Weekly Wide-Awake: How To Winter

[The Stage is on Fire] is a page-turner in which, much like life, there are no easy answers and yet each step of the journey yields insight and hope. This work of heart must not be missed!

Melanie Faith

Creative Writing Teacher, Essayist & Poet.

Katie Steedly’s first-person piece [The Unspeakable Gift] is a riveting retelling of her participation in a National Institutes of Health study that aided her quest to come to grips with her life of living with a rare genetic disorder. Her writing is superb.

The Society of Professional Journalists

In recognition of receiving the Dateline Award for the Washingtonian Magazine essay, The Unspeakable Gift.

I thank you … It is the authenticity of your “class notes”; and it is the delicacy and skill with which you present the nuances of classroom life and the actuality of your students’ and fellow teachers’ lives.

Maxine Greene

Philosopher and Education Scholar

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Weekly Wide-Awake: How To Winter

Some winters happen in the sun.
Katherine May

I have thought about the concept of wintering since listening to the On Being podcast “How Wintering Replenishes,” a conversation with Katherine May years ago. Wintering — a verb, in this case, denotes a necessary time of reflection, stock taking, and rest — is a time to be experienced and lived and breathed into. May suggests that we are living through a time of global wintering, where isolation, grief, and stillness are part of the very air we breathe. She also points to the natural flow of life and suggest we are all — people, bees, mice, bears, etc. — in a perpetual dance with winter. Winter carries a natural weight. That makes sense to me when I think back over the last few years, in particular, but also to a bigger moment that started many years ago characterized in my own experience of perennial goal setting, perpetual movement, noisy thoughts, and a center tethered to shiny objects of random stuff of which I am constantly seeking more.

Weekly Wide-Awake: How to Winter

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