| The landscape is some place in Northern
California, my homeland - but in reality, it could be anywhere...
The School is in the hills, where the sky is full of light.
Here are oak trees, and space for the deer. It is warm in summer,
dry and golden - and suddenly, with the fall and winter rains,
amazingly green. In springtime the blossoming orchards and fields
of yellow mustard shimmer with life.
The buildings of the School are full of light and warmth. They
are simple - white, like old adobe, standing among vegetable
and flower gardens, among fields and orchards. There is water
on the land, a stream going out toward the sea.
Some of us, those who live and work here with their families,
have small houses not too far off. Others, children and adults,
come every day from the nearby cities and communities. Children
come by the free shuttles that pick them up in the morning and
bring them home in the afternoon. They come early enough to taste
the morning as they walk up to the school from the main road,
on the field paths, looking for creatures and wild flowers and
odd plants.
Older students and teachers and parents and elders come as they
will - by shuttle or car, on bicycles or skateboards. Everyone
walks up the field paths to the school in the hills.
If you come at any time of day in good weather, you will always
see people outside - doing art or science, farming, exploring...
At night, there is the observatory.
And everywhere, you hear song and laughter. After that terrible
time at the end of the millennium, when the children almost forgot
how to play together, and the adults were too tormented to notice,
the coupled arts of play and
song are reviving, spinning out their endless new universes
of grace. Here children live the timeless poetry of the great
Humanist, Silo: "...superar el
dolor y el sufrimiento... aprender sin limite... amar la realidad
que construyes..."
"...to surpass pain and suffering... to learn without limits...
to love the reality you are building."
The School began almost imperceptibly, in the first days of
the new millennium when most people were still just waiting.
But one by one the doors kept opening, and we discovered that
we might begin to fulfill our Destiny here - before we even knew
where Here was.
Now, with the continuing unfoldment that keeps surprising and
now and again terrifying us, a visible image is shaping - a human
artwork whose nature is change and evolution.
The School is not a school in the old sense. It is an essential
community resource, an intercultural connecting point, a place
for decision and action,
and a retreat. Here people of all ages backgrounds, ethnicities,
lifestyles,
and beliefs - families, teachers and individuals from the surrounding
communities - come together to teach and learn from each other,
to share their stories, to co-create new possibilities.
The authoritarian model - where the pecking order is based on
age and title and enforced by fear - has shrivelled from neglect.
Authority accrues to
those who use their knowledge wisely, with kindness and with
strength.
The older and the younger teach each other - they just have
different things to teach. The old are honored - for the light
in their eyes, for their long
life, for their multitude of skills and wisdoms. And the young
are respected - for who they are, for their unexpected minds
and their startling grasp of
concepts never dreamed of, for their joyful daring, for their
extraordinary beauty, for their unfolding wings...
Even in these hills, even in this pervasive light, the great
shadows penetrate our lives. But we are learning to take joy
in the totality that we
are. We are learning the only way possible to overcome human
suffering: through the undying gift of oneself, over and over,
until the last moment, when the body becomes quiescent and the
spirit climbs to greater freedom.
from a forthcoming book, Where the Sky is Full of Light:The
New Schools for a Human Civilization
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