The Repeater and the Black Bird (both teachers) conducted a day-long session at The Brewery. In the courtyard we set up cooking plates and brewed a portion of beer (named Mead by us). Beforehand, we asked the School Nurse (the Medicin Woman) to conduct an initiation ritual to open our minds and hearts for the process of brewing and teaching. Our focus was on the knowledge and poetry which can be…
I met my students as a teacher at the academy for the first time today. I introduced me as my poetic self and tried to stay true to the communicative characteristics related to this. Not too much instruction, focusing instead on relating what was interesting seen from my point of view. This led to a class exercise, inviting students to try my method – listening, repeating, passing on fragments of…
Today the students in the genre project were given secrets and little personal pieces of the puzzles that will become their writings. The cardboard Indan woman performed the ceremony. She is a cardboard indian because she has old scraps of paper in stead of Buffalo skins, she has paper and porcelain artefacts in stead of real animal tokens. The beads around her neck are made of paper mache. The secrets…
It began with the sound of the soothing song of the Black bird and its hectic, laborious upbringing of two or more broods of bickering hatchlings per summer – That was my image of the teacher I am becoming (willingly or not), and a suitable poetic background to the challenge of entering Sisters Academy for a short while. In the process of finding my place in this strange as of…
Reading about forest gardens and roots while eating super dark ecological chocolate. How politically correct does it get? These guys in the article want to heal the earth – no less – with natural Band-Aids, which preserve the carbon in the ground and let the roots intertwine. I feel taken back to the days when we were vegetarians for the sake of Nature, were idealists with a firm belief in…
