Quote of the Day…

…Goes well with convos about Scholarship and Blogging as action research.

Measured objectively, what a man can wrest from Truth by passionate striving is utterly infinitesimal. But the striving frees us from the bonds of the self and makes us comrades of those who are the best and the greatest.

                                                                 ~Albert Einstein

Just the Pics Ma’am, Just the Pics!

                         

  Nekked Troll                             KJ as Tree Topper

                

Austin City Limits                       BYU Student Visit

            

Meet Bernajean Porter              Sitting on Kayi Laa 

Rambling Down the Road Not Taken…

It has been a very long time since I posted -I am painfully aware, and every time I acknowledge the fact, I feel more guilty than the time before. I wonder why that is so? I have come to the conclusion that I am better at replying to other people than sharing on my own, which is really in opposition to my real life M.O. What does that say about me?

I’m not sure, except that I always think that I don’t have anything novel worth sharing. Why read my blog when KJ and Vic and countless others have such a commanding handle on the blogosphere? Perhaps it is because I am so reflective by nature (obsessively so), that by the time I have intellectually and emotionally digested whatever situation I would write about, that I am done with it. And those things that hang on the back of my consciousness, may be better left un-written.

The last six months have been very hard, and very exhilarating. I have learned much about myself, and about others -some of which I would like to give back, but alas, time  marches inexorably forward. Does this mean that I have changed, or will change? Intrinsically -no, but my words and actions have become more circumspect. A fact that may make my life easier, but on some level, I despair for the loss of complete openness of mind and heart that has always been who I am. I have lost a friend and maybe a half of two others, but it is what it is, whether I understand or not, and however I feel about the matter.

Song lyrics seem to roll around in my head sometimes -not the same as when you hear a few notes  and then the tune is *stuck* in your head, but more in relation to what I’m thinking or feeling. Just now a lyric from an Anna Nalick song popped in:

“If I get it all down on paper, it’s no longer inside of me,
Threatening the life it belongs to”

I’ve considered writing poetry again, but that is a path that I do not wish to walk down right now. My aura is bright red and extends  a great distance, I am a very *old soul*-or so I am told, and who cares after all? It all reminds me of a quote from Shakespeare:

“It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”

A bunch of maudlin BS is more like it!! Ironically that was the first Shakespeare monologue I ever memorized -at the University of London in the summer of 1977 -two months before I was to enter USC as a drama major.

This blog was born 10 months ago, and I have made 16 posts -better than one per month, but hardly worth calling blogging in my book. Victoria has commented many times about the lack of validity of most blogs as not worthy of being considered scholarship, (see Long Time in Many Ways…) and frankly I agree with that.

However, what is that the real function of blogging? At EduBloggerCon West the day before the CUE conference, Sylvia Martinez said something that was most profound, “I see blogging as action research by teachers.” Whoa! What a novel thought! But then she is correct as well. The people, like me who reflect (ad nauseum) in their writing or speaking with “I think, “I feel”, and “I believe” should not be invalidated because we’ve based our understanding on what we’ve experienced, but rather, it takes people like us to “think,” “feel,” and “believe” in order for true scholarship to proceed. Nothing great was ever learned or invented without someone first being curious, reflecting, and acting upon their own questions.

So what is this all leading to? Well, while many bloggers write as reporters of events in which they’ve been involved from a relatively objective point of view, I reflect and report from my gut; I am in fact, getting better at listening to the Universe (eg. my gut). So my writing is colored by my thoughts and emotions -in much the same way that all of written history is biased, because no matter how objective a person tries to be, or how much scholarship their work is based upon, they are still subject to the human condition -as messy as it is sometimes. For some of us it is messier than others.  Thus my wild ramblings today. :-/

All of this leads to my decision to post all of the things I have started to write and then abandoned for lack of time, or for other reasons not remembered -or deliberately forgotten. They will be posted in the order in which they were conceived so as to not confuse anymore than I have already done above!