Raise a Glass…

I just learned that Sir Ken Robinson passed away today.

He was my gateway drug to self directed learning. In 2007, I watched his first ted talk which is now the most watched you tube video of all time. I went on to devour his books and research and I used it in many ways to thwart the systems within which I was teaching and receiving my two masters degrees.

By the time Elena had arrived in 2011, I was deep in mourning for a society that I had deemed incompetent and unable to shift into truly embracing a new paradigm that I knew would be the only way we would be able to sustain as species on the planet long term.

And here Tommy and I were bringing babies into a world that talked like they want to embrace what Sir Ken was saying and yet structurally, systemically, there was no place for that to happen without a drastic burning to the ground, a dismantling of every system that is irreversibly connected and that keeps us trapped yet feeling secure.

And yet I knew what must be done and that what we were doing as a collective would not sustain. In my or in my children’s lifetime it would all begin to unravel. I understood clearly that we must be ready to change every core system away from racist, extrinsic, survivalist, competitive nonsense and embrace equitable, intrinsic, individuation within a community mindset. That would offer creativity to thrive. And the structures that require us to be living shells of ourselves living only to pay bills and feed ourselves and fill our lives with status, things, and addictions without time to know deepest needs and understandings, those would be the end of any humanity I wanted for myself or my descendants.

So I must follow these threads Sir Ken was weaving with his own work on the myriad ways in which school was killing creativity and so much more. I was entrenched in these systems and knew they were strangling me and the student debt I had accrued to jumó through the hoops of that system reminded me of how I had sold my soul to it all. And so I began the journey to see if I could unravel it enough to ensure my children’s souls could be be spared.

Here I am in 2020, with so many lessons learned from the journey that Sir Ken pushed me toward in his Ted Talk in 2007. So many lesson learned but the biggest one is that you can not truly set your children free until you are free. It’s why we are all bound to our ancestors who were not free either. So freeing ourselves from these systems, not only frees our children but it frees all our ancestors, or at least those seven generations back and it offers respite for our descendants, seven generations forward. And who wouldn’t want that?! That kind of freedom will change the world.

Cheers to you, Sir Ken, for sharing your vision. May we carry it to the far reaches of existence and back again.

“Raise a glass to freedom. Something they can never take away. No matter what they tell you.” – Hamilton