AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. As the lily pads brush the bottom of the canoe in the brief pause between strokes of the paddle, I am reminded of John Cage’s 4’33” and the symphony of “silence” that is available to us anytime we choose to listen to it. When one becomes present to the stillness of the world, we invite stillness in side of ourselves. This internal quiet gives us the opportunity to experience a different reality as our senses come into focus. We are able to see a world that is often hidden to us because of our drives to achieve our goals. Yet, when we are able to put aside those drives we find a wholly different world. A deeper clarity emerges and we start to notice the things in a different way, for it is those “empty” spaces of silence that enable great things to occur. Not through any action on our part, rather the simple awareness of the world can have a profound affect on our perceptions, often causing us to act instead of react. This gift of silence, of listening to those things that we often ignore, is often a gift that we give to our students when the curriculum is secondary to the relationship, when the lesson is secondary to the person, when the words spoken are secondary to the words not spoken, when the anger expressed by a child is secondary to the pain that child is experiencing. This gift of internal stillness enables us to remember that we are teaching children and not a subject, that we are guides on a journey of exploration and not performers on a stage, that we are first and foremost human beings that are broken in our own unique way and not a perfect example for someone to emulate. When we own our truth, when we quiet our soul, when we open our self to possibility, when we function from a place of abundance rather than a place of lack, it is then that we truly become guides to children to find their own silence, their own path, their own life.
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