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A Pilgrimage into the Night and the Night Wind (abstract)
In “A Pilgrimage into the Night and the Night Wind” the author shares her passion for teaching and her intuitive desire to include nature as an important part of her curriculum. This desire is based upon a belief in the power of nature to create opportunities to bring students to new understandings of themselves and of the world we share with creatures, human and non- human, with plants and sea and stone and sky. Using three different examples from her lived experience as a teacher, the author provides documentation of the effect of nature on herself and her students. The examples span a lifetime of teaching and give evidence to the fact while teaching fads come and go, nature remains ever faithful in its power to teach what needs to be learned, to heal physical, mental and spiritual suffering and to create meaningful relationships among the people who experience her teachings together. One experience took place in Vancouver’s Stanley Park where the author and her colleagues held oral comprehensive exams for the students of an alternative EdD program. During the opening acknowledgement of the place they occupied as the unceded traditional territories of the Coast Salish peoples, the group came face to face with the impact of colonization and the importance of using the ways of indigenous peoples to understand indigenous ways of being and upholding de/colonizing commitments.
A Pilgrimage into the Night and the Night Wind
As a young high school teacher in a small prairie town, I unwittingly pushed the envelope and put a chill of fear in the heart of the ultra-conservative principal in the school where I began my long career as an educator.
It was my practice to take my students out for a walk on the riverbank running a few blocks north of our school, Riverside Collegiate. We would not do any planned activity, no writing of poems inspired by nature, no discovering one new thing about plants that live in water, etc. No, our mission was to be together in nature.
What possessed me to do this, the “walks” which would be repeated each day until we felt ready to go into class and “begin” the work that was expected in any grade nine or eleven English classroom, the work of books and reading and writing of essays, the answering of questions and completing assignments.
I had never read a theory about activities that were organized out of the regular classroom, was only twenty years old, with only one year of Teacher’s College to prepare me for this fabulous adventure we call teaching.
But something pulled me outside, something made me believe that nature would provide the environment that would allow 25 strangers to get to know one another and form relationships that would last at least the year and would permit us to take risks and learn things about life that were important.
Perhaps it was that my grandmother’s blood coursed through my veins. Born on a ship carrying her parents from Germany to America, she worked herself to the bone and an early grave pulling the roots of trees and huge boulders from the stubborn land the government offered for the taking. Land, not theirs to give, but given non-the-less.
My grandmother put hands and heart into that land, grew corn and beets and raised seven children, four goats, two cows and a black bear she had rescued when a hunter had killed its mother for the fun of it.
I remember so much of what she taught me, it floods me with memory though I was only three years old when her body left the earth she loved so much. That flooding was what had me bring my students to the banks of the Saskatchewan River.
I could not, back then, have articulated the importance of creating meaningful relationships, of working as a team, of feeling safe enough to take risks. That came later, after completing my degrees in Education. I was moving forward on instinct, on intuition, on my own experiences living in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, surrounded by vast prairies and deep forests, by wild moose, elk, and deer; by blue jays, black birds and eagles; by jackfish, pickerel and trout.
Kahn, Severson & Ruckert (2009) claim that our interest in and attraction to nature is a fundamental, genetically based human need and uses the term “biophilia” coined by E.O. Wilson in 1984 to discuss this need. If we lose this relationship, we lose part of who we are.
I trusted nature to teach us what we needed to know. I would have told you, I needed to be able to “hear the beating of their hearts” before I could begin the taunting task of teaching them literature and composition. Administrators just shook their heads and rolled their eyes. But it was a time before fear of litigation guided every action a teacher might attempt that was out of the norm. No one stopped me. And the success of my students spoke to the success of what was labelled my “organic” methods.
My twelve years teaching high school in that school were the best anyone could imagine as a way to begin a passion for one’s profession. I believe my natural inclination to trust my intuition and bring students into three worlds, all of which were so important to us – the world of literature, of narrative writing and of what the Japanese call “forest bathing” contributed significantly to my dedicating the rest of my life to education. At 78, I am still teaching as professor and writer-in-residence at Simon Fraser University.
An incident that occurred on my second day of teaching remains forever in my mind. We were walking on the riverbank when someone spied a bed of clams sticking out of the mud and we decided to investigate. The bank of the river was very steep, and I, dressed as any sensible young teacher would be, in a long skirt made of blue silk dotted with large white polka dots found it a challenge to navigate back up the bank when our clamming was complete. You see, I had worn a white silk blouse and three - inch white high heels to set the skirt off to maximum advantage.
A young man, small of stature, almost frail, very blonde, had no difficulty scaling the bank. I had already decided to keep my eye on him as he kept to himself, almost isolated from the others. I didn’t know if the isolation was self-imposed or whether he was being shunned for some reason.
The young man saw me struggling and turned, reached out his hand for me to grasp. I reached up and saw a thin arm and a dwarfed hand, all fingers intact but small, as one might expect to see on a baby. Our eyes met and I saw the sad expectation of rejection. Without hesitation, I grabbed that little hand and allowed the student to heave me up the bank with him.
Danny, (not his real name) the student, and I became a team that day. He was a model student and as I accepted and related to him, the other members of the class began to follow. I read the report on Danny later, when I had had enough time and opportunity to get to know my students based on how they represented themselves to me and to their classmates. The report described Danny as a troubled child, deformed, with a bad attitude, reluctant to participate in classroom activities.
Hmm. Too bad the teachers who wrote the report hadn’t had a steep river bank to provide opportunity for a different kind of experience which might have made possible a different way of being in the classroom. Oh, and white high heeled shoes.
Chung in his article discussing the power of place, recognizes the importance of being with nature when he says, “My snowshoeing through this land is a lot more than what it appears. It is a part of my recovery. Frankly, this land supports my own attempts at self-care, addressing the accumulated stress of 30 years as a teacher, researcher, and administrator, as well as a lifetime of figuring out how to live” (p. 20).
Education fulfills its mandate to learners when it creates opportunities for them, as teachers and students, to come into fuller manifestations of presence … people of what Buber (1947/2002) calls greater character, those who satisfy the “claim of situations out of a deep readiness to respond with (the) whole life” and who manifest a sense of unity with others and the world (p.135)(in Scott, 2010).
My “organic methods” followed me throughout my teaching. As a professor of education in Vancouver, British Columbia, it became the highlight of each semester when I invited my students and their family members or friends out to my cabin on a property where I had built a three - acre garden in the middle of a rain forest.
Students reported that these times with one another, in the forest, with animals I had rescued, changed their lives. For example, one student wrote a description of how education at SFU changed her almost a year after the course had concluded. “The outdoor experiences in 832 opened a door for me to discover myself as a person and my confidence in myself began to re-charge…I wake up in the morning now with a weight somehow lifted off of my chest and I can enjoy my relationships with people, the sunshine, the world. And I see my dealings with students and colleagues in a different light.” (Wishbone, 1999)
One aspect of our adventures in nature is that the experiences that matter grow out of occasion, not pre-determined assignments. “We know the garden is there and we will be having a day in the garden. We avoid personally irrelevant writing tasks…. Instead we explore and discover in a bigger more natural way, consistent with the way nature reveals itself to us” (author, 2018, p.16).
I often borrow the phrase from the poet Keats who in a letter to Benjamin Bailey in 1818, proclaims his belief in bringing one to nature - in whatever form - as a way to create a “greeting of the spirit – as if the psyche recognizes something of itself in the matter of nature ” (in Plumly, 2008, p.81). One of my goals in bringing my students “(shinrin-yoku)
forest bathing”, as it is called in Japan, is to allow opportunity to “greet the spirit”.
The research of the Japanese scientist, Dr. Qing Li, who is recognized as the world's foremost expert in forest medicine, shows how forest bathing can reduce your stress levels and blood pressure, strengthen your immune and cardiovascular systems, boost your energy, mood, creativity, and concentration, and even help you lose weight and live longer. “The sounds of the forest, the scent of the trees, the sunlight playing through the leaves, the fresh, clean air — these things give us a sense of comfort…… They ease our stress and worry, help us to relax and to think more clearly. Being in nature can restore our mood, give us back our energy and vitality, refresh and rejuvenate us” (2018, p.3-8) .
What better atmosphere in which to make connections, open our hearts and minds to powerful relationship building and personally relevant learning?
I was determined to include nature in the new EdD Program on Transformative Change developed for Simon Fraser’s Education faculty. My colleagues and I put everything we had learned in our long careers as teachers into the development of the curriculum. Change was part of our mandate. Personally, I was committed to change those things that I felt limited our present programs. It was foolish of me to think I could pull it off. It was a huge huge task, which failed in some ways and triumphed in others.
One of the traditional components of the doctorate in almost all universities is the comprehensive exams held at the end of the course work and before the dissertation defense. As a graduate of a huge university in the US, I had experienced comprehensive examinations which were held over a three - day period, where you had no idea what the questions would be and an armed guard assured there was no cheating. Scary stuff!
At Simon Fraser University, comps consisted of the senior supervisor giving you a question and you had a specific set time to answer it. You could look at any books or notes. To me, it was an elaborate essay.
I wanted to invent something more useful, more memorable, more challenging, more celebratory. With the organizational help and brilliant conceptualization of my colleague, Dr. Milt McClaren, we created something that had never been done before. We organized comprehensives that were oral and group, almost a conference where the presenters were our students, where the audience was our students, where the ideas were vitally important to the presenters and to the work they would be doing to create systemic change in their various organizations. We had invited a variety of leaders to take the program, leaders from education, from the arts, from business, from health, from Indigenous communities.
Dr. McClaren had connections with outdoor living and schooling all over the province. He was a world renown environmentalist and had created and run a Summer Institute on Environmental Education for SFU in Kelona, BC.
He managed to secure a wonderful location for the event in Stanley Park, a park which is described as “ Stanley Park is a magnificent green oasis in the midst of the urban landscape of Vancouver. Explore the 400-hectare natural West Coast rainforest and enjoy scenic views of water, mountains, sky, and majestic trees along Stanley Park's famous Seawall” (vancouver.ca/parks-recreation-culture/stanley-park).
The location and building served our needs in every way. We could go outside into the beautiful forest, there were rooms where the students could present their oral comprehensives. The arrangement of rooms and chairs, and presentation opportunities served the way we had divided students in a rotating delivery process so that everyone of our 24 graduate students were able to hear and discuss every presentation. Each student’s committee members were able to be present to adjudicate the work. Making the event totally pleasurable, the food they served was healthy, natural and delicious.
The entire three - day experience was documented in film.
We expected it to be special; to be innovative, creative, educational, group and individual enhancing, recognizing personal identity and research interests. The discussions that followed were as exciting and informative as the presentations themselves.
As is our custom at SFU and most educational institutions in British Columbia, a person was invited to introduce the whole event with an acknowledgement of the unceded traditional territories of the Coast Salish peoples we were occupying. Several indigenous leaders were in the program and were ideal to perform this important task for us. Snitelwet (Deborah Jacobs), recognized for her community support work in the Speech to the Throne in 2019, had joined our program in 2011 to discover Squamish co-participants’ personal knowledge, and how it may inform emergent Squamish pedagogy and the transformative process for the Nation. She honored us by taking us out of the building and into the park where she acknowledged her Nation in the most powerful prayer I have ever been privileged to witness.
Snitelwet prayed to her ancestors who had been buried in the trees in the very Place we were standing. The prayer in her language with an English translation was so profound, so real, so full of the spirit of her People, we joined the prayed in respect and sorrow.
Madden Brooke, in her award - winning article, A de/colonizing theory of truth and reconciliation education, is guided by two central questions: “How do I understand prevailing constructions of reconciliation in circulation? and How might I theorize a philosophy of truth and reconciliation education that responds to and upholds my de/colonizing commitments” ( p.284)?
We had just experienced two of the components that Brooke posed as being crucial to us, as educators, to understanding of indigenous ways of being and upholds de/colonizing commitments: Indigenous land-based traditions for establishing and maintaining respectful relationships, and the central role of Indigenous counter-stories in truth and reconciliation education.(p.284).
We had just been witness to and participant in an important opportunity “to learn about reconciliation from local Indigenous knowledge that carriers through Indigenous approaches to teaching and learning”(p.285).
The experience had a life changing effect on me. I would never again enter Stanley Park without saying a silent prayer of acknowledgement and respect. The spirits of that sacred burial place were no longer words in a book. They were real, I was standing in their burial ground. I had been many times in the past, standing on these very grounds, eating hot dogs and walking my dog. Without any awareness of the Place.
Stan Chung, in his chapter on indigenist decolonization of teachers uses his snow-shoeing through the pine trees of northern BC to discuss place-based knowledge. “The long ponderosa needles help me realize that decolonization is fundamentally rooted in place and that every place has its specific story, particularly the story of the indigenous people who used to live there and may still (p, 15).”
“No mere report or essay can fully express the tale of death, tragedy and intergenerational trauma caused by colonization. But place-based stories might be a start” (Chung, p.15).
As a person who has dedicated much of her life to surrounding herself with plants and animals due to a strong belief that such a life nourishes, teaches, connects one to life in a way that is essential, I have always appreciated the beauty of that park, the gardens, the forests, the ocean. But this new awareness went beyond that attunement. The leaves spoke now with new voices, rustling in soft winds, aspens chattering like small birds. The movement of water, soft lapping of waves on sand or rock had a secret message, sometimes of grief, of hope, of anger. I listened in silent intensity, to hear the message of the gulls and eagles. I wondered, for the first time, if I were worthy of their teachings and wondered, too, what I could do to become more worthy.
I was not the only one to be moved, altered. Many of the students were in tears during the prayer. We sat together, in hushed silence and awareness of where we were. Several gathered around Snitelwet, the woman who had spoken the prayer, comforted her in her sorrow, understood her grief in a new way.
Two of the male “settlers” who had felt under attack by several of the strong Indigenous women in the class, looked at me, mouthed, “No wonder.”
The next day, a passionate discussion among students signaled a recognition of how hurtful so much of what we see, hear and read every day can be. One student brought an article about Stanley Park she had read in a newsletter. I no longer have that article, but a quick search on google will reveal article after article which would be a brutal slap in the face to the Indigenous peoples reading it.
For example, Four Things You Didn’t Know About Stanley Park describes at length the Zoo, the aquarium, its use during wartime, and its haunted island which refers to the “small, 3.8 hectare island to the south of Stanley Park with a history as chilling as its name. Long used as a First Nations tree-burial site, non-aboriginal settlers first discovered Deadman’s island in 1862”.
That is the only mention of Indigenous peoples in the newsletter, Kitsilao.ca (2014). 5,042 people read and liked this article.
Brooks reminds us that it is not uncommon for knowledge about reconciliation to be asserted from a Eurocentric paradigm. This fact formed a central theme in our conversation. Our work in the park reflected “endeavours to advance change that honours Indigenous knowledges and nurtures Indigenous communities (inclusive of human, natural, and spirit worlds)” (Brooks, p. 290).
Taking your students into Places in nature makes possible a different kind of curriculum, a different source of meaning making. The instructor goes prepared to accept what happens. It is not pre-planned, orchestrated by the instructor, controlled. The place is trusted, nature is trusted, students are trusted.
Moments, sometimes hours of silence, where nothing seems to be happening often produce the deepest insights. Traditionally, teachers are uncomfortable with such seeming lapses in productivity. “Busywork” abounds in classrooms thought the country. Not so in the curriculum when the “books” or “study sheets” are trees and birds, are fields of grain or rocky cliffs.
Such teaching takes courage. Simply so. Courage. A willingness to let go of control, a willingness to use intuition, sensitivity, a belief that meaning will come, that you will be able to act as mentor without your teacher’s guide. Your biggest job is to provide opportunity.
We must ask ourselves, as educators, can we embrace such a curriculum, a curriculum which allows the experience to unfold, to get to a place of presentness and what Buber (1967) calls “holy insecurity”.
This is the “holy insecurity” which is willing to go out to meet the unique present, rather than taking refuge in orientation and knowing one’s way about. The man of “know how” wants to master the situation. The man of existential trust is able to accept the unique which is present in each new situation, despite all resemblance to the past. Real presentness means for Buber. . .being open to what the present brings by bringing oneself to the present, allowing the future to come as it comes, rather than attempting to turn it into a predictable replica of the past (Friedman, 1967, p. 288).
If we answer, “yes” we are willing, the rewards for us and our students are life supporting. The path is not always easy.
“In work it has always taken courage to follow a unique and individual path exactly, because making our own path takes us off the path, in directions which seem profoundly unsafe. A pilgrimage into the night and the night wind. The territory through which we must travel to make a life for ourselves is always more difficult than we could first imagine; it takes us to the cliff edges of life” (Whyte, 1991, p. 15).
References
Brooke, Madden (2019) A de/colonizing theory of truth and reconciliation
education, Curriculum Inquiry, 49:3, 284-312, DOI: 10.1080/03626784.2019.1624478
Chung, Stan (2020) The courage to be altered: Indegenist decolonization for teachers. New Directions for Teaching and Learning.Dol:10.1002/tl.20327
Friedman, M. (1967). To deny our nothingness: Contemporary images of man. New York: Dell Publishing.
Kahn, P., Severson, R. L., & Ruckert, J. H. (2009). The human relation with nature and technological nature. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 18(1),37 – 42. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8721.2009.01602.x
Plumly, S. (2008) Posthumous Keats: A personal biography. New York; WW. Orton & Company.
author (2018) “A Greeting of the Spirit”, Journal of Education and Human Development, Vo. 7, no. 3, pp 10-17.
Scott, C. (2010) Turning to the other: Teaching as a life of dialogue, PhD dissertation, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia.
Whyte, D. (2001) Crossing the unknown sea: Work as a pilgrimage of identity. New York, New York, Riverhead Books.
Wishlove, Renee. (2014) Commentary about Course 485.