Suscipe

Take Lord, and receive all my liberty, my memory, my understanding, and my entire will, all that I have and possess. 

You have given all to me. To you, O lord, I return it. All is yours, dispose of it wholly according to your will. 

Give me only your love and your grace, this is enough for me.

--St. Ignatius of Loyola

I completed the Spiritual Exercises two years ago and one of the prayers I learned is the Suscipe prayer. However, I had a difficult time praying it authentically if I took the words seriously. Give up my memory, my intelligence, my gifts, my talents, my will? Hard thing to do, especially for a willful child.

At a moment when I was when I was tired, spent and at the end, that I realized that the prayer was written for just such moments of depletion that I recognized its impact.

Happy feast day, St. Ignatius of Loyola.

****

SF murals

@ Universal Cafe

visit to SF

Ade on Stawberry Hill

with my dad.

Abraham, Dad & Adam on Stow Lake

Armida & Armando

cool pose

In the kiva at the deYoung.

on cell phones

With some disdain, I have often seen youths texting while walking, adults scrolling their smart phones while wait on a bus and infants in restaurants be given an ipad to entertain themselves. Seems the whole world wants to be “on” and connected.

As I arrived on my last day of work as site manager for three Early Education Sites I noticed I had left my cell phone at home. This wouldn’t do as I was dependent on my cell in case of emergency at any of the sites. I went home to get it and recognized my dependence on this small device.

PLI closure

After 14 months of intense learning, bonding, changing and hoop-jumping our Principal Leadership Institute Cohort 12 comes to a close. I am still revising my LARP (thesis) but the end of the program is here. I am so grateful to the learning, the intensity and friendships I gained. I am a changed person. While I was not offered any of the administrative positions I applied and interviewed for, we shall see what the future holds.

I don’t know what the previous cohorts have been like. But this has been an amazing cohort. We are a transitional cohort: Lynda’s last cohort and Rebecca’s first. We got to know each other and bonded in the summer, worked exceedingly hard in the fall, LARPed (thesis writing) full time in the spring (and summer) and completed our internship this summer and LARPed some more. But we had D3 (our social committee) to remind us to have fun, and as we become effective social justice leaders we recall Emma Goldman’s admonition, “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be a part of your revolution.”

We leave with the criteria of what a good school is, cognizance of the gods we serve and the gods we choose to serve, of the importance of identity, race, gender, sexual orientation, and religion in our role as leaders, how to have courageous conversations, recognize data as our friend, build our educational expertise, do research, prepare and cultivate our communities for change, and hold our schools together for the purposes greater than ourselves. For ultimately we carry on the legacy of our educator forebears for this present generation, that they too, when it is their time, will be women and men of courage, vision, and social justice.

A priest once told me, “if you want to be happy, be grateful.” So let me live in the house of gratitude in acknowledging the gift of what the PLI Cohort 12 has been. We have been a blessing to each other, our collaboration & our initiatives, our conversations and conflicts, our affect and our accomplishments, our venting and validations. You have my admiration, gratitude and love. 

A big thank you goes out to Rebecca, who helped us to see that data can be our friend. If I recall sometime in the Spring she had us graph our stress and it put the our lives in perspective.

She has been with us from the beginning and was a constant reminder not to give up hope. “Si se puede.” Thank you Rebecca, I hope you see our gratitude to you in the teachers we support when things get dark and desperate, “Si se puede.”

At our introductory session we were given a Rumi poem to ponder. So let me end with Rumi.

“The way of love is not 
a subtle argument. 



The door there
is devastation. 



Birds make great sky-circles 
of their freedom. 


How do they learn it? 



They fall, and falling, 
they're given wings.”

So let us fall in order to be given the wings we need.

© 2012 Hector Viveros Lee

Violeta's niece and Nelson

 I appreciate my family coming out to see me.

Two Kinds of Intelligence

We began our PLI experience with a Rumi poem at the PLI information session.

There are two kinds of intelligence: one acquired,


as a child in school memorizes facts and concepts


from books and from what the teacher says,


collecting information from the traditional sciences


as well as from the new sciences.




With such intelligence you rise in the world.


You get ranked ahead or behind others


in regard to your competence in retaining
information.

You stroll with this intelligence


in and out of fields of knowledge,

getting always more
marks on your preserving tablets.




There is another kind of tablet,

one
already completed and preserved inside you.


A spring overflowing its springbox.

A freshness
in the center of the chest.

This other intelligence
does not turn yellow or stagnate.

It's fluid,
and it doesn't move from outside to inside
through conduits of plumbing-learning.




This second knowing is a fountainhead


from within you, moving out.

--Rumi

Devastation

The way of love is not 
a subtle argument. 



The door there
is devastation. 



Birds make great sky-circles 
of their freedom. 


How do they learn it? 



They fall, and falling,
they're given wings.

--Rumi 

embrace

Happy Bday, Ade!

Acting Principal

My first week as the Site Manager of the Early Education Classes at three sites in San Francisco of largely holding down the fort, largely meeting people and ensuring paperwork. The best part was to engage with the 3- to 4- year old students, who are so cute. The teachers and paraprofessionals are quite dedicated to their charges. In the afternoon, the children take naps and I do paper work-like making sure the licensing forms are up to date.

I did have a false fire alarm on my first day at SF Montessori, where I pretended to be in charge as I followed the clerk around to the fire department and to the construction crew. I realized how important it is to know your people and resources on site and off.

My first week, I had to deal with a little drama between the head custodian, and my staff, who kept walking through the courtyard. She had been trying to set up signs and DO NOT CROSS tape in the courtyard so she could clean it. And it came to a head that she raised her voice to the staff. I too had walked down the stairs through the courtyard. She was upset and I tried to calm her down and asked her what I could do to help her. I asked that she let me know what the access for the EED and school age class would be and we would set that up. I set it up and she seemed grateful. The EED staff gave me an earful. “What we have here is a failure to communicate.” Much of my job is addressing this very issue.

explore

Happy
Birthday
Pio!