Dear Hartsbrook Community,
Back to school in outdoor classrooms, we are able to more keenly experience seasonal shifts. We started with mostly glorious days – blue skies, hawks soaring overhead and natural beauty everywhere! We sense, however, that change is coming. The dipping temperature brings chilly, dew-filled mornings, and the light fades more quickly each day.
The turning of the year is a time to reflect deeply. Yom Kippur, which many of our community members will celebrate today, is a time to dedicate to reconciliation, self-reflection and inner change.
At Hartsbrook, we take time to celebrate these seasonal shifts as a community. The coming Fall Festival acknowledges that the ease and glory of summer with its warmth and long days is fading and we will be challenged ahead with the need to provide warmth and light for each other as the days grow colder and darker. We tell stories of battles with the dragon, a mythical creature, which can represent aspects of ourselves and of the world around us that are yet to be redeemed, changed or perfected.
We are grateful to be together on the land which nurtures well-being and a sense that the world is a good place. Here, we can more readily inspire each other to be courageous, and lend the strength necessary to make the changes we seek, especially when the change is overwhelming. A community can inspire each other to act, rather than give up or remain passive.
Thanks to the hard work of Nicki Robb, Paule Sustick, the Land Stewardship crew and a dedicated group of teachers, staff and volunteers, our land this year has yielded a particularly abundant harvest. We, for the first time, were able to feed our own community by creating a CSA. And then, so great was our abundance, we were able to collaborate with Gardening the Community, an organization in Springfield which grows and shares food as an act of social justice. Every week we delivered fresh vegetables to add to what they were delivering to their community.
So indeed we have a great deal to celebrate! We will honor the season of self-reflection at Hartsbrook, celebrating the abundance and the beauty of our garden, and our land. We will also take care to nurture a hopeful vision of our future and celebrate the gifts that are borne from hard work. How quiet and powerful even the small act growing food can be!
We wish for Hartsbrook to be a space filled with peace and calm so that our students can stay steady on their course to becoming human beings who are inspired to act in ways that have a positive impact upon the future. The future that awaits our students will require that they have the courage to help make the world all it could be. Please enjoy the video below.
Happy Fall season to you all!
Virginia McWilliam, Pedagogical Chair