Graduation in Goddard's IMA Program

Just about anyone who witnesses a Goddard graduation walks away thinking it was unlike any graduation they ever saw before. That's because each of our students is, in effect, his or her own valedictorian, sharing his/her story of finding a focus of study of great meaning individually and communally. During a typical graduation, often held in the winter in the Haybarn, a grand old theatre, or during beautiful summer days, in the garden, surrounded by lilies and pines, we of course begin with a speech, or in the case of this last February, a commencement performance by Bread and Puppet during which time, many graduates, students and faculty got to take flight.

Then instead of graduates streaming across a stage, the stories begin. Each graduate is presented by a faculty member, who tells the tale of how this study came into being, what it meant for the graduate, what it means for us, and how it can help change the world in some vital way. The graduate then gets to make his/her own speech, which may entail everything from crying and laughing while thanking a list of family, friends and faculty to playing wooden flute to leading everyone in a sweet old folksong. But in just about every speech and for just about every graduate, we hear how this degree is life-changing, helping students find their callings, do something they didn't think they were capable of, and finding a new way to energize their life, shape their work, and find greater life, spirit, connection and joy.

Graduation is nestled into a weekend of activities, bringing together graduating students along with continuing and new ones, with plenty of time for improntu jam sessions, the student-faculty reading, presentations by graduating students on what they studied that often are some of the most inspiring and mind-blowing moments of all, and lots of time for people to share experiences, encourage one another, and build community.

All photos from February, 2009 graduation weekend.

The Mystical Road: Read a Thesis on Pilgrimage

Angela Mullins, featured several entries back on this site, has just posted her entire IMA thesis, Awakening to Awakening: Journeys Along the Pilgrimage Road. To read about her study -- which encompassed pilgrimages around the world along with investigating the cultural, psychological and spiritual road map of pilgrimage -- please see www.mysticalroad.blogspot.com.
Her work also demonstrates one way to create your own world-changing study.

Three Peas In A Pod: Faculty At Play

In February, at the last Individualized MA residency, which we share with the Health Arts and Sciences program, faculty often met in the dorm each night to visit, relax, and, quite obviously, keep working. The three peas in a pod here are, from left, Sarah Van Hoy (HAS faculty), Francis Charet (IMA faculty and coordinator of Consciousness Studies), and Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg (IMA faculty and coordinator of Transformative Language Arts). Jim Sparrell, IMA faculty, was the photographer.

Transformative Language Arts and Reclaiming the Erotic: Jen Cross and Writing Ourselves Whole

Jen Cross began with a hunger to study transformative writing, especially how it could help people, particularly sexual trauma survivors, reclaim the erotic and live more vibrant lives. Her passion led her to write this manifesto now posted on the website of her writing workshop business, Writing Ourselves Whole:

A Manifesto I believe...

• that writing has the power to affect transformation, to spell out not only how we feel now but how we want to feel, how we believe we can feel.
• that we expand in our erotic possibility when we become deeply aware of one another's truths and desires.
• that there’s a power in writing about sex explicitly and in community, using charged and taboo language – we take that charge and make it our own electricity, utilizing it for our own ends instead of remaining subservient to it.
• that much of our sexuality and our erotics is manifested through language–one of the ways to alter our reactions to all the sex-negative messages we are force-fed from birth is through practice and play with new language, in a less-charged space than a bedroom, alone or in the presence of others struggling and playing similarly.
• that we all need safe space in which to be our whole, complete and complex erotic selves – to delve into the desires that we've learned or been told don't "go with" our particular identities.
• that, finally, when we risk empowering and transforming ourselves, we transform and empower the communities we exist within–and changing our communities means that we are changing the world!
  

With such an expansive view of writing, spirituality, sexuality, the body and the body politic, it's no wonder that Jen is a gifted workshop facilitator in San Francisco who has helped many people create communal change through individual transformation. She credits Goddard with helping her articulate a theoretical framework for these workshops as well as Amherst Writers and Artists and Pat Schneider for giving her an ethical framework for non-clinical writing workshops.

Like many students, what Jen ended up studying wasn't what she initially planned. “When I began my studies, I had a deep desire not to focus my studies on sexual trauma survivor communities – I was still battling that internalized shame, of course, and a sense that real academics don't talk about their experiences of trauma. Where do these ideas come from that they get so lodged in us? However, midway through my second semester (it never takes long at Goddard), I finally allowed myself to hone in on the issues of sexual trauma, creative writing, and access to erotic language.” The essay she wrote on this topic become the first of many essays that composed her powerful thesis project that also included her poetry and prose.

“I am deeply grateful for having had the opportunity to dig into those difficult places of my history during my work at Goddard, and I am thankful, too, for the ways that the program encourages intimate and personal interaction with academia, ideas, theories, so-called certainties -- I got to experience that inevitable and beautiful tension upon realizing that I had to bring myself into all the work that I do. Disconnecting through some veneer of 'objectivity' just doesn't fly -- not at Goddard, and not in the real world of transformative/expressive arts and, you know, that other real world of true human connection and love.”

In addition to her writing workshop business, Jen has published in many journals and anthologies. See www.writingourselveswhole.org, and her blog for more information. See an audio piece by Jen at the Arts and Healing Network.

Place-Based Studies and Environmental Action: Ralph Lutts

Ralph Lutts, IMA faculty and coordinator of IMA's environmental studies concentration, always believed environmental action in rooted in our relationship to place. “I came to realize that when we speak of thinking globally but acting locally, the local is one's place, and the notion of a place embodies knowing local history, local environment, one's neighbors and experiences.” He also found that science alone isn't enough to understand place because science tends to apply generalizations to specific situations. “The science is important, but human values are very important, the nature of personal experience is very important, and in order to discuss environmental effects, you need to bring all these parts together....As I got into this, I realized this has been a consistent theme in my life.”

As someone who grew up with a passion for the earth and for writing poetry and eventually essays about place, Lutt's community activism, while teaching at Hampshire College, led him to help found a local nature center in Amherst, MA. From there, he moved to Milton, MA – near where he grew up in Quincy – to direct a nature center in a 7,000-acre open space park just north of Boston. Realizing that the center's museum featured exhibits that could describe the natural history of just about anywhere in Southern New England, he helped raise funds to revamp all the exhibits to interpret the park's natural and cultural history.

After a decade in Milton, Lutts moved to Virginia to direct the Outreach Divisions of the state museum of natural history. His efforts included traveling exhibits to community centers and shopping malls around the state. “We saw ourselves as not interpreting natural history in the abstract but interpreting the natural history of Virginia.” As a result, the exhibits, which previously only reached 25,000 people a year, now reached over one million. At the same time, he worked with the economically challenged community of Saltville, VA., where an ice age mammal was being excavated. He arranged for public tours of the excavation site, and on salt mining history in Saltville, which was the principal source of salt for the confederacy during the civil war. Everyone who went on such a tour was given a “I dig Saltville” button, which showed local merchants the effects of eco-tourism.

While working at the state museum, Lutts also happened upon a community located in the Blue Ridge called Meadows of Dan. “I fell in love with the place and decided my next career move would be not for the job but for the place.” He resigned from the museum in 1994, started looking for employment, and found Goddard. Eventually, he fell in love with a person too – his wife-to-be, Sue, a librarian and quilter who now runs a bookstore in the heart of Meadows of Dan. They built a house on 39 acres of wooded landed just three miles from the Blue Ridge Parkway.

No surprise then that at Goddard, Lutts brought a place-based approach to environmental studies, an approach gaining cultural currency and of great interest to IMA students such as Sebastian Marino, the hereditary chief of a small island state in the within the West Pacific country of Palau. Marino came to Goddard to learn how to integrate indigenous conservation strategies into plans to protect the large coral reef near his island, which is also the largest protected natural area in Palau.. “If you live on a two-square-mile island for centuries, if not thousands of years, you know how to conserve the resource,” Lutts explains. The place-based approach is also effective for those on the move. Kate Mendenhall, another environmental studies alumni, wanted to understand organic agriculture on an international level, so she visited organic farms around the world, volunteering and studying how each farm fit within the context of its local culture and economy.

In all this work, Lutts advocates for the importance of personal experience that connects the person to the place, and the place to its history, culture, politics and, most of it, its most sustainable future.

Ralph Lutts, top photo, and Sebastian Marino, fifth photo down; all other photos by Ralph, from top, Lover's Leap view in the Blue Ridge, autumn in the Blue Ridge, pink azeleas, small yellow lady's slipper. To see the extensive extensive environmental studies resource page, visit George.

Bohemians at Goddard!

I suppose that there have been bohemians at Goddard for decades - but these are Bohemian Waxwings. As I was walking to my office the other day I saw this large flock of birds high in a tree making a noise that sounded to me like purring. Gina Gifun, HAS student, refined that aptly to a sound like "pigeons purring." I saw them swoop down to eat the small crab apples and then fly back up high in the tree. After getting a closer look I thought they were Cedar Waxwings, and didn't have my binoculars with me. I emailed my wife who told me to look for Bohemian Waxwings mixed in. I did some research as to distinguishing features and hoped I could see them again.

So this morning I rushed out early from the dorm to see if they were still there. I was so excited to see them that I slipped on the ice and fell quite soundly on my backside. But I did manage to get some pictures and confirm the reassuring news that we continue have Bohemians at Goddard.

Happy Go Lucky

I thought this was a wonderful film about looking at the world and the impact of perspective as a filter or point of view. Suggesting that perspective is a way of constructing the world.