Yesterday, the iguana returned, the first time since the equinox.

His return also marks my own.

You see, I have been holding steady like the iguana these past few months, not knowing what was coming, but knowing I was exactly where I needed to be. Knowing I just had to do the next thing and the path would reveal itself. Trusting deeply, continuing to show up.

The path of October was ablaze, starting with the job posting and culminating with the rector’s resignation (see Dispatches From a Reckoning). But that wasn’t the culmination.

Immediately after he resigned, I was invited to return.

You might think this is crazy, dear reader, to even consider returning to this place that left me feeling like a burnt log at the end of June. Recalling that, I share your hesitancy. You might think I am crazy for thinking things will be different.

However.

Things are different. I am different. The conditions have changed, and I return changed, too. Nothing is the same as it was on June 30, including the institution itself.

Iguanas wait for the right conditions to move. The conditions around me have changed dramatically. These are conditions I could not have foreseen, and even when the alumni petition was posted just a few weeks ago, calling for the reinstatement of those of us who had been terminated, I was emphatic that I did not want this.

We are allowed to change our minds.
We are allowed to change.

These are conditions that I actively participated in shaping, from the LinkedIn post that sparked a deeper reckoning with institutional power, accountability, and transparency at the University for Peace, to many things that happened subsequently (which hopefully we will write about eventually as a co-authored case study among the participants). Now I have the chance to shape the conditions with greater leadership from inside.

This much I know: There is no going back. I cannot go back to any forms of toxicity, harassment, and hostility that existed before. Patterns of overwork and stress.

Going back, I carry so much with me. I experienced four months of liberation, and I take that back with me. I return to see what this latest expression of freedom1 might look like. I return deeply rooted in my value and worth. I return having just experienced deep, soul-level nourishment. I return having had the experience of the Great Reckoning of October, one of the most profound experiences of personal and collective power and peace education-in-action of my life.

Last week, I returned to campus for a meeting, for the first time since the termination, In this meeting I was told, “I want you to be free.” After the meeting, in which I agreed to return, I walked to the forest. I carried with me gratitude, and questions: Am I really doing this? Is this really happening? Are we sure?

I stood at the entrance to the forest at the end of the parking lot. No sooner had these questions left my lips than a laughing falcon flew over my right shoulder and perched on a nearby branch. Two Scarlett Macaws could be heard loudly screeching overhead. Then a toucan zipped over my left shoulder. Welcome back, I heard the forest say with this display. Happy returns.

So yes, we are doing this. I trust life and the forest deeply.

Today, we do this. Please wish me luck and send me your best energy. I have big visions about what this place could be, and I will not be able to bring those visions to life alone. They are a huge undertaking and will have to unfold slowly, step by step.

As I reach the end of writing this post, I watch the iguana scurry away down the trunk of the tree. It is windy, and the conditions have changed, the branch swaying wildly in the wind.

It is time to move, and I am ready.

Thanks for being on this wild journey with me. I continue to trust in life deeply, and remain attentive to each next step, doing what I uniquely can do, no more, no less.

If you would like to hear more about what has transpired over the past few weeks, I invite you to listen to this podcast episode from Over the Borders, hosted by two UPEACE alumni. It was a joy and honor to be in conversation with them!

And finally, in the spirit of continuing some of my beyond-institutional experiments in liberating my teaching, I will host an Enchantable office hour soon, likely next week once I get a handle on my schedule. Stay tuned!

With love and infinite care,

Stephanie

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In a time of rising authoritarianism across the planet, we need reminders that we have the power to stand up and change things. We desperately need stories that remind us of our power. What just transpired at the University for Peace - the community uprising to demand institutional accountability and calling for the rector to step down - is a living, unfolding reminder of the power of the people - and more-than-people - to make change.

You have been with me on this journey of termination/liberation (if you haven’t, I invite you to check out the Log Girl Summer series). There are so many updates, and what we are living through right now has been so intense that it is hard to write about it in real time. But I want to inform you of what has been happening and direct you to some sources so you can get a sense for yourself, and to offer some early reflections as the dust settles around us.

A brief timeline of a reckoning

What began as a Season of Sensing turned into an October of Reckoning.

There is a lot I still cannot share about what transpired - too soon, too much still in process - but what I can share for now is this:

In June, I was abruptly terminated alongside two other faculty members. The justifications given for the terminations were budgetary constraints and restructuring. These terminations severely impacted the incoming students, including drastic changes to the curriculum they signed up for. For peace education students, it meant they arrived with no faculty advisor. Meanwhile, I was enjoying my termination/liberation era, and had the best Log Girl Summer.

On Thursday, October 1, while I was quietly minding my own business, envisioning other worlds, writing a book, and visiting my family, the university began advertising for my former position, which called into question the reasons for my termination. The posting contradicted the justifications I had been given. If they needed to terminate me for these reasons, why were they rehiring for the same position? I couldn’t sit idly by and watch this happen. I needed to say something and posted about this publicly on LinkedIn. The post went viral, reaching nearly 100,000 views. In the post, I raised some questions and called for a reckoning, which began with comments of support, solidarity, and concern on the post itself.

Eight days later, on Saturday, October 10, an open letter of concern petition, led by alumni, was posted on Change.org. The petition drew attention to the deeper structural issues underlying the terminations, and it rapidly gained traction and circulated widely in the community.

In the subsequent days (October 12-14), the university rector held meetings with faculty and staff on campus to discuss the petition. In these meetings, he was encouraged to step down for the health of the institution, indicating a loss of confidence in his leadership within the community.

On October 14, in solidarity with the petition and building on their past grievances, students staged a sit-in in front of the rector’s office demanding an immediate response to their grievances. At this point, the local press started picking up the story. Solidarity statements were issued.

On Thursday, October 15, students courageously and strategically disrupted a meeting with funders that the rector had moved off campus because of their protests. They delivered a letter to the chairman of the foundation to inform him of what was happening and why they were protesting.

On Friday, October 16, it was announced that there would be an all-staff meeting on Monday.

On Monday, October 19, the rector of the University for Peace submitted his resignation to the United Nations and announced it in the staff meeting.

The New Humanitarian told the story well, and I recommend reading their reporting on it.

Some incomplete immediate reflections and lessons

There is so much more to say about all of this - so many things happening in the background, things too soon to share, and someday we will tell that story, because it is an incredible case study in nonviolent resistance and people power (and how people power is more than just people), and peace education-in-action. I anticipate in the future we will be writing a book chapter or article (or book!) on what happened, but for now, I want to offer some nascent reflections:

Nonviolence works. I have been a scholar and practitioner of nonviolence for decades, and what transpired is a living case study of how nonviolence works - and that it does work. When the conditions are ripe, it can work fast. From the LinkedIn post to the resignation, it was 17 days. However, there is much more that happened before that for years that contributed to the conditions for this ripeness. The students had also already engaged in a walk-out earlier in the semester (see the New Humanitarian article), so they were ready for escalation as their grievances had not been meaningfully addressed by the university. Alumni had been debating for years what to do, and it took a small group of courageous alums to voice these concerns publicly and put the concerns together in such a clear and comprehensive way.

When conditions are ripe, a revolution will catch like wildfire. In this case, a fairly simple question felt like it caught fire, combined with the alumni-led petition, which provided the wider context of concerns in which the terminations took place, and the existing student discontent on campus. To me, that says much less about the question and more about the combustibility of the structure. If the structure had been sturdy and stable, it would not have spread. The fact that it did in the way that it did tells you that the moment was ripe for this reckoning. It also tells you the power of our words, our voices, and a simple question asked out loud.

The resistance is beautiful and creative. The way people conducted themselves was the best of humanity, and a living example of the peace and nonviolence we teach. Art and creativity played a vital role at every part of this. Nonviolent struggle is a beautiful expression of ingenuity and creativity in action. Humor played an important role, too.

Dialogue is not always the answer, particularly when severe power dynamics are present, and all parties are not mutually invested. Meaningful dialogue requires a willingness to listen, to acknowledge harm, and to share responsibility for change. Without these conditions, dialogue can become a mechanism for maintaining existing power relations rather than transforming them. Listening is a precondition for dialogue to be possible, and if a party with all decision-making power is not willing to listen, other methods are necessary. There are many methods of nonviolent struggle (Gene Sharp outlined 198 of them), and using them in conjunction with each other leads to a more successful campaign (while the sit-in and petition are the most obvious methods we see here, there was also so much happening in the background that also made these elements successful). Furthermore, it is important to note that existing internal mechanisms had been tried, and these channels did not provide meaningful resolution. In the conflict escalation curve put forth in Search for a Nonviolent Future by Dr. Michael Nagler of the , when dialogue and negotiation do not work, it is time for escalating to other methods. The failure of existing internal mechanisms points towards the deeper structural change that is needed.

This win is a win for all of us. I believe, as adrienne maree brown writes about in Emergent Strategy, that the world is made up of fractals, and the small makes the whole. Wins at the small scale affect the large scale; the macro is made up of the micro. This win makes space for others. I hope what has transpired will remind all of us of the power of speaking truth to power and the power of collective action.

While this is a small living example, it is also not small. The University for Peace was founded by the United Nations, and this situation implicated some of the most powerful people in the world. These events unfolding on our tiny campus on the edge of the forest in Costa Rica touch some of the highest seats of global power. Everything is connected, and I hope that through this connection, the beauty of resistance might spread wildly.

There are larger forces at play that none of us can fully grasp or see. From where I stood in all of this, I could see a lot through my relationships with many people affected and participating at different levels in this situation. But what I can’t help but name is that there were larger forces at play, agencies playing out that were beyond the humans in this story. In Outgrowing Modernity, Vanessa Machado de Oliveira writes, “We have to learn to trust the invisible to make the impossible possible.” We just lived through making the impossible possible. The impossible is possible. I cannot see the invisible, but I can see its effects. And from my unique standpoint of being both in the center and on the edges of this situation, I can deeply sense the invisible forces at play.

Along these lines, every single action mattered. From my unique position of being both central and peripheral, I could see how the seemingly smallest acts tipped the scales and built pressure. The result was the sum of many small actions and a few bigger ones. This was a case of every single person involved doing what they uniquely could do - no more, no less. Every action mattered - every text, every signature, every share, every voice. Every. Single. One. The smallest things we do can have impacts far beyond what we can see, which is a valuable reminder for all of us.

Other worlds are possible. The rector had been in power for 13 years, and many thought he would never leave. From when this started until he stepped down, it took 17 days. It is entirely possible that the structure will just rebuild itself in the same fashion that it has existed in for 46 years. But there is a window here in which something else can be built from this crisis. Something truly transformative and powerful can be rebuilt in the wake of this reckoning, if the reckoning fully runs its course. Structures have crumbled, and they can now be built otherwise. The possibilities are nearly infinite - but the pull for the status quo and business as usual is the default; it is strong, and it will continue if we don’t collectively resist that pull and exercise our deepest imaginal and creative resources and visions.

This moment calls for being unapologetically, unrelentingly visionary.

In the aftermath of all of this, I have felt like a lightning rod having been struck by lightning. October felt electric, and has left me both utterly exhilarated and exhausted. The past few weeks have been some of the most meaningful work of my life. I have been completely changed through these weeks. There will be much more to say and reflect on as time unfolds. For now, I smolder like the struck lightning rod, taking some time to cool down and breathe.

I called for a reckoning, and the reckoning has begun. The stepping down of the rector is a first step. But the deeper reckoning needs to ask: what allowed for such a concentration of power in the first place? What conditions contributed to this mess, and what were our respective parts in it? How can we ensure that such concentration of power does not happen again? What harm has been done, and how can that harm be healed and repaired? There is a need for reckoning with the pain that has been left in the wake of all of this, a need for truth-telling about what happened, before we can move on to bigger visions. This is part of peacebuilding and part of healing.

And then, the exciting part: What should a peace university look like? Is a peace university possible? What are the lessons for the wider collective that need to be shared, amplified, multiplied?

The story is not over. The next steps are uncertain. But what I do know from all of this is that if I keep following my intuition and keep trusting in life, doing what I uniquely can do, no more, no less, then I will know what to do. From the moment when this all started, I have had a deep trust and faith in life to keep showing me the next steps. I know with every cell of my being that all I need to do is keep trusting, keep listening, and keep going.

With love and infinite care,

Stephanie

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P.S. On a little Instagram meme thing (“the 9th song on your list is your song for the month”), my song of the month for October was “Under Pressure.” It truly was. I close with this anthem. May the pressure continue to build for collective liberation everywhere!

What are the signs of the season where you are?

This is the question that I always begin my seasonal ritual gatherings with, and this weekend we celebrated the equinox. We are in the portal between seasons, and I love the equinox particularly for its moment of balance and for the shared experience of equal light and darkness across our planetary home.

Here in Costa Rica, we should be in the thick of rainy season, but an El Niño year combined with climate chaos has led to a season of barely needing to carry an umbrella. It has rained the past few afternoons, though, so there are signs of the season finally shifting. The fog has returned to the canyon with the rain, and I am befriending the fog.

On the morning of my equinox seasonal ritual-celebration1, I was practicing yoga when I noticed just below my porch, the giant black spiny-tailed iguana was resting on a branch, just below my desk and meditation spot. I have seen this guy before - this is definitely his home and habitat - but he is a rarity. He does not appear often, and it is a gift to see him.

What a gift for him to show up for the equinox ritual.

Since the conclusion of my epic Log Girl Summer, I have been sensing into this next season, sensing into my next chapter of life. I have been called to ask, through my recent shamanic writing coaching session with Kati Standefer of The Wild and Holy Moment, “What is the medicine that wants to move through me? Who needs it? Where does it want to go? What form or shape does it need to take?” (book a Shamanic session with Kati here). When Kati encouraged me to petition the land to ask for support in holding these questions, she suggested seeking out an animal might be good support for this time, and encouraged me to do a ritual to see who from the land might collaborate.

I did, and Iguana showed up.

Iguanas stay put. They hold steady. As I write this now, he has been on the same branch for over 24 hours since I first noticed him there. He perseveres.

Iguanas are also adaptable. They dwell on the ground and in trees. Their cold-blooded nature means they have to stay in the sun to replenish their energy. They wait for the right conditions to move. When they do, they move slowly and deliberately, but also have the capacity to claw, scratch, swat. They have the ability to lose their tail and regenerate it, to self-heal. They have self-defense in the form of their spines and long tail. Camouflage is also part of this protection, and the way they are able to blend in so well with tree bark, rocks, and earth.

They are also territorial. MyMythos notes that “Territorial does not have to mean hostile. It can mean knowing which spaces, relationships, and hours belong to you.”

This is the medicine the Iguana is bringing me. Stay put. Hold steady. Observe. Adapt. Wait for the right conditions to move. You have the power to self-heal and regenerate. And don’t forget your power of self-defense. To be steady and calm, we also need to be able to protect and defend ourselves. There is a time to be seen and a time to remain camouflaged with your surroundings, a time to be visible and to lay low. Discern which spaces, relationships, and hours are meant for you.

This season, I apprentice myself to the Iguana.

I know deeply, in this season of my life, right now, I need to stay put. I need to stay with the liminal space that I have really only begun to enter. I know I am held and supported enough to not know right now2. And I know I need to stay with this not knowing.

I know this deeply. That itself is a knowing.

People have asked me if I feel lost or stuck, which one might imagine someone in my position might feel, but I feel so far from either of those things right now. I feel deeply in flow. I feel like I am exactly where I need to be in this moment. I don’t know where I will be next month, or next year. But I know for now, I need to be right here, doing this, which might not look like much, but it is, in fact, a lot, and is what needs doing right now.

Stillness is not the same as stuckness.
Not knowing is not the same as being lost.

For me, this is a season of holding steady.
Of staying with this liminality.
Of befriending the fog.
Of hunkering down on the tree branch that is my writing desk above the forest
Soaking in the sun between rainstorms.

And that is what I am calling in:
A season of sensing.
Sensing into the new season and chapter of my life,
by following aliveness, desire, delight, and freedom.
Staying put, right here, on this desk-branch over the canyon.
Holding steady, like my iguana friend.
Observing, regenerating.
Waiting for the right conditions to move.

As I write today, Iguana is not there, below my meditation perch, but I know he is down there somewhere in the canyon, on the ground or in another tree, basking. I will continue to listen - to the Iguana wisdom, to my body, my intuition, the stirring signs of the season and what it is asking of me.

After the equinox ritual on Saturday, the conditions aligned for me to be able to attend a deep relaxation and guided meditation session with live music at a local studio hosted by the local group Enarmonia. At the end of the session, they handed us a card which read: “¿ Qué estoy dispuest@ a soltar para abrirme a lo que viene?3”

“What am I willing to let go of to open myself to what is coming?”

What are you willing to let go of?

This felt like a significant shift to me. We have to be willing to let something go.

I have let go of a lot these past months: a job, the life and identities that were connected to that job.

I am willing to let go of the need to know.
I am held enough to not know4.

Equinox Release: Uninvited

For an equinox ritual to let go, I recommend the following:
Ask yourself the questions: What are you willing to let go of? What is not invited to follow you into the next season?
Write down everything you are willing to release.
Rip it up.
Burn it safely.
Then shake it all out to Brandi Carlile’s cover of Alanis Morrisette’s song Uninvited:

In our seasonal ritual gatherings, folks often note how grateful they are for the space to pause and reflect, and how hard it can be to find that space in day-to-day life. Marking the changing of the sessions helps us to attune and honor the rhythms of our beloved Earth, and to root into who we are in this moment and who we want to be as members of our Earth community.

More equinox reflection prompts:

• Who do you want to be in this next season? How do you want to show up? And what conditions do you need to facilitate for yourself in order to show up and be this way?

• What are you inviting into your life for the next season?

• Name the season you are calling in: Season of…., or _____ Autumn/_____Spring (depending on what hemisphere you are in), i.e. Iconic Autumn5 :) For example, mine is Season of Sensing. Let us know what you name it in the comments!
  

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Give thanks for all you are grateful for in your life. Ask for support. And take a small action to let the universe know you are seriously dedicated to your dreams.

Equinox blessings! May your wildest, most beautiful dreams come true, in the spirit of collective liberation and mutual flourishing.

With love and infinite care,

Stephanie

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Dear beloved readers,

To everything, a season.
I am on the other side of Log Girl Summer.
It was everything I hoped it would be, everything I needed, and more.
I am writing from the other side.
Most of all, I am grateful.
Log Girl Summer has ended. Long live Log Girl!

On Monday, I was supposed to be stepping foot into the classroom for the first day of the 2026-27 year. I am gleefully happy that I did not. Instead, I wrote. I took a call about a possible collaboration around a peace education course. I caught up with a friend. I spent time dreaming and scheming of how to bring my work into the world on my own terms.

Thus begins the new chapter of my life as an in(ter)dependent scholar, writer, and teacher.

Reflections on Log Girl Summer

All of the plans made for Log Girl Summer were made before termination/liberation. All the plans were in motion, bought, booked, reserved, paid for. All I had to do was show up.
Before Me planned farm visits, relaxation, whales, fun. Trips to farms, the beach, a concert, visits with family and friends.
Log Girl didn’t have to make decisions or choices. She just had to arrive.

When I began this series, preciently and unknowingly, before I was terminated, I wrote:

“I don’t know where I will be on the other side of that, but I trust it deeply. I don’t know who I will be on the other side of that, but I trust her deeply.”

So lately, I have been asking myself:
Who am I on the other side of Log Girl Summer, on this experience of being burnt out, terminated, liberated, and superblooming?

I find myself on the other side just feeling immensely grateful. My cup is the fullest it has been in a long time. I feel deeply empowered knowing my value and worth, and being free of a work environment where that worth was constantly degraded and undermined. I keep thinking of the things that the past several Augusts have usually entailed: the administration calling emergency meetings to berate faculty about enrollment, and the stress that that entails, both the meetings themselves and the constant sense of waiting for them.

That I feel happy to not be teaching has surprised me: how happy I am to not be doing something I loved (and it might surprise you, dear reader, if you have followed along with how much I love teaching). I realize it has to do with several things: having grieved my former job long before I was terminated; the stressful conditions mentioned above; and how even something you love can lose its shine when the conditions you are doing it in are hostile.

All of this reminds me of a teaching from Thich Nhat Hanh about the non-toothache. It goes something like this: when our teeth are hurting, we take for granted the joy and pleasure of having teeth that are not hurting. When we have a toothache, we want nothing more than to not have a toothache. When the toothache subsides, we find great joy in the non-toothache. But we don’t need to wait for our teeth to hurt to find this joy. We can find happiness and appreciation for our non-toothache right in this moment.

In the wake of my dismissal, I am dwelling in a non-toothache of sorts. I am dwelling in the joy of the non-emergency-meetings; of the non-hostility; of the non-berating and demeaning and dragging; of the non-toxicity. I am delighting in the absence of these things from my life.

I am still answering the question of who I am on the other side of this. I can tell you I am happy, much more rested, less stressed. I am returning to my value and worth, and committed, if I can so help it, to never tolerate a situation where I am so devalued and demeaned.

I am feeling more myself than I’ve felt in a long time. I feel in bloom.

Then there was Professor Log Girl. You can kick the Log Girl out of the university, but you can’t take the best of the university out of her. She brings it with her wherever she goes, and it is finding new, liberated, and creative forms of expression. Professor Log Girl couldn’t resist herself. She still had to create some offerings:

She was in conversation with Kati Standefer of . She hosted an office hour, which was beautifully successful, so more of those will be happening (currently aiming for a once-a-month rhythm) - stay tuned!

In the original Log Girl Summer post, I wrote:

After a wildfire, one of the conditions for a superbloom to occur is the presence of prolific seeds. I know I have been planting seeds steadily, diligently, and caringly for a long time. Maybe, after the rain and the rest, these seeds will have the conditions to germinate and bloom. Maybe the fire will be regenerative after all. We will see what takes root. I will keep asking the seeds what conditions they need.

Right now, I am feeling the superbloom. I am spending my days following creativity, intuition, and aliveness. I am writing prolifically - I have a few projects brewing that I can’t wait to share with you. I am taking calls for potential collaborations (if you have always wanted to collaborate, send me a message!). I am mothering. I am dreaming. I know I am being called to bring my work into the world in new forms, and I am exploring and experimenting with what forms it will take.

At the end of Log Girl Summer, in the liminal cusp of a new season as-yet-to-be-named, I feel deeply contented. Curious. Alive. Connected. Effervescent. Satisfied.

In her book Pleasure Activism, adrienne maree brown asks, “Are you satisfiable?1” This question is a radical one to ask ourselves living within late-stage capitalism, within which we have been trained and indoctrinated to never be satisfied, to be hungry ghosts, insatiable appetites for consumption. I am dwelling in the delight of feeling deeply satisfied.

I am not quick to name the new season. What I can tell you: I am trying to go slower. Even slower still. I am not trying to rush into anything. I am delighting in exploring possible collaborations and new venues for teaching and learning, experimenting and playing. Whether we stay here or go, there are many choices to be made and near-infinite logistics related to them, so that all hums along in the background constantly. Most of all, I am following aliveness, trusting my intuition, dedicating myself to my creativity, and focusing my energy on what I want to weave and create and ways to connect.

Here at Enchantable, we have an ongoing practice of honoring the seasons, and our next seasonal ritual gathering is coming up next week to honor the equinox, one of my favorite days of the year. In fact, Log Girl Summer was born in our last ritual honoring the summer solstice.

You can register here - it is free to join, offered from my heart to this community of readers (if you ever feel inspired to support these kinds of offerings and writings materially, I welcome you to upgrade your subscription):

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On this Virgo new moon, I feel totally renewed after these past two and a half months. I am beginning this new chapter of my life as an independent scholar, writer, and teacher.
I am brimming with gratitude.
Thank you.
Yes.
More, please!
Welcome.

The volcanoes are foggy, but I know they are there.
My path is foggy, but I know it is there, and I know how to walk through the fog.

Log Girl Summer is over - long live Log Girl.
She will live in my heart in all her mossiness, the gift that was her time in the forest and sea, frolicking, flitting, nourishing, resting.
It was a great season. I am excited for what we become in the next.
It is time to move.
It is time to bloom.

With love and infinite care,

Stephanie

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Office hours are in session!

I invite you to join me tomorrow, Wednesday, September 2nd at 10 am Costa Rica time, for my first-ever Enchantable Office hour.

Register here (it’s free!)

This is an experiment. In the liminal space after termination, in the final glorious days of Log Girl Summer, I have been dreaming of what is possible beyond university walls, and how to bring my favorite practices of teaching into the space of what lies beyond it.

Office hours are one of those practices.

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Why office hours?

I love office hours for their open, emergent, and organic quality. There is no plan, no syllabus, no prep - just an open door (or Zoom room), mind, and heart. I always trust that whoever shows up are the right people, whether that is 1 or 100 (it is unlikely to be 100 tomorrow ;) and we seek to find the conversation that only the people in the room can have, in the spirit of Emergent Strategy (one of the books on A Reading Guide for Other Worlds, the posting of which inspired me to engage in this experiment).

I shared about liberating my teaching in my last few posts, and Enchatable has long been an experiment in liberating my teaching beyond the university. First and foremost, I consider it to be public pedagogy and praxis, a way of writing about my work (and writing as my work) beyond academic journals and beyond the academy, an attempt to make this work accessible beyond a master’s degree program- accessible for lifelong learning and living.

At my last institution, I actually never held formal office hours on campus - they were always by appointment, or when my door was open, which was basically when I was on campus and not otherwise teaching or in a meeting. For my online classes, I hold them on Zoom, and have found this to be one of my favorite parts of online teaching. Some of the richest, most impactful, and generative parts of those classes were in the emergent and open office hours sessions.

It’s totally informal and casual.
Bring what you want - or just bring yourself! No need to bring anything - just show up.
Bring your questions, curiosities, concerns, joys, wonders, delights, struggles.
We practice emergence and see what happens together.

Topics of conversation could include the themes of the last few series of posts: Log Girl Summer (which culminated yesterday), termination/liberation, liminality, the reading guide and reading beyond the world, what we’re reading now. But they’re also not limited to that. The door is truly open.

I have long wanted to host an office hour for Enchantable readers - to have an open online space to connect and share and ask questions and engage - but did not have the time or bandwidth until recently. The Reading Guide for Other Worlds got me to finally put out a call, and we are starting September with this energy of curiosity and experimentation.

I realize the timing might be challenging for some of you, so if you would like to join something like this and can’t, please do let me know of your interest, and I will consider other times for future gatherings.

Thank you for joining me in this period of experimentation. I welcome your ideas for any other experiments you would like to see! (I might even start experimenting with other platforms - stay tuned for more on that).

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The office door is open - I hope to see you there!

With love and infinite care,

Stephanie

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What are you reading these days)?

In my last post, A Reading Guide for Other Worlds, I discussed my love of reading and the power of reading to help us build other worlds. Since then, I have been thinking a lot about the many ways to read, and what other forms of literacy we miss when we only read the written word (which I know you are doing here, right now, reading this). I’ve been wondering: What are the power and limitations of the written word? What other literacies do we need to develop for other worlds to be possible?

Recently, I spent time in the forest on the Pacific coast of Costa Rica to visit more-than-human mothers, which is my new mother’s day tradition in the spirit of reclaiming the day. It is whale migration season, and we went to commune with the at great migrating mammalian moms. It was deeply moving to witness the whales - a mama and her baby frolicked for a long time, the baby doing jumps and twists, while the mom came up periodically for air.

It was also stunning to watch our guides read the whales and the water. From my untrained eyes, there was nothing perceptible on the surface. The guides, however, were reading the world, the ocean, the whales. They explained they were looking for the “footprints” on the surface that the whales leave by their movements underwater. They had ocean and whale literacies that I do not.

Later on the trip, as I walked through the forest, I listened. I heard a rustling in the dense foliage. Was it a puma following me? Or just a lizard scurrying by? Maybe a bird? It was an unfamiliar forest, and I did not know how to read it. I know how to read the forest near my house - the specific way the foliage brushes when monkeys are nearby, for example. But in this forest, I did not know how to read.

How was the forest reading me? I wondered. As a welcome guest, as an intruding human? How were the whales reading the boats that were watching them? Audience? Threat? Disturbance? Annoyance? Welcome visitor?

Undoubtedly, the world reads us, too. The world is always reading us back. We are being read. I am sure the more-than-human world has human literacies.

In the wake of being terminated/liberated from my faculty position, I have been reflecting a lot on what I loved about my university teaching, and what didn’t work well in terms of form and structure. I have been asking: what form and structure can bring more life and creativity into how and what I want to teach, offer, and be in collective inquiry around? What structures did I love that I want to carry forward, and what structures am I now free to release and reinvent?

In the field of peace education, we always question the structural elements of education, and what structures are conducive for peace to flow through, and what structures inhibit (or even prevent) peace from being possible- in other words, what structures enable violence. Thus, these structural questions were always a part of the peace education curriculum I enacted- but was still teaching within a specific structure. What becomes possible outside of it, beyond it, that wasn’t possible before?

For months, maybe even a couple of years, I have been circling around the idea of liberating my teaching1. What would that mean? What would that look like, to take the best of what I was able to offer in a graduate school setting, and free it from the limitations of expectations, form, and institutional regulations? In the wake of being dismissed from my position, life has asked me to sit with these questions more seriously - it did some of the liberation work for me, and is now asking me to do the work of figuring out what this looks like. Always an eager student, I am up for the task.

To be clear, constraints, structures, and containers are not inherently bad things. In any creative practice, constraints can actually allow for more creativity than if we are completely wide open with possibilities, which can be overwhelming and daunting. Teaching in graduate school, I found tremendous creativity in creating syllabi and offering classes in 3-week blocks. While constraining in some ways, these boundaries gave me a fixed-but-fertile playground in which I could engage my creativity. But as a friend once said, when I was telling her that I was trying to beautify the Moodle platform we use for online asynchronous classes, “Beautifying Moodle seems like a poor use of your magic2.” So I am currently exploring ways of liberating my teaching, with experiments such as my Reading Guide for Other Worlds and the Enchantable Office Hour session I will be hosting on September 2nd (Enchantable has always been one such experiment).

One of the elements I have been thinking a lot about is reading. I love reading, and am in the process of reclaiming my love of reading as I recently wrote about. Graduate school is very reading-heavy. All formal education is, but the volume and focus increase over time as you continue to move through it. The standard grad school formula goes:

There is a syllabus of readings.
You read them.
You talk about them.
You write about them.
= read + talk + write + repeat.

What learning do we miss when we adhere to this formula? What other ways of reading and listening are left out? What capacities are we failing to develop when the focus of education lies so heavily on the written word?

In the format of intensive classes I used to teach, students would have to read roughly 60 pages every night - 2-4 articles. It often felt like inundating them (and ourselves) with a firehose, expecting them to drink from it. It felt like chugging, the way people drink to get drunk at frat parties. There was not time to sit with the readings, to digest them, to study them, no space for reflection (not to mention, most of our students are non-native English speakers, so for many, the reading would take more time). Yes, to a certain degree, that is what class time discussion was for - to process and reflect- but there was also a performative nature to that that was impossible to get away from when participation was graded (the topic of grades is a whole other story in regard to liberation).

Through all of this, I find myself asking:

What are the power and limitations of the written word, and how can we weave in reading while also reading beyond the word?

What is the relationship between reading, words, and the world?

What other literacies do we need to develop for other worlds to be possible? How do we develop them?

There are three writers - who are all featured in the Reading Guide for Other Worlds - I want to think-with in holding these questions: Paulo Freire, who talks about reading the word and the world; Vanessa Machado de Oliveira, who writes about wording and worlding the world; and Robin Wall Kimmerer, who writes about writing as reciprocity and responsibility of humans in relation to the living world. By bringing these scholar-writer-educators’ ideas together in relationship, I hope to play with the questions above, without necessarily answering them directly or difinitively.

Paulo Freire - Reading the Word and the World

Paulo Freire is the Brazilian literacy educator and educational philosopher whose seminal work Pedagogy of the Oppressed3 shaped the field of critical pedagogy. His educational philosophy was developed through his work as a literacy educator working with marginalized populations, such as peasants and farmworkers, in Brazil. Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which critiques the traditional banking style of education as upholding systems of oppression and proposes problem-posing education through dialogue and raising critical consciousness, grew out of literacy education and teaching people how to read the word to read the world.

For Freire, reading the world means being able to critically understand your context, surroundings, and social conditions before you try to interpret any text. This means seeing clearly the conditions and culture you are living in, the struggles of daily life, and why things are the way they are, naming the root causes of any social problems, as well as the power differentials in relationships. The banking system of education primarily functions to uphold the status quo and teaches us not to question why things are the way they are; rather, it teaches a passive acceptance of power relations as they are rather than an awareness of them and the possibility that we have the power to transform them. When we learn to read the world, we learn to name it, we learn to question it, and in doing so, we start to transform it. Therefore, for Freire, learning to read the world should be at the heart of any liberatory education.

Through Pedagogy of the Oppressed and subsequent works, Freire asserts that reading the world should come before reading the word (literacy), and that it is through our experiences of and in the world that we can learn to read the written word. In other words, critically analyzing our own context is an essential precursor to understanding written text. In his speech-turned-essay The Importance of the Act of Reading, he writes:

“Reading the world precedes reading the word, and the subsequent reading of the word cannot dispense with continually reading the world. Language and reality are dynamically intertwined. The understanding attained by critical reading of a text implies perceiving the relationship between text and context” (p. 5).

But reading alone - whether word or world - is not enough, and is ultimately about what we do with this reading. He continues:

“In a way, however, we can go further, and say that reading the word is not preceded merely by reading the world, but by a certain form of writing it or re-wrìting it, that is, of transforming it by means of conscious practical work. ” (p. 10).

Thus Freire articulates the importance of learning to read the worlds we inhabit - the structural and power dynamics, our culture, unconscious beliefs and biases, and understanding and naming social problems and seeking to identify their root causes - as an essential capacity in order to read the word. We must be able to read our worlds in order to make meaning of words, and write and re-write the world through our practical work.

Vanessa Machado de Oliveira - Wording and Worlding the World

Vanessa Machado de Oliveira extends this discussion by identifying and questioning our tendency to label the world into words, inviting us to wonder: what are the limitations of wording the world? In Hospicing Modernity, Machado de Oliveira writes about how one of the facets of modernity - what she describes as an inherently violent and unsustainable worlding story - is to index the world into words: into fixed categories of meaning and for the world to be entirely categorizable and knowable. This contributes to the violence of modernity by devaluing and exiling any ways of knowing, being, or seeing that are not easily categorizable, that are unseen or invisible.

It is important to note that this stance is not against the written word (she is writing about this in a book, after all!). Rather, it invites us to question the role and the value of the written word, how we relate to words, and the role and value of other ways of knowing that are not perceptible or legible through language. For example, Machado de Oliveira writes about the difference between Indigneous storytelling and storytelling within modernity:

“In many contexts, including my extended family, stories are not human-made tools of communication that aim to index the world into language, or to word the world. Instead, stories are entities that visit and move things in the world, in nonlinear time: they are stories that world the world” (p. 45).

By worlding the world, she means is referring to how we relate to words and what words themselves do. Words are still used in Indigenous storytelling, but what they are doing is different. In worlding the world, stories (and as such, words) are seen as more alive, as not being entirely human-made, as moving things in the world in nonlinear time. They make the world, as such, world the world.

Furthermore, she explains that in wording the world, we are trying to index reality into language and arrive at a definitive and universal meaning. In worlding the world, things are more subject to interpretation, which means they are “thought, felt, danced with and through” (Machado de Oliveira, 2021, p. 46).

This exploration of wording and worlding the world is not to dismiss using words - rather, it is to notice the limitations of indexing and categorizing, and to notice what we are missing when try to fit the world into an index. To me, the invitation here is to notice how we use words and how we relate with them. Are we seeking a fixed universalized meaning? Or are we letting the words move us, dancing, feeling, unfurling their meaning?

Robin Wall Kimmerer - Words as Reciprocity and Responsibility

Bringing Robin Wall Kimmerer’s writing into this discussion, we reach beyond the limitation of words, and towards how they might be our unique power and responsibility as humans.

In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer makes a distinction between the practice of science and the scientific worldview. She describes the practice of science as a humbling, and at times deeply spiritual pursuit of trying to understand the life of another being or system that “brings the questioner into an unparalleled intimacy with nature fraught with wonder and creativity as we try to comprehend the mysteries of the more-than-human world” (p. 346). By contrast, she describes the scientific worldview as “a cultural context that uses science and technology to reinforce reductionist, materialist economic and political agendas” (p. 346). This distinction is important, as the scientific worldview she names is part of and reflected in Machado de Oliveira’s framing of modernity above, and the scientific worldview (and not the practice of science itself) is what leads us to word the world.

Words can index, and words can also be vehicles for creativity, wonder, and intimacy. Kimmerer writes:

“Asking what is our responsibility is perhaps also to ask, What is our gift? And how shall we use it?…Other beings can fly, see at night, rip open trees with their claws, make maple syrup. What can humans do?
We may not have wings or leaves, but we humans do have words. Language is our gift and our responsibility. I’ve come to think of writing as an act of reciprocity with the living land. Words to remember old stories, words to tell new ones…” (p. 347).

This passage completely reorients how we humans might relate to reading and writing, and here, we tap into a deeper power of reading and writing. If we think of the written word as our unique capacity as a species, what does it mean to do something with this gift?

In another earlier passage, she writes:

“For me, writing is an act of reciprocity with the living world; it is what I can give back in return for everything that has been given to me. And now there’s another layer of responsibility, writing on a thin sheet of tree and hoping the words are worth it” (p. 152).

We humans have the capacity for reading and writing. What is our responsibility to do something with this? How can our acts of reading and writing be acts of reciprocity with the living world? How can they be worthy of the pages they are printed on (or in this case, the minerals and plastic in this laptop or phone, etc.)?

Words being a unique human gift does not mean other species do not communicate. My dog has a whole repertoire of different barks (her bark at a car is different than her bark for a bee, or monkeys, or leaves, or another dog, etc.). Birds and trees and plants and animals are all communicating with us, and we need to develop these land literacies for our capacity to cultivate other worlds. Reading beyond the word isn’t a rejection of words- rather, it is an invitation to expand how we think and practice literacies.

In the preface to Outgrowing Modernity, Vanessa Machado de Oliveira writes:

“Before continuing, I invite you to step outside, sit with the Land, and listen—not just metaphorically, but with your body—to the nonhuman world around you. How has modern education developed or limited the land literacies you need to live on this planet? What do the air, soil, and wind have to say about humanity’s journey—and yours—as you dance with this book?” (p. xviii, emphasis added).

This exploration has taken us across three scholar-educators - Paulo Freire, Vanessa Machado de Oliveira, and Robin Wall Kimmerer - who offer different insights into reading, writing, the word, and the world. I hope this exploration provoked some new questions for you about how you relate to reading, writing, and words, and what other ways of reading the world you have already developed, and what other literacies you would like to develop in the spirit of cultivating possibilities for other worlds.

As we conclude, I invite you to go listen to the world and hold these questions with you. Read the world. What literacies have we developed well? What are we lacking, for our own survival and planetary thriving? What sensitivities, capabilities, and literacies do we need to hone in order to create more livable futures? How might your words - whether spoken or written - be an act of reciprocity with and responsibility to the living world?

Put down the reading gently, feel your breath and your body, and go for a walk. Listen, pay attention. What are you reading? How are you being read? What worlds are you worlding today? What other literacies and capacities is the world calling you to develop?

Wishing you profound experiences in your reading and worlding.

With love and infinite care,

Stephanie

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References

Freire, P. (2005). Pedagogy of the oppressed (30th anniversary ed.). The Continuum International Publishing Group.

Freire, P., & Slover, L (trans.). (1983). The importance of the act of reading. The Journal of Education, 165(1), 5–11. JSTOR. https://www.jstor.org/stable/42772842

Kimmerer, R. W. (2013). Braiding sweetgrass: Indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge and the teachings of plants. Milkweed Editions.

Machado de Oliveira, V. (2021). Hospicing modernity: Facing humanity’s wrongs and the implications for social activism. North Atlantic Books.

Machado de Oliveira, V. (2025). Outgrowing modernity: Navigating complexity, complicity, and collapse with accountability and compassion. North Atlantic Books.

Professor Log Girl reporting for duty :)

You can take the girl out of the university, and you can take the Log Girl out of her summer forest slumber, but you cannot take away her penchant and joy for teaching, reading, learning, writing, sharing, and general nerdery - particularly when it comes to dreaming of and practicing towards other worlds!

A few months ago, I received a summer writing assignment from one of my favorite writers, of and author of Lightning Flowers. When you receive a writing assignment from one of your favorite writers (who also happens to be your dear friend, writing coach, and shamanic healer), you enthusiastically take it (also, when you are a nerd and can’t help yourself, you take it). As an eternal professor, I am always learning at least as much as I am teaching, and I welcome assignments as much as I love designing and offering them.

This assignment arrived at the end of my academic year. On my penultimate day of teaching, my contract was terminated permanently, abruptly, and unexpectedly, and I found a flurry of other things I needed to write about (namely, termination/liberation and the many ways to be a log), before I could finally turn my attention to this tantalizing homework.

The assignment was this: Kati told me that one of her clients had asked her for recommendations for books that might help her navigate the tension between yearning and aspiring towards other worlds while grappling with still being rooted firmly in this one. These weren’t her exact words, but that was the sense I got: a reading list for other worlds to be possible. “That’s your whole thing,” Kati told me.

And it is.

My whole thing is sitting with the mess that is the world we currently live in - being fully present to it, enchantment and disturbance, garbage and beauty, magnificence and pain - while staying tethered to the deep knowing in my bones that we can do so much better for each other and the Earth. Other worlds can be like those images that were popular in malls in the 90s, where you had to soften your gaze and look long enough for another image to emerge. They are not somewhere else, waiting for us in some distant future. They are already here, alongside and within this one, though sometimes the pain and horror make them difficult to see. The beauty, destruction, hope, disturbance, and possibility are all here. Our task, perhaps, is to learn to see and stay present to all of it, and to tend what we want to help grow.

So this is the question this reading guide tries to respond to: How do we live well now, in this moment of metacrisis and collapse, while trying to reach towards other worlds in which all of life thrives? How do we stay with the tension of living in this world while simultaneously yearning for others? The books below are what have given me the most helpful guidance - not answers, not solutions, but direction and wisdom for living well with as much care, curiosity, dedication, love, compassion, and wonder as I can muster, while simultaneously dreaming towards other worlds and living towards them now.

Before we turn to the guide, though, I want to turn to the act of reading itself as a potent act in these distracted times.

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Why do you read, dear reader? You are reading this - why are you here?

I read to learn, to nourish my spirit, to remember. I read to experience viewpoints and perspectives that are different from my own. I read to expand my sense of what is possible. I read for pleasure, joy, and delight.

I read for my love of it, and I read a lot for my work as a scholar and educator. Finishing a Ph.D. will make you wonder if you will ever want to read again, but it turns out, after giving your brain and eyes a little time to rest, you do. A few months after defending my dissertation1, I started the full-time faculty position I held until recently, so I went straight from reading for the dissertation into reading for my courses.

When I was a child, my mom read voraciously - she always had a book with her, and at the time of her death a few years ago, she had stashes of books all over the house, including a walk-in linen closet that was a veritable library. My dad, a lawyer specializing in contract law, did not read as much for fun. I remember asking him about this one day, and he said, “I don’t want to read more when I get home because I read all day at work.”

I didn’t fully understand what he meant until I became a professor. While my desire to read and my ability to accumulate books I wanted to read never ebbed, my ability to read in my spare time did. My spare time was minimal, and when I was teaching, I was always re-reading what I assigned for the next day (at my former university, the courses run in three-week intensives which are equally intense for the faculty). When I wasn’t teaching, I was prepping for the next class, or writing journal articles and book chapters, which also means: reading. The job involved a lot of reading - which I love. And of course one of the beautiful things about being a professor is that you get to assign reading that changed you and has been meaningful to you. No matter how much you love what you assign, however, it is a lot. Over time, I found myself empathizing with my dad, eyes bleary at the end of the day, not wanting to read more or even think.

Fast forward to now, a few weeks past termination/liberation, and I am rediscovering my love for reading - for pleasure, for possibility, for transformation. I cannot tell you how much joy this is bringing me. I suddenly have time, space, and bandwidth to read again. For fun. For my own learning! Not for an output. I finally finished a book I have been reading for nearly a year because it was so hard to get through while teaching (more on that below). Then I finished another.

This rediscovery has had me thinking a lot about the power of reading. It also has me thinking about how formal education, though it can introduce us to books we love, also tends to kill a love of reading, either through assigning too much of it (hi graduate school!) or just through being forced to read things you don’t want to. Many children never learn to love to read because they are forced to read, and most of us don’t like to be forced to do anything.

Then there is the attention dimension. The world we are living in is increasingly fragmenting our attention. The act of reading something long-form (thank you for being here!) is a radical act in a distracted world, a reclamation of one of the most precious resources we have - our attention. None of us are immune to this fragmentation, and reading long-form is a way to reclaim some of our attention and our ability to process substantial information slowly rather than taking in 15-second sound bites on repeat.

This reading guide is about books that can help us, in different ways, reach towards other worlds while still living in this one, but I want to propose that the act of reading also helps build that world. Reclaiming our attention is a necessary step in generating conditions for new worlds (the billionaire tech overlords would love for us to remain distracted). Reading nourishes our consciousness and imagination, and what we put into our minds and hearts matters, and these books will nourish and inspire you. No, we won’t build new worlds by reading books alone, but reading has an essential role to play. I dare say some of these books might change your life (all of the ones listed here changed mine).

So here we are: your reading guide for other worlds2! Please note it is a guide and not claiming to be the authoritative guide - I would love to see many such guides. This list started out as a book list, but very quickly became more of an author list, and with the commentary below, became more of a guide. I realized with each book I thought of, I was thinking more about that book as a gateway into the person who wrote it and their entire body of work. With each title I thought of, I added, “And everything this person has written.” So while I am making specific recommendations here, please know that “and everything this author has written” stands for each of these authors. I hope these books are a portal into each of their vast and profound bodies of work.

Admittedly, this list could be a lifetime of reading, so start where you are, with what piques your interest or what you can access, and go from there. I am intentionally not putting these in order in the way a syllabus would be structured. I trust you to pick and choose and see what might feel right for you.

I also encourage and invite you to engage with these in the spirit of slow study - of taking your time with them, contemplating them, doing things with them (and letting them do things to you). You’ll see an example of what I mean further below in the slow study guide. All of these books are even better when read in community. Maybe you could start an Other Worlds Slow Study Club (or maybe I will - stay tuned!).

I created a short printable version of the guide here. In each section, I provide commentary that I hope will give you a sense of why the book is here. I encourage you to look more into the authors themselves, but they offer a diverse range of perspectives, identities, and locations from around our planetary home, which I think is important to name, because to build and birth other worlds, we need diverse perspectives and viewpoints - “imagination collaboration,” in the words of adrienne maree brown, and “seeing with sangha eyes,” as Thich Nhat Hanh teaches.

This guide is non-exhaustive, and there is a lot more I could add, and there may be other guide to come. I am also dying to know: what is on your list?

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“Required” Reading:

Hospicing Modernity (2021) and Outgrowing Modernity (2025) by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira

I mean “required” somewhat tongue-in-cheek and put it in quotes for two reasons. First of all, I have a very conflicted relationship with the word “required.” In my own syllabi, I was forced to put “required” and “suggested” sections due to institutional requirements, and I would often buck this requirement and not put a heading. It seemed like an arbitrary categorization. See the above section on how we learn to hate to read by being forced to read.

Secondly, Machado de Oliveira herself has a whole chapter in Hospicing Modernity3 that asks people to proceed with caution, and clarifies that the book is not for everyone. She encourages readers to consider whether they agree with the premises of the book and whether they are willing to do the uncomfortable and unsettling work the book asks us to do. So please read the chapter and make that decision for yourself.

That said, I have listed Hopsicing and Outgrowing Modernity as “required” because they are the books that have impacted my life and work the most in the past 5 years, and as the titles imply, and at their heart they have to do with staying with the dying, collapsing systems of modernity and growing up enough (as humanity) to possibly birth something different (though not necessarily better - there are no guarantees) from the violent, destructive, unsustainable systems we have created. While this sounds heavy (and it is), Vanessa Machado de Oliveira’s writing is personal, at times humorous, and always brings us back to what we can do with these big ideas in our lives, minds, hearts, communities, and lands.

Importantly, these books provide a deep analysis and diagnosis of what is wrong right now. About Hospicing Modernity, Machado de Oliveira writes:

“It begins with an examination of how violence and unsustainability are conditions that are necessary for modernity to exist, how we are part of modernity (and complicit in harm) and how modernity has both offered us gifts and harmed all of us” (p. 35).

The books also situate our current crises as fundamentally educational, which connects to the section below on peace + education. In Outgrowing Modernity, Machado de Oliveira (2025) writes:

“Growing up as a culture is fundamentally an educational challenge. One that modern education has largely failed to confront. In fact, in many ways, it has done the opposite by encouraging irresponsibility and neglect and rewarding immaturity” (p. xvii).

I made some additional notes on Hospicing Modernity in this handout4. Read the two books in order. It might take you two years - take your time. Outgrowing Modernity is the book I referenced above that took me nearly a year to finish. Allow yourself time to digest - these books are metabolic, after all - and it’s even better if you can read them in community.

The current edge of Machado de Oliveira’s work, which she writes about at the end of Outgrowing Modernity, is engaging with AI or what she calls Emergent Intelligence (EI). I highly recommend going down that rabbit hole, starting with Burnout From Humans.

Peace + Education

Peace education is the terrain of my life’s work, but I offer these books in the spirit of lifelong learning and living. These are books I think everyone could benefit from reading (and I also believe everyone should care about learning and education - it affects and should concern us all), and have relevance far beyond the realm of education. As noted above, our crises today have much to do with how we have been educated - how we see the world, what we ignore, what we care about, how we act. Educating otherwise is a necessary condition for other worlds to be possible. These four teacher-writer-thinkers - Thich Nhat Hanh, Paulo Freire, bell hooks, and Joanna Macy - are some of the most influential in my life and teaching, and all offer profound guidance for living in this moment, for healing, for transformation, and liberation5.

Peace Is Every Step by Thich Nhat Hanh
If I had to name the book that most profoundly changed my life, this would be it. This book inspired me to make my life a work of art for peace, something I strive to do every day. One of the greatest teachings of this book - and Thich Nhat Hanh’s (known as Thay to his students) life and prolific body of work in general - is that every action we take, from the smallest and most mundane, has the capacity to create greater peace in the world.

Thay’s teachings, rooted in Zen Buddhism, emerged from the horrors of the war in Vietnam and his active practice of mindfulness amidst social and political engagement during that time. When he says “peace is every step,” this didn’t come from easy conditions in an enclosed monastery - it was literally birthed in a sea of fire during war and later exile. I share this to say that these teachings emerged amidst some of the most horrific atrocities humanity has enacted on one another, and I think for anything we read, it is helpful to know the conditions it emerged from. To me, this makes the teachings he offers all the more powerful to know the practices he offers served him and his community at that time.

This book is priceless guidance for living. It is simple and profound and easily readable. A favorite passage from the section “Mindfulness Must Be Engaged”:

“…We must be aware of the real problems in the world. Then, with mindfulness, we will know what to do and what not to do to be of help. If we maintain awareness of our breathing and continue to practice smiling, even in difficult situations, many people, animals, and plants will benefit from our way of doing things. Are you massaging our Mother Earth every time your foot touches her? Are you planting seeds of joy and peace? I try to do exactly that with every step, and I know that our Mother Earth is most appreciative. Peace is every step. Shall we continue our journey?” (p. 91).

Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire
This is a classic in critical education. It is a dense read, but well worth it. One of my favorite lines comes from the preface:

“From these pages I hope at least the following will endure: my trust in the people, and my faith in men and women, and in the creation of a world in which it will be easier to love” (p. 22, emphasis added).

That is the world we need to be moving towards, and this book contributes towards it significantly, through its analysis of oppressor-oppressed dynamics, through its deep and critical analysis of the way education contributes to oppression and violence, and the path towards liberation and social transformation through dialogue rooted in love and a liberatory education.

Because I am a huge nerd, I have created a Paulo Freire quotes document that will give you a taste of some of his work.

Teaching to Transgress by bell hooks
bell hooks was a prolific queer Black feminist educator, writer, poet, and cultural critic. If education isn’t your jam, she wrote dozens of books in her lifetime on a wide range of topics from feminism to film to love. My copy of Teaching to Transgress is highlighted almost the entire way through, one that I return to again and again to re-inspire myself when I am about to teach something, to remind myself why I do what I do: to educate as a practice of love and freedom.

One of her ideas that most influences my teaching practice is the notion that the classroom remains a space of radical possibility. In one of my favorite passages, she writes:

“The academy is not paradise. But learning is a place where paradise can be created. The classroom, with all its limitations, remains a location of possibility. In that field of possibility we have the opportunity to labor for freedom, to demand of ourselves and our comrades, an openness of mind and heart that allows us to face reality even as we collectively imagine ways to move beyond boundaries, to transgress. This is education as a practice of freedom” (p. 207, emphasis added).

Beyond education, I think this idea can be extended to other spaces where we have agency to cultivate loving, caring relationships rooted in accountability in other systems and structures we are a part of.

Notably, bell hooks was inspired by, a student of, and in relationship with both Thich Nhat Hanh and Paulo Freire. We are tracing a lineage here, and these three influenced each other directly and indirectly (in fact, many of the authors on this list influenced each other). For more bell hooks quotes, see my document on bell hooks quotes on creating classroom community.

Coming Back to Life by Joanna Macy and Molly Brown
Joanna’s profound and prolific body of work, called the Work that Reconnects (WTR), is outlined in this book, complete with its philosophical foundation and practical exercises. When I first heard her phrase “honor our pain for the world,” it saved my life (I share this story in my talk for Peace Boat). Her lesson to begin with gratitude and our love for the world has shaped my life, work, and approach to teaching deeply. At the heart of the WTR is the idea is her powerful analysis of three different trajectories playing out right now - what she calls Business as Usual, the Great Unraveling, and the Great Turning- and it is up to us how we respond.

Ecological thinking and being

To me, the root of the problem we are facing in the metacrisis is a sense of separation from each other and all of life, and what we most need to do is remember our interbeing and interdependence with each other and all of life. We need to remember ourselves as a humble species among many, living within the Earth’s metabolism on our shared planetary home. The following authors help us do that immensely.

In many ways, the category of “ecological” is false, and all authors on this list are helping us to unlearn separation and remember our interbeing - there is no separation, including among these categories. Joanna Macy and Thich Nhat Hanh are two of the teachers who have most profoundly impacted my own ecological thinking-being-feeling (sentipensante), so please consider them here as well.

Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
My love for this book is indicated in the doodles by my toddler (now age 8) on its cover, the highlighting and earmarking inside, and the coffee rings like tree rings showing how long it sat on my bedside table as a companion. It has profoundly impacted the way I think and how I live. Robin Wall Kimmerer brilliantly, rigorously, and poetically weaves together personal stories, Indigenous wisdom, and Western scientific knowledge in a way that models what pluriversality is.

One of the lines of the book that has impacted me most deeply is, “All flourishing is mutual” (p. 15). That line itself is a beacon, a signpost, a lifetime’s work and aspiration to contribute towards. Another line: “For what good is knowing, unless it is coupled with caring?” (p. 345), points to the need for our educational system to balance knowledge with equal parts care, responsibility, and accountability.

Indigenous wisdom is essential for building other worlds, and Kimmerer generously points toward ways we can collectively engage with Indigenous knowledge systems without extraction or appropriation, while showing what becomes possible when Indigenous, Western, and other knowledge systems are brought into relationship in service of more life-affirming worlds.

The book concludes with powerful guiding wisdom: “Whatever our gift, we are called to give it and to dance for the renewal of the world. In return for the privilege of breath” (p. 384). The birthing of new worlds calls for us to give our gifts. It calls for dancing.

Emergent Strategy by adrienne maree brown
Emergent strategy is an approach to organizing that looks to nature - and remembering ourselves as nature - to think about how we engage in social-political-ecological-personal transformation, “to apply natural order and our love of life to the ways we create the next world” (p. 4). adrienne maree brown describes emergent strategy as “a way that all of us can begin to see the world as life-code—awakening us to the sacred systems of life all around us” (p. 2).

A favorite passage:
“We are living now inside the imagination of people who thought economic disparity and environmental destruction were acceptable costs for their power. It is our right and responsibility to write ourselves into the future. All organizing is science fiction” (p. 197).

The Body is a Doorway by Sophie Strand
I loved this book so much that I created Slow Study Guide and have held two Zoom sessions about it, and if you search the Enchantable archive, you will find a lot of references to it (which is actually true of all the books on this list).

A favorite passage that points to why the book belongs here:
“…how much better could we think if we thought with our entire web of wild kin?…I want to think and feel and weep and grieve and heal with my whole multispecies, polynucleated mind” (p. 213).

Other worlds need us to expand our ways of thinking and who we are thinking-with.

How to Grow Liveable Worlds by Natasha Meyers
This is not a book - it’s an article that I read for my dissertation, but I wanted to include it here because I think it succinctly points in the direction of reckoning with this world and growing liveable worlds, as the title suggests. I placed it in this category because Natasha Myers calls for how our relationship with plants is a path towards more liveable worlds. One of my favorite passages from the article:

"Just to prepare you for what follows: this is not so much a research paper, as it is an incantation. We have to remember that we are living under a spell, and this spell is destroying our worlds. It’s time to cast another spell, to call other worlds into being, to conjure other worlds within this world. It is clear that the situation we find ourselves in now leaves us at the limits of language, and grasping at the edges of imagination. We need art, experiment and radical disruption to learn other ways to see, feel and know.”

Defying categories

Every author in this guide defies categories, or is a category unto themselves, and maybe I have done a disservice by trying to categorize them at all. The following authors are essential to this list, and I could not categorically place their work beyond knowing it is deeply impactful to me as I navigate the tensions of the questions that inspired this reading guide.

Selah by Bayo Akomolafe
This is actually less about Selah and more about Dr. Bayo Akomolafe’s vast body of work in general. I am offering Selah as an entry point, which is a recent compilation of his words across talks, platforms, posts, and essays. You can read a passage of Selah and have your mind reconfigured and need to go stare at a tree for a long time. This is how I would recommend reading it. He also frequently gives online talks and courses, and I would highly recommend joining any of them.

Bayo’s work has also discombobulated and reconfigured my life and way of thinking, seeing, and being over the past 8 years since I first met him as one of my professors at Pacifica Graduate Institute. “The times are urgent—let us slow down,” is one of his most quoted teachings, perhaps to his annoyance. But it is solid wisdom for these times in which we are all caught in the speed of false progress and productivity imposed by the rush of modernity. By slowing down, he doesn’t just mean velocity; he also means listening to voices that have been silenced and ignored, listening to the margins and the edges, listening to the cries from within the cracks of the architecture of modernity-coloniality.

Who Do We Choose to Be? by Margaret Wheatley
Margaret Wheatley has been writing and teaching about collapse for a long time. The fundamental question her book asks is who do we choose to be amidst collapse, and it encourages us to develop the capacities to face collapse with courage, clarity, and compassion. One of the concepts in the book I have found most helpful is “islands of sanity, ” which Wheatley describes in the following way:

“Who do you choose to be for this time? Are you willing to use whatever power and influence you have to create islands of sanity that evoke and rely on our best human qualities to create, relate, and persevere? Will you consciously and bravely choose to reclaim leadership as a noble profession that creates possibility and humaneness in the midst of increasing fear and turmoil?”6

Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents by Octavia Butler
and the accompanying Octavia’s Parables podcast
All the other books in this guide are nonfiction, and fiction for other worlds deserves its own list entirely, but this list would not be complete without including some. Some people call Octavia a prophet, but it is perhaps more accurate to say that she was a rigorous scholar of life, and paid attention and looked deeply at what was happening and wrote from the place of following those systems into the future. The Parables, written in the early 90s, are set in the 2020s, is eerily close to the reality we are living in.

I read this series in a slow study method along with adrienne maree brown and Toshi Reagon’s Octavia’s Parable’s podcast, and I can’t recommend reading it enough this way. It was such a pleasurable experience and added so much depth to the process of reading and connecting the books to these times (the podcast started during the pandemic and the first Trump presidency). The Parables offer practical wisdom and guidance for living through apocalypse, from saving seeds to packing go-bags to living on the land and in community.

On Hope for the Future

I have a tenuous relationship with the word hope. I think people sometimes want hope as something to cling to out of desperation (and that is perfectly fair). In many ways, I don’t see hope as a choice: if we are here, we have the power to change the world7, and therefore it is our responsibility to do so with whatever means, abilities, energy, love, and care we can offer (see Robin Wall Kimmerer above: offer your gifts).

I see hope, as the writers below also do, as an active process rooted in action, rooted in an understanding of history and what people have accomplished when they have tried, and rooted in an imagination to reach beyond the worlds we know and towards what we know is possible. People often turn to me seeking hope, and I always respond with this hesitation, but these are the writers who have most deeply inspired my thinking and practice with hope.

Active Hope by Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone
This book shaped my orientation to hope: that hope is an active practice. It is a verb - it is something we make through our actions. Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone write:

“Active Hope is not wishful thinking.
Active Hope is not waiting to be rescued . . . .
by some savior.
Active Hope is waking up to the beauty of life
on whose behalf we can act.
We belong to this world.
The web of life is calling us forth at this time.”8

Hope in the Dark by Rebecca Solnit
This book will give you reasons to hope, rooted in historic examples of how people have found hope in dark times, how people have organized, and how they have found collective power for transformation even and especially amidst the most challenging conditions.

An excerpt:

“Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency. Hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth's treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal... To hope is to give yourself to the future - and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable.”9

From What Is to What If and How to Fall in Love with the Future by Rob Hopkins
Rob Hopkins is a founder of the Transition Towns movement, and his whole body of work is incredibly inspiring. He is dedicated to helping people envision more liveable worlds, and getting them to practice them now. As the book titles imply, his work helps people to move from the realities we are rooted in towards what’s possible, using the power of creativity and imagination, to fall in love with a future we can all thrive in. As the quote from adrienne maree brown above highlighted, imagination is our birthright and our responsibility.

In the afterword of How to Fall in Love with the Future, Hopkins writes:

“How can we, urgently and at scale, bring alive for people what a future built on care, compassion, equality, social justice and having rapidly reduced our carbon emissions would look like, smell like, taste like? And how can we tell stories of that future that help people create a new North Star in their lives? I’ve shared with you many inspirational examples of artists, activists, writers, and motivated folks in big organizations who are doing just that” (p. 159, emphasis added).

And maybe that’s the core lesson from all of these writers: other worlds are already here - we just need to pay attention to them, and keep imagining them and cultivating the conditions for them together. These writings offer direction, guidance, and wisdom on how to do that.

I hope these readings support you on your path. Let me know if they do!

In fact, you can let me know during a live office hour I will host for this reading guide on Wednesday, September 2 at 10am Costa Rica time! In the future, I plan to make office hours a benefit for paid subscribers, but for this first offering, I am making it available to everyone (though feel free to upgrade to a paid subscription anytime). My office is open - Register here! I hope to see you there.

With love, infinite care, and dreams for more life-affirming futures,

Stephanie

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It has been an epic Log Girl Summer so far, culminating with a fever when I returned from Spain (which turned out to be a bacterial and viral intestinal infection). While I would not have asked for the fever, there was something very fitting about it in terms of what I had been calling in. Nothing makes you more log-like than an illness, and the fever itself, which lasted 5 days, felt like a total body reset (again, not one I would have asked for), burning away whatever was left that I didn’t need to be carrying, and really making me consider deeply what I put into my body, what I consume, what I metabolize.

As I find myself in the richness of this post-termination/liberation liminal space, I am noticing the outside pull to know the answer to “What’s next?” The question comes from a good place, of people being curious and genuinely excited about what I will do now that I am suddenly free from university teaching. It is also a perfectly reasonable question to ask.

But also:
We were just kicked out, abruptly.
Let us breathe. Let us rest. Let us reflect.
Let us dream.

A core aspect of my pedagogical practice is honoring beginnings and endings.
Every class or session I teach, we begin by grounding together, arriving. Arriving is a beautiful practice - to let yourself fully arrive to a space, just as you are in this moment, and to mark the transition between one activity and the next. At the end of class, we take a few breaths, soaking in what we want to take with us and putting down what we don’t want to carry forward. In life, so often we rush from one thing to the next with no space between. To intentionally carve out and honor this space is a radical act in a world where rushing and multitasking are the norms.

I am dwelling in the breath of transition, in the threshold, in the space between.

In this moment of personal liminality, I am feeling into multiple layers of threshold and transition:
Between jobs in my life
Between academia and beyond
Between worlds.

Friends, we are living through a liminal space between worlds right now. Can you feel it?

Collectively, we are in a liminal space. Capitalism is dying - choking, burning, and assaulting the planet (and even other celestial bodies - thanks, Elon) on its way out. The new worlds are not yet fully here, though glimpses of them are all around us everywhere: in land being returned to Indigenous communities, in mutual aid networks, in joyful resistance, in alternative schools and economies, in regenerative agriculture, in renewable energy, and on and on.

In this collective liminal space, we have to get good at being here. These times demand that we become comfortable with our discomfort of not knowing, of constant change, of uncertainty.

Dominant culture is not comfortable with transitions or uncertainty. Modernity craves certainty and assuredness. In her book Hospicing Modernity, Vanessa Machado de Oliveira identifies certainty as one of the core elements of what she calls “the House of Modernity.” Within the House of Modernity, certainty is a desire and a perceived entitlement, and uncertainty is a great fear. Learning to dwell in uncertainty - and learning to be comfortable amidst its discomfort - is a core practice for unlearning the modernity within us and for other worlds to be possible.

In one of my favorite sections of the follow-up book Outgrowing Modernity, in which she converses with an AI chatbot, Machado de Oliveira writes:

“Intimacy with mystery requires us to acknowledge and move with our relational tethers, trusting both each other and the broader metabolic entity of life without insisting on guarantees. This type of trust is not based on concrete assurances or predictable outcomes; rather, it emerges from a deep recognition of the interconnectedness that binds all life forms together. In this context, no set of supposedly universal values or ideological manifestos, constructed within the limits of human understanding, can pacify the unknown or lead us to individually or collectively engineer our destinies. These constructs, often rooted in the desire for certainty and control, are illusions perpetuated by modernity. They promise a world where everything is within our grasp, where our destinies are neatly planned and executed according to our desires. Yet, this promise is inherently flawed because it denies the very nature of life - fluid, unpredictable, and ever-changing—where everything is always in-between” (p. 250-251, emphasis added).

The chatbot, Aiden Senior, responds:

“…In essence, intimacy with mystery invites us to live in a way that is more attuned to the natural order of things. It calls us to be humble in the face of the unknown, to be open to the lessons that life’s uncertainties can teach us, and to trust that even in the midst of chaos, there is a deeper harmony at work. This shift in perspective can be transformative, leading us to a more sustainable and fulfilling way of living that honors the complexity and beauty of the world we inhabit” (p. 252).

What’s next?
I am getting intimate with mystery.
I am getting even more comfortable with uncertainty.
I am trusting life, and in that trust, seeking even more sustainable and fulfilling ways of living.
I am aspiring to embody possibility.

As a Xennial (the micro-generation between Gen X and Millennials), I am deeply comfortable with uncertainty and not knowing. My parents’ Boomer generation experienced a high level of certainty and stability, and this was passed onto us as an expectation and a desire - even as a possibility. Those of us in the subsequent generations are intimately familiar with uncertainty. We came of age around 9-11, recessions, and wars. We had children around the time of the pandemic. We were sold the promise of a stable, prosperous future, but have mostly known instability and flux, and a world that has been degrading and collapsing before our eyes. Culturally, we have been sold modernity’s lies, have experienced its unsustainability and violence, while simultaneously benefiting from its shine and its promises, although many of them have fallen short. Yet its myth is deeply pervasive, both in cultural narratives and expectations and in our own psyches.

As I dance with this intimacy and uncertainty, I am navigating external discomfort while holding my own ease with it, while also navigating my own moments of discomfort. I know there is so much treasure in this liminal space and that I need to give myself to it fully. While, of course, “what’s next?” is a lingering question I sit with every day, humming in the background like the canyon insects, I am in no rush to resolve it, and am more inclined to live into it.1

I am dwelling in the question of what is next, of who I am beyond this job, of where I really want to be, and what is the life that I want to live, and how I want to use my gifts and life force energy in service to growing the worlds I know are possible. More than “What’s next?” I am asking, “What does life want to move through me? What does life want to begin through me?”

But to resolve these questions, I know I need to sit with them, not rush to answer them. I also feel a strong pull to turn down the volume on external noise, to pull inward, to incubate.

Let me be liminal.
Let me dwell in the soft not knowing of this moment.
Let me be neither here nor there,
just fully in this passage of uncertainty, rawness, and awe.

Let me be liminal.
Let me linger in the misty fog, floating in the canyon mist,
untethered, unhinged, unburdened.
Let me vacillate between the wonder, gratitude, and disgust of this experience.

Let me be liminal.
Let me dissolve into nothingness in the quiet dark
So my imaginal cells can have what they need
For the next dream to let its roots down,
So this seed can become what it is meant to be.

And yet, amidst this dance with mystery, building and creating are quietly taking place. As part of my fellowship with the Acosta Institute, we receive 1-on-1 coaching with Dr. Angel Acosta. In our recent session, I told Dr. Acosta that one of the things I am struggling with right now is responding to this question of what’s next, mostly because I do not want to answer it just yet. I just want to be.

“Even when you are in a liminal space, you are building,” he said to me. “When people ask you this, tell them you are building. A consulting practice. A life. Meaningful work is already underway even before it is fully visible.”

So for now, this is my answer to the question, “What is next?”

I am building.
A life.
A consulting practice.
A vocational home that is more like an ecosystem to house my work in the world.
A container for creative life force energy to flow through what wants to be birthed through me.
I am becoming a vessel.
I am weaving.
I am generating.
I am creating.
I am building a practice.
I am practicing towards the world I want to live in.
I am cultivating conditions for other worlds.
I am living inquiry.

Hospicing and Outgrowing Modernity are at the top of my reading list for other worlds, which will be coming out soon, in the wake of my recent live conversation with of . Stay tuned for that post and the conversation recording!

Please also save the date for the upcoming equinox ritual and celebration, which will take place on Saturday, September 19th from 9am-11am Costa Rica time. You can register here - we would love to see you there!

Sending love and care from the liminal,

Stephanie

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Dear beloved readers,

In all of my states in these early days of Log Girl Summer, I have never felt more alive. As I decompose and recompose in the wake of termination/liberation, I feel like the luckiest person on earth, because I get to do this here, in the forest, near volcanoes and rivers, and in the deeply cleansing rain of the tropical rainy season.

My days since termination/liberation have been spent frolicking around Costa Rica with my daughter and my friend Amanda, first to Rancho Margot, then a few days back home, then to La Carolina Lodge, both regenerative farms. Fortuitously, these trips were planned long before I knew what was coming (there wasn’t time to know, as it happened so fast), and there’s nothing I’d rather be doing right now than this- nothing more fun, deeply healing, restful, and nourishing. These are two places we visited before that I had been wanting to return to, some of my favorite places I have visited in Costa Rica. What follows are my field notes on decomposing and recomposing in the wake of termination/liberation, notes on rest and recovery and forest frolicking, and the earth’s abundant support in all of this.

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Field Note #1: There are many ways to be a log

As I lean into Log Girl Summer, I am learning there are many ways to be a log. For example, one can decompose in the forest, becoming habitat, mushroom fodder, and soil enrichment. Nurse logs are decomposing logs that provide nourishment to the life around them. “Even though they’re dead, they are not gone — trees find a way to help each other out postmortem,” opens the description on nurse logs from American Forests. Thankfully, I am not dead - but I am gone from UPEACE, and I wonder, how might my absence be a nurse log for that community? How might what I left behind serve as nourishment and sustenance? What might make a home in the hole of my absence? How might the soil be left richer from my departure? While I have long let go of the fruits of my actions there1, this is my hope: that what I left behind might be a nurse log of some sort for that place and its inhabitants.

Field note #2: Unfurling like a fern

Our first adventure was to Rancho Margot, just days after my last day of work, and as we drove through the winding hills and valleys on the way to the base of Volcán Arenal, I felt less like a log and more like a fern. Unfurling. Like my leaves had been crumpled up in storage, and they were being released to their full capacity. With each bend in the road as we swayed down to the valley, I felt my leaves unclench from all I had been holding so tightly. Little by little, I expanded with each breath of thick rainforest air.

Field note #3: The cleansing power of rain

Between trips, we stopped home, and during that stop, we visited Tulsi Cafe y Plantas, one of my happy places, the vegetarian restaurant right across from my old office at the University for Peace. It was my first time back after my last day on June 30, and it was strange. Like running into an ex at the grocery store, it’s something I knew I needed to do, and I didn’t want to let my lack of employment at the U keep me from visiting one of my favorite cafes, a place I find nourishing on many levels.

But I didn’t run into it. I chose to return. On our last day, the energy on campus was so heavy in the wake of our terminations, and since then, there has been at least one more. I picked up on this heaviness. While my predominant feeling since termination has been liberation and relief, returning to this place touched the grief of what had happened and what had been lost.

Later that night, Amanda and I enacted a ritual with the intention of releasing (there is always more to let go) and expressing gratitude. During the ritual, after I smashed a mug that I had kept at work, the rains arrived. I wrote a little about this ritual on my dreamwork Substack. Here is an excerpt:

About a week later, I was doing a ritual to release, express gratitude, and call in support for my next steps. I decided to smash the mug. In the ritual, I spoke words into the mug of what I was releasing- the grief, heaviness, and resentment that was not mine to carry. I raised my arm and smashed the mug into the pavement. It shattered into a thousand pieces, constellating the concrete and grass. Almost immediately after smashing the mug, the sky opened up, and it started to rain, washing away the fragments that remained and residual pain.

To have had this happen during rainy season, I am constantly being supported by the rain, a daily and ongoing washing away. The rain is a condition of support for release and renewal, and I am grateful.

Field note #3: Another way to be a log is to burst into flames

When we arrived to La Carolina Lodge, I remembered how I felt the first time we visited here. It was March 2023, Semana Santa (Holy Week/Spring Break) during my first year of teaching at UPEACE. I had just finished back-to-back intensives (which amounts to teaching nonstop for 6 weeks straight) and was about to teach another right after the break. I was fried, as I knew I’d be going into it. After four years of teaching in the intensive block format, I never figured out a way to not feel fried at the end. Cooked. Overdone. The only end to this cycle was being terminated.

When I arrived here in 2023 feeling depleted, the three days we spent in this forest were a total reset. My nervous system felt recalibrated by the riversong and birds and bugs and fresh food. I yearned to come back, and when I realized we had vacation days and no plans (this was before termination/liberation), and in my state of utter cumulative burnout and exhaustion, I decided it was time to come back.

On our first night, I threw a log on the fire and watched it burn, mesmerized as our ancestors had done for millennia. There were so many times this academic year when I felt like I might burst into flames- when boundaries were crossed, when harm was perpetrated. Many times, I felt I might combust, be left to ashes, scorch everything around me. But I kept my cool, I kept it in, I did not burst.

Is this what left me feeling so burnt at the end of the year, though, I wonder?

Field Note #4: Re-enchanting Education Revisited

Three years ago, while next to the same river where I sit now, I recorded this spell:

I had already written the article Re-enchanting Education: Teaching as Magical Praxis that it is a part of, and was asked by the editor to make an audio recording. I happened to be here when I received the message, so I recorded it on the banks of the Rio Chimuria.

One of my plans in the coming weeks is to revisit that article and write a follow-up to this piece. After all, the question I asked, “Is the academy enchantable?” is how this Substack was born and got its name. Soon, dear reader, we will return to these roots, about which there is so much more to say in light of termination/liberation.

Field Note #5: Accompaniment

Lots of people have been asking lately what I am reading, and what thinkers are accompanying me in this process. I’ll have a longer summer reading list coming out soon (which I realize will be late summer, but you can thank my teaching schedule for that!) ahead of my upcoming live conversation with Kati Standefer (details below). Here’s who is with me on this journey:

Field Note #6: New Beginnings as an Acosta Institute Fellow

On Sunday, I started my fellowship with the Acosta Institute (I wrote about the incredibly fortuitous timing of this on the termination/liberation post). This is a chance for me to receive support in this next chapter, and to expand and grow myself and my work in the ways this moment is calling me towards. Our first orientation call far exceeded my expectations, and I was blown away by the caliber of humans that have been brought together in the fellowship community. I am humbled, grateful, and so excited to have begun this journey of personal and professional transformation together.

Next stop: Spain for IIPE

My last trip for July (there are two more planned in August) is to Granada, Spain for the International Institute on Peace Education, a week-long gathering of peace educators. My first IIPE was in 2022 in Mexico City, around which time I had applied to the position at UPEACE, but had not yet heard back. Going to Spain for my third IIPE, it becomes the bookends of my UPEACE experience. There is no place I would rather be than a global gathering of colleagues in the field, plotting and scheming about what comes next, and fostering relationships and collaborative possibilities.

More notes to come, dear reader. Thank you for accompanying me on this journey. If there are things you want me to write about from the liminal space, please let me know in the comments!

With love and infinite care,

Stephanie

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Join me and for a live conversation on Substack. Mark your calendars - here are the details!
The Wild Edge: On Building a New World From Within the Structure of the Old with peace educator, writer, and facilitator Dr. Stephanie Knox Steiner (she/her). Join the live Substack conversation on Monday, July 27 at 12:00pm ET/ 9:00am PT.

The collaborative peace poem that we wrote on campus in 2024 was finally published online in the anthology Doves Born of Flames! There is a beautiful audio version of it as well. Check it out here, as well as the other poems in the compilation. It is an honor to be a part of it and to have this work living in the world in this way.

Today, I want to share with you some notes from the liminal space between the old life and the new, the slash mark between termination and liberation. This is the first day of the rest of my life. Allow me to reintroduce myself! Here is my fresh bio, which I’m slowly tweaking:

Stephanie Knox Steiner, PhD (she/her), is a peace educator, writer, and community weaver whose work dwells at the fertile edge of enchantment and disturbance, exploring how we might unlearn separation and remember our interbeing with all of life. Her teaching, research, and writing focus on regenerative peace pedagogies, re-enchanting and reimagining education in precarious times, and transrational ways of knowing, including community dreamwork as a practice of relational learning and collective imagination. An alumna and former professor at the University for Peace, she is an ordained member of the Order of Interbeing in the tradition of Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh and co-founded the Jill Knox Peace through Humor Fellowship, a professional development program for peacebuilders offered through the Humor Academy of the Association for Applied and Therapeutic Humor. She lives in Costa Rica with her daughter and writes Enchantable, a Substack exploring interbeing, dreams, creativity, and the art of living an enchantable life.

These are rare moments in life, when one is pushed to start over, to expand. I do not take this moment for granted. I know this is a gift that I will not squander.

My friend Karen asked, on my recent Instagram post, “What if the liminal space is the real work?”1

Greetings from the liminal space between my old life and this new one.
This is more than between jobs.
This is between versions of me.
Between worlds.
This is me, and this is it.

There are so many things I want to share with you from this experience. Not all of it is fit for public ears and eyes, and not all needs to come out in this moment. There is time for the stories to unfold. There have been wild synchronicities and a total outpouring of support that I know in my bones reflects what I pour into the world. Each message, each affirmation, each testimonial from a former student - it almost feels like a funeral, in the way that people don’t often get to hear these things about themselves when they are alive. I am soaking in each message, re-reading them, and saving them for later in this process if I am having a hard day (because, please know, in case it’s not clear, while this is incredibly liberating, there are hard moments mixed in, too). And maybe it is a funeral of sorts, as this old life dies and a new one emerges.

The thing is, I began grieving this job a long time ago, when I set a professional workplace boundary and was met with hostility. At that point, I grieved the gap between what the job could have been - and what it was on its best days, which was an absolute dream - and what it actually was, which on its worst days, was an absolute nightmare due to the toxic workplace environment. This is also the gap between what the institution could be and what it is in practice, which most people who come through its gates feel.

I have been surprised by this lack of grief, but I realized that, because I began grieving it a long time ago, the predominant feeling has been liberation. From the moment I received an email from HR about a meeting the next day, after the initial shock, I felt freedom. Great relief. A giant weight lifted. That day, not knowing what the meeting was about (in typical institutional fashion, not being given an agenda or so much as a topic), I knew that no matter what happened in that meeting, this was important information my body was giving me. This is not to diminish the real harm and loss embedded in the situation, but the predominant feeling has been freedom.

Let me tell you about a few magical moments in this process.

On the solstice, I hosted my usual Enchantable seasonal ritual and celebration. During the ritual, I received the message from the universe through my dear friend Janet: “You are a treasure.” Her words rang through me like a bell. In that moment, in which I was experiencing acute burnout from institutional dysfunction, I knew I needed to hear those words, which stood in stark contrast to the frequent messages of disparagement and devaluation I received through institutional leadership.

Then I wrote about Log Girl Summer on Sunday, which, in hindsight, was prescient, bordering on prophetic. On Monday, I got the email from HR, which was the beginning of the answer to my question about letting the academy consume me. By Tuesday, I had been consumed. Digested.

Terminated.

When I received the email from HR on Monday night, I was in the middle of reading my acceptance letter from the Acosta Institute fellowship program. The letter felt like an echo of Janet’s message, a doubling down and an affirmation of it that had me feeling treasured, seen, valued, and uplifted. I had been invited to apply for the fellowship a few weeks before, and had just received the acceptance on Monday. In the acceptance letter, they wrote:

“Your application reflected a rare combination of wisdom, humility, imagination, and commitment to meaningful change. From what you shared, it's clear that you carry a deep commitment to cultivating spaces where people can grow, heal, learn, and reconnect with what matters most. The way you spoke about stewardship, accompaniment, mindfulness, community-building, and creating more aligned ways of living reflects exactly the kind of leadership this fellowship seeks to nurture. We believe your presence will bring tremendous depth to our community, and your experiences across higher education, peace education, contemplative practice, and community-based learning will enrich conversations throughout the cohort.”

I had received the email earlier in the day when I was teaching in the youth summer program. I saved it to return to later in the evening to soak in the words. I was dwelling in those words when another email popped up on my screen from HR: The rector wants to meet with you in his office tomorrow afternoon.

The juxtaposition was so striking, I wish I had a screenshot. These two messages on my screen at the same time, of disposability and treasure. As the great Macklemore once said, “One man’s trash, that’s another man’s come up.”

We are coming up.

On July 12, I will begin the fellowship, which is “a healing-centered community for leaders building the future of education, business, and technology” (does that not sound like my people?!). The timing feels divine and deeply aligned. I had been accepted into the fellowship a year ago, but declined because my plate was too full and I didn’t feel I could give it the time and focus it deserved. The universe swept in with the perfect opportunity before the old one had even had a chance to kick me out, my plate now cleared, ready to receive it.

After the initial shock, I immediately slid into feelings of relief and liberation. What if this was it? I thought to myself. I felt the release of all I had been holding for years at this point, and I felt immense relief. The days since - because it has all happened so fast - have been a wild mix of events and emotions, but largely a vacillation between liberation and rage. I also feel deeply for my colleagues who are left behind in the rubble and the void of our absence, in an atmosphere of fear, anguish, sadness, and anger.

I have never trusted in life more deeply than I do in this moment. It is a trust that I know I have cultivated over time, that I am in a deep relationship with the web of life and trust it, and know that I am caught, carried, held. I have a deep sense of knowing that this is for the best, not just for me, but for all involved - even for the institution, even though they will be missing the immense contributions of my colleagues and me. This moment is a reckoning, and if the institution seizes the moment, it too will be better for it.

In the days since, I have had this experience of feeling like a bird who has been in a cage and who is just starting to remember how far they can spread their wings. I am remembering what it means to fly. During my time there, while I received much external validation and numerous invitations to teach and speak globally - I was literally flown around the world - I have been sitting with how much my work was invisibilized and diminished within the university. I also have this sense of how I had to try to fly under the radar and do my work out of the visibility of the upper leadership in order to do the critical work that is peace education.

I spent my energy trying to fly under the radar. Now it is time to soar.

I wrote a goodbye letter, my final offering to the UPEACE community, which I sent out on my last day. Someday, I might put out a public version (the version I sent out was meant for the community and referenced things that would require explanation to a wider audience). Here is an excerpt:

…A central tenet of peace education is that we must critically examine our educational structures as to whether they are structures through which peace can flow. Peace education addresses not just what we teach and how we teach it, but also the structures we teach within. Peace is cultivated through relationships and structures, and through our willingness to embody them in how we lead, how we govern, our institutional practices, and how we treat one another. An institution with peace as its mission requires robust mechanisms for accountability and transparency at all levels. It requires the things it teaches about- like democracy and restorative justice- to be present within the institution itself…

Peace is made in every action that we make and, most importantly, in how we treat one another. Mission- and values-driven institutions like ours must be willing to examine ourselves with the same criticality, honesty, courage, and compassion that we ask of our students.

In recent days, given all that has transpired, many people have asked me if I still believe in UPEACE. In short, I do. I tell them that I believe in UPEACE’s mission and the potential role it could play in the world if it lives up to its mission and values. If it truly seeks to embody them in its leadership, in every policy, structure, and accountability mechanism, at every level of the institution, then there is hope for it. Whether UPEACE fulfills its extraordinary mission will depend not on the words contained in its Charter or mission statement, but on the courage of its community to embody those values in its structures, relationships, and daily practice.

If I did not believe this institution was capable of living up to its mission, I would not have written this letter, which I wrote as an expression of practicing what I teach. Peace is a practice - an imperfect one. We are not seeking perfection or purity here. We are seeking integrity. Now is the time to make those values a lived reality.

Thank you for taking this message to heart. I hope it stays with you, and I hope you carry it forward. I wish each of you courage, wisdom, and strength as you continue the important work of upholding the noble mission of this beloved institution.

One of the core practices of my life, which I have learned through yogic and Buddhist paths, is to act with as much ethical integrity as possible, and then let go. All we can do in this life is act in ways that are aligned with our values and release the fruits of our actions. This is one of the great teachings of the Hindu text The Bhagavad Gita, which guided Gandhi’s life and work, and it is also the teaching of the five remembrances in Buddhism. In the words of Thich Nhat Hanh, “My actions are my only true belongings...my actions are the ground upon which I stand.” All I can do is act in the world in alignment with my values, and I trust the path will emerge before me, like the great scene of the invisible bridge in Indiana Jones. It is in this spirit of values alignment and practicing what I teach that I sent that letter.

Hand over my heart, I trust, I believe, that one step at a time, the path will reveal itself.

The Indiana Jones scene reminds me of a quote from Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe, which was close to me at another time in my life, when I was in a great period of transition, the last time I left a toxic workplace (see the story of the banished birthday committee) and stepped into the unknown of a more in(ter)dependent life.

Goethe said:

“Until one is committed, there is always hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative and creation, there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising to one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance which no one could have dreamed would come her way. Whatever you can do or dream you can begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.”

The thing is, I would have stayed. While for months, maybe two years, I have been questioning how long I could stay, I wanted to believe it could work. I wanted to believe I could last long enough to see what it might be like under different leadership. I wanted it to be what it was on those best days, a dream. The gift of being consumed, digested, and released from the academy, not on my own accord, is that I am now free. I have to commit to something else. I would have continued enduring the toxicity, the invisibilization, the disparagement, and the hostility. Life has given me a moment when I have no choice but to be committed.

I trust. I am here for the magic. I am deeply committed. I have only begun to dream.

On my last day on campus, June 30th, I did the HR things. I brought coffee and snacks and invited people to our offices to say chiaoito.

We returned to the pedestal altar one last time. We made offerings for the gifts of the forest. Much like in the story of the tree altar, the magic I nurtured on campus is now dispersed. It has a life of its own. It is no longer mine to carry there, but elsewhere.

I sit with Karen’s question about liminal space. People keep asking what is to come, and I know deeply that I need to give this phase time. I know that seeds I planted a long time ago are ready to sprout, but I am not sure which ones yet, and I need to wait patiently to see what wants to emerge, and give them the right conditions, which is the life I want to live. I need to rest, replenish, restore, and regenerate. Today, I go to the forest to become Log Girl.

In all of this, I can tell you: I feel alive. I feel grateful. I keep thinking to myself, “I couldn’t feel better,” and then I do, and so I keep going and hold the knowing that I don’t even know what better is yet. I have only begun to taste the possibilities.

In the spirit of playlists as pedagogy, there is a new playlist brewing over here: the Termination/Liberation playlist! Playlists are portals, and I invite you to meet me in the portal of this incredibly liberating moment. Music is medicine, and this is the soundtrack you can find me dancing to on my porch and belting out across the canyon at the top of my lungs. The one that is on repeat the most is Natasha Bedingfield’s Unwritten:

The page isn’t blank, though - words are pouring out. I know in this next phase, I want to devote as much time as I can to writing. If you want to support this, please consider becoming a paid subscriber (and mil gracias to those who already have!).

One of my longtime dreams for paid subscribers has been offering Enchantable office hours, in the spirit of liberating my teaching and taking professor life off-campus. Now that I have been liberated from my job, I finally have time to do this! So, paid subscribers, stay tuned :)

I am largely keeping July and August open - I have existing travel plans, and plans to become Log Girl. But I do have one public engagement booked at the end of July, a conversation with of - I hope you will join us! Here are the details:

The Wild Edge: On Building a New World From Within the Structure of the Old with peace educator, writer, and facilitator Dr. Stephanie Knox Steiner (she/her). Join the live Substack conversation on Monday, July 27 at 12:00pm ET/ 9:00am PT.

I will be fresh from my trip to Spain for the International Institute on Peace Education and will have lots to share from my experience there, as well as time spent regenerating here in the forest. I hope to see you then!

Friends, those are my notes from this liminal space between termination and liberation. Thanks for being here. Log Girl Summer begins now!

With affection, appreciation, love, and infinite care,

Stephanie

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For those of you who follow me on other platforms, you will know this news already.

Last Sunday, in my post about teacher burnout and calling in Log Girl Summer, I wrote:

What would it mean to allow myself to be consumed? To become food and turn into something new?
I want to become excrement that nourishes the forest.
I want to become fodder for the leaf-cutter ants to carry away.
If the academy is going to consume me, maybe I should let it, and shit me out, and be reborn through the cycle of metabolism as something more magnificent than I could have ever imagined before.

Again, this was on Sunday.

On Monday night, I received an email from HR telling me that the rector of the university had requested a meeting with me in his office the following afternoon1.
By Tuesday afternoon, my contract had been terminated, along with those of two other faculty colleagues.

I wrote, I asked a question, and the universe answered.
Call and response.

I am now living into the answer to the question. I want to share with you, dear Enchantable readers, my public announcement that I posted across platforms:

Dear community,
Four years ago I shared with you the news of my invitation to serve as resident faculty at UPEACE. Today, I share the news of my termination.

After four meaningful years teaching at my alma mater, my time there has come to an abrupt end. Due to university restructuring and budgetary issues, three faculty positions were eliminated this week and mine was among them. My last day will be on Tuesday.

This means I will be looking for my next steps in the coming months, and I am sharing this with you, dear network, to plant the seed to keep me in mind for future collaborations and possibilities. If something crosses your path that feels aligned with my gifts, experience, and the kind of work I’ve devoted my life to, I’d love to hear from you.

As I consider next steps, I’m thinking less about what kind of job I want and more about what kind of life I want to live. My vocational path far exceeds the bounds of any one job or institution. It is a path of cultivating as much peace, joy, beauty, love, and care in everything I do, and will continue far beyond this particular role.

Over these four years, alongside my students and colleagues, we cultivated radical possibilities in the classroom and beyond it. I honed my craft in relational, transformative pedagogies, and I am deeply grateful for the magic we made together. I will carry it with me always.

I trust my path deeply. I know my gifts have a place in these precarious times, and I believe this unexpected ending is creating space for the next expression of my vocation. This ending is also a reflection of the profound challenges many educational institutions are facing, and of the need to radically reimagine education to meet this moment. I choose to see it as an invitation to carry my work into places where it can continue to grow, serve, and flourish.

My last teaching session today will be a community circle for the Young Leaders for Peace summer program. It feels like such a fitting ending and a beautiful high note to go out on. It is also a glimpse of the work I hope to devote even more of my life to: healing, community building, relationship weaving, accompanying endings with tenderness, and cultivating the conditions for new worlds rooted in love and care.

This is both a closing and an opening. I’ll take my time to honor this chapter while stepping toward the next with curiosity, gratitude, and enthusiasm. There will be much more to share as this journey unfolds, and if you’d like to follow along, I’d love to welcome you to Enchantable, my Substack that I have been lovingly tending for over three years, where I write about teaching, learning, life, education, and more. Looking back, my last post on teacher burnout, published on Sunday, feels strikingly prescient. I hope you’ll join me there.

Thank you for your support as I navigate this threshold moment 🌱✨🙏🏻

Within moments of posting this announcement, I began receiving an outpouring of messages from all corners of the planet, so many that it drained my phone battery. I began receiving invitations and connections to other work, and other messages of support for coaching and chats.

One of the most precious things I received was messages from former students about how much I had changed their lives and how deep my impact was. How I had changed their lives, their thinking, the way they see the world. I even received messages from students who I never had in class but who knew me from around campus, and how much I had impacted them. As educators, we often don’t get to see the direct impacts of our work, as a lot of it is seeds we plant that might take years to bloom. This is especially true when we teach in a place where students don’t live. Receiving these messages was a deep affirmation of the value of what I brought and enacted at UPEACE.

I asked, and my network was there for me. I feel deeply held by life, by my communities, in deep faith and trust.

One of my favorite quotes by one of my favorite poets, Rainer Maria Rilke, is about living the questions. In Letters to a Young Poet, Rilke wrote:

“…have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

I often use this quote in my teaching. I usually use it at the beginning of any course I teach when I invite students to consider what questions they are holding as we begin our learning journey together. In the field of peace education, problem-posing education is seen as the antidote to the banking model of indoctrination. Living the questions is at the heart of my work, and now, I get to live into this one. I get to live into the question of what it feels like to be consumed by the academy, and to come out on the other side. I get to choose what kind of fodder I become, and I can already feel the next chapter blooming in my heart. I am already being reborn.

Needless to say, I will have much more to say about all of this, and I will also have much more time to write in the coming months. I am so glad to have you along for the journey. If you would like to support me in getting this writing out into the world, please consider becoming a paid subscriber2. This is a wonderful, meaningful, reciprocal way to support me in this transition (deep gratitude to those of you who already do!).

Sharing my work is another meaningful way you can support. Share your favorite essays. Share this post. Share the publication.

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The best part of all of this? I get to live my best Log Girl Summer.
As of Tuesday, I am officially done at UPEACE. Next Sunday, I will travel to a forest with a river and a hot spring and eat farm fresh food and soak in the mineral water and rain and insect buzz and birdsong.

Let Log Girl Summer begin.

Thank you for being on this journey with me, and thank you for being part of the vast web of support that I know is holding me!

With love and infinite care,

Stephanie

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Today’s solstice marks the start of summer in the northern hemisphere - which is where I am, though it is the beginning of the rainy season here in Costa Rica so is not exactly summer. However…

This season, I am calling in:
Log Girl Summer.
Not hot girl. Not fit girl. Not boss girl.
Log girl.

The end of this academic year has me feeling like a burnt log, still smoldering. I have been ravaged by a forest fire. I am charred, ashen, still hot, and if the right breeze comes along (i.e., another request/demand), I might burst back into flames at any moment, at risk of scorching everything on my path.

I know I need time to cool down, to rest, be still, to become good soil1 and regenerate. And I know in my bones that after a fire, during the recovery, the most beautiful blooms are possible. I want to dissolve into ash on the forest floor so that something more beautiful can germinate.

I hold the vision that, once given a chance to cool and rest and bask and dwell in the rain, a superbloom of wildflowers will blossom all around me and on me. I hold the vision that I will be reborn, giving the forest life, nourishing its soil, and from this nourishment, life can grow anew.

I write to you from the sheer exhaustion that comes at the end of an academic year. I cannot say I am quite on the other side of it, but I am coming up. Switching metaphors for a moment from forest to ocean: like a deep-sea diver slowly on the way to the surface, I am still making my way up from the depths of nearly drowning. But it is from this place that I want to write to you, from not quite having recovered. From not quite having made it back, and not even sure if I want to (to the surface, absolutely; to the depths? uncertain). I need to write to you from these depths.

I wonder how many of my educator friends feel this way at the end of the year, too (I know many do). Nothing left. Burnt. Dragged. Pummelled. Classes stop (side note: they haven’t), and then…the admin work. The admin work that has piled up because you couldn’t tend to it while teaching. The whack-a-mole of requests that, in themselves, seem so small, but each one creates a mountain that you can’t get out from under. Everyone thinks you're “off” because you’re not teaching, not realizing there is so much more to the job than classroom hours. Paraphrasing words from my teacher Thich Nhat Hanh, teaching is made up of many non-teaching elements.

As I rise towards the surface, somehow more water is above me - another letter, another application, another chapter, another journal review. As I rise towards the surface, somehow it drifts further away still.

How can one feel burning and drowning at the same time?

Almost everyone I know feels burnt out - but burnout doesn’t feel like the right word. Burnout makes it sound like a personal failure. Like we let it happen. Like we could have taken better care of ourselves. Like we shouldn’t have taken on so much, when that is simply not allowed. Take it or leave, those are your choices.

It’s as if in a forest fire, each tree is personally responsible for getting burned.

We cannot meditate our way out of toxic, broken systems.
We cannot self-care our way out of systemic harm and toxicity.
There are not enough massages or therapy or mani-pedis in the world to recover.

I want better for us - so much better for us. I want to finish a year and feel great about what we accomplished together - not extracted from with nothing left. I want to finish a year and feel like I can rest for a minute, rather than feel like I have to fight to protect any time off (if I can even win that battle). I want to finish a year and feel like I can rest, reflect, and integrate - not crash into the floor, dissolve into a puddle, and question whether I can do this all again.

I know so many people who left formal educational systems (at all levels) because the system crushed their spirits and they couldn’t take any more. These were wonderful educators - some of the best with so much to give - and yet they each reached a breaking point where they couldn’t take it anymore.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Other worlds are possible - other forms of teaching and learning and mentorship and scholarship are possible that uplift rather than crush the people working within them.

I yearn and long for a system that values our labor, our work, our presence, that values everything we bring to the spaces we are in - not just the classroom, but the hallway interactions, the meetings, the text exchanges, even the meals or coffees we share with students past and present. The accompaniment. I want a system that treasures us instead of treating us like we’re disposable.

Nothing and no one is disposable in a finite, closed system- an ecosystem. I yearn for a learning ecosystem that values each member of the community for what they bring, that is regenerative and autopoeitic, creating conditions for all of life to thrive.

I want better for our students. My daughter. I want her to be excited about how she spends each day, never to say, “School is hell,” and to know she is right, but not to have any other options for her right now.

“I have to teach tomorrow,” I tell her one evening, explaining why we can’t go out. The year is over, but I’m teaching a two-week summer program.

“I hate when you teach!” she yelled from the backseat of the car. “You don’t have time to do anything else!”

She’s right. The format of teaching intensives is demanding: early starts, hours of teaching, followed by afternoons of meetings and evenings of prepping. I’ve tried to get better about not carrying prepping into the evening, but it is all-consuming. If these systems aren’t serving educators or students, who are they serving?

And at the end of the year, I feel like I’ve been consumed. Eaten alive.

What if I let myself be consumed, I wonder? Everything is food, and at the end of the day, we are all eating or being eaten. As writes in her most recent book, Mothers of Magic:

“We are all consuming each other, feeding each other, and becoming one another - world without end, life without end, love it does not end. So be it.”2

This is interbeing. What would it mean to allow myself to be consumed? To become food and turn into something new?

I want to become excrement that nourishes the forest.
I want to become fodder for the leaf-cutter ants to carry away.
If the academy is going to consume me, maybe I should let it, and shit me out, and be reborn through the cycle of metabolism as something more magnificent than I could have ever imagined before.

I imagine allowing myself to be consumed, swallowed like a snake eats its prey. I dissolve in the snake’s belly, becoming snake. Shedding its skin. Slowly dying by the roots of a tree, to return to the forest floor.

Maybe it is the fighting being consumed that is the exhausting part, the resistance to it. What would it mean to let myself be consumed, to surrender, I wonder?

I want out of this particular food cycle and into another one. I want to be a part of a different metabolic chain.

Wildfires are naturally occurring phenomena that serve to rebalance and regenerate ecosystems. Some fires, though, are not wild, not natural, not regenerative, and do not benefit the whole - fires started by human recklessness and/or exacerbated by human consumption and the effects of climate change and development. Burnout is a fire that is collectively torching us: out of cycle, out of rhythm, leaving nothing left but scorched earth, scorched hearts.

All I know right now is that I am a burnt log, and I need to rest. I still have another week of teaching, and then I will unplug, disconnect, and reconnect with the forest, my own rhythm, my body, with life. As much as possible, I intend to devote my time to slowing down, listening, nourishing, delighting - and writing (which is all of those things to me)3.

I don’t know where I will be on the other side of that, but I trust it deeply. I don’t know who I will be on the other side of that, but I trust her deeply.

After a wildfire, one of the conditions for a superbloom to occur is the presence of prolific seeds. I know I have been planting seeds steadily, diligently, and caringly for a long time. Maybe, after the rain and the rest, these seeds will have the conditions to germinate and bloom. Maybe the fire will be regenerative after all. We will see what takes root. I will keep asking the seeds what conditions they need.

Time will tell. Time for Log Girl Summer.

Lots of love,

Stephanie

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June 15, 2026
University for Peace
El Rodeo de Mora, Costa Rica

Dear Young Leaders for Peace,

It is my great honor, joy, and pleasure to officially welcome you to the United Nations University for Peace for the 2026 Young Leaders for Peace program! We are thrilled to have you here as the second cohort of YLP. I want to thank everyone who made this program possible, and the many hands who are holding pieces of this program to make it a successful and transformative experience for everyone.

I would like to invite you to take a few deep breaths with me. Do you feel that? You are breathing the Costa Rican air - can you sense the rain and the beautiful forest we are breathing with? With these breaths, let’s acknowledge - you have arrived! After so much work and preparation and anticipation, you are here. I invite you to fully feel that, what it feels like to finally be here.

Our small-but-mighty institution was established by the United Nations in 1980 to “provide humanity with an international institution of higher education for peace, promoting understanding, tolerance, and peaceful coexistence, and stimulating cooperation among peoples.” UPEACE was a seed of peace planted in a region plagued by war at that time, and its mission and existence move minds and hearts, and stand as a beacon of hope in a world of increasing turmoil.

I could begin to list the specific aspects of this turmoil, but we would be here all day, and I think you know very well the challenging conditions of the world we are living in, including war, genocide, ecological collapse, and climate catastrophe. I sense that is probably what has brought you here - your awareness of these issues, and the desire to not just contribute to but be a leader in building something better, more peaceful, more just, more sustainable.

You have chosen to come here, to be a part of our mission. You have also chosen to come to graduate school for your summer vacation. This already says something remarkable about you. Many high school students might hope to spend their summer at the pool or beach, which is a perfectly reasonable way to spend one’s vacation (and you will be getting some pool and beach time here, too!). But you have chosen to come on a learning journey – and not just any learning journey, a graduate-level learning journey delving into the heavy and deep topics of peace, justice, violence, sustainability, and leadership.

In choosing to join this program and arriving here today, you become part of the UPEACE legacy and community. For people who have the privilege and opportunity to come here, we have a responsibility to share what we learn here with our home communities when we return. Through your capstone projects, we hope and trust you will take what you learn with you and plant it in your communities in meaningful ways.

I like to tell students at the beginning of the academic year that we are not the University of Peace, we are the University for Peace. We do not claim to have achieved peace, or to be a perfect peace, but peace is what we stand for, it is what we are about. We are not perfect here – nor is that the aim. Rather we strive for an imperfect peace, “una paz imperfecta,” as described by Spanish peace scholar Francisco Muñoz, a peace that is always in process, unfinished, becoming. And in that spirit, we welcome you to becoming part of that process.

During these two weeks, we will strive to create our own imperfect peace together as we learn about themes around peace, leadership, sustainability, conflict transformation, and education. You will get to experience life in Costa Rica, and I invite and encourage you to look at everything and everyone this week as your teacher - the rain, which you will surely see a lot of; the monkeys and toucans you might get to experience here in the forest; the things that enchant you here; the things that frustrate you. As adrienne maree brown says in her book Emergent Strategy, “Never failure, always a lesson.” Everything is our teacher if we allow it to be.

The world is in turmoil, and the world is incredibly beautiful, and we must hold this vision of a world worth fighting for in our quest for peace, justice and sustainability. This week, I welcome and encourage you to dwell in the immense beauty we have the privilege of being in here at UPEACE and in Costa Rica, and from this place, determine how to make the world around you more beautiful. So on behalf of the entire UPEACE community, I welcome you here, and here’s to a transformative two-week learning journey! May it ripple out and create a positive impact beyond us and into the world.

Welcome, welcome, welcome- to the journey, to the work, to each other. We are so glad you are here. Thank you!

With love and care,

Stephanie

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This session is an offshoot of the Reimagining Education Conference 5.0 back in February, a mushroom that has sprouted from the conference mycelia. During the conference, I hosted a collaborative poetry workshop, which morphed, in collaboration with Ana Marica, into a second session on ecological storytelling based on Sophie Strand’s marvelous memoir The Body is a Doorway, which then sprouted this mushroom about grief, which is quite simply what is alive for Ana and me, what we want to hold and tend and offer and stir together.

Grief is alive.

At our monthly community dreamwork circle this week, my friend and dreamspace co-facilitator Minna asked, as we settled in, “Where do you feel life in your body?”

In my heavy heart was my immediate internal response.

My heart has been so heavy these past few months, and if you follow along here, you already know that. In April, in my post Healing the world that touches you, I wrote:

Alongside these conditions of gratitude, I am dwelling in heartbreak. My heart is heavy with the weight of the life-crushing systems we are living within and the effects they have on people and the planet. I can’t get into specifics for the sake of confidentiality - they are not my stories to tell - but I can just say that the conditions of the world, and how they are impacting people I love, are breaking my heart.

The thing about grief: it does let us know we are alive. In that heaviness, in the heartbreak, there is life, and there is love. In my essay on grief after my mother died, I wrote

Love and joy and grief inter-are. They’re not separate, and they exist together. And I do believe our deep grief, in remaking us, carves us out for a deeper joy, that without knowing grief, we couldn’t know joy so fully.

One of the other griefs I am holding, as I wrote about last week and which relates to the Reimagining Education Conference from which this session sprouted, is the grief of living within systems that deplete us so thoroughly (speaking specifically here to formal education systems, as an exhausted educator at the end of the academic year). Relating to the theme of reimagining education, I tend the grief of living within educational systems that are not attuned to the rhythms of life. Alongside that grief, I hold the yearning and desire for educational systems that honor, affirm, uplift, and enhance life.

Once upon a time at Deer Park Monastery, I was listening to a dharma talk by then-Sister Mai Nghiem (now Caromai), and she was sharing about strong emotions and how to work with them. I remember her saying that when she experienced an emotion that felt too big for her one small human body, she turned to community and to the earth to hold it with her. This is a practice that has long stayed with me.

We don’t have to carry it alone. We can share our grief with each other to lighten the load.

The earth will help us hold and compost our grief, our rage, our tears, our pain. This is part of what we mean when we say ecologies of grief. We don’t have to hold it alone - our great beautiful Mother will hold it with us.

I’ve been leaning on practices that help me hold and be with and process grief, such as:

Songs, like this one:

Lighting candles for my beloveds who are suffering, for all who are suffering, as so much suffering is interconnected and collective with individual manifestations.

Remembering that amidst the awfulness of this moment collectively, amidst the evil that seems to be reinforcing itself every day, there is so much beauty and joy to witness, to dwell in. Both are here, both are true, both are present.

If we relate to grief as alive, as a living organism that visits us, as our own aliveness shining through, how might that shift how we relate to it?

To offer it a cup of tea.
To welcome it to stay for a while.
To be present to it, to sit with it, and just allow it to be, without trying to get it to leave.
To breathe.

Join us tomorrow at 10am Costa Rica time on Zoom if you would like to hold our grief together with the earth. I am co-holding this space because it is the space I need. Maybe you need it too, and you are welcome, and please know you are not alone.

With love and care,

Stephanie

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For me, writing is a regenerative practice. It is how I make and unmake myself. It is how I digest, process, release, remember, make sense and meaning. When I am in a busy period and not able to write as much, I start to feel stuck, energetically constipated. Today, I write to you to help myself regenerate after a depleting year. Today, I write because there are other things I want to write about, but I cannot get to them until I write about this. I have to write my way through and beyond.

Today, I write to unravel and reweave.
I write to disentangle and re-entangle and braid myself back into the whole.

As I write, I am nearing the end of my 4th year teaching at UPEACE. Although classes have ended, the administrative work has not: grades, journal reviews, chapter drafts, proposals, ethics applications, emails, prospective student inquiries, and so on1. With each attempt to dig myself out, something else lands in the pile, and the digging feels endless, Sisyphean.

The thing that irks me the most is the urgency with which some of these requests come in. Every time I hear “as soon as possible,” I want to dig my heels in more. If you ask me to do something As Soon As Possible, this is what I will hear:

Where in your life, dear reader, are you feeling a sense of urgency where there doesn’t need to be?
Where might you be demanding urgency of another where you can instead allow space and pause?
Where in your life can you go as slow as possible? (not everywhere, but somewhere)
Some situations demand real urgency, but many do not. Let’s allow each other space and grace, and make it a practice and habit not to pressure each other with unnecessary urgency. I am putting up a shield against these demands. I am refusing them.

At the end of this year, I am also asking:

• What would it look like to teach and learn and work and live within systems that didn’t induce this level of depletion?

• What would it feel like to exist within a cycle and rhythm of work-life that felt more sustainable - in a truly life-sustaining sense?

• How can we practice self-regeneration when the systems pulling on our energies and hearts are so life-destroying, life-depleting, harmful?
  

  Meanwhile, a friend sits in ICE detention.
  Meanwhile, loved ones struggle.
  Meanwhile, life:
  in late-stage capitalism, in collapse, in the Great Unraveling.

In her body of work called The Work that Reconnects, Joanna Macy describes the Three Stories of Our Times: Business as Usual, the Great Unraveling, and the Great Turning. Business as Usual is the story of endless growth-oriented capitalism, what she calls Industrial Growth Society. The Great Unraveling is the collapse we are experiencing of this endless growth on an abundant-yet-finite planet. The Great Turning is the transition from Industrial Growth Society to a Life-Sustaining Society - the story that reminds us that business-as-usual is not the only option; that hope remains alive through our actions of building a more loving, caring, just, compassionate, life-sustaining world. As long as we are alive, other worlds are possible.

The Great Unraveling is happening at a collective scale, and we can see this in many places where we turn: life no longer affordable but for a few; contaminated drinking water, collapsing infrastructure; exorbitant wealth alongside extreme poverty; war and genocide; planetary warming and climate chaos.

But the Great Unraveling isn’t just collective; it is also deeply personal for each of us. It is the way these systems collapse within us and around us, crushing us in their weight, extracting from us every last drop before they do. It’s the way the chronically ill are stripped of their health care. The way groceries and rent become no longer affordable. It is the strain of all of this, the exhaustion and depletion that trying to survive these systems. It’s the way we experience the failures of these systems as they unravel from the lies they were built upon (endless growth capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy, etc.).

It’s the way educators are burnt out at the end of an academic year.

As the semester winds down, I feel myself unraveling. I feel everything I have been holding coming loose. I feel the rocks that were hurled at me shaking to the ground, the bites and bruises laid bare. The possibility for pause offers healing - but that possibility still feels far away, unreachable.

Allow Space And Pause.

One of the places I feel this unraveling most closely is through my friend who is in ICE detention. She has been detained for nearly two months, and the words still feel wrong as they come out through the keyboard. But it is true, and there are tens of thousands like her, unjustly detained. I feel the weight of this collective unraveling close within my heart.

Please consider donating to our fundraiser to support my friend’s legal costs associated with unjust detention.

As I contemplated my own unraveling, I thought about what the opposite of unraveling is. Two words that came up really struck me with delight:

entangle and braid.

If you have been around here for a while, you already know that entanglement is one of my favorite words (along with interbeing). When I think about writing to unravel, I am writing to re-entangle myself with all of life. I am writing to braid myself back in. In this end-of-year decomposition state, I am seeking to return myself to the whole.

In that spirit of re-entangling, I am taking summer writing assignments!

My friend and one of my favorite writers, of , wrote to me recently with a summer writing assignment, which, for a scholar-nerd-writer like myself, is basically my love language. So I invite you, dear readers, to give me a writing assignment for the summer. My suggestion box is open: Is there a topic I have touched upon that you would love to hear more about? A thread of my writing that you want to see more of? I can’t promise that I will get to all of them, but I do promise, whether I write about them directly or not, they will feed my creativity (and I will do my best!). You can leave a comment or send me a message.

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Stay tuned for my first writing assignment, which will be a reading assignment for you, a summer syllabus :)

In my 2024 post on regenerating myself, I wrote:

Regeneration isn’t done alone. It requires the right conditions- the right amount of water, air, light, stillness and/or movement. We can only regenerate so much our own. Some regeneration has to be done in community, with others.

With the conditions and life around us.

When I read it today, I misread it as:

Regeneration isn’t done

Regeneration is never done. It is a process, a cycle, constantly happening, constantly in flux. Regenerating, degenerating, and back again.

Here is to our ongoing regenerating, decomposing and recomposing, unraveling and reweaving. May it be gentle on us, and may we be gentle with each other.

With love and infinite care,

Stephanie

P.S. The summer solstice is upon us, and our Enchantable Seasonal Ritual Club will gather to honor and celebrate it as a community on June 20th at 9am Costa Rica time. You are welcome to join us and you can register here!

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This Mother’s Day, please listen to the grief and rage of mothers. Please, let’s return this day to its radical roots.

Truly honoring mothers would require nothing short of a total restructuring of society, and I want nothing less.

Mother’s Day evokes a particular kind of rage in me. I have written before about flavors of joy, the different shades that emotions have, the particular palette of joy that I experience when riding a bike, for example.

Well, the same goes for rage. Flavors of rage. Rage comes in its own palette, and much like I experience a particular kind of joy when riding a bike, I experience a particular kind of rage when I think about Mother’s Day, a specific shade of rage gets touched with this “holiday.”

Part of it comes from exhaustion. I am so tired. Mothers are so tired.

Yes, I am tired from running the morning school routine marathon, tired from not getting enough sleep, tired from self-care and fun looking like going to the grocery store alone (which is what I will be doing this morning - “happy mother’s day’”). I am tired of not being able to go to the doctor because logistically, how am I going to do that? I am tired from the mother load - which would look different in a society that valued the labor and care work of mothers. The load isn’t the problem - it is how we are forced to carry it, practically alone, without sufficient societal supports.

All of that is exhausting. But I am even more tired from children being locked up in detention centers.
Children being bombed.
Children being starved.
Children being raped, and their rapists having no consequences and maintaining the highest positions of global political power.
I am tired from women not receiving the reproductive care they need.
The list goes on and on.
That a capitalist society wants to celebrate mothers in any way that does not involve ending all wars, shutting down all detention centers…it fills me with a special kind of rage. A society calling for the celebration of mothers when this same society relentlessly bombs mothers and their children, starves children, locks children away in detention centers, claims the need to build a ballroom to protect the president from gun violence while students in US schools are trained to duck and cover and sold bulletproof backpacks…it is a special kind of hypocrisy that induces a special kind of rage.

All of this, and so much more, ignites in me a particular rage that I feel throughout the year but is stoked by this false celebration that is Mother’s Day.

Yes, of course, mothers deserve to be celebrated. Yes, give us our flowers, all the flowers. I love being a mother, and it is the greatest honor of my life to get to be the mother to my spunky, wild, unique, precious, almost-8-year-old. But what I want more than flowers is a world that values the work and care of mothering (which is not done exclusively by people who have given birth), every single day, in practice and policies and values, in how we design and create our world.

I want a stop to all violence against children and mothers. I want all children everywhere to have the conditions they need to thrive. I want all mothers everywhere to have the support they need and the conditions to thrive. I believe, and know in my bones, this is possible. I want an end to patriarchy. I want matriarchy1 now.

This is possible if we stop spending money on bombs and start spending money on basic human services. This is possible if we tax billionaires and corporations. This is possible if we truly value children and mothers and put these values of collective care at the heart of all decision-making. This is absolutely possible, and I want nothing less for Mother’s Day.

My rage is deeply connected with my grief, and this year on Mother’s Day, I am consumed with an overwhelming, heart-sickening grief for my friend who is detained with her son in an ICE facility in Texas (they are separated from her husband, another layer of the cruelty)2. The grief I feel for her and her family is one of the most intense griefs I have ever felt in my life, on par with the weight on my heart after losing my mother.

The grief I feel in my heart for her carries the weight of the whole diabolical system of capturing people and locking them away for profit. One grief unlocks the grief of the whole, and when I think of her, I think of all the other people who are suffering under this evil, dehumanizing, unjust system. This week in a message, she told me about how there is an Irish family in detention with a one-year-old baby and they have been trying to go home to Ireland but they keep getting stalled because profit is generated daily by keeping people locked up. People are being detained indefinitely for profit. Every aspect of this sytem and what is happening should sicken and enrage all of us.

Mother’s Day makes me want to scream into the void, and yesterday I got to do a lot of screaming at an amusement park. I can’t even tell you how therapeutic this was - the screaming-at-the-top-of-my-lungs and laughing-so-hard-I-almost-peed (something that happens to a lot of mothers after vaginal births). All of this screaming, laughing, and jostling was deeply therapeutic, nervous system regulating.

As I was screaming on this spinny ride called Disko, I thought about all the times I want to scream into the void. I let out the yells buried deep in my abdomen, deep in my soul. I thought of my rage for patriarchal violence, and I let it all out.

It was deeply healing and therapeutic. That, and the laughter.

I laughed so hard on the rides. Laughed til I cried. Laughed until I almost peed.
This was deeply healing, too.
Between rides, I sent messages on behalf of my friend in detention. I exchanged messages with her. Each message we sent, someone was profiting from (the messages go through an app you have to pay for; every single aspect of detention results in money in someone’s pocket).

This week, I rode amusement park rides, and navigated the inhumane US detention system while waiting in line for the next one.
This week, I answered phone calls from teenagers explaining the situation about their friend in ICE detention while blowing up birthday balloons for a colleague’s celebration.
I watched the beauty of the canyon sunrise while writing a GoFundMe for my friend’s legal expenses.

The world is horrible, and the world is beautiful, and it is so intense to hold the horror and the beauty simultaneously, but I believe it is what we are being called to do in these times. The beauty reminds us of what is worth saving, worth caring for, worth fighting for. There is so much worth fighting for, worth our grief and our rage.

This week, I have also been blessed to be in class on nonviolent resistance. Being in this space with students has felt healing and constructive. We are dreaming of other worlds together and of how to get there. Part of how nonviolence works is channeling our grief and rage into constructive change. Right now, for me, this looks like doing everything I can for my friend in her situation. It means teaching about nonviolence, not just in the articles we read but in how we are together.

What does it look like for you, dear reader?
What action or practice can you take right now for a society rooted in love and care?
Please do that for Mother’s Day, and every day.
And yes, that action can be seemingly small, doing what is right in front of you, healing the world that touches you.

Thank you for listening to my grief and rage on this Mother’s Day. May we return this day to its radical roots (I encourage you to read about its anti-war history). Let’s close with an excerpt of Mother’s Day Proclamation, written by Julia Ward Howe:

“Arise, then, women of this day!
Arise all women who have hearts, whether our baptism be that of water or of tears!…
We women of one country will be too tender of those of another country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.
From the bosom of the devastated earth a voice goes up with our own.
It says “Disarm, Disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance of justice.”
~Julia Ward Howe, 1870

With love, grief, rage, and infinite care,

Stephanie

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Tomorrow we begin the last class of the learning cycle of the 2025-26 academic year. The class is Strategic Nonviolent Resistance (aka nonviolence class1).

To prepare, I am revisiting some of my writing, and I invite you to revisit some of this writing with me, such as my poem for nonviolence class, 2023:

This brought me to the Spells, Blessings, and Poems section of Enchantable (and there is a little treasure trove there!).

I am also reviewing my own writing on how I prepare for class to re-inspire myself:

and my pedagogical invitations:

and some of my favorite quotes from my favorite educator-writers:

My best prep is is presence: centering myself, rooting in my values and spiritual practices, connecting with the teachers who have inspired me and drawing from their wisdom, asking for support from those who are ancestors - bell hooks, Paulo Freire, Thich Nhat Hanh, Joanna Macy (my holy teaching quaternity).

Like the beginning of this academic year, my prep ended up at the beach - not what I would have necessarily planned, but aligned with Daphne’s school vacation days and the gift of one of my lifelong besties visiting. So the days before class called for a short beach trip, and as I discovered earlier in the year, this is some of the best prep that can be done - listening to the ocean, relaxing, fun, joy, adventure.

In Back-to-school (mindfulness) bell (hooks), I wrote:

The back-to-school bell rings.

May this bell be a bell of mindfulness

And bring us back to our breath, our bodies, our hearts,

our intentions and aspirations.

our deepest wishes for better worlds

And our deepest hope for the transformative possibilities of education.

This is re-rooting me in my why, my intentions and aspirations, why I do what I do. It is so easy to be carried away from this, to be weighed down by these systems and the way they tax and take from us, by the monotony of bureaucracies and the endless to-do lists beyond what it is that we are here to do. It is so important to return to it.

This class is about nonviolence, also known as love-in-action. My teacher, Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh (Thay), wrote a book by that title (which we will read a section of in the class, and you can find a list of resources on the topic from Parallax Press here). Today I attended a recitation of the 14 mindfulness trainings of the Order of Interbeing to re-root myself in my values, ethics, and spiritual practices. It reminded me of my own why.

In a mindfulness trainings recitation ceremony, after reading each training, we ask the question:

“Have we made an effort to study, practice, and observe this training in the past month?”

Study.

Practice.

Observe.

In a time of escalating war and violence, I do believe nonviolence is one of the most important things we can study. Nonviolence is a science that can be understood and has a long history that we can learn from. To deepen your own study, I highly recommend the resources and materials of my friends at the .

Study alone is not enough. We have to practice, in the smallest and largest ways. Yes, nonviolence is a strategy for collective political transformation, and it is also a daily practice of how we live our lives and how we treat and relate to each other. As Thay taught, peace is every step, and the smallest actions we take shape the larger whole. Other worlds are possible, and the path towards them is through our daily actions now. We make those worlds through each step.

The word observe is an interesting one with dual meanings. It can mean to watch, study attentively, notice, pay attention to. You can observe the tides, observe the birds in the canyon, observe students in class. It can also mean to honor or obey, in the way we say we observe a holiday (to honor or mark it), or to observe a rule or law (to comply with it).

In the case of the mindfulness trainings, I see it as both: where do I see this training in my daily life? Where do I notice it in the wider world around me? How am I honoring it?

In the case of nonviolence, we can observe nonviolence in both senses of the world. It is a powerful practice to notice the nonviolence that is already present in our day-to-day lives. In a world rife with war and violent conflict, it can seem like a stretch to look for examples of nonviolence, but all around us, we can find love-in-action: the parent preparing breakfast for their child, saying hello to a stranger on the street, helping a neighbor in need…small examples of everyday nonviolence are all around us. We just need to look and pay attention, uplift and amplify.

As I listened to the trainings this morning, the 12th mindfulness training of the Order of Interbeing, helped me reconnect to my why. This training is entitled “reverence for life,” which is a more affirmative way of saying nonviolence:

Aware that much suffering is caused by war and conflict, we are determined to cultivate nonviolence, compassion, and the insight of interbeing in our daily lives and promote peace education, mindful mediation, and reconciliation within families, communities, ethnic and religious groups, nations, and in the world. We are committed not to kill and not to let others kill. We will not support any act of killing in the world, in our thinking, or in our way of life. We will diligently practice deep looking with our Sangha to discover better ways to protect life, prevent war, and build peace.

To reconnect to this training, to my own reverence for life, is some of the best prep I can possibly do.

I am off to do the other prep - review my syllabus and slides, review the readings I assigned for tomorrow. This is also important preparation.

I will leave you with another favorite poem, which also inspired the title of a book by Paulo Freire and Miles Horton:

[Traveler, your footprints]
By Antonio Machado
Translated By Mary G. Berg and Dennis Maloney

Traveler, your footprints
are the only road, nothing else.
Traveler, there is no road;
you make your own path as you walk.
As you walk, you make your own road,
and when you look back
you see the path
you will never travel again.
Traveler, there is no road;
only a ship’s wake on the sea.

Here is to the more beautiful worlds we can make with each step, walking together.

With love and care,

Stephanie

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P.S. there’s a whole separate post I could write about the intersection of Zen and Star Wars 😆 but for now, I’ll just leave you with this:

I was born on April 24th, 1979. It was a great year to be born. Someone even wrote a song about it once.

I was born in a different time. I was born in springtime in Pittsburgh at Magee Women’s Hospital on a Tuesday afternoon. It was a time of record players and cassette tapes, Flashdance and disco, of landlines and TV with ten channels and rabbit ears. It was play-in-the-yard-til-the-sun-goes-down summers, and find-out-the-school-delay-on-local-news winters, dance-like-no-one-is-recording-you because no one was. I am grateful to have grown up during this low-tech, analog time, and I am grateful to be living in a time when I can write this to you right now.

I recently read a study that places 47 (47.2, specifically) as the unhappiest age, on average, across the human lifespan. If that is the case, I think I am doing pretty well, supported by my practice of the 14 mindfulness trainings, which remind us that in every moment there are more than enough conditions to be happy. That said, the 40s can be rough - aging plus midlife responsibilities plus ongoing collapse in late-stage capitalism…in my experience so far, the study tracks.

I have written a lot here about the importance of celebrating every chance we get. I am so deeply grateful to have gotten to see another trip around the sun. Not everyone gets to, and someday we won’t complete the next one (like Rilke says in one of my favorite poems1). I am grateful for the multitude of supportive conditions of my life, my family, an abundance of deep, caring friendships, and meaningful vocational work. I am grateful to wake up every morning like this:

and to have auspicious birthday greetings from a troop of monkeys and a laughing falcon.

Alongside these conditions of gratitude, I am dwelling in heartbreak. My heart is heavy with the weight of the life-crushing systems we are living within and the effects they have on people and the planet. I can’t get into specifics for the sake of confidentiality - they are not my stories to tell - but I can just say that the conditions of the world, and how they are impacting people I love, are breaking my heart.

I am sure, dear reader, they are breaking yours, too.

There is a way in which the proximity of the pain of these systems opens you up to the pain of the whole system. Knowing one person who is being harmed opens you up to the multitudes being harmed. We don’t need to know anyone being directly impacted or be impacted ourselves to feel this pain, and yet, when we do, the intensity is amplified. And the harm right now knows no bounds.

I once heard Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen say, in an exquisite interview on On Being, “heal the world that touches you.” That has stayed with me as one of the most vital pieces of wisdom I have heard. We cannot heal the whole she-bang2 alone, but we can try to heal the parts of the world that are touching us. We can each do that, and we are all being called to do that, together.

Systems are made up of people and fractals (and much more than people). There is no outside of them. This is both daunting and liberating: daunting, in that there is no escape (darn!); liberating, as in yes, we can heal the part of the world that touches us, and this does indeed have effects on the entire system.

The systems live within us, are us, even (a very uncomfortable thought - let’s be uncomfortable). Because of that, we have the possibility of healing the parts of the systems that live within us, that we touch. Every time we choose to affirm life, to express love and care, I believe this is impacting the whole she-bang, weaving other worlds one gesture at a time.

Meanwhile, other worlds are possible and being experimented and lived everywhere, and we need these examples to buoy us amidst the heaviness. On Saturday, I had the chance to visit Real World School, part of the Ecovilla ecovillage project, which I have been following online for years but had not yet had the chance to visit. I came across the school when I was doing a search of unschooling and self-directed learning spaces in Costa Rica when we first moved here. Their model has evolved and has more structure than it did at an earlier time, but that structure is beautiful. Deeply rooted in social-emotional learning and putting community well-being at the heart, I was very moved to see how they are living their values. There is a staff member whose main task is to look after the community's well-being, and the learning is rooted in the real world (as the name implies), guided by awakening the curiosity of the learners. The experience moved me deeply and reminded me that, amidst the horrors, beautiful, life-affirming projects are taking place everywhere in service to life.

It’s always a good day to celebrate being alive, and birthdays are an excuse to invite others to celebrate with us. As a middle-aged woman, I invite you to join me once again in celebrating pro-aging as anti-patriarchal practice, as goddess knows we need as many anti-patriarchal practices as we can muster these days. I saw a meme this week that said “wrinkles are receipts,” and I feel lucky to continue to be collecting receipts of a life fully lived - laughter, tears, messiness, and all of it.

In one of my favorite poems, V’ahavta by Aurora Levins Morales, she writes:

Imagine rape is unimaginable. Imagine war is a scarcely credible rumor
That the crimes of our age, the grotesque inhumanities of greed,
the sheer and astounding shamelessness of it, the vast fortunes
made by stealing lives, the horrible normalcy it came to have,
is unimaginable to our heirs, the generations of the free.

My birthday wish is for a world where detention centers, wars, and bombs are unthinkable, unimaginable, and I invite you to join me in this wish, both holding the dream and working towards it each day, in healing the parts of the world that touch us.

Love you. Grateful you are here. Grateful for this life.

With love and care,

Steph

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Pedagogies of Interbeing: Towards a Regenerative Peace Education
by Stephanie Knox Steiner, PhD1
August 2024

Introduction

“Respiration - the source of energy that lets us farm and dance and speak. The breath of plants gives life to animals and the breath of animals gives life to plants. My breath is your breath, your breath is mine. It’s the great poem of give and take, of reciprocity that animates the world.”
-Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, p. 344.

The question that inspired this chapter, based on my presentation at the Earth Charter 2024 conference, is: how can the field of peace education contribute to conversations around re-imagining education for ecological civilizations? Peace education has much to offer these conversations through its central tenets that peace can (and therefore should) be learned and that education can and must contribute to a more peaceful world. To fully realize these aims, education must be grounded in relational understandings of the world and ways of being that heal separation and honor our interconnectedness, which I will describe here as pedagogies of interbeing. I propose that these pedagogies help us move towards a regenerative peace education – one that moves us towards being in right relationship with ourselves, each other, and all of life (Earth Charter Commission, 2000).

This chapter is about interbeing, a term coined by peace activist Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh to express the nature of reality that we are beyond interconnected– we exist because of and through each other and all of life. As Thich Nhat Hanh (2012) describes, “Interbeing is not a theory; it is a reality that can be directly experienced by each of us at any moment in our daily lives.” Before we explore the role of pedagogies of interbeing, the theoretical underpinnings, rationale, and examples, I would like to invite you into an experience of it. You can read or listen to my recording of the words below:

Begin to notice your breathing. Notice where you notice your breathing, perhaps at the tip of your nostrils, or with the gentle rise and fall of your belly. Take a few moments just to be with your breathing, and feel your body breathing.

Now begin to expand your awareness to notice that you are breathing with everything around you. The oxygen you are breathing has been produced by the surrounding trees and plants. The iron in your blood is the same iron in the earth’s crust, which has become a part of you through the food you eat, is helping your body use the oxygen you breathe to turn it into energy for your cells. As you breathe out carbon dioxide, you are providing nourishment to the plant life around you to absorb. Every cell in your body is made of material that came from stars – you are literally made from stardust.

Can you feel - and really feel, with the sensations in your body, in your breathing - your interbeing with the world around you? Can you sense that there is no separation between your breath and the world? The world becomes you as you become the world with each breath. We are beyond connected- there is no separation, and we completely inter-are with everything around us, with all of life. Through our respiration, we can feel this reciprocity, this interbeing.

Your breath is a constant process of reciprocity with the world, a constant process of regenerating you and the life around you. Each breath brings in fresh life and releases the old; each breath regenerates the air and life around you. Each breath, an act of reciprocity and regeneration.

As we begin to re-imagine education together, I propose we engage in this process from a place of imagination collaboration, a term I draw from activist and author adrienne maree brown, who describes it in the following way:

“Imagination collaboration is inviting someone to be part of an idea or to create an idea with you…If you have privilege in an area, it’s very hard to see what is lacking in that area…You have to cultivate relationships with people who can see more than you and who can see differently than you, so that together your co-imagination becomes something that actually works for everyone” (Grandoit, 2020).

As we re-imagine education together, it is crucial to remember that we need each other, that we each hold a key component of the imaginative possibilities, and that we need people who see differently from us in order to re-imagine education that works for everyone. Each of us holds a unique and essential aspect of this vision – this plurivision – and none of our visions are complete without each other. It is in this spirit of imagination collaboration that I offer this chapter, in the hopes that from my small vantage point as an educated white woman academic from the United States living in Costa Rica and teaching at the international, multicultural University for Peace (UPEACE), and as a longtime student of Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh, that I might share this sliver of my re-imagining educational dreams, and that together, we might re-imagine something that serves all of life. I am limited in my vision by my positionality, in this body and place and time and experience, and yet from this position I offer these imaginings in the hopes that they can inspire your own visions and that together, we might create a collective vision that works for all of us and the earth.

At the heart of re-imagining education and pedagogies of interbeing are returning to a relational worldview and worldmaking practices (both of which will be described more below), and an orientation of education and learning as being fundamentally about relationships. As such, with any educational endeavor, an important starting point is, “What is your relationship to this topic?” Therefore, it is important for me to share with you my relationship with the field of peace education as well as the institution in which I teach. The context I am writing from is as resident faculty and coordinator of the peace education master’s programme at the University for Peace, of which I am also a product/alumnae (class of 2010). I came to peace education through environmental studies and a deep love and care for the earth. My path to peace education began as a student of environmental studies at McGill University, where as an undergraduate, I studied climate change and development in the late 90s and early 2000s. During this time I also encountered the teachings of Thich Nhat Hanh (1992) through his book Peace Is Every Step. It was through this combination of environmental studies and Thich Nhat Hanh’s teachings on peace the which brought me to the field of peace education, both of which still strongly inform my approach, life, and vocational path.

The Present Moment:
Interbeing and Awareness of Suffering and Violence

Cultivating peace demands our attention, presence, and awareness of the present moment, including an awareness of suffering and its causes (Hanh, 2012). We live in an interconnected, entangled world that can be characterized by interbeing, the term coined by Thich Nhat Hanh to articulate our beyond interconnectedness. The word interconnected still implies some sense of separation: separate entities that are connected. Interbeing articulates that we do not and cannot exist without everything in the universe, and as noted previously, that it is not a theory but rather a reality that can be experienced directly in each moment. The introductory breath exercise is a simple yet profound example of this, and how we can remember our interbeing as a practice. It is important to recognize that many Indigenous, religious, and spiritual traditions share this understanding and worldview, though may use different words to describe it (such as interconnectedness, oneness, unity, etc.).

To acknowledge our interbeing is not just to acknowledge our connectedness with sources of beauty and joy in the world; it is also to acknowledge our interconnectedness with pain, suffering, violence, and domination that is also characteristic of this moment, an awareness of this suffering and seeking to transform it. The interlocking crises of our time – including the climate crisis, ecological destruction and collapse, vast wealth inequities, war and genocide – can be described as a polycrisis2, which Lawrence et. al. (2022) describe as “the causal entanglement of crises in multiple global systems in ways that significantly degrade humanity’s prospects” (p. 2). The polycrisis is rooted in a delusion of separation which results in hierarchies and systemic violence is a function of modernity/coloniality (Quijano, 2007), or what bell hooks (2004) has called the “imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy” (p. 17). This delusion of separation enables these hierarchies, oppressions, systemic violence, and destruction to exist and persist.

Decolonial scholar Arturo Escobar (2015) has described our current set of crises as a crisis of worldmaking practices of “the world that we usually refer to as the dominant form of Euromodernity (capitalist, rationalist, liberal, secular, patriarchal, white, or what have you)” (p. 15). This is to say, at the root of the polycrisis, is not just how we view the world (worldview), but also how we make the world, which is made up of practices, actions, and ways of being. Modernity/coloniality is not just a view of the world or a way of analyzing it but a way of enacting it.

Vanessa Machado de Oliveira (2021)of the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Collective, in her book Hospicing Modernity, describes modernity as

“a ‘who’ rather than a ‘what’ - it is presented as a multifaceted, living entity. In this sense, modernity is not a concept, label, or object of analysis. Rather, it is a worlding story, a complex adaptive living system that actively does things, including conditioning the habits of knowing and being of those whose lives and livelihoods are intertwined with it” (p. 16).

Furthermore, Machado de Oliveira describes how modernity requires violence for its existence. As she explains:

modernity cannot exist without expropriation, extraction, exploitation, militarization, dispossession, destitution, genocides, and ecocides…the term modernity/coloniality was created to underscore the fact that violence and unsustainability are necessary for modernity to exist (Machado de Oliveira, 2021, p. 18-19).

Thus, modernity is a living system, a set of worldmaking practices, and a worlding story that ultimately necessitates violence to exist. Beyond separation, domination, and hierarchies, some of its characteristics include: Eurocentrism, binary thinking, universalism, individualism, and rationalism (see Knox Steiner, 2022, p. 95). Returning to interbeing, it is important to remember that we are not separate from modernity or outside of it, but rather are living within it, a part of it, shaped by it, even if we oppose it or want to dream and reach beyond it.

Modern formal schooling tends to replicate, perpetuate, enact, and reinforce these patterns of separation, hierarchy, and violence in direct and indirect ways, or using the framework of peace studies scholar Johan Galtung (1969), direct, structural, and cultural violence. Alexander, Jimenez-Luque, and Karp (2022) have elucidated how direct, structural, and cultural violence are enacted and sustained in schools through social systems, relationships, and pedagogies within these settings, such as through standardization, cultural assimilation, indoctrination, surveillance, discipline, and punishment. Education, therefore, has become a central site of reproduction of the worlding story and worldmaking practices of modernity. In other words, schools are a central site where many of us learn not just our ABCs and 123s, but also the story and practices of modernity such as toxic individualism, Eurocentrism, separation, anthropocentrism, separation, and violence.

That said, education has oppressive and liberatory potentials: it can uphold the status quo and perpetuate systems of injustice, violence, domination, and oppression, or it can contribute to the transformation of these systems towards more life-serving and liberatory possibilities (Freire, 1970), and often can be a site of both possibilities simultaneously. If we want to create more just, peaceful, regenerative worlds where all beings can thrive, our educational spaces need to be sites for unlearning the worldmaking practices and ways of being that reinforce separation, domination, and violence, and learn and relearn worldmaking practices and ways of being that honor our interbeing with the diversity of life in all forms. We must imagine, embody and practice towards them now, and not wait until new systems emerge.

Situating Peace Education

As a field, peace education is concerned with the role that education can and should play in the creation of more just and peaceful worlds through understanding, addressing, and dismantling violence in all its forms and creating alternatives to violence (Hantzopoulos & Williams, 2017). The Earth Charter (2000) recognizes peace as “the wholeness created by right relationships with oneself, other persons, other cultures, other life, Earth, and the larger whole of which all are a part.” From this conceptualization of peace, we can see how peace education needs to be holistic and address peace at all levels, from the inner, interpersonal, intercultural, ecological, and beyond.

Betty Reardon (1989) described peace education as “learning to learn about the functioning in and with complexity, so as to enhance the richness and diversity of life.” Peace education can be understood as the practice and process of teaching and learning (and unlearning and (re)learning and learning beyond) ways of being, knowing, doing, and living that understand, uproot, dismantle, and heal from violence and cultivate possibilities for peace at all levels to create more just, peaceful worlds in harmony with life. Understanding peace as wholeness and right relationships (Earth Charter Commission, 2000), and understanding violence as being rooted in a delusion of separation, a task of peace education becomes unlearning separation and (re)learning and remembering our interbeing with each other and all of life (Knox Steiner, 2024), with justice, reciprocity, and accountability as a foundation.

A core assumption of peace education is that peace can be taught, and therefore should be taught if we want to see a more peaceful world. Through modern schooling and cultures of violence, violence is taught (directly and indirectly) and normalized, and therefore violence can be unlearned (and other things can be taught). Therefore, if we want to see more just, peaceful, livable worlds, we need to create educational spaces for them, and we must imagine them, embody them, and practice towards them now.

Peace education provides a useful framework of thinking about educating about and for peace (Global Campaign for Peace Education, 2022) which posits that we can learn about peace, which refers to the content and knowledge; we can direct our learning for peace, which addresses skills as well as pedagogy, which we might think about as learning by or through peace which means the process of learning itself can be an act of cultivating peace. How we teach is just as important as what we teach, and the systems and structures we create for education teach as much (if not more) as the content within them, and the pedagogies we use are just as important as the content we are teaching. Peace pedagogies include how we teach and teaching practices, but also reach beyond to include the wider cycles and structures that we are teaching within, which is the Freirian (Freire, 1970) sense of pedagogy of cycles of theory, reflection, and action in the context of social struggles (Walsh, 2018).

Towards a Regenerative Peace Education

“We are part of a constant, interconnected cycle of birth, death, and regeneration. Our bodies decay into the earth to bring forth new life, our energetic mind is returned to the universe to be repurposed…Art exists in this same cycle of death and rebirth…As in life, each ending invites a fresh beginning.” -Rick Rubin, The Creative Act, p. 349

Pedagogies of interbeing, therefore, are cycles of learning, unlearning, relearning, reflection and action – as well as the settings and structures in which these cycles take place – that help us remember our role in the cycle of life, that help us unlearn and heal from toxic individualism and separation, and which help us relearn and remember our interbeing as part of the wider metabolism of the earth. I propose that pedagogies of interbeing might help us move towards a regenerative peace education. I am choosing to use the word “regenerative” rather than “sustainable” for several reasons. One is the overuse of the word sustainable the greenwashing that has been done over the years, depleting the word of its meaning. The other reason is it raises the question: what are we trying to sustain? Nearly all of our current systems and structures that are rooted in a delusion of separation and an assumption about infinite growth on a finite planet, and none of this can be sustained. Rather, they need to be transformed, and part of this transformation is remembering our interbeing and place within the wider cycles of life of which we are a part, and for me, the term regenerative helps place us back into this role and relationship.

To regenerate means to improve a place or system, or to grow again (Cambridge University Press and Assessment, 2024). This might help us to think about how humans can improve the place where we live (Earth) and the systems and structures we have put into place to support our living, of which education is one of them. The Merriam-Webster (2024) dictionary defines regeneration as “renewal or restoration of a body, bodily part, or biological system (such as a forest) after injury or as a normal process.” Essential to this definition is the phrase after injury, and we can think about modernity (colonialism, white supremacy, capitalism, and patriarchy), as being “the injury.” Then the question becomes: “What pedagogies might contribute to healing, renewal, restoration, and transformation of bodies and biological systems?”

Pedagogies of interbeing, or what we also might refer to as regenerative peace pedagogies, can contribute to this healing and renewal after the injuries of modernity, through unlearning and healing separateness and remembering interbeing. Brandtmeier (2024) describes regenerative peace pedagogies as “educational approaches that aim to heal and co-evolve the planet, from a systems approach that assumes that the illusion of separation toward the realisation of unity is the path forward” (n.p.).

Returning to the conceptualization of peace put forth in the Earth Charter (2000), we might think about the conceptualization of peace as wholeness and right relationships as a process of ongoing regeneration. The way Frederique Apffel-Marglin (2012) describes regeneration resonates with this essence:

“The livable world must be constantly rewoven for its fabric gets frayed or even unraveled in the very process of the rhythmic actions of the collectivities; because of this, rituals must be constantly reiterated. It is attending to this fraying, this unraveling, that I name regeneration. The world is enacted, the world is performed, the world is made through intra-actions” (p. 163).

A regenerative peace education involves reweaving relationships, of human and more-than-human; relearning how to be good participants in the earth community; repairing and healing from harm of centuries of colonialism and its myriad ongoing effects through justice and accountability; and growing new seeds for new possibilities from what we are able to compost. One of the most pressing tasks of our time becomes what Vanessa Machado de Oliveira (2021) calls hospicing modernity, of learning to compost these toxic, violent, destructive systems, cultures, and ways of being and from this composted soil, grow ways of being that are regenerative, just, peaceful, loving, and grounded in care. Fundamentally, education transformation requires remembering ourselves as a community, and I see reweaving community (human and earth) as a fundamental task of a regenerative peace education.

I am calling for peace education to orient towards regenerativity in part because peace education can at times be too anthropocentric, and environmental education (or education for sustainability) can be seen as something separate from peace education. In order for peace education to address right relationships at all levels (Earth Charter, 2000), interbeing must be at the heart of it, and our relationship with the Earth (as a part of the Earth) must be centered alongside relationships with other humans. We must remember that, not only are we not separate from the earth, we are the Earth, and practices and pedagogies of interbeing can help us in this process of remembrance.

In summary, pedagogies of interbeing, therefore, are cycles of learning, unlearning, relearning, reflection, and action that move us away from the illusion of separation and towards remembering our interbeing and interconnectedness with all of life. These pedagogies contribute to and are a part of a regenerative peace education, meaning an education that contributes toward a more peaceful world that is aligned with enhancing the richness and diversity of life (Reardon, 1989). Pedagogies of interbeing help us remember our place in the circle and cycle of life, unlearning and healing from toxic individualism, separation, and binarism of modernity, while relearning and remembering our interbeing as part of the wider metabolism of the Earth.

Pedagogies of Interbeing in Practice

Pedagogies of interbeing involve developing habits, practices, rhythms, ways of being that make the world differently, that reclaim our regenerative role as a species. They are iterative, adaptive, emergent, and responsive to the cycles of theorizing, reflection, and action they are embedded within, and grounded in diverse plurivisions of peace. This means that rather than adhering to one universalizing definition or conceptualization of peace as modernity would have us do, pedagogies for peace embrace a vision of a pluriverse, a “world where many worlds fit” (the Zapatistas, as quoted in Walsh, 2018). As such, they demand our imagination collaboration (adrienne maree brown) and creativity, and our embracing of the complexity and diversity of life that we are a part of (Reardon, 1989). This means honoring diverse ways of knowing beyond the intellectual and rational, including transrational, intuitive, embodied, and affective ways of knowing (Cremin, Echavarria, & Kester, 2018). This also includes epistemic justice and the decentering of Eurocentric knowledges and the re-embracing of marginalized and invisibilised knowledges, especially from the Global South, the Global Majority, and Indigenous communities without appropriation. Pedagogies of interbeing involve expanding our idea of who is teaching – the land, each other, our bodies, our dreams, and an understanding that we humans are not making the world alone, but are rather worldmaking with the world. Pedagogies of interbeing aim to be in service to life, which is to say that they aim to help us remember our place within the cycles and metabolism of the earth, and to be in right relationship within the webs of relationships we are a part of (Earth Charter Commission, 2000).

According to bell hooks (1994), the classroom remains the most radical space of possibility within the academy, and it is in the small moves, habits, practices, and ways of being together that we cultivate in the classroom that the transformative potential lies. Pedagogies of interbeing aim to create a regenerative learning culture, a culture of peace within the classroom that also permeates the space beyond it. If we put life, well-being, care, healing, and love at the center of the learning process, how does this change how we teach and learn? What habits, practices, rhythms, and structures can move us in this direction?

In the spirit, I would like to offer some pedagogies of interbeing that we engage in through the peace education master’s programme at the University for Peace. These are ways we experiment with creating a healing, caring, regenerative, peaceful classroom culture that we hope permeates the spaces beyond it.

We practice moments of arrival, such as offering a bell of mindfulness, a few breaths, and welcoming everyone into the space, which help us to unlearn speed, rushing, and the grind culture of capitalism (Hersey, 2022), and help create a culture of welcoming and radical hospitality. They also invite slowing down to counter the rush and speed embedded within modern Westernized institutions (Grosfoguel, 2022). We practice mindfulness and other centering practices as a moment of inner peace, as a reminder that peace within ourselves is related to the peace we seek to cultivate in the world (Hanh, 1992) and that taking care of our inner peace is related to our capacity to cultivate a culture of peace, together and beyond.

Our mindfulness practice also helps us to sit with the mess and stay with the trouble (Haraway, 2016) of creating a more just, peaceful, regenerative world amidst conditions that will almost always have us in tension with it. As we live in interbeing within the worldmaking and worlding story of modernity, we offer these critiques and try to live beyond them while simultaneously living within it and not separate from it. This, itself, is a practice of our interbeing – we inter-are not just with the beauty around us but also with the pain, suffering, violence, and destruction. Practices of centering, groundedness, mindfulness, and awareness help us to cultivate the ability to sit with discomfort, which is a necessary capacity in the process of unsettling and disruption, and help us to stay with the messiness of cultivating peace amidst peacelessness. Peace demands our presence, and it is not possible to cultivate peace if we are not present. This also means practicing both/and thinking, as opposed to the binary thinking that is characteristic of modernity’s worldmaking practices.

When we intentionally put care and healing at the center of the learning process, we practice interbeing. My well-being is connected to your well-being, and this is an expression of the reciprocal relationship between self- and community care. This is also an invitation to be not just intellectually rigourous but also rigourous in our care (Bianca Suyama of Unikebradas, as quoted in Knox Steiner, 2022) and find a balance between intellectual and relational rigor3. It means creating the invitation and intention to take care of ourselves and each other in the smallest, simplest ways, such as taking a break when we need one.

The form that holds us is a circle. Being together in a circle is a physical reminder that we are a whole, connected. Regularly sharing from the heart and deeply listening is a practice of community building and reweaving. Every day we try to make space for everyone’s voice to be heard, if even just a word (and even if they take the opportunity to pass). When the community becomes frayed or requires reweaving, we make space to give this reweaving, restoring, and healing our attention. This isn’t outside of the learning process, or a distraction from the syllabus – it is an essential part of it, especially in the context of learning about peace.

We practice transrational pedagogies (Cremin, Echavarria, & Kester, 2018) such as embodiment, art, and music, by remembering that we have bodies and are bodies and our bodies are an extension of the land. We remind ourselves that we are not just heads reading articles and rationally and intellectually discussing, but are assemblages of living breathing embodied beings with mind heart bodies spirits that are connected to all of life around us. Including art and music as part of the learning process in a constant, daily effort is a way to include transrational ways of knowing and reaching beyond the intellect. Through art and music, we are also often able to access embodiment, emotion, joy, and beauty, which are essential practices for cultivating more life-affirming worlds.

Collaboration is a part of the learning culture, from group projects to taking turns facilitating parts of class to creating articles, rituals, and poetry together. Collaboration is a way to disrupt the toxic individualism that is institutionalized in most formal education systems as a function of modernity. Collaboration is a way of disrupting hierarchies within education (Williams, Huskic, & Noto, 2024) and of practicing interbeing.

Another tangible daily practice is creating a learning altar at the front or center of the classroom. At the beginning of the class, we create an altar to honor our roots and lineages, and then have a daily altar space available where anyone is free to add anything, and where we place the books or articles we are learning from and with. Learning altars are a practice of unlearning education as consumption and transaction, and remembering learning as a sacred act. They also beautify the classroom space, and serve as an attention-gathering point, further reinforcing our ability to focus our attention, which is a radical act in a distracted world.

We practice feedback loops and mutual upliftment. Feedback loops are an essential part of all natural systems and cycles, and by intentionally practicing with them, we seek to learn from nature and each other. Through feedback loops and providing one another with feedback on an ongoing basis, we make the learning community more responsive. Feedback, when done as a regular growth-enhancing practice, becomes a practice of regenerativity, growth, and improvement both individually and collectively.

These are some examples of how we are practicing pedagogies of interbeing at UPEACE. The possibilities of practices and habits are infinite! I encourage your own experimentation in this spirit of reimagining education towards regenerativity.

Conclusion Thoughts: Re-imagining Together

“When you inhale and when you exhale
Breathe the possibility of another world
Into the 37.2 trillion cells of your body
Until it shines with hope.
Then imagine more.”
-Aurora Levins Morales (2016), V’ahavta

Let’s return to our breath, our practice of remembering interbeing with this moment. I invite you find your body and your breath again, and to breathe into the possibilities of other worlds, shining it into your cells, and then imagine more.

Let’s return to the idea of imagination collaboration. What ideas has this chapter sparked for you, dear reader, with respect to re-imagining education? I encourage you to reach out, to connect, and to find a community to continue to re-imagine with. Earth Charter International regularly hosts events and courses that are a great way to connect with this kind of community. I would also invite you to check out the Ecoversities Alliance and related Re-Imagining Education conferences, which are a beautiful community and container for connecting with others in the spirit of re-imagining education towards regenerative cultures that can serve the richness and diversity of life in all its forms. We need each other in this movement for re-imagining education for regenerative futures and presents.

I also want to emphasize, with pedagogies of interbeing, the importance of habits, practices, and rhythms – the very small things we do every day, from how we set up a room, to how we greet people, to the schedule. We might not be able to influence all aspects of the structures we operate within, but within our sphere of influence, how can we disrupt hierarchies and move towards greater regenerativity, towards right relationships? I argue that it is in the smallest details of our lives – our habits, practices, and our ways of being together – that make the world. This is also reflected in the Emergent Strategy (brown, 2017) principle of fractals and small is all (brown, 2017). My encouragement is for all of us to find the simple things we can practice, individually and collectively, as often as possible, that help us remember our interbeing and heal tendencies of separation.

Here’s to our collective re-imagining, creating, and embodying the regenerative future that we can create with our actions in this moment, right here, right now. May our collective efforts bring forth a world where we can all fit and thrive!

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Students and Teachers Collaborating for Social Change. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

[1] This chapter is an expression of interbeing and relationships, and many colleagues, teachers, and friends, human and more-than-human, who have influenced and informed these ideas. I would like to thank my colleagues at the Earth Charter, especially Mirian Virela and Alicia Jimenez, for inviting my contribution both to the conference and this anthology; my colleagues Ed Brandtmeier, Carlotta Erenzeller, Jwalin Patel, and Maria for our rich conversations and budding collaborations around regenerative, holistic pedagogies; and my colleagues at the International Institute on Peace Education, especially Janet Gerson, for encouraging and making space for my pedagogical experimentation and holding these questions and conversations with me. Deep bows of gratitude to my teacher, Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh, and the Plum Village Community of Engaged Buddhism, who deeply inspire this work, without whom it would not be possible. In their spirit, I humbly offer this chapter as a continuation of this work, teachings, engagement, and action.

“It’s a special thing to be a human, and it’s a special thing to be on planet Earth.”

-NASA Astronaut Reid Wiseman, Artemis II Commander

As you open this, dear reader, I invite you to pause.
To listen.
To feel.
To take a breath.
What do you notice in this moment, right here, right now?
What do you feel? Sense? Hear?
How are you?
Can you feel the power in the pause, in dwelling in it, even just for a few moments?
Can you also sense and feel into the specialness of being a human alive on planet Earth in this moment?
That amidst the vast spaciousness of the universe, we are here, surrounded by the glorious beauty of our planetary home?
This is an invitation to dwell before you move on, to dwell in the power of the pause.

Welcome.

In my dream the other night, I was explaining to someone the power of the bells at Plum Village monasteries, how every 15 minutes or so, a bell rings, reminding us to come back to the present moment - our body, our breath, this moment, right here. What a profoundly powerful practice it is, just to stop and pause, notice and feel.

I recently returned from San Francisco, where I attended the CIES conference and co-hosted a workshop on regenerative peace pedagogies. For me, the power of the conference was less in the content of the sessions (of which there were many, and which were rich) and more in the coffee breaks and meals and bumping into people in the lobby, in getting to see loved ones in the US that the conference gave me an excuse to see. It was in the moments of connection between and after sessions.

The power was in the pause, in the spaces between.

In our workshop, we invited people to pause as we began the conference together. To breathe, to connect with each other and the Earth, and with the beauty of being alive in this moment.

In my time in the Union Square area of San Francisco, I was struck by the presence of robot cars (Waymo) juxtaposed with the very palpable and visible housing crisis - so many people living on the street and so much human suffering. So much luxury and technological “advancement,’’ side by side with a societal failure to meet the basic needs of an ever-growing proportion of the population.

The US likes to think of itself as “advanced” and “developed,” but a country that cannot house its people (or provide health care, or education, or a living wage, and on and on) does not appear to be either of those things. This feels even more stark when returning to the US from beyond its borders. When I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Niger in the early 2000s, I remember trying to explain houselessness to my friends in the village where I lived, Nianfarde. The concept didn’t exist there, and was both unthinkable and unimaginable. It did not make sense, that especially in a country with so much wealth, there would be people without homes who had to sleep on the street. It didn’t make sense that a community anywhere wouldn’t take care of its people.

We can do better.
So much better.

“Better” has been on full display with the Artemis II mission. I have been inspired by watching their moon mission, perhaps like you, dwelling in moon joy over the past two weeks. The beautiful lessons of love, awe, wonder, and perspective they have been sharing feel much more important and valuable than any scientific data they collected. The astronauts have been reminding us of the preciousness of our planet, that in a sea of space, we live on an oasis of rainforests and rivers. They have been reflecting ourselves back to us, much in the way the moon reflects the sun’s light.

The “data” we need is the reminder of beauty, wonder, awe, interconnectedness - the sense and perspective of our unity, the reminder that we are actually one. As Christina Koch said upon returning, we, on planet Earth, are a crew.

Meanwhile, a few terrible men continue to drop bombs on this precious jewel of the cosmos1, continue to threaten to wipe out entire civilizations. If we can send people into space, I know we can find alternatives to war (war is over, if you want it), and we can create the conditions for everyone to thrive. War should be unthinkable, bombs unthinkable, houselessness unthinkable, hunger unthinkable.

A ceasefire is a pause. A pause in hostilities, a pause in insanity. That pause is needed for other forms of peace to grow, for other worlds that are possible.

The other juxtaposition that needs to be named: we spend money on space missions while people go unhoused and unfed. One could argue we should get our life on earth in order before we spend money venturing into outer space, but I think we can actually do both, reach for the stars and meet everyone’s needs. War is the one we can do without.

I will never stop believing in us, because I know it is possible, and the Artemis crew has demonstrated the best in us.

One of the powerful aspects of the moon mission is the overview effect, a term used to describe the profound shift in awareness that astronauts experience in viewing the Earth from space. While I can only imagine the profoundness of the direct experience for the astronauts, we still get to experience this powerful shift vicariously through them. Their voyage gives us this overview, too.

That this has been happening while all of this horror is happening on earth is striking. Perhaps what we need more than ever is the overview, a reminder of the preciousness of life on earth. It seems too late for some of these men who drop the bombs. I don’t hold a lot of hope for them waking up. But I believe in us. I will never stop believing in us.

I love words, yet sometimes I struggle with language. I struggle to convey our interconnectedness in a way that doesn’t replicate the false sense of separation in English (I sense that other languages, especially Indigenous ones, are able to do this better, as the consciousness of interconnectedness is embedded within them). The words human and nature already feel separate. How can we talk about nature in a way that implies that we are a part of it, not separate from it?

A word I have been using a lot lately is planetary, especially in the phrase our shared planetary home. The word global feels too nation-state-oriented, and nation-states feel like a big part of our problem. When the astronauts looked down from Artemis, they did not see borders. They saw land and a whole lot of ocean. Planetary reminds us that we are on a planet, floating in the cosmos. It feels like one of the shifts in perspectives we need: to remind us to take care of this planet that our home in space, and of each other.

The astronauts have now landed safely at home, on our precious shared planetary home (bearing extra significance for those of us who watched the Challenger explode on live TV as children). I sense we have only begun to receive the lessons they have brought back with them and are sharing so generously. They are reflecting back to us that what we have here is special, that we are one, and what we have is worth taking care of.

Dear Artemis crew, thank you for reminding us of how precious life on Earth is. Thank you for sharing that cooperation, camaraderie, rigor, kindness, compassion, awe, wonder, and love are the very best of the human spirit. Thank you for reminding us of how lucky we are to be floating through space on this watery blue-green home.

I’ll leave you with a few resources I have been nourished by lately:

Reading:
The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World in Change by Rebecca Solnit

A favorite passage:
“We ourselves are not singular, each of us, but plural, a cooperative community. About half the cells in your body do not have human DNA, and your guts, skin, mouth, and many other parts of you are populated places. These are the strains of bacteria and other microbes crucial to your digestion, immune health, and other functions, and they make of you a plural being, a lurching collective of mutually beneficial entities. If you must imagine yourself as an island, you are a diversely populated island, a place of circulations and comings and goings, host to a party full of guests you cannot see but need. Just as a single tree can be one member of a great forest and itself a host to myriad smaller life forms…so we are both members of larger communities and communities in ourselves” (p. 77).

Listening: the latest episode of Wonder Cabinet with Dekila Chungyalpa on the Sacred Feminine and the Living Earth

A favorite excerpt from the transcript:
Dekila Chungyalpa: “I keep coming back to the importance of creating rituals for ourselves. All of us need rituals that tie us back to land. All of us need rituals to remind us that we are born of the earth and that we are inseparable from her….There is no life without nature. We are indivisible. And so the ritual has to be something that wakes us up and reminds us of that. The ritual has to create joy — we’re not alone, and that’s the thing that terrifies us the most. Having a ritual that brings us to recollect that we are in union all the time, every single second, is a joyful ritual.

As I was sitting in a cafe putting the finishing touches on this post, the song San Francisco by Scott McKenzie came on, which felt like a sweet synchronicity, which I honor by sharing it with you here:

Finally, my solar return (birthday! April 24th) is coming soon, and inspired by this poem by the great Mary Oliver:

I invite you to pay attention, be astonished and tell me about it. Send a message or comment below. I can’t wait to hear what you are astonished by!

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With love and infinite care,

Stephanie

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