About

In lieu of including all of my responses to the Proust questionnaire, I’ll limit myself to the following:

I learn. Before I am anything else, I am a student. Of everything. I learn from people and books and the way poppies open only for the sun. I learn from cairns, chrysalises, dreams, disasters, sorrow, exuberance, and the God of my (mis)understanding. I can’t not learn. Learning has taken me around the world and earned me many degrees, some of them from Very Prestigious Universities, but I still consider my willingness to be like Rumi and gamble everything for love as my greatest credential.

I teach. There’s almost nowhere I feel more alive than when working with students, whether it be in a classroom, a wilderness program, a gym, a hospital wing, a prison rec room, a mountaintop, or wherever two or more are gathered in The Name. I am especially devoted to Waldorf education.

I write. How precious is it that I get to turn phrases that give shape to what I most believe: that each living thing is a school unto itself; that our existence is a factual miracle; that our lives are our most important sermons; that the right words in the right order can nudge the world a little (that’s Tom Stoppard though, not me).

I etc. Let’s do something beautiful together that would make this category proud, and can it please involve trail running?

“Pay attention. Attention is the only
debt you owe the natural world. Pay
attention.

It is the only debt that is dangerous
to ignore.”

—Lee Maracle, “Where Love Winds Itself Around Desire”

Insistent Salmon,

Your body and its miracles
are not about us. We drag
you with our senseless questions
into a scheme to undo wonder.
When our debt sits unattended
as a doorstop, meet us
in our fires and our dreams.
Implicate us in our own disaster
so we might find ourselves
where we actually are
and begin.

آمين

The name of this website is inspired by this collect, written by Iman Hassen.
To learn more about how to write your own collect, visit this post by Andrew May!