pod” is a great blessing for Ashley and me, as it is to spend at least one full day a week as Jack’s companions and care givers.  This is one good example of what many are calling a silver lining of the pandemic.  Thankfully, we can say that some silver linings have manifested, for at least some of us, during this strange, lonely, and challenging time.  

Chris and Jack in their garden

Lately, when so much seems up in the air at least, and in turmoil at worst, I have been thinking about and focusing my attention on what hasn’t changed.  One of the things that is constant and reassuring is the growing world of summer and another is the love and treasured presence of family and dear friends.  

Ashley wrote about envisioning, designing, building, and planting a garden in our June blog post.  That garden has produced such bounty…tomatoes, eggplant, kale, chard, beans, peas, lettuces of all sorts, and now patty pan squash and zucchini.  Our son Chris, Jack’s dad, also has a prolific garden that he planted in the spring when he and his family found themselves in Vermont.  Today, Ashley, Jack, and I went to Chris’s garden to pick our lunch, and eat some of it right there.  Jack loves Sungold cherry tomatoes which he pulls off the vine himself and pops in his mouth.  Ashley loves the Cherokee purple heirloom tomatoes which he picked, washed, and cut in slabs for a fat tomato sandwich between 2 slices of our sourdough bread.  Jack also loves what he calls “chini” cooked just until soft with butter.  A garden lunch, with grandparents and grandson, grown with summer sun and rain, and love and care.  

Ashley’s garden

My dear friend, Laura, and I have been walking socially distanced regularly since the pandemic started, at first in parkas, gloves, and hats, and then, gradually transitioning to shorts and T-shirts.  Among other beautiful walks, we witnessed all the spring wildflowers, called ephemerals, emerging from the brown leaves of winter on the forest floor…spring beauty, trillium, Dutchman's breeches, hepatica, wild ginger.  What a blessing that was.  In July, we planned a day together for her birthday beginning with a picnic in her garden and concluding at the Von Trapp Greenhouse display garden overlooking the Green Mountains.  I have rarely seen flowers so beautiful anywhere.  The bounty and beauty of gardens this year seems a miracle and a balm.  We are more aware than ever that we are privileged, most especially during quarantine times.  For this, we are grateful beyond measure.  For this, we seek to be of service in ways that we can, whenever we can. 

Drying garlic at The Knoll, Middlebury College

What is known as The Knoll, Middlebury College’s organic garden, has stayed open this summer.  That was not assured at the beginning of the pandemic.  I encountered the director and lead educator there in early spring working the soil by herself, not knowing what would happen. Eventually, they were able to hire several Middlebury College food service workers who have been full time, and because of this, the garden is yielding an abundant harvest.  Much of the produce has been donated to HOPE, a local food shelf in Addison County.  Now, some will also go to dining service at Middlebury College.  The summer gardeners have planted many flowers that are suited to drying and plan to hold virtual sessions on wreath making later in the fall.  The garden will be open to student volunteers after they fulfill their in-room quarantine period.  It will also serve as a refuge for them during their more than strange autumn on campus.  The garden is closed to all but students now, so I won’t be able to visit it.  I will continue to be grateful that it is there, blooming and bountiful, providing solace and peace for students.  

View from The Knoll

As summer turns to fall, we wish all of you a bountiful harvest of beauty, love, and friendship.  We hope that wherever you are, and that whatever these next months will bring for you, that you will find peace and renewal in the natural world and in the love of family and friends.  This is what we all need if we are to take good care of each other and our world.  Be well, be safe, and many blessings.  Louise and Ashley

Larkspur poppies in our garden

Anti-Racism

The barn on the Vermont farm where I grew up.

What follows are my brief reflections on now…with no great insights into education…just an attempt to get some perspective on NOW…so that maybe insights will come.

Let’s see…how many ways are these days difficult…unsettling…upsetting…untethering…depressing…unnerving…challenging?

There is the pandemic.  Even living in Middlebury, Vermont, one of the “safest” places in the U.S., when I’m out and about town (or even visiting my children, who may have just returned from NYC, or NJ, or Boston), I’m always on the alert, paranoid that the virus is floating in the air…entering my lungs.

Then there is all the conflicting “information” about the pandemic.  What to believe?  Who to believe?

Then there is the economic recession caused by the pandemic.  What seemed secure, comfortable even…now, not so much.

Then there is the fact that Vermont just finished the hottest June and July in history.  The climate crisis is a fact. Every day new evidence comes to the fore. Here is Bill McKibben on July 29, 2020.

As if my body and economic well-being under the threat of a virus and the climate crisis is not enough, the efficacy of my economic/social/political construct is now unmoored by reasonable revisions of the history I was taught.  It turns out “these truths” of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” were not meant for all.  The founders of the U.S., all white men, most of considerable wealth, composed a constitution that would facilitate the consolidation of power among them…for generations.  I have been a beneficiary. I would not have what I have today without the inheritance from others and the political and economic systems that permit and perpetuate it.  

Now, how do I feel about that?

And, while I plumb the depths of my feelings there, let’s layer on some guilt: to what extent have I been complicit in the systemic racism upon which that consolidation of power among the elite, mostly white males, is built?

To explore this history and hopefully to reach a deeper understanding of it and myself, I’ve read four powerfully written books: American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America by Colin Woodard, These Truths, A History of the United States by Jill Lepore, How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi, and How to Be Less Stupid about Race by Crystal M. Fleming.

Woodard’s American Nations traces the history of our fractured continent, offering a revolutionary and revelatory take on American identities, and how the conflicts between them have shaped our past and continue to mold our future. From the Deep South to the Far West, to Yankeedom to El Norte, Woodard reveals how each region continues to uphold its distinguishing ideals and identities today, with results that can be seen in the composition of the U.S. Congress or on the county-by-county election maps.

Lepore’s history is a chronological sweep that delves into the horrors of conquest, slavery, and recurring prejudices…while she also illuminates the origins of the passions and causes that still inspire and divide Americans.  In the end (after some 782 pages), in 2018, she wonders about what will come next, after Trump.  Lepore creates an elaborate (and I think, hopeful) metaphor of a new generation that could reconstruct the tattered ship of the American state:

It would fall to a new generation of Americans, reckoning what their forebears had wrought, to fathom the depths of the doom-black sea.  If they meant to repair the tattered ship, they would need to fell the most majestic pine in a deer-haunted forest and raise a new mast that could pierce the clouded sky.  With sharpened adzes, they would have to hew timbers of cedar and oak into planks, straight and true.  They would need to drive home nails with the untiring swing of mighty arms and, with needles held tenderly in nimble fingers, stitch new sails out of the rugged canvas of their goodwill.  Knowing that heat and sparks and hammers and anvils are not enough, they would have to forge an anchor in the glowing fire of their ideals.  And to steer that ship through wind and wave, they would need to learn an ancient and nearly forgotten art: how to navigate by the stars.

Ibram Kendi and Crystal Fleming are that new generation.  And to begin the reconstruction of the American state each of them reinforces Lepore’s history of the U.S., with particular emphasis and focus on racist white supremacist policies.  They relate the graphic and horrific history of discrimination, citing detailed examples.  

Kendi carefully differentiates between racist and antiracist policy.  He focuses on policy, not behavior.  He contends that policy is the driver, behavior will change if policy changes.  

While Flemming certainly takes on racist white supremacist policy, her lens is more focused on individual behavior…and the necessary change.  She confronts these behaviors with blunt, in your face honesty.  

For me, what saved both books from being just histories and/or diatribes, is that into their advocacy for change both Kendi and Fleming integrate their narrative of personal change.  Their personal stories are testimony to the ways personal change can occur.  Their stories become an entry point for the reader, an invitation to imagine ways to change and act.

In the end, Flemming actually maps out 10 steps for becoming racially literate. She sets the stage for the steps by invoking Martin Luther King’s April 4, 1967 speech at the Riverside Church in Harlem. If hadn't read it in years. If you don’t know it, read it now. That his words ring so true 53 years later is sobering (to say the least; yet also compelling to DO SOMETHING! ABOUT IT!  And as of today, July 29, 2020, add John Lewis’s brief essay in the New York Times, written two days before his death, to be published on the day of his funeral today.

Flemming’s suggestions end with, Choose an area of impact that leverages your unique talents.

She also makes the final point that:

The outcome of this struggle is uncertain. Nothing is promised. But no matter how impossible the odds may seem, no matter how daunting the history of oppression feels, change is always possible. We can imagine a less harmful world, one in which white supremacy and heteropatriarchy and class oppression no longer exist, where love and interdependence are valued above power and dominance. The amazing thing about being alive is that we can imagine this world, even if we never live to see it. And we can choose to commit ourselves, moment by moment, day after day, to the always unfinished work of overcoming.

I have found the combination of these four authors’ research and thinking to be sobering and uplifting.  I am more grounded in an accurate account of what actually happened in our history, though I am equally appalled and ashamed. I am much more clear about the foundation and vision of Black Lives Matter.

And, with this reflection, I am resolved to DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT with my unique talents. For one, I will work on Fleming’s suggestion #4: Empower young people to understand systemic racism.

Comet Neowise photographed by nephew, Isaac Cadwell Levine