Blogs from Our Graduates

Several IMA graduates are finding their path into businesses and organizations by making it and walking it. Read about what some of our alumni are up to these days.

Anne Smith studied sense of place, creative writing and especially memoir, and place-based community building during her time at Goddard. Out of her studies, she also started her own business and blog. In One Little Window, she writes about building community, raising her son, and making things to become more self-sustainer and close to the sources that sustain her. Quoting Eleanor Roosevelt in her sidebar, she reminds us ""One's philosophy is not best expressed in words; it is expressed in the choices one makes... and the choices we make are ultimately our responsibility." This blog explores everything from preparing to raise to chickens to feeding the birds to resurrecting a 1942 knitting pattern. The blog is accompanied by Anne's business site, One Little Window, which brings to readers ways to buy vintage clothing sewing and knitting patterns as well as eco-products Anne makes, such as cloth napkins.

Scott Youman's new blog, This Energetic Man, is a marvel of a website when it comes to great writing prompts, inspiration, vision and replenishment. As Youmans describes his site, "This Energetic Man is a space on the Interweb to share my work and insight as a Transformative Language Artist. My work involves writing and the use of poetry, literature and myth to provide experiential workshops that help expand and affirm our humanity. The insight I offer, imperfect as it may be, arises from my work and continued interest in personal growth, spirituality and anti-oppression work." His site also lists writing workshops and retreats he offers.

Jeanne Chamber's great blog, The Barefoot Heart, isn't just the "ruminations of a red dirt girl" but powerful good writing about life and meaning, punctuated with ample humor. Jeanne describes herself as "a complicated simple girl fluent only in southern and english, i feel beautiful when wearing dangly earrings and dresses that caper. sundays are my most creative day, so i try to have at least 7 sundays each week. whether telling them in cloth, clay, or chirography, stories are my oxygen, characters my blood." Her posts include musings on bioquiltographies, travels with outrageously intriguing characters, explorations of the ordinary in which all manner of magic resides, plans and revisions of plans to live with greater vividness, seasonal transformations of us, and there's even good eats: occasional recipes. Much of her writing lands on how we can bring ourselves greater power and voice through simple, constant and nuanced awareness. 

Visit all these blogs to see what Anne, Scott and Jeanne are cooking up, and how it might enhance your own possibilities.

The Nature of Consciousness: An Interview with Francis X. Charet

Francis X. Charet, faculty member in the Individualized MA program and coordinator of Consciousness Studies, speaks about the conditions of time, mind and the soul on the Single Eye Movement website. Drop by and listen to what he has to say. Here's an excerpt:

My own view is that there is a fundamental unity underlying "body" and "mind" and yet a distinction has emerged seemingly to initiate a dialectical process for the purpose of the differentiation of consciousness. Some have resisted this distinction in favor of one side or the other; there are others who have seen and experienced the unity behind it all and these are the visionaries. But to attain this level of consciousness, and not experience it as the consequence of regression into unconsciousness, is exceptional, transpersonal, and probably the work of several centuries on the collective level.

Read more here.

Speaking of consciousness, here is Francis with the very conscious Grace Paley several years ago on the Goddard campus.

In Praise of Goodness

Goddard faculty member Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg was recently interviewed by Diane Silver, a writer who keeps up the blog, "In Search of Goodness," a 365-day quest to answer an impossible question. Here's an excerpt from Mirriam-Goldberg's interview:

DIANE: What about poetry and goodness?

CARYN: Poetry and poetic language – which I would extend to memoir, novels and short stories, spoken word and song writing, just everything we can do with language — it’s all about, at its best, taking life and encapsulating it, and passing it on to us in a way that we can see more who we are and how we live. Even speculative fiction shows you a lot about how you live or about how people could live or what people could become. I think the arts serve as a mirror of where we are, but also of a larger vision of where we could be and also historically where we have been. For people trying to cultivate goodness in their lives I don’t think they can do better than to turn to the arts because you’re going to see things there. You can hear it in song, you can see it in painting, you can listen to it in a spoken word performance.

DIANE: It’s a matter of looking at it, but also maybe participating in it? I know that writing has taught me a lot about myself.

CARYN: Creating it, looking at it, doing it. You can see in all these things — what’s the word I want? — you can see your reflection. You can also see where you might be limiting yourself, where you might go instead, through the use of writing, through imagery and rhythm. Imagery speaks to our five senses: smell, taste, touch and so on. Rhythm — just the sounds words make when they’re put together — kind of jars us out of that thick layer of stories and myths that I talked about earlier. We can kind of lift it up and look underneath it. You can use that as pathway to connect to who you are.

Pictures: Above: Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg; below: Diane Silver

Francis Charet: Graduation Talk on Ganesha

Graduation talk delivered by Francis Charet, IMA faculty and coordinator of Consciousness Studies, at the Individualized MA graduation ceremony on Feb. 14, 2010.

Ladies and gentlemen, members of the Goddard community, families and friends. I am honored to have been invited to say a few words at this commencement. When I received the email from Jaes asking me, on behalf of the graduates, to be the commencement speaker I was sitting at my desk at home in Montreal. I began to remember my own graduate studies and all the things I was interested in and pursued, my ambitions, hopes and dreams and what I had attained in the years in which I studied. As I thought about all of this, I looked up over my computer and starred as I often do at a wooden image that sits on a shelf. It is a small statue of the Indian deity and mythological elephant headed figure, Ganesha. It found its way there, like other objects I have accumulated, because of my interest in the cultures and religions of the planet and of India in particular. In fact, it was really my encounter with Indian culture that first awakened in me a sense of the largeness of the world, how small and western I was, and how much we all have to learn from each other and yet we often miss the opportunity to do so.

As I thought about all of this it occurred to me that the figure of Ganesha represents a combination of the things that might be of value to try to briefly speak about to our graduates. Lost in work and other things I thought I would pick up on these ideas sometime later. As fate would have it, when I arrived at Goddard with as yet not entirely worked out thoughts, I ran into Sowbel, acting director of the HAS program, who said she wanted to show me something. This turned out to be this statue of Ganesha sitting on a figure with three elephant heads. Bemused, I took this as a sign that, indeed, my brief talk should be about the qualities that Ganesha embodies and clearly, to fit the symbolism of the three heads, there had to be three of them namely strength, wisdom, and responsibility, all qualities that are attributed to Ganesha.

Now Ganesha is one of those remarkable combinations of human and non human elements that India has characteristically produced in great abundance, flourish and wonderful variation. He has a human body, usually with a nice rounded and very full pot belly, and his torso is crowned with an oversized elephant head. In the earlier fateful encounter of East and West, he ran afoul of the colonizing Europeans and their aesthetic ideals and entered the list of what one contemporary historian of Indian art has called “much maligned monsters”.

Yet, since medieval times, Ganesha has attained an audience in India that surpasses them all. This elephant headed figure is found in greater numbers in statue, relief, painting and poster form than the rest. There are now monographs written on this figure and various stories to explain his emergence and I won’t detain us by looking at these as interesting and entertaining as they might be. Instead, I simply want to acknowledge that this figure has become an object of interest and popularity and now even migrated to the west and it might also have something to say to us and to our graduates in particular. In order to do this I would like to focus on the three things that I mentioned, namely strength, wisdom and responsibility.

Let me add that one of the interesting parallels between the figure of Ganesha and Goddard is that we, like the figure, combine together things that often are not combined elsewhere and in that sense we, too, are unusual and maybe even a bit exotic. In Indian myth and culture Ganesha is an archetypal auspicious figure who is known by his chief attributes as the remover of obstacles, patron of scholars and protector of the community. Obstacles Ganesha, the great and powerful elephant headed god, is often displayed as using his strength to move seemingly immovable objects and does so with considerable determination and patience. He is especially venerated for this attribute for the obvious reason that life is chock full of obstacles, big ones and small ones, some easily overcome others not. Graduates, I know that all of you have faced such obstacles in your lives but here, at Goddard, we also know that not infrequently, the greatest obstacles are those we ourselves have created. Getting out of our own way is a challenge and requires similar resources such as strength of character, determination of will, patience and kindness. Learning this has been an important part of your experience here at Goddard.

Knowledge Ganesha is the patron of scholars. This attribute implies that knowledge is one of the most desired and vital resources in order to understand, move through the world and make it a better place. Graduates, you have all acquired considerable knowledge in a variety of subjects and disciplines but I would venture that the most important acquisition has been knowledge of yourselves, who you are, what interests you, and what you want to take out into the world. This, too, has been an important part of your experience at Goddard.

Responsibility Ganesha is the lord of hosts and protector of the community. Knowledge of the world and oneself is both a valuable accomplishment and an indication of success that is commendable and is a shared goal of many educational institutions. Yet at Goddard you have learned something more and that is that knowledge becomes much more enriched when it can be applied in the world to make it a better place for all beings. This, too, has been an important part of your learning at Goddard. In India, invoking the presence of Ganesha and what he stands for –remover of obstacles, bearer of knowledge and wisdom, protector of the community - is common at the beginning of rituals, scripture reading, engaging in any contractual arrangements, and even in the breaking of ground for new buildings and other seemingly non religious events. Goddard graduates you are not at the end of your journey but at the beginning.

This is Ganesha time. Take the attributes associated with Ganesha, the strength you have acquired to remove obstacles, what you have learned and apply it wisely, your sense of responsibility for others and be contributors to and caretakers of the world. I should add that there is another attribute of Ganesha I have not mentioned: he is also the god of good luck.

Oṃ Gaṇeśāya Namaḥ

Pictures include Ganesha as statue and painting, Francis Charet with graduate Erica Pierce, and a graduation-Valentine's Day-Chinese New Year cake to celebrate graduation.

Awakening Through Pilgrimage: Angela Mullins

Angela Mullins, an accomplished flutist who has performed and taught around the country, came to Goddard with a yearning to go on a pilgrimage – a sacred journey to a site of religious and spiritual significance. So she set out to study pilgrimage, which she defined as “an intentional journey in which the pilgrim communes with the divine, communes with the divine, contemplates his/her life path, and renews his/her connection to the sacred.” Inspired by a pilgrimage to Camino de Santiago in Spain before she started the IMA program, she focused her IMA studies on pilgrimages to China, Tibet, Bolivia, Peru, and even Paris. The journeys culminated in her thesis, Awakening to Awakening: An Intimate Exploration of Pilgrimage, a comprehensive exploration of the traditions, psychology, and religious roots of pilgrimage, and a beautifully-written memoir of her own journeys that also includes her sparkling photographs.

Mullins explains that the study “allowed me to integrate parts of myself that never integrated before. When I first went on my original pilgrimage – to Santiago – that itself unraveled my life in a powerful way, and I realized that writing was going to be really important to my life, but the process of studying pilgrimage at Goddard and integrating my own experience to the depths of my soul, and my writing and study, enabled me to realize my work and life don't have to be separate things.” Along the way, she also took her bamboo flute with her on many journeys, and played around the world, offering her music and collaborating with local musicians. “Being in other cultures, I learned how music served culture, and how music is beyond high art and is its own pathway to healing.”

In addition to her music, she awakened the writer and photographer in her. She says she only started taking her writing seriously right before she started at Goddard. “Up to that point, I was a closet journaler, and would have smacked somebody if they dared to read it, but going on that first pilgrimage, and realizing writing would be an important part of understanding pilgrimage showed me how to follow writing wherever it took me, and how writing was its own pilgrimage path.” What she saw not only infused and opened up her writing, but her photography also as she took thousands of pictures on her travels.

Her pilgrimage continues in several forms. Right after she finished her thesis at the end of 2007, she went to Pisco, Peru to volunteer for Hands on Disaster Response. She currently is on a journey through massage school, and she's studying yoga, looking all the time for how these healing arts enhance and integrate into her writing, photography, and music, and in how she serves her community.

While she continues to teach flute at a studio in her home, perform, and do arts outreach in Washington, D.C. public schools – taking music into the classroom to help students find their own voices – she says her journey in the IMA program and around the world has “taken music from where it was before my life – as an intellectual process – and taken it back into my heart and back into my body. It's also opened up my whole life so that everything I do – music, writing, photography, yoga, massage, everything – now comes from that place within me.”

For more on Angela's reflections, please see http://mysticalroad.blogspot.comand http://mandalajourney.blogspot.com

Photos (from top): 1) Walking along the Camino near Pamplona, Spain; 2) Inside the Inca Ruins at Ollantaytambo, Peru; 3) Flying over the Himalayas: the Rooftop of the World; 4) Sharing melodies inside the Temple of Heaven, Beijing, China; 5) Friends from the Camino, in front of the Cathedral in Santiago de Compostela, Spain; 6) Connecting with the music inside Templo de la Luna, near Cusco, Peru