When I was a little girl, I played school. I loved setting up the classroom. Arranging the desks. Gathering the crayons and pencils. Piling the paper. Stacking the books. Getting ready for the children.
No one knew I was playing school unless they asked because my playthings were old boxes and jars in the garage, fallen leaves in the yard, or turned-over cushions in the basement. My school was imagined. My children were daydream. I talked with elves, insects, clouds, and dust. I spun webs of story and songs of hum.
I have always been a teacher.
After five decades of experience in schools as a student and a teacher, the truest thing I know about schools and learning lives in my 6-year-old self.
I see her clearly. What she knows and trusts is possible. How she sees beyond what’s there, beyond how things are named, beyond what others say is the way of things. How she listens in the corners, the edges, the places hidden and tucked away. How she plays in the overlaps and savors the blur.
I see her as she grows, at age 16, 26, 36, 46—full of ideas, strategies, and arguments; full of insistence, plans, and brainstorming maps; full of new programs, solutions, and innovations. I honor that work and what she (I) could see then. I honor the work of others who have questioned, reimagined, and restructured schools and learning. I honor the care and hope and effort and action.
And… I’ve always felt an underlying angst with human ways of reimagining schools and learning, including, perhaps especially, my own (even as I named my business the reimagining project). I can see now that my angst has led me through the density I needed to feel and release in order to remember. Remember what I knew at age 6:
Learning is alive—a breathing force, in-out, give-receive, a landscape of curiosity, dream, awe, and unfolding.
Learning is soul liberation—remembering who we are and why we’re here.
Here, now, at the end of 2024, it is time to pause, to sense within and beyond ourselves, to feel the rawness of our unsettling, to ask humbly: What is school?, and to listen to the essence of learning that’s calling us home.
To (re)imagine schools and learning isn’t the work of the mind. Or at least not what humans tend to think the mind is. Imagining is a living being within us, breathing its own wisdom—connected threads uncountable, the space between, ocean caverns of sky, archives dissolving, dying to become.
There is death here. Necessary death.
We aren’t fixing a system.
This isn’t a moment of incremental change.
We aren’t revising mission statements or strategic plans.
There’s no more tweaking, patching, or polishing on the surface.
We let the systems die.
We let whoever we think we are inside the systems die, too.
And we let the imaginal rupture reimagine us.
We are the matter being unformed and reformed.
We are the imaginal goo.
We’re all in the heap as Catacherisis continues to cry, again and again and again. Do you hear her? The onyx-winged goddess who asks: How wrong are you willing to let yourself be? What will you let go?
I hear the humans cry, too:
But what about…
We can’t just…
We need to…
The problem is…
Holding on is not the way through.
The old ways won’t work anymore, including the ways our minds explain and justify and plan with human apertures and logics of control.
We are emergence.
Porous, transient, multiple, hybrid, dynamic.
We are threads of listen and dance, gather and breath—ancient oak trees, plankton sky, dragonfly eyes spelling the weaving of our hums.
This is not the matter we’ve known so far in this lifetime. But this is matter we’ve known before.
It is the matter we’re remembering each moment we feel a nudge, see a glimpse, sense a tug, dream a path, hear a wisp that tells us what we know deep inside ourselves:
Children hold eternal wisdom.
Schools don’t have to be this way.
Stale, tight options are not true choices.
Learning is alive, reciprocal, interconnected.
Curiosity is liberation.
Everything is spiral.
We are already whole and free.
This year of 2024 began with a message from the word-being, architecture (Texture of arcs) and I can feel the arcs offering us a rainbow into 2025…
The arcs know what to do—
span an opening,
create passage,
invite new ways of texture
for us to weave, fabricate, build
what we choose to create now,
for all of us,
human and more-than-human—
no gates on the arches,
no forms too solid to get through,
no passageway that needs a key.
We don’t build the bridge.
The blueprint is in our cells.
Our attunement is the bridge.
Where we place our attention, the frequency of how we tend and attend,
this is what releases arcs upon arc of bridging, of passage.
As we let the imaginal rupturing of this moment reimagine us, our work is our attunement.
Where we place our attention is what we will grow.
I choose to attune to children, bees, delight, and liberation.
What do you choose?
*
as delight, Melissa
If you appreciate what I share and feel inspired to join Noticing Matters as a paid subscriber, I welcome you.
I love sharing with our curious, open-hearted reader community each week. For the rest of December, I’ll be writing about the books, words, glimpses, and surprising fragments who have nourished this year and offer us some guidance for where we are going (when we slow down to notice and listen).
Children Whole and Free
As we attune to our creation of emerging, liberatory systems for our collective future, we are also living inside and between the old systems as they crumble. This makes for some challenging times in the years ahead, and it’s why our personal and community practices are particularly important right now… especially for children.
How do we attend to children in this moment between the worlds?
Some families have the infrastructure now to create their own small communities and schools, but what about everyone else? There are a few programs and opportunities that nourish children’s authentic, whole expressions, but what do we do between now and when we’ve created liberatory learning spaces for all children?
If you are a parent, grandparent, neighbor, mentor, or caregiver, there are many small and significant ways you can support children to stay connected with their inner wisdom, light, and joy. Small invitations, small questions, small shifts in what you do (and don’t do), and what you say (and don’t say). Simple things to incorporate within your comings-and-goings and ordinary daily routines with a child of any age. Even as children continue to be influenced by old systems and logics, there are beautiful ways you can support your child to remain whole and free.
If you feel called to receive support in order for you to better support the children you love, I will be offering an online class—Children Whole and Free—along with other accessible resources beginning early 2025.
If you’d like to be among the first to receive further information about this, please simply reply to this email with the words “Children whole and free!” and I’ll make sure you receive the information when it’s available.
In the meantime, feel free to reach out with any comments or questions.
How to Notice is a lovely book to gift someone who is longing to slow down and notice more in the small things of their everyday life.
As whimsical as it is serious, How to Notice takes you on a slow and surprising journey that starts small (find an object, look closely, wonder about it), and steadily grows as you notice things you didn’t quite expect and discover new layers of awareness deep inside yourself.
Learn more and connect with purchase options: How to Notice.
And a few songs who have been nourishing me and you might enjoy, too…
Let’s work together!
Reach out if you’d like to discuss a possible (re)imagining experience for your community or organization, or collaborate on another scope of work.
www.melissaabutler.com | melissa@melissaabutler.com
Thank you for being YOU. And thank you for reading Noticing Matters.