RETREATS AND PROGRAMS FOR REFLECTION AND RENEWAL: 

CIRCLES OF TRUST(R),

COURAGE TO TEACH(R),

COURAGE TO LEAD(R)

See Retreats/Programs for details

Wintering Into Wisdom 

An excerpt from Wintering into Wisdom:The Dance of a Lifetime: 

The Transaction of Individual and Community and Work

By Sally Z. Hare, Ph. D.

Not until we winter into wisdom can we see the dance we have been dancing all our lives, the transaction of Individual and Community and Work.   We see what we know.  And some things have to be believed to be seen…Life is a dance, not a linear uphill battle. It begins as a dance between our role as individual and our role as community member. It’s a dance between light and shadow; a dance between simplicity and complexity; a dance between abundance and scarcity. This dance is about embracing paradox, about being in life in a way that is not either /or, but both/and. It's a lifelong dance between who we are and whose we are and what we are here to do; a lifelong dance co-creating our Work in the world, developing our birthright gifts so we can use them in service of the community.  Through the process of this lifelong dance, we are constantly constructing and co-constructing the Individual and  Community and Work.   I have spent most of my professional life in education looking at communities in classrooms and in schools, in work places and on college campuses, deepening my understanding that we humans are communal creatures – and that learning for us is a social action and interaction.  Only as I winter into wisdom do I also recognize that we spend our lives in a dance co-creating who we are  and whose we are and our Work in the world, what we are called to do. 

Wintering into Wisdom: A Transactional Theory of Community

Community seems to be the solution for everything wrong in our world today.  The breakdown of community is cited as the cause for everything from children murdering each other in schools to racism and ethnocentrism to drug overdoses to the high rates of suicide.  The disappearance of community gets the blame for why we are destroying the planet – and it is Brian Swimme’s solution for what he calls the “crisis of mass extinction” (Bridle, 2001).

Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone (2000) has become a national bestseller, as we search for ways to understand social change in the United States and the growing sense of disconnectedness and isolation that led to the Columbine shootings and the Oklahoma City bombing. Putnam’s detailed graphs and tables point to his belief that we are looking for ways to create or re-create social capital as the antidote for the so-called loss of community. I say “so-called” because I don’t believe we lose community any more than I believe we can create it. Humans can’t exist without community. If we’ve lost anything, it’s our own hearts – and our own capacity to know what’s all around us, to hear our own inner selves, our spirits. We’ve lost our ability to know community, to recognize the dance.

Community begins at home.  Our parents are our first dance teachers.  Relationship and communication skills, so essential to community, start, for better and for worse, in the home.  Community development has to begin within the individual, as each person reclaims his or her identity and integrity and remembers what it means to know community.  And we learn those first dance steps, the basis for community development, at home.   T. S. Eliot’s words offer insight into why we can’t see this dance that we have been dancing all our lives until we are able to

winter into wisdom:“We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time."Some things have to be believed to be seen. We see what we know.  Yes, it takes the grace of wintering into wisdom to see the dance of a lifetime, the transaction of Individual and Community and Work.  

OTHER PUBLISHED WORKS BY SALLY AND JIM WITH A FEW MORE IN THE HARD DRIVE

"It is good to see the State Department of Education looking in this direction! (The Courage to Teach direction) That could do more to stop the hemorrhaging of teachers out of the profession than about anything else they could invest in.
You would be interested to know that our District’s Asst Supt for Instruction, gave a copy of a book of poetry to our principals and me a couple of weeks ago called “Teaching with Fire: Poetry that Sustains the Courage to Teach.” I started looking through it this weekend and was extremely pleased to find poems by Marge Piercy, Rilke, Mary Oliver, and even Rumi included. I planned an email to you. Then I found where you had submitted one and written the introduction of it, then I found Debbie Dewitt, Angela Peery, and Parker Palmer. Thought I was having a Courage Reunion!

District Superintendent and early Courage to Teach participant.

Sally has written a children's book, as well as a number of articles and essays. She often speaks to groups, in addition to facilitating workshops and retreats.

Jim contributed a chapter on Parents as Partners in education, a textbook for teachers in training. 

His ABC's of parenting was published in Tom Carr's The Blueprint for Parents and is available from ParentsCare page.

 More from Sally published in