I have been thinking about Martha’s notion of cover story. As someone who fired her first doctoral committee when they objected to my wide-awakeness research, (“Wouldn’t you be better served writing about standardized testing? That is what people want to know about. You would surely get an academic job writing about testing.”), the idea of needing a cover story rang true. Luckily, in retrospect, my chair believed in wide-awakeness, too, and let me reconstitute my committee with philosophers and artists and policy makers that supported my work. In school, my day jobs were all left brain heavy and work was wide-awakeness. After school, I developed my skills as an applied researcher, engaging my left-brain skills with right brain passion. Always, and in many different ways, I was researching wide-awakeness, navigating my left and right brain, trying to live wide-awake. Sometimes it was called literacy. Sometimes it was called public health. Sometimes it was called after school programming. Sometimes it was called arts education. Even knowing philosophical heavyweights like Greene, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, and Schutz discussed wide-awakeness, I did not give myself permission to full-throatedly talk about it. Perhaps I was afraid I/it would be too much.

For more than 20 years I have used a cover story to describe my wide-awakeness journey. I have swum methodologically, philosophically, pedagogically, and critically through the waters. I have flirted with related ideas — like flow and aesthetic experience and powerful encounters with the arts — of which there are many. I have spoken in purely analytical terms to describe something so much bigger than our modern understanding.

So, my cover story has been blown. In the wild new world, I can stand on the shoulders of those who have come before and had the audacity to speak directly about magic, to understand the alchemy of creativity, to believe whole heartedly in our capacity to imagine and realize. I can create space for wide-awakeness. I can call it by many names but always stay true to the fundamental idea that we are both in and of our experiences. I can pay attention to wide-awakeness and tell others about it.