AmazonMidwife

So Abby over at Stretchy Pants tagged me with the following meme:

* Think about what you are passionate about teaching your students.
* Post a picture from a source like FlickrCC or Flickr Creative Commons or make/take your own that captures what YOU are most passionate about for kids to learn about…and give your picture a short title.
* Title your blog post “Meme: Passion Quilt” and link back to this blog entry.
* Include links to 5 folks in your professional learning network or whom you follow on Twitter/Pownce.

After some surly whining (can one be surly and whiny at the same time?) I came up with...Grace. Of course it's because it's something that I am trying to learn myself---"you teach best what you most need to learn," says Richard Bach, and it seems to hold true for me.

Heck, it's hard enough for me to define what I mean by 'grace'. It isn't so much the idea of being physically graceful, although I think that the more one's psyche is in touch with one's physique, the more one can attain grace. For me, it's those moments when I can be at one with myself, sink into myself so well that I am not conscious of my body but together with it and moving through whatever I am doing/thinking/being/saying.

That unconsciousness of self isn't just physical. It's the freedom from that part of one's consciousness---I might call it the superego, if I hadn't taken a spite to Freud---that whispers, "am I saying/doing the right thing? am I (a la Stuart Smalley) 'good enough, strong enough and do people like me?'" etc. All those whispers get in the way of our communications, our perceptions, our learning and experiencing of the world, of grace.

Some people might call it transcendence, or think that one can only reach it through communion with a deity, but that goes beyond what I'm trying to define. I've been pondering this off and on for some time and writing this blog entry has actually been helpful but I still cannot fully articulate it. This is what I've got for now: being endowed with grace allows one to move beyond oneself/sink into oneself enough to have the ability to reach out and help someone else move toward their own grace. Some might call it putting people at ease, but what I am envisioning has less movement/action and more...being.

There it is; I want to model ('cause I don't think one can teach) moments of grace. I think if my kids can recognize that state of being, that ease, they will learn to achieve it, and then anything they do, they will do with ease, and grace.

You may consider yourself tagged or not, whichever state of grace you want to choose.