Kaleidoscope

"I feel a need to pull back from the tools, and gravitate more toward meaning when I write." -Clay Burell, Web Legacies Wrap-Up, 9 Aug 2008


I began my blog in June, 2007, intending it to serve primarily as an online professional journal. Since that tentative and hopeful beginning, I've evolved, and so has Journeys.

While educational issues, like filtering, student blogging, and cyber safety still occupy my thoughts, my writing now is more likely to reflect the life I've lived and the person I'm becoming.

Technology is no longer an add-on. Social networking and other connective tools have helped to forge ties that defy categories: in many cases, my virtual colleagues have become true friends. Tools are...tools. Not the focus but the facilitators.

Both my husband and I are moving towards retirement. All the polished pieces and jagged shards of our experiences are shifting into new patterns, presenting us with choices that we never could have anticipated even a few years ago.

The world is changing, we are changing. The past will continue to influence but not dictate our futures. Hippies and cowboys, poetry and paintings, family and friends will all contribute to our kaleidoscope's colorful compositions.

Both are Transformed

"The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances. If there is any reaction, both are transformed." -Carl Jung


I meant to write a well-reasoned, yet passionate counterpoint to Graham Wegner's posting about the "point" of online social interaction.

By citing "leading experts" on cyberspace, and quoting scholarly studies, I had planned to explain my intensely emotional response to meeting some of my virtual friends face to face in San Antonio.

But I'm tired, my summer schedule has been at least as hectic as my school schedule. So I'll settle for a personal response.

My online connections are invaluable for extending my professional knowledge. I'm able to access a rich assortment of resources; there is help available if I run into difficulties; sympathy and encouragement are only a keyboard away.

I want more.

I want to see and hear and interact with a person, in real time, in physical proximity. I want to observe expressions and body language, to share a hug and a joke. I want to follow a conversational thread where ever it might lead, and make startling discoveries or not.

I want to made the virtual "real".

My online, real time friend, Terry Shay, blogged about Friends today. His wife remarked that he really didn't know me, but she's wrong. We know each other very well because of conversations and interactions in cyber space.

I have close friends now who are scattered around the globe. I firmly believe that one day I will meet many of them face to face. That doesn't negate the value of online collaboration and social networking. It enhances it immeasurably.



"There is an electricity about a friendship relationship. We are both more relaxed and more sensitive, more creative and more reflective, more energetic and more casual, more excited and more serene. It is as though when we come in contact with our friend we enter into a different environment.” –Andrew M. Greeley


"Net Surfers don’t ride alone." -Smith and Kollock, Communities in Cyberspace



"spark" by Burning Image

Age of Aquarius

“When the moon is in the Seventh House and Jupiter aligns with Mars, then Peace will guide the planets and love will steer the stars

This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius”

-Fifth Dimension, Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In

A young friend of mine asked what it was like to be a "hippie" in the '60s. This is my answer.

Like most middle class children of my era, I lived a pleasant, well-regulated life. The shadow hanging over us was the specter of the "Evil Empire", Soviet Russia. The Cold War was in full swing, the Iron Curtain firmly drawn. We practiced duck and cover drills in school and shuddered at photos of mushroom clouds. The UK's Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament combined the semaphore signals for N and D to produce the icon later adopted as the universal Peace Symbol.




A defining moment for my generation was the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the young, charismatic president who carried the dreams of a nation on his shoulders. After his tragic death, the world turned colder and darker. Demons had been let loose.


The Vietnam War began to escalate as many of us entered college. I listened to protest songs and marched in demonstrations in New York City and Washington, D.C. There were still good times to be had: open air concerts in Central Park, weekends exploring Greenwich Village, an unforgettable summer at Oxford University with trips to London (Carnaby Street), Paris, Cologne, Amsterdam. Beatles songs became progressively more complex mirroring the growing counter-culture mindset of college students with time to discuss issues and act on convictions. We rejected, or thought we did, our parents' values. They didn't like or understand our long hair and activism.

My present-day students use the word "hippie" in a mocking or derogatory sense. One elementary-aged child told me that hippies live on the street, have funny clothes, and don't like technology. The high schoolers think being a hippie was all about drugs. When I tell them that I never chose to participate in the drug scene they don't believe me, but it's the truth. I was high on the experience, the music, the sense of being part of a youth movement unlike any seen before.

The war dragged on and a lottery was instituted. Young men I knew chose to resist the draft by emigrating to Canada or fleeing for parts unknown. My husband, a young sailor at the time I was a peace marcher, tells me that servicemen felt unwelcome or invisible on returning home. I was anti-war, not anti-soldier, I reply. We both agree that we would not want to see our son drafted or serving in the armed forces.

Our wedding was as non-traditional as we could make it without offending our families. My hair flowed past my waist as I walked down the aisle. The music we selected included "In My Life" and "Morning Has Broken".

With the arrival of two children, my life settled into a more conventional pattern. But my attitude and world view are still firmly based on what I experienced as I matured in the late '50s and '60s.

I still consider myself a member of the Woodstock generation.

"And I feel to be a cog in something turning
Well maybe it is just the time of year
Or maybe its the time of man
I don't know who l am
But you know life is for learning" -Joni Mitchell, Woodstock

"Keep true to the dreams of your youth." - Johann Friedrich von Schiller

"Blah-age" by Zeusandhera
"The Companion Plan for Survival at Home" by Uh...Bob
"JFK Motorcade" by Tom Dillard

"Once Upon a Time" by dmcordell 

Stars were with me most of all

“But stars were with me most of all. I heard them flame and break and fall.” -Fannie Stearns Davis

The quotes came first this time. They seemed melancholy to me, whispering of change, illusion, loss.

My life has been all about change this year, as I rush headlong into a series of new adventures: feverishly reinventing myself professionally, moving towards retirement from my current career, coping with the very real challenges of growing older in a world so different from the one into which I was born.

When I was a child there appeared to be more permanence in the world. The difference between good and evil was clear. If one followed some basic rules, life was safe and stable. People worked hard and progressed towards a comfortable old age.

Was all of that perceived permanence and safety illusory? Or are there still constants, a few remaining rock-bottom certainties in which to believe?

I am blessed in my family and friends. The choices that life offers seem diverse and exilherating. And yet I feel the tears behind the laughter as the year draws to a close and the cosmos reels in its crazy dance.

"The countless stars, which to our human eye
Are fixed and steadfast, each in proper place,
Forever bound to changeless points in space,
Rush with our sun and planets through the sky,
And like a flock of birds still onward fly;
Returning never whence began their race,
They speed their ceaseless way with gleaming face
As though God bade them win Infinity..."
-John Lancaster Spalding, The Starry Host

"Neutron Star 2004 by NASA (NASA)" by pingnews.com

Marble and Mud

"Life is made up of marble and mud." -Nathaniel Hawthorne

Jeremy came back to visit today. After graduating last year, he enlisted in the Navy. He has completed his training and will report for duty at Pearl Harbor on December 14.


Joelle gave me a poster today advertising her dance studio's holiday presentation of The Nutcracker. My daughter and I will enjoy the magic of music and dance as we celebrate the holiday season.

Two unique personalities, two students whose lives have intersected mine.

"Every experience in life, everything with which we have come in contact in life, is a chisel which has been cutting away at our life statue, molding, modifying, shaping it. We are part of all we have met. Everything we have seen, heard, felt or thought has had its hand in molding us, shaping us." -Orison Swett Marden

Happy Howliday!

“By the pricking of my thumbs, Something wicked this way comes.” -William Shakespeare, Macbeth
Enjoy some images of Halloween in the north country, as students and staff get into the Spirit of things...







...and pumpkins meet their inevitable fate

“From ghosties and ghoulies, And long-leggety beasties, And things that go bump in the night, Good Lord deliver us.”
-Old Scottish Prayer

A Perfect Storm

"The phrase perfect storm refers to the simultaneous occurrence of events which, taken individually, would be far less powerful than the result of their chance combination. Such occurrences are rare by their very nature, so that even a slight change in any one event contributing to the perfect storm would lessen its overall impact." -Wikipedia

1. School begins
2. Only daughter gets married
3. Housework remains least favorite task

This weekend is for catch-up in the personal sector. Educational postings on hold for a day or so. Visits to lifehack and zen habits may be in order so that I can "Ride in the whirlwind and direct the storm." -Joseph Addison