Weekly Wide-Awake: Object Permanence

[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: Object Permanence

Oh, how we entertain the angels/ with our brief animation.
Nicole Sealey

I am interested in the relationship between impermanence and permanence, birth and death, light and dark, truth and fiction, happiness and sadness, brevity and length. Where do we find angels and how do we make them laugh and cry? In the midst of it all, it seems like love is the point of our brief animation. If life is our brief animation and love is the point — and object permanence, which is the understanding that something exists, whether or not we can touch, taste, see, or feel, it — how do we build in our hearts and minds the experience of love so deeply that it transcends it all? Holding it fiercely and gently and closely and permanently while we live.

I call it permanent love. Permanent love is honest, reciprocal, abiding, sacred, and deep. It is occasionally joyous and always present. It pays attention. It breathes. It grows toward the sun. That is how it survives. It is not concerned with judging and keeping score and scorched earth — those are not permanent. Permanent love is not for the faint of heart. Demands within permanent love soften into boundaries. Expectations within permanent sound like clarity. Edges within permanent love look like kindness. Failure within permanent love is concerned with forgiveness and healing and trust. We know permanent love when we feel it. We know permanent love when we share it.

Weekly Wide-Awake: Object Permanence

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