We left from work on Friday afternoon, June 30th. It was the last day of school – my last day at Gleneagle after almost ten years – and the beginning of a new summer, a summer of transition. Transformation. It seemed only fitting to mark the onset of the season with an epic adventure with […]
Read more "Out of Dodge"Just back from a whirlwind six-day sojourn in New York City, I’ve been thinking about the thread that runs the breadth of the learning I have been fortunate to join in on the road. In the British Columbia backcountry, Cuban fine arts classrooms, backstage tours of Disneyland, weekends at local ski resorts, and now the Big Apple, I’ve shared a […]
Read more "Learning On the Road: NYC Edition"The performing arts are made of fleeting moments of genius. Whether on nights under the lights on the school stage, or transcendent travels among musicians from different places and cultures, I’ve been fortunate to spend time basking in the magic created by our school’s musicians for a few years now. As a newly minted […]
Read more "My Life as the Music Department Digital Archivist"Italy, Spain, Cuba – half the world is filled with the places that he appropriated simply by mentioning them. In Cojimar, a little village near Havana where the solitary fisherman of ”The Old Man and the Sea” lived, there is a plaque commemorating his heroic exploits, with a gilded bust of Hemingway. In Finca […]
Read more "With Hemingway"For a formative period in my youth, I was made of books and words. Half a continent from home at the end of my adolescence, I filled the blank slate of my life in Arkansas with the stories and poetry of the literary zeitgeist of people like Jack Kerouac, Jim Morrison or Douglas Coupland. Such […]
Read more "The Summer Book Project"“People who hear about the types of trips we take with young people invariably have two responses,” I told the class just over a week ago. “They either say, ‘You’re crazy,’ or ‘Wow! How lucky are you to have such a job?’” I understand each of these responses. Maybe we are a little crazy: we […]
Read more "On outdoor trips and trust"It’s over, already? This glorious stretch of time when everyone and everything “anyone ever knew” was being photographed, watched over, and sung to sleep by a Canadian hurtling around the planet a dozen times every day, has come to a close. But then, it seems a beginning, too. Alan Levine marks the occasion by wondering: […]
Read more "A few thoughts on the return of Chris Hadfield to Earth"I’m happy to report that the fruits of last summer’s Unplug’d 2012 event have emerged as a fabulous mosaic of letters, songs and stories written and published in Algonquin Park over a weekend in August. You can find my letter, written in the form of a song, on my page here, as well as video of […]
Read more "Unplug’d 2012: Letters from the Edge"Fall Retreat Photoset on Flickr A quick post this Monday morning to offer thanks and a massive shout-out to our TALONS friends at Sea to Sky Outdoor School, in Gibsons, British Columbia. We’re just back from our third annual fall retreat with Wings, Owl, Moondust, River, Chinook and Goose, an invigorating experiential study in leadership, […]
Read more "Hoitchka"Photo by @cogdog I arrived at Unpludg this year without a finished draft of my letter. Either out of procrastination or by an unconscious but deliberate choice, I made the journey east resolved to not panic about not having completed my draft and to try my best to remain open to the vibrations of the […]
Read more "Carrying Stones"