Woolman Blog

“By what name will future generations know our time?

Will they speak in anger and frustration of the time of the Great Unraveling, when profligate consumption exceeded Earth's capacity to sustain and led to an accelerating wave of collapsing environmental systems, violent competition for what remained of the planet's resources, and a dramatic dieback of the human population?

 Or will they look back in joyful celebration on the time of the Great Turning, when their forebears embraced the higher-order potential of their human nature, turned crisis into opportunity, and learned to live in creative partnership with one another and Earth?” -David Korten

Activists, authors, indigenous elders, and philosophers from many countries and backgrounds describe this point in human and natural history as The Great Turning. Essentially, it is a term that recognizes that we are at a crossroads and continuing the path that we have been on for the last 100 years will lead to unmatched devastation of human and natural life. However, there are actions, alternatives, and solutions springing up in areas of human rights, economics, the environment, (and so much more!) that are actively combating these crises and the best part is that the folks participating in them are having fun in the meanwhile!

The Great Turning Trip’s goals will be two-fold. Part of the experience will include a tour of some of these fantastic organizations located in the San Francisco Bay--a kind of vortex of visionaries working and playing for a more just and sustainable future. Much of the time will also be spent in interactive workshops with leading activists, using internationally acclaimed methodology for helping us to get in touch with our own individual roles in The Great Turning. Being an activist means something different to each of us and the hope is that through experiencing and being introduced to a range of change-makers, activism and alternative systems, we will be able to see how we might each use what makes us happy in life to make the world a better place!

If you would like to learn more about The Great Turning, here is an article by David Korten:

http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/5000-years-of-empire/the-great-turning-from-empire-to-earth-community-1

What: Catalyst Project is a center for political education and movement building. We work to create a world where all people are free from oppression and exploitation. Catalyst Project works in majority white communities with the goal of deepening anti-racist commitment and building multiracial movements for liberation. We create spaces for organizers to develop and share analysis, visions and strategies to build movements for racial, economic, gender and ecological justice. Catalyst programs prioritize leadership development, supporting grassroots organizations and multiracial alliance building.

Website: http://collectiveliberation.org

What: The Canticle Farm is an intentional community based off of the values of The Great Turning, including service and nonviolence. The community and its urban garden are located in downtown Oakland. Please click link to read an article about the community:http://www.johndear.org/articles/making-peace-in-inner-city-oakland.html

The Canticle Farm: http://canticlefarm.wikispaces.com/Mission and http://www.servicespace.org/join/?pg=why

o   At the Canticle Farm we will talk to Pancho: http://www.dailygood.org/view.php?sid=127

o   And Adelaja: http://www.awakin.org/forest/index.php?pg=profile&cid=48&sid=12302

What: We will learn about their wonderful projects helping people to speak out for justice, build a green economy, empower voters, build community and invest in young leaders.

Website:www.ellabakercenter.org

What: The Generation Waking Up Experience - called a “WakeUp” for short - is an interactive, multimedia workshop about the challenges & opportunities of our time, and inspires participants to take meaningful action toward a thriving, just, sustainable world. Whether it be social entrepreneurship ventures, community service projects, or hard-hitting advocacy campaigns, the WakeUp has inspired collaborative action by young people around the globe. Since its launch in 2010, young people have brought the WakeUp to at least 12 countries including the United States, China, Mexico, India, Kenya, Australia, Egypt, Germany, and Brazil.  Thousands have experienced it and over 150 are now trained as WakeUp Facilitators.

Website: www.genup.net

What: Global Exchange is an international human rights organization dedicated to promoting social, economic and environmental justice around the world. We will have the opportunity to talk with amazing activists who are in the front lines of the community rights movement, as well as meet a former sweatshop worker who exposed the factory to the ABC 20/20---and more!

Website: www.globalexchange.org

What: ThePachamama Alliance empowers indigenous people of the Amazon rainforest to preserve their lands and culture and, using insights gained from that work, educate and inspire individuals everywhere to bring forth a thriving, just and sustainable world.

Website: www.pachamama.org

What: Bay Area Community Exchange (BACE) a collaborative network that supports the development of alternative means of exchange in the San Francisco Bay Area, will host the event. They will introduce us to the Gift Economy concept and the idea of the Time Bank. The Happiness Institute is a space where community members collaborate and work on social projects.

Website: http://timebank.sfbace.org

Website: www.foodnotbombs.net

We will spend the morning touring and engaging in activities related to the various alleyways of the Mission District that are painted from floor to ceiling with graffiti which is often very current and political.

HOME AGAIN by dinner!!!

One thing that's been coming up a lot for me in the past month here at Woolman is the definition of activism.  What makes one an activist?  What counts as activism? Does volunteering?  What about simple living?  Making a documentary about child slaves on the Ivory Coast certainly counts. (Doesn't it?)  But what about distributing said documentary?  What about just watching it?  I'm not sure yet, but last night I met somebody and had a conversation that felt like another little step towards figuring it all out. 

We were sitting on a beach near Point Reyes, cooking dinner when Joseph rode in.  There was a puppy in the basket of his bike, a trailer full of gear hitched to the back.  We offered him some of our rice and sat down to talk while he ate.

He's riding down the coast, he told us, for awhile.  He worked 8 months at an office job, got fed up with capitalist bullshit, and took off. 

As the sun sank lower our new friend waxed poetic, calling himself a trailblazer, explaining that he hopes in a few years there will be more people doing what he's doing- opting out of the capitalist money system and living un-materialistically.   

We all sat and listened, petting the puppy occasionally.  Wow, we murmured.  That's awesome, Charlotte said.  You changed your whole lifestyle, that's the most you can do.

To a certain extent, I agree.  It's important and admirable to live what you believe.  But is that the limit of activism?  When people see Joseph pedaling along, when they stop to talk with him, is he acting as an activist?    

For me, I think a big part of defining activism is about intent.  Joseph seemed happy that he was modeling the life style he believed in, but I also got the sense that any awareness he raised was just an added bonus to the adventure he was having.  Maybe I'd feel differently if he was distributing literature about his life style as he rode, or if he was giving more organized talks and lectures.

Still, who am I to judge?  The hour we spent talking didn't convince me to abandon capitalism as a broken system, but it did get me thinking about ways I might work as an activist.  That's something.   

(Warning: For the sake of authentic representation in art, the following poem has not been edited for language)

"Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought...As they become known to and accepted by us, our feelings...become sanctuaries and spawning grounds for the most radical and daring of ideas." -Audre Lorde, "Poetry is Not a Luxury"


Word in the World, Woolman's spring elective on spoken-word poetry, has kicked off to a strong start! We (one intern and five students) meet twice a week to create a "sanctuary and spawning ground" for phenomenal poems, discussions of issues, performance, and play. Students have helped build the course, structuring content and working through consensus-based process to form the facilitation structure of the class.

"Spoken-word" refers to oral traditions in poetry, storytelling and performance that have largely come out of, and/or given voice to, marginalized, silenced, and sidestream communities. This form includes everything from oral mythologies to the beat poets to hip hop to competitive slam poetry. Spoken-word poetry, performed by folks from many different backgrounds and communities, often honors its silence-breaking tradition by including political, personal, and highly narrative content that enthralls and fires up the audience through passionate storytelling.

The students in the class have already built a vibrant and creative safe-space for exploring expression and making poems. We have collaged a group poem together in silence, played a freestyle rhyming game that made us giggle a lot, cut up our own freewrites to create mini-book poems, and are currently working on a 'zine (homemade magazine) on the theme of "Recipes."  We were particularly inspired by our visit to the Berkeley Slam during the Peace Studies trip, and came back with rockin' ideas about how to make a performance stronger and help tell our stories through vulnerability, humor, and body language.

Over the semester, we hope to hold community open mics and even a competitive slam or two, do some guerilla poetry by performing or posting poems in unexpected places at unexpected moments, and get to know and learn from lots of rad poets, virtually and in person. It's already clear that some of those rad poets will be the students in the class themselves. Their bravery and curiosity have already driven them to unexpectedly raw and delightful heights of poetic prowess. Looking forward to a rollicking and firey semester of words and stories, at Woolman and in the world.

Click the screen shot to see an interview with Devin Cruz

The definition I like best for global citizenship was from Oxfam International: "It is an outlook on life, a belief that we can make a difference". And in the Great Turning, which was described as on page 12: "a joyful celebration on the time of the Great Turning, when their forebears embraced the higher-order potential of their human nature, turned crisis into opportunity, learned to live in creative partnership with one another and the Earth". Based on these two descriptions, I see global citizenship as a key concept in the phase of the Great Turning.

Hi all,

Today was a day filled with writing workshops.  We had time with three different writers, Bob Burnett: a Quaker Journalist who covers the Middle East, Rachel Reynolds (from Memoir Journals), and Virgie Tovar (an expert on the intersections of gender, race, and body size).  With all three we read some published works and then we had time to write and share ourselves.  

The first picture is of mariana sharing what she had written while we were with Bob Burnett.  The second is of a group all working on writing in the Trueblood's living room while we were working with Rachel.  And the third is with students listening to Rachel talk.  

One of the things we did in our workshop with Rachel was to all write poems using the same form as one of Billy Collins' poems.  Here are three of the favorites:

I want to have a bank account with money
and be able to send everyone artichokes
when you have a bad day
and I am left wondering what I could have done
-Leda

I want to peel the scaly brown skin with craters to reveal rich green scaly flesh
and squish those avocados slowly and with purpose through the cracks in between my fingers
when you tell me I should not do that, that I'll make a mess, that I'll ruin them
And that the world will end, I just walk away.
-Charlotte

I want the beat to be harsh
and the words to drown me out
when you steal
and enjoy me.
-Selena

One of our other prompts this afternoon was to write about how we are a part of history.  This led to a series of interesting responses, as well as a long discussion started by Amy about the word "history" and how it might not be the best word, and doesn't seem to include everyone or speak to everyone's history, and that maybe we should find a word that speaks to the story of all humans or even all of earth's creatures.  This discussion also touched on what had been taught in different students' history classes and what may have been left out.

Althea is the child of Coleman and Elizabeth, former Woolman staff and current residents in our community. Every semester, she steals the hearts of and makes friends with several students. Her presence adds a wonderful intergenerational feel to our space. 

Althea is one of the brightest young people you will ever meet. She is a perfect image of a mini-Woolmanite with her fierce passion, unending curiosity and love for the natural world! 

Her hobbies are doing "molecular experiments", helping to butcher/dress animals for food and harassing geckos. She is also currently auditing Art class and shared work!

Check out this recent quote from this highly intelligent little person:

Althea: "I don't like video games, they pollute the brain."
Me: "What do you mean by that?"
Althea: "Kids who play video games think dead animals are yuck."

Here are some shots from her birthday party today!

Basilia, another Woolman community member, chows down on raw milk homemade icecream

A few students showed up to wish her well. Callum is A's lil brother. Sweetest baby ever!

Only a few high school juniors would want to build a bicycle-powered weaving loom from scratch, and insist on doing so after his teacher told him repeatedly it would not work. Russell Hofvendahl, from Ben Lomond, CA, is such a student. Why a mechanical loom you might ask? When first arriving at the Woolman Semester School, located in the foothills of the Sierra Mountains, Hofvendahl had the idea to make prayer flags to put around campus but felt limited by the capability of Woolman’s existing handloom.

It is no surprise why Jacob Holzberg-Pill, the Environmental Studies teacher of three years, was hesitant to give Hofvendahl the go ahead when Hofvendahl proposed his ambitious Sustainability project. In addition to the outside work of three core classes, Peace Studies, Global Issues and Environmental Science, all which include an independent project, Woolman students are expected to engage with the community through dish crews, cooking meals, and bi-weekly shared work crews.  Moreover, the Woolman program includes three experiential learning trips correlating to each core class. This tightly packed schedule does not leave much time to work on independent projects, so projects are expected to be of a manageable size.  A full sized, mechanical loom that runs on bicycle power did not seem to fit that criterion.

Yet, as the semester came to a close, both faculty and fellow students rethought their initial disbelief over the completion of Hofvendahl’s project. Having spent time almost every single day building it, plus fighting for permission to use the woodshop after nightly check in, Hofvendahl presented his loom in the final week of the semester. “We never had to wonder where Russell was during this past semester because you could always find him in the woodshop” says Emily Wheeler, admissions director.

While originally inspired by his desire to produce an abundance of prayer flags, Hofvendahl describes how his mechanical loom is designed to move the school “one step closer to ending reliance on factory-made textiles.” He goes on to explain how though weaving with hand looms might be the preferred method, they are just not efficient enough to produce the amount of cloth we have come to rely on in today’s world. Mechanical looms can provide a middle way between factory weaving and handlooms. Beyond self-sufficiency, Hofvendahl created his loom so anyone with access to basic wood, hardware and tools can build one. However, while he talks eloquently about self-reliance and open source ideas, Hofvendahl’s real reason for slogging through four months of complicated gears, shuttles, and frames shines through with his simple explanation; “because mechanical looms are just really cool.”