Fall Master Class with Sally
“Love is the Lesson”
The first weekend of October, Sally taught a Fall Master Class preparing a small group of educators to facilitate Consenses’ “At Home” Curriculum. Over the course of the weekend, Sally led participants who spanned the globe from Boston to Florida to Germany, through creative muscle-building exercises and playful, artistic risk-taking adventures allowing teachers to play in the field of the Consenses process. These teachers learned, not only how to present the Consenses at Home curriculum to their own group of future students, but got to experience the magic of Consenses’ education by participating in and practicing the tools and skills inherent in our curricula.
Friday and Saturday teachers used each other’s art, in the vein of a game of ‘telephone,’ as catalysts to inspire their own creations in 5 different mediums (photography, music, movement, sculpture, and poetry). On Sunday we revealed to them the collaboration they’d hitherto been blind to. I think it is fair to say that they were amazed and awed by the unifying, heartfelt, “Interpretive Chains” they’d created together. They said they felt heard and seen, valued, and empowered. The lessons we learned were about love.
We started the workshop by asking each teacher to come up with a “cataclysm sentence’ inspired by a question the renowned physicist Richard Feynman posed to his Cal Tech class in the 60s:
‘If in a certain cataclysm, where all of the scientific knowledge is to be destroyed, but only one sentence is to be passed down to the next generations of creatures, what would be the best thing? The thing that contains the most information in the least number of words’
The statement each teacher came up with, was passed to someone else in the group to take a photo that representing its essence. Each photo was exchanged with yet another person in the group to write a song about the photo’s essence. Each piece of art that inspired the next, that inspired the next, in the artistic game of ‘Telephone’ that is Consenses, represented a hand-off of a baton in the human race. The next generation takes up the baton of the original seed of wisdom, reinterprets it as their own, and passes it on.
Sally says “Each time we teach a class we seed our hopes and dreams and goals for a better tomorrow into the fertile minds of our students with wisdom that was planted in us and which we have, in turn, reinterpreted in our own image. In this way, knowledge is a work of art. A work of art that was started generations before the history of man began to be written down. Just as our ancestors couldn’t predict how their seeds of wisdom would manifest in the next generation, neither can we know where our wisdom will manifest or how it will be used and painted into future generations.”
Check out all the artwork created throughout the weekend, below.
https://padlet.com/CONSENSES/7mqyg2y9fitmyght
Of the chains Sally, in closing said:
“I was so overwhelmed by love throughout these chains. Again and again, I was brought to tears. Overall, the lesson for me was about LOVE. How it is there for the taking. It is us. When we reject love we reject ourselves. I also got how scary that can be and how much courage it takes to accept love, our lovability, and our oneness with all things and that the light doesn’t exist without the dark, just as I (as a single being on the planet) don’t exist without the you. We are a bunch of I’s who’ve agreed to accept the love that is our oneness. What a gift this Masterclass has been for me. Words that seemed to permeate all the chains for me are Love, ebb and flow, lion, power, and light.”
The chains were stunning, provocative, emotional, and heartwarming. As a collection, they suggested that perhaps, at the center of the seed of ultimate wisdom that originated hundreds of thousands of years ago, that the essence of all teaching is love. Love is what matters. Love is what we must, must, must pass on… and on… and on.
From the mouth of one of our participants, Stephanie Wiedemann says, “Consenses: Life changing! A masterclass in vulnerability, courage, and empathy. It reminds us to approach the world with an open perspective – to really stop and listen, observe, and search for bigger truths outside of our own limited views – while also demanding that we listen to, trust, and follow our own creative voices. I can truly recommend this course to everyone who is open to connecting to themselves and to others in a more meaningful and powerful way – while also exploring and learning about different art forms. “