Happy To Be Part of a National Park Grant With Weir Farm - A Collaboration That Is Simply Beautiful

 For the 2nd year, CWP-Fairfield is hosting a teacher institute in collaboration with Weir Farm National Historic Park and the beautiful landscape of Connecticut. The art center, which also is a nature and farm preserve, has been a part of the CWP-radar for a few years and I'm really exited that the National Writing Project has a special collaboration with the National Park Service.

So much of this is a throwback to my Beargrass Creek State Nature Preserve work in Louisville, Kentucky, and my Kentucky Institute for Educational and Sustainable Development Masters from the the University of Louisville. My days of working with Barbie Bruker-Corwin and members of the Kentucky Environmental Educator Association are irreplaceable. All my work at that time has been sort of back-burnered because of English teaching, but it has all found a way back into the Connecticut Writing Project that I lead.

Yesterday, Rich Novack led several opportunities where we were asked to paint like the artist Weir and to think about the ways we gravitate towards nature writing in our classroom. I've been trying for years to figure out how to do water coloring, and each year it is an epic fail. Still, I find my place in the attempt to capture the moment of what I am thinking about (I don't have the talent of Rhiannon Berry who just magically went outside and painted brilliant replication of what she wanted to write about).

I'm in love with the landscape of Weir Farm as it true does remind me of my Kentucky days. I'm always drawn to conversations with fellow educators as we try to figure out a relationship between the world and words (to draw from another reference offered by Rich Novack).

Never impressed when impressionistically 
enmeshed in a human encountering with nature.


Paths lead, diverse, indulge, 
and I fell like a mortal bulge
in the way of a more tranquil world.

Good intensions swirled in a whirlwind of my excess.
I am a the mess, I confess, looking to green invitations -
my hesitations are on the collective we,
interrupting tranquility of what should be without me here.

On the edge of entering, I choose the exit.

Let is exist, let it persist, let it resist -
our roads of good intentions...

natural tensions between a man and his world.

It was a beautiful, albeit hot, first day. I'm looking forward to seeing what comes next in our discovery of self, the earth, and and the ways the local connects us to a more complex, global world.