- I ran naked through the UC Berkeley school library during finals
- I got hired as a substitute preschool teacher
- I ran naked through the school where I got hired as a substitute preschool teacher
If you guessed the third option, you are very wise. I have not yet run naked through Aquatic Park School, where I sub.
Good. Now that you're caught up on my life, I want to explain why I'm re-entering your cyber lives. Writing about my experience has always been something really important to me, and it assumed a heightened importance when I was in South America and far away from my community. I realized there I really love to write about my ideas and reflect on my experiences. But because of circumstances of the last year, I had sort of stopped writing.
Now I'm in a class at Berkeley called "Non-violence." The class is about physical violence that happens out in the world, but perhaps even more so, it is about emotional "violence" (unkindness is another way to think of it) that we perpetuate on ourselves. In the class of about 70 people, we sit in a circle (almost unheard of at Berkeley), and dialogue about various things that come up, from homelessness to sexuality and repression to our own inner struggles. This is my favorite class I've taken at Berkeley, and I feel really lucky to have found it.
Our class is based upon a project which each student undertakes, called a "Vision Actualization." This is basically a project we design and implement which somehow spreads non-violence in our world, or in ourselves. We have a huge amount of freedom in the project we create: projects range from learning to grow your own food to teaching a class in an inner city high school about dialogue and conflict resolution. And that's why I'm back here: my vision includes writing a consistent blog.
My vision, encapsulated into a magnified baby nutshell:
1) Educate myself about diverse topics, ranging from evolution to cosmology to psychology
2) Write, write, write. Write about what I'm reading, write personal reflections to myself, share ideas and experiences with a larger community through a blog
3) Personal mission statement: Create a document of my own personal mission statement. Another way to think of it is: what do I believe and what do I want to do?
4)Here's the culmination of all of it: Student-teach a class at Berkeley about inner and outer non-violence in the fall. It will be called something like "Community and Empowerment," and will include elements of the first three pieces of this project.
I'm excited to undertake such a project. Already it feels pretty revolutionary. In my three years at Berkeley I don't think I've ever checked out a book from the school library. I've actually tried to avoid it at all costs, because it is large and partly underground and filled with people, many of them stressed out and not looking that happy. And now in the last week I've checked out 7 different books. The latest is called "Being Peace" by Thich Nhat Hanh, a Vietnamese monk who won the Nobel Peace Prize. I'll write more about it later.
Well, my battery is running out and I feel like reading. Nice to be sharing with all of you again!
Love,
Ryan
