The second day of the LEAP Summit felt better than the first. Today I felt like I actually got the opportunity to meet people, and it is easy to appreciate their stories and their lives.
After the opening session, I made a fortuitous mistake and ended up in the wrong LEAP Unpacked session -- the one full of parents, students, LEAPSAs, and new teachers to LEAP. I immediately began connecting with students, albeit feeling a little odd since I figured I was in the wrong place.
Turns out I was in the right place, but the wrong time.
I wrote down so many things that John Gilmour talked about, as he and a LEAP student led the session. He talked about fear in education, and the need for students to claim their space. It made me wonder about my own students. What spaces did they need to claim?
In the afternoon, they offered the LEAP Unpacked session again, and this time I realized my error. I ended up crashing an interesting session, another place I was not supposed to be. The session was entitled, "Consciousness and Personal Voice Development" and we began by centering ourselves, placing our feet on the ground, and breathing together with our eyes closed.
Immediately, I began to cry.
As soon as I slowed down, I felt the deep sadness that I have carried. That I fear to talk about. It is uncomfortable to share my grief with people here. How could they understand?
But in this session, we talked so much about how people may not able to understand a circumstance, but they can understand a feeling. We talked of many things, each issue reflecting our situations in the world, white, black, colored, single, married, parent, teacher. I felt so grateful to accidentally be here, where I could share my feelings, and where that not only encouraged, but demanded.
After the day's activities, we all loaded up into buses and went into Langa, one of the townships that LEAP primarily serves. It was beautiful, and tragic, and beautiful, and full of life and the stuff of living. I met a couple teachers from LEAP 3, where I will be stationed, and I felt excited to know them, to meet them, to feel like this actually might work.
It actually might work with all of me. The broken and the strong parts together.
This has been my prayer for you--or at least one of them-- that you will have times to grieve. It's easy to set aside difficult feelings, especially when you are the only one.
ReplyDeleteOn another note, I really like the repetition in this sentence:
It was beautiful, and tragic, and beautiful, and full of life and the stuff of living.
So poetic. It speaks to multiple kinds of beauty, emphasizes the power of the beauty over not only the tragedies of life, but also its tendency to become mundane.
I love you.