November 13, 2017
I seek privacy while I taste these new things. These ideas and thoughts that co-mingle inside my being, each one changing the colour and tone of the one before, sparking new thoughts in marvellous chemical reactivity.
More like alchemy, it feels. As though I’m levitated, it feels.
All of this internal, so I have few words – there are no words in fact, at this point, to describe the changes in me. My feelings are volatile, powerful enough to do damage, and yet I know they must be felt as they are, acknowledged, contained, allowed to move. I do not happily sit in conversation these days for fear I might erupt. I’m sure people who don’t know me well think I’m the same as I was.
Artistic Citizenship (Elliott, 2017); Engaging in Community Music (Higgins &Willingham, 2017); Teaching to Transgress (Hooks, 1994); Pedagogy of Hope (Freire, 1992); I am Woman (Maracle, 1996); Unsettling Canada (Manuel, Derrickson, 2015); The Mother of all Questions (Solnit, 2017); Remixing the Classroom (Allsup, 2016); Success for All… (New Zealand – Rakena, 2015); Women’s Work, The First 20,000 Years (Wayland Barber, 1994); Klee Wyck (Carr, 1941); at least twenty mind-changing journal articles from all over the planet (1996 to 2017)…
For these ideas to take, they need to spark, and oh, but they are. This is not a mental exercise, but a heart-based one. I’m not new to academics, but I have been away from the process for some decades, in which time I obtained some common sense about the way things work. Heart first. Then mind.
Then Voice.