Moving Day
Last Saturday we moved on. We moved from our home in Herbster. The place is rented and we have less reason to go back than we had last week, last month and last year — for over twenty years. Thomas Wolfe said, “you can never go home again.” Perhaps Saturday marked the time when we will never return to Herbster in quite the same way. Our home is now in Minneapolis.
Home is about the systems that support life. That is ecology. A house is a shelter and one of the essentials for life support. Homeless people need to seek shelter in order to enter a state of unconsciousness or sleep on a daily basis. We saw homelessness in Herbster but now see evidence of the homeless nearly every day. The price of poverty is way too high!
We are, thanks to a lifetime of work in socially acceptable occupations, not homeless. In fact we have an apartment home that costs a lot of money and those rents will undoubtedly increase. We are located in Minneapolis in the near downtown area and are thrilled with the amenities both in our home and in our new but still very familiar city.
As we continue to grow individually and together we will make and take the rich resources of the Twin Cities for a new physical, intellectual, emotional and spiritual ride. Walking, biking and particularly the fabulous public transportation system — not an automobile — will physically become a healthy alternative for meeting a necessity of life. Transportation and the Internet will open doors to new relationships with people and institutions never all that easily accessible in Herbster.
Now with the move, and a pending sale of the Herbster house, there is going to be more time to reflect on what has passed and what great ideas will be taking us forward. My personal hope is that there will be new opportunities to share ideas with others. I understand that sharing will be greatly advantaged with the use of social media. So far my uses of social media have been limited to FaceBook and LinkedIn. In each my contacts number about 500 with some conspicuous overlap. In addition I still have a rich contact list from the days of writing the weekly blog TGIF.
A new school year is just around the corner. Our grandkids, Hunter, Sawyer, Wyatt, Kiera & Riley, will all be returning to school this week and next. My son Brent and his wife, Erin, have already returned to their school in Las Vegas and are preparing to see their students again; getting their “Kid Fix” as Brent would put it. They were in Minneapolis recently and we had a great time attending the wedding of my nephew Stuart and Maureen “Mo” . Stuart, with graduate school recently behind him, and Mo are traveling in Europe.
Life is a trip. I hope my travels will bring me to many new places in many of these United States. Along the way I will carry forward new and, I believe, important ideas about education. My writing has never ceased from the weeks of over ten years of preparing and sending the essays of TGIF — Taking Great Ideas Forward. My new blog will eventually get a new name, but in the meantime I will continue using TGIF as well as the Up North Clipboard to keep in touch with all of my friends, and contacts.
The topics I touch on when writing are part of what I am increasingly seeing as a passion for educational reforms that embrace a more systems-based way of seeing education in a framework of ecology and economics. In that sense I will echo the late Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin who founded Earth Day and famously said that Economics is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Environment. This means that we must develop economically while finding new ways to support the wholeness of our environment. Natural Capital is the richest resource for living and sustaining our home on Earth. Our planetary imperative is to impress our billions of people with new approaches to education that can take our human species back from the brink of a World AT Risk.
While I will continue writing essays and sending out blogs on a daily or near daily basis, my hope is that you will help me meet new people and visit new places. I will carry messages of hope for New World Learning that embraces an ecological view — that is to say, a systems view — of education. I passionately believe that learning is not confined to schools and that our access to rich resources throughout a lifetime will enable humanity to construct a new consciousness that will better serve a World At Risk from poverty, inequality and exploitive pollution of soil, air and water as well as extractive exploitation from earth’s crust.
After all is said and done, I hope to have done more than just talk about educational reforms. Communities of geography and communities of interest are inclusive if not integrated. Our futures are bound to integral messages that propel action-learning through strategic doing. My hope is to promote dialogue that is a way of knowing through building new relationships. Education Ecology is all about building relationships. I am moving on and looking forward to constructing and connecting rich new relationships. Let’s Keep In Touch!
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