Hormonal resonance

I really love my husband – but I don’t talk about these things, much less write them. After 20 years, sharing this, would it embarrass him? Does it embarrass me to write it out loud? Others in these kinds of marriages will know what I’m talking about. We hold hands at the movies and while falling asleep at night. Why is it embarrassing to admit so much love? Though friends have remarked upon the quality of happiness of in our household, like it’s an extraordinary event, or something not often encountered in family life. Love stories, and marriages, can be so very much otherwise. Like love lived through rupture and continuing heartache (a not-love), not finding the one to love (a not-finding), or stories of being alone by choice or circumstance. 

I love him better as the years go by. How can this be? No one ever ‘told’ me that love and marriage can be like this. That it can be sweeter over time, that the erotic can have a sustaining charge. This is not to say we haven’t had trials, oh no, we have our trials. And we’re not particularly romantic, or the kind of lovers who put their locks onto that Paris bridge. Such a confident romantic gesture. The matter of our marriage took its time, questioning the institution as we did. Yet being together as a couple continues. I want to be around him, to be in his presence. I breath his smell and vitality like oxygen. To sink my nose into his neck each day is one of the divine pleasures of my life. We have hormonal resonance.

I used to relish short breaks from the intensity of my young family. Breaks given through my various studies, conferences, or research projects (at the time, always San Francisco). I no longer feel this way. Now I don’t want to leave home. Right now, I ache with the absence of my family. And I feel a texture of raw longing for my partner, my husband. Being away from him for these five weeks is the longest in our 20 years. It’s painful in a physical way, but it gives me a view. I’ve been with this guy for 20 years, and I’m still secretly, madly, in love with him.

There is fear of the ‘evil eye’ in admitting my true love. If I say it out loud, will I loose it? There is always a cost to love, the price of its potential loss (unspoken). You don’t want to say it, because maybe it’s not really that good. Or you’ll admit something is good, and then not live up to it afterwards, after-words.

A friend was recently and shockingly widowed by the sudden death of her husband, her soul mate. His absence opens a gapping wound she can barely live with. Maybe it’s important to admit that such love is possible, what it’s like, even if we can be devastated in its loss. There are so many clichés on this – to love anyway, and all that. But in real life, it’s actually much deeper then any cliché. Long-term love has been a cornerstone of my own life so far. I am told that one must life-write not only of trauma, but of the good things in life, of pleasure and happiness too.

I think it, or should I say feel, that our happy household is the extension of our love, and holding the space in this for our girls. In Hinduism, they say husband and wife should literally worship each other as god and goddess. This may seem a bit over-the-top from a Western view, but I get it. As in: say nice things to each other. Don’t back-talk your mate to others. Do things for him/her that make them happy. I experience this from my husband. In his actions, his doing, he demonstrates his love.

I’m not talking about the whole co-dependent thing that my mom read, worried, and warned me about during my childhood/teenage years. My mother’s love life was filled with strife and her rumination on the topic of love (or not-love). The theme of rumination on failing love can become a favoured habit. There is a lot to talk about when love goes wrong, but what to say when it’s right? My mom and her boyfriends lived in lover/enemy dyads. In this view, relationships are ultimately traps, and we are replaying the traumas of our childhood and family dynamics. We may certainly carry our family and social histories, but how to pass (not pass) them?

I witnessed my grandparents’ life-long (till death did they part) relationships. Though these seemed, at that feminist moment, to be more about the social duty of marriage. On my mother’s side, a settled co-existence between grandparents, but also an undercurrent of resentment and verbalized upheld regrets. I noticed my paternal grandparents cultivated an earnest kind of love in their togetherness. And my father re-married long-term, happily so, to my stepmom. Yet as a child, experiencing years of an acrimonious parental divorce, I had no idea that long-term love can about inter-dependency, safety, enjoyment of and with the other. Maybe I wished it were so, or deeply desired to love in such a way, with this kernel of potential. 

When my youngest daughter was a little baby, I went to a soothsayer. She was an astrologer recommended by a friend whose birth I had midwifed. At the time, my husband and I had about 2-years under our belts. We were stressed as new parents, and had been fighting (in bad ways). We had had some significant challenges at the start of our love, ones that left me with mixed emotions, and tested us. My mind wandered to co-parenting as a non-couple (I cringe on writing this now). I suppose that thought was born of experience with my parents’ divorce. Also, at the time, many young couples /families around us were breaking-up after their children’s births. It was like I had no other ‘go-to’ thought for resolving difficulties. I did not voice this. At heart I did not wish it to be. I was in love with this man. The soothsayer looked at my chart, and she firmly told me (not knowing my thoughts) that I must not leave him. He was in the other room caring for our baby – an actually apt activity for him, who has been so admired, by other women especially, for his involvement in such things (and his good looks).

“You must be together, it’s very important for you. To live in a life-long partnership, to learn to trust another, it’s very important. You will see, after many years you two will experience the quality of your love with more and more depth. You will draw strength from this. Others will admire your partnership, and remark on it. This is of great benefit, not only to you both, but for others in your lives.”

Oh wise woman, whose voice I carried in my head through difficulty. It comes true. As it is, so may it be. A lived inter-dependency of the sweetest kind. One that asks us to love and trust in each other every day, building these qualities into every act between us. Body, speech, and mind.

Artful Paris

Paris is truly art-ful, as in: full of art.

Unbelievable, formidable. Even when I see it, it’s hard for me to take it all in, such local movements of historical and modern European art. Which I studied in my undergraduate textbooks of art. I let it all absorb, a feature of my research here in situ, in Paris, being the wonders and education of this place itself. Everywhere the actual artifacts are on view, like walking into Brancusi’s atelier yesterday. A small museum next to the Pompidou Museum houses a collection of Brancusi’s sculptures. All set up to his exact(ing) specifications, as if in his actual studio of the day. His forms are smooth, organically curving, rounding without edge. An oblong head lies sideways on a wooden block, Cycladic in appearance, the eyes are unreadable and serene, the nose a clean, long line. Behind this, form after form rests in the studio, on the floor or atop piers in a precision of space, as if grown from nature itself, or the human expression of such.

Last weekend I went to visit La Musée de la Mode, in the sumptuous building and grounds of the Palais Galliera. The exhibition was of the fashion/textile designer Jeanne Lanvin. I became completely absorbed in the details of her extraordinary art and craft. Her dresses, the clean cut lines of the 1920s, and 30s. Her velvet blue, and endless hand-made details in embroidery and beading of dresses. We need these dresses now! They float and flow, and look comfortable to wear draped upon the body. Lanvin’s motto/logo is an image of mother and daughter. Phrases from maternal life made their way into her fashion pages, like, “have you finished your home work?” and, “you’re going to fast maman!” Her daughter an enduring feature of her life, a motivation and inspiration for work and art.

In my state of wandering Paris, these art-full viewings impress upon me like an oracle. I am con-currently immersed in this theme of art and mother-lines. Working on a paper that juxtaposes Cixous’ artful mother texts (in particular “Eve escapes” 2011), with my own mother texts. I work autophotographically to make series of photographs “at home,” about home, and on visits to my mother’s home. Also on a maternal theme, a whole corpus of Cixous’ recent books are devoted to the figure of her mother, who lived a long-life of over 100 years. Her books portray the daughter-writer who is constantly (in both serious and comedic ways) pulled between the presence of the beloved mother, with whom she lives and cares in proximity, and the needs of her art in writing. The impending and unimaginable (dreaded) death of her mother, and the call of Writing itself, are always on her mind, as she writes about writing and thinks and dreams in the presence of writing (and Mother). Cixous, in the writer’s voice, is always bridging this impossible gap of life and art. Mother and art keep arriving together in text, an exquisite evocation of living art and artful living, with life left alive on the page. 

Bon courage

Bon courage – what a beautiful thing to say.

We don’t say this in English, wishing another well in overcoming difficulties, like: “Good courage!”  

Reading a blog interview by Sion Dayson of writer Jessica Levine (both Americans living in Paris), Levine describes what it takes to live the creative life, and to have become a novelist as she did in her 50s. Her list is topped by qualities of confidence and courage:

“Creativity requires qualities—self-confidence, courage, spontaneity—as well as conditions—time, financial ease, mentorship or positive role models—that are not always available. It took me many years to overcome the destructive inner critic…”

see "The Geometry of Love": https://parisimperfect.wordpress.com/2015/03/26/the-geometry-of-love/#more-8065

This applies to being an artist. What does it take to be successful in art? Success meaning not only having the courage to make your art, but having the qualities and conditions to publically exhibit and continue the practice, day-by-day, to even earn your living from this. Currently, with SSHRC fellowship support, I have the conditions. My stumbling block right now is exhibiting my visual artwork. Production has not been a problem for me. I have the work, ‘to make’ is a matter of my being. I could put my lack of exhibitions down to pre-occupation in other areas, like writing, parenting, and my involvement in collective artistic practices, but I’m aware that it’s not just that.

Three years ago I was here in Paris, on a preliminary trip for this research. I found a good place to stay, but I couldn’t explore much. I was here, here. But so physically and emotionally fragile it’s a wonder I even got on the plane to France (my youthful habit of being the adventurer kicked in?). I became very ill on finishing my PhD, and whether due to my fragility, or provoking it further, I was battling/greeting the worst of my mother’s monsters. The ones she had always offered me, the ones she wanted me to take, maybe to relieve her own burdens or to create more, who knows? I knew on an intellectual level that they weren’t mine, but emotionally, experientially, another process was at work. I had been coded, marked, through repeated exposures. I had to let them pass, each horrendous one, in a process of separation.

All my life, my mother’s monsters dogged my path, along with my fear of these engulfing me. I had been singular in staking out my own identity. But I felt, and was repeatedly reminded by my mother, of the sharp edges of family traps and traumas. Traps and traumas can become transformative fuel for art. For Cixous, it is the wound itself that writes. On my previous trip to Paris, I was completely heartbroken, with even physical pain in my chest. Were my mother’s monsters family inheritances, hers alone, or the works of mental illness? A mix of all and more. They had finally caught up with me in a visceral way. I was facing each one, acknowledging the depth of the wound in order to pass through the gates (I'm getting an image from Harry Potter here, all those death-eaters coming at you - it’s a good analogy). And the gates were very real. I had to pass through large wrought iron ones each time I entered or exited the grounds of my Paris abode. Weaving my body through these entrances/exits each day, the metaphor was not lost on me. Some of the gates were not passable, being always locked. The gates became an extended meditation on both my own condition and the work of Cixous, whose gates in writing life are most always open. She passes through. 

In a kind of poetic justice, I was beginning this “work” in Paris. Though armed with remedies, medications, and meditations, I could hardly go out the door. My life at that time was one of surrender without choice, and a practice of ‘extreme’ self-gentleness in tending to the wound. Though I felt the reality of death, this was an equally painful birth-giving process. It was June, and rained almost every day. In my disability, marked by pain, fatigue and anxiety, all I could do was get groceries, barely – step by step. I carefully walked the parkland of my surroundings in the Paris rain. The highlights were getting to see my friend and her new baby, snuggled onto her chest. We walked around the park as she recounted and I listened to her Paris home birth story. An intense and beautiful birth (they are all intense - and beautiful, a doorway for the force of love and life to come through). And then a hemorrhage, saved at home by the midwife - step by step. The birth story, my favourite genre. 

The other highlight, I attended a daylong seminar on Cixous’ book “Partie” (1976) - departing, leaving from, arriving to (in the feminine). I was in just such a state of feminine arrivals and departures. The language of eggs and regenerative birthings in her text hovered about, my destiny as unclear as it ever could be. To return now, again, is a gift, a new mark, a code for birth in being.

And so “courage.” Yes, courage. Bon courage!

Paris in the springtime

I have returned. And it’s all true what they say about Paris in the springtime. Paris is gorgeous right now – warm, sunny spring days. It’s alive! The chairs are out at all the cafés. People and tourists are out in droves. Les bouquinistes on the Seine have re-opened shop! I am re-entering the dream, walking back into this story, and the weather sure is nice. All this mind-emptying into the Seine has put me into some kind of Paris-bliss state. I am unlikely to get much work done like this. What project is this again?

It’s been a bit long (for me) since I last posted – I meant to write about “transformative writing” via “Adult Learning and la Recherche Féminine: Reading Resilience and Hélène Cixous” by Elizabeth Chapman Hoult (2012). A recent book related to Cixous and methodology, Hoult gleans into my own thoughts and experience. She explains a lot of the things I am interested in about Cixous as inspirer / inspiriter of off-grid writing methodologies.

Will catch up soon. Tomorrow it’s time to attend the Cixousian seminaire again.

            

Methodology – the cosmic sewing machine

Perhaps the term "methodology" encapsulates my Cixousian/life writing study, a methodology driven study? I know - Cixous’ writing defies notions of “method.” My point – exactly.

                            “get past the wall”  

                                             

                                              (Cixous, Coming to writing,1991)

How can we defy and re-defyne methods? Recognizing the ways in which gender, social forces and patriarchy shape practices of writing, and who can or can’t write. How can writing and methodology speak/communicate/commune-with life in new ways? I see Cixous’ writing as midwife-provocateur of such birthings, an invitation to break free of convention and “etiquette” (à la Sean W.), finding language, dreams, birth/death, the life of objects and poetic-philosophy - narratives in the narrative, turning/tuning towards words-in-themselves.

Tracing the educational genealogy of this study is to look at the forces of Coming to writing/ L’avenue à l’ecriture (Cixous 1991/1977) in my own life. I was a secret teenage poet. Poetry gave me a way into my-self, my emotions and scenes of life with others. I loved what words could do. I handed a file of my poems to a university professor in my first year of visual art studies. A well-known Ottawa poet, he let me into his writing class, with words of praise and promise for my writing. I entered and promptly dropped the class. I did not feel able to commit to both writing and visual art. Or I was afraid, of writing.

Growing up in a literary (reading) family, I read too, a lot. Mostly female authors, Virginia Wolfe and Doris Lessing were mainstays of my teenage years. I didn't feel I was 'novelist' material, but I sensed the need to write. Reading gave me worlds and words and ways into life within and beyond my own. Years later, after community-based midwifery studies, and the birth of my first daughter, my entrance to a Master of Arts in Women’s Spirituality in San Francisco gave writing back to me. Who knew?

Who knew that poet, cultural theorist, and educator Judy Grahn (http://www.judygrahn.org/) would be there, nudging students along in her creative, generous ways, “did you write that story Nané?” In our classes, writing groups, and pedagogical immersions through women-centred scholarship, space, and ritual, hearing the stories of others, telling and re-finding my own stories, I recovered my desire to write.

Research methodology was key to this arrival. New feminist research methodologies were about creatively locating ourselves in our own lives as women. We could use the “I” word, a subjective voice! VOICE! Feminist qualitative research as “Organic Inquiry” (Clements, Ettling, Jenett, & Shields, 1998) opened these doors more. Art, writing, and the sacred could merge within me, in a community of e-mergence. I followed red threads that I yearned to, through women’s birth stories, midwifery, eco-feminism. This was the kind of research I had been longing to do through my years of living the birth-work, and reading women’s stories and healing ways. How to make research sing and soar, breath life, give life.

Into my PhD, I found arts-based researchers in education at UBC. Again, artists, writers and poets arrived, with communities of stories as our calling. Life writing with an arts-based research team began. And reading Cixous, more and more, things evolved to this place of reading-writing, in its potent-poetic transformative impact. All that is possible in reading-writing - its individual and collective sewing.

The cosmic sewing machine (poem for Judy)

In this classroom, I am made more,

in saying, telling, writing, following

my own tales/tails, letting words 
come through, the flesh and blood of me, 
words spin out into sentences, forming

a new body.

These soft glowing orbs

I can hand to others, placement of

figurative touch, head to hand to heart,

this funny mind-meld, enscribes my sensory

awareness, of being.

That story I told Judy, long ago

about the wolves calling, and she said,

“have you written that down?”

no – I hadn’t, but soon did,

now the thought often arises,

to write things down, 

to stitch stories.

I am a bit more familiar with

this cosmic sewing machine,

the one Judy points to, saying,

“I have to get back to my sewing”

I look in the direction of her gaze,

to the sewing machine on the floor

and I think – that looks a lot

like a computer.

And so begins another way of thinking

about sewing, about writing.

                                                       Nané (2015/2009)

Provoking Curriculum

Just attended the 7^th Biennial meeting of Provoking Curriculum Studies, a gathering of Canadian curriculum scholars, educators, and researchers. Held this year at UBC, on my home ground, easy to get to. And where this very conference was inaugurated in 2003, when I was very new doctoral student! Back then, I knew I was following the right threads, but I was somewhat dazed and confused as to my path forward in the field of education, so new to me. Let alone, “curriculum studies and theory.” I couldn’t have imagined what I feel now, that curriculum studies is my “home” in education. And judging by the good company I keep in those attending this event.

From the conference “call” (thank you Carl & Erika):

Break out! Break from all safe

comprehensive arrangements

never completely comprehended by

controllers or controlled.

(Margaret Avison)

Instructions for living a life:

Pay attention.

Be astonished.

Tell about it.

(Mary Oliver)

“Acknowledging that curriculum studies are always plural and polyphonic, we invite educators to provoke curriculum studies by attending to the multiple denotations of provoke: to stimulate, arouse, elicit, induce, excite, kindle, generate, instigate, goad, prick, sting, prod, infuriate, madden, ruffle, stir, and inflame.”

“Second, we invite submissions for presentations that ask diverse questions about curriculum studies by engaging with our long traditions of provoking and invoking and evoking. Let’s embrace William F. Pinar’s (2011) invitation in “The Character of Curriculum Studies”: “Perhaps we can allow ourselves to go into temporary exile, to undergo estrangement from what is familiar and everyday and enter a third space, neither home nor abroad, but in-between, a liminal or third space…” (p. 76).

Papers included titles such as:

- Sharpening the Focus: Postcards in Pursuit of Poesis

- “Am I an English Teacher Yet?” Co-Authorship, the Invisible Subject, and Narrative Identity

- Coyote and Raven Paddle Upstream: Rekindling Human, Non-Human, More-Than-Human Intra-Actions in Education

…and many, many inspirited others (not quoting names in the blog). As you can see, these folks are not working for anything to do with instrumentalizing teachers and students through education regimes, or the human-machine-making process of modernity that philosopher Hannah Arendt so aptly warned us of.  

What is curriculum theory? (Pinar, 2004), as my French colleagues ask. A good question. More answerable after immersion in this field at UBC, where many esteemed originators and navigators are. And judging by conference attendees, its grad students are now a corpus of education professors across Canada.

I appreciate the idea of curriculum as what we immediately think it to be: the contents and design of a course of education. But what informs these? Like McLuhan, “the medium is the message.” How do we articulate, know, or experience, the structures that contain education, in all levels and phases, through the “medium” of its holding? How do we grasp, generate, and create, the institutions and classrooms within which we circulate our acts of teaching and learning?

“Sensing pain and trouble of living.” (Arendt)

Here is American, turned to-life-in-Canada, curriculum scholar William F. Pinar, with the re-conceptualization of curriculum. Moving “curriculum” from noun to verb as “currere,” in this etymological movement of "running the course," with book titles such as:

The worldliness of a cosmopolitan education: Passionate lives in public service (2009)

Queering straight teachers (2007)

Understanding curriculum as racial text (1993)

Here also, was Ted T. Aoki, “inspiriter” of Canadian curriculum studies. Infusing his grad students with oration, keen curriculum insight, support of their inquiries, and some kinda orb of transmitted life-energy, that even I am benefactor of – a trace-effect of his wise presence.

Tracing and unraveling what is brought to bear in education, in the everyday lived and hidden curricula of classrooms, from K-12, college, university, and life beyond. The university and life beyond tend to be my areas of inquiry. Who are the teachers and learners in systems of education? It’s this interfacing of school to society to daily life and back again. "Who" is there, and “how are they doing/feeling/thinking/being,” in or out of the system, that keeps me rooted in the kinds of questions that curriculum theory can ask. Arts-based methodologies and life writing grew from this generous field of inquiry, from a series of artful, life-engaged, thoughtful steps and stops along the way.

I am, perhaps, an unlikely curriculum scholar, though now it makes sense. I do not have a K-12 teaching background. But my husband is a teacher, and comes from a teacher family, and my girls are in school. We live and breath this stuff as lived experience. I came into the field of education with a very interdisciplinary background: visual arts, midwifery/birth-work, textiles, women’s studies, feminist studies in spirituality, motherhood studies. I am happy to have landed in this curriculum place, where my views of inspiriting education with social gender justice, embodied/bodied life, ecology, Earth-wisdom, the arts and writing life, the value of story in cultural transformation, have had space to gestate and grow.

I have often thought (felt-thought) how curriculum studies and inquiry, which is little known outside the field of education, sits at the “heart” of the university itself. As if by the very effort of our soulful engagement we keep the disciplines more honest, by virtue of education attempting to look at itself.

Transformative / holistic / experiential education

This title is key to some of my basic impulses in educational practices and research. It may lie at the heart of my interests and passion for learning/teaching and research. It’s why I am drawn to and inspired by the work being done by Indigenous education scholars in Canada, alongside studies in women’s spirituality education that nourish my path. This work integrates social justice with attention to social-cultural-spiritual development and healing of the human being, who we are, where we come from, and what do we really need to know and learn. It’s about finding and walking one’s way. “Wayfinding” à la curriculum scholar Cynthia Chambers. Narcisse Blood was one such Indigenous teacher (https://vimeo.com/119367676). Sadly, he was killed in a car accident last week. I give my heartfelt condolences and payers to the family, friends, and colleagues of this wise, funny, serious Blackfoot elder, filmmaker, and educator at Red Crow College, Alberta. 

In the university, there can be that most excellent of lectures, the kind that lifts you in thinking and knowing from the professor’s passion, intelligence and delivery of her subject. Oration from the teacher, like Socrates, and elders such as Narcisse (yes, Narcisse and Socrates!) is an ancient path of learning. I love this kind of study. 

I also love the study that comes from good books and reading. My independent reading, in finding the right books (yes, the ones that drop off the shelf for you), has taught me as much as anything I’ve learned in coursework at school. Reading ‘schools’ me, over and over, all the stories and ideas of others, transforming me in their words. It’s reading itself that leads my study of Cixous. And what reading generates for further writing/research in one’s self-development and education. This can ultimately affect the collective human good. Perhaps this encapsulates a history of my own sense of “study” (in the Bill Pinar sense).

Reading, taking contemplative time with texts, re-generating through generations of the human being, “humanitas.” We pass our-selves backwards and forwards in time and space. Though reading is done in a solitary way, it’s a multi-vocal, multi-textual and bodied space. Giving our focused attention in reading, a cacophony of others and ancestors joins us in the collapse of space and time. Cixous, a reader extraordinaire, writes of this over and over. She reminds us how many voices are joined in every single text. Questioning “authorship” in writing, as a ‘stable’ or singular identity. Who is writing? Who joins us in our writing? A nod to the corpus of many.

Going back to my blog title. I didn’t know this writing would take me to the notion of “reading.” Who is guiding this pen/keyboard? My original idea was to write about how important programs and curricula that integrate the “whole” person are, to my own path of study. An integration in learning of mind/body/emotions/spirit. Where I’ve been able to bring my-self, my own fragmented stories and history, sensing into life as education. It’s also why reading Cixous is so alluring for me. She moves across daily life, dreams, memory, place, the enigma of objects (things), people, dialogue, thought-in-itself, literature, in a multi-sensory, reading experience (sens/sang – sense/blood). I think of her as “dakini” Cixous – instant enlightenment! (dakini à la Vicki Noble)

What I set out to say, is that I think it’s so important that education be centred upon, not only factors of good oration, reading and critical analysis - but inclusive of body, emotions, vital life, and spirit of students and teachers. At least it has been for me. How to be vitally engaged with one’s experience and history, and not just the delivery of information – the ‘curse’ of "instrumentalism" identified in curriculum theory. This delivery needs to be a physiologically attuned birth-giving, genuinely midwifed, if we want to feel a connective, relational sense of study. Scholarship is not much without a self-body that lives, breaths and is enhanced by it, an inspirited self-body. It’s hard for the singular teacher to work holistically or transformatively without a programmatic and philosophical structure to midwife and ‘hold’ their work, without colleagues taking on co-leadership together in new ways. Ways that can respond to the political, ecological, economic, and justice challenges of our times.

I think arts-based and life-writing research go in this direction, in a Canadian education context. These are communities of scholars working with and through “wholeness” of life-forms, in practices of social engagement, justice, daily life, culture revival, in artful ways. It’s why I’m drawn to these forms of research. But in itself, research is not enough. There is so much more to a “whole” curriculum of human-making and being. This is best accomplished in collective communities of scholars /educators /learners, who are able to work together analytically, organically, emotionally - responding and creating as needed in our universities and schools. 

My doctoral topic on Women’s Spirituality education was ahead of me in these concerns. It wasn’t specifically the question I set out to ask, but it's part of what I discovered in my inquiry – the necessity of collective creative effort. Over and over I see how this graduate program was such a unique example. A collective of educators /mentors, devoted to feminist scholarship and social justice, in concert with attending to the birth of students' emergent inquiries, blending transformative and holistic education of self /body /emotions /spirit. Interestingly, it was my independent reading that brought me to this program of study. These women were not anyone taught to me in my undergraduate university coursework.

How to focus on the human being in her/his becoming, an ongoing birth. Who is she? What does she bring? Where did she come from? Where is she now? What does she fear and hope for? What does she yearn for, or want and need to know more about?