Bird Droppings November 1–2, 2026
Gathering the Pieces: Along the way, thinking about the puzzle
Another morning, another sunrise, and another opportunity to wander through the pieces of a life. I found myself looking across the pasture, hoping to see a deer. The sun was coming up, the trees were beginning to show their autumn colors, and the world seemed to move along at its own pace, quite indifferent to the schedules and deadlines we humans impose on ourselves. The deer were nowhere to be seen. Perhaps they had other plans.
Yesterday was my birthday. Seventy-seven years of wandering through this world, meeting people, losing people, learning from people, and occasionally discovering that what I thought I knew was not quite what I needed to know. I have been thinking about connections lately. Carl Jung used the term synchronicity to describe meaningful coincidences, those seemingly unrelated events that intersect in ways we never anticipated. I wonder sometimes whether the connections were always there and we failed to recognize them.
Over the past few days, memories have been drifting through my thoughts like leaves carried along a mountain stream. Former students, old friends, family, teachers, and people I encountered briefly but who somehow left an impression that has lasted decades.
This morning I was thinking about a former student who graduated nearly twenty years ago. He spent considerable time in my classroom during high school, and we stayed connected as he moved through college and into his first career. Then a tragic accident changed his life. A close friend was killed, and he suffered injuries that required years of recovery and rehabilitation. Life has a way of changing the lesson plan. After years of recovery, time spent in the North Georgia mountains, and several attempts to find work that fit his circumstances, he returned to college and eventually became a teacher. We still talk, sometimes about curriculum and teaching, sometimes about almost anything. I wonder how many educators realize the relationships they build with students may continue long after the grades are recorded and the classroom doors close.
Another thread carried me back to Foxfire and the mountains of Rabun County. I thought about some of the original Foxfire students and the people they interviewed more than fifty years ago. Those young people traveled through the mountains listening to stories, documenting traditions, and learning from individuals whom conventional schooling might never have recognized as teachers.
One older woman, Aunt Aerie, living alone in a mountain cabin, became a particularly important source of stories and knowledge. She shared her experiences of gardening, cooking, and everyday mountain life with students who were genuinely interested in what she had to say. She had no elaborate curriculum, no standardized assessments, and no educational technology. What she possessed was a lifetime of experience and a willingness to share it with young people willing to listen. Perhaps that was the lesson all along.
Now many of those original Foxfire students are themselves growing older, and some have passed away. The young people who once preserved their elders’ stories have become the elders whose stories need preserving. There is a certain symmetry in that.
I have also been watching a documentary about the struggle to preserve Mexican American Studies in Tucson, Arizona. Listening to students describe classrooms where their histories, families, and communities finally mattered, I was reminded again of Foxfire: different places, different cultures, different generations, yet the same fundamental question. Whose knowledge matters, and who gets to decide?
John Dewey wrote about education growing from experience. Foxfire demonstrated what that might look like in practice. The students in Tucson discovered that learning could become meaningful when their own lives and communities were part of the curriculum.
And I think back to my own classrooms, the aquariums, animals, sofas, talking sticks, and students who had been told too many times what they could not do. Perhaps teaching was never simply about delivering information. Perhaps it was about creating a place where people could discover that their lives had meaning, their experiences had value, and their voices deserved to be heard.
Over the past few days, I have also been thinking about solitude and loneliness. These two experiences may look very much alike from the outside but feel remarkably different from within. I remember walking alone as a young boy, following creeks, watching wildlife, and discovering places where I could be myself. Those walks were not necessarily about escaping people. Sometimes they were about finding a place where the world made sense.
Perhaps that is part of why I still find myself driving along country roads at sunrise, looking for deer, listening for birds, and watching the light change across a pasture. Some things change very little in seventy-seven years. Yesterday I turned seventy-seven. This morning I watched another sunrise. Somewhere along the way I have accumulated a rather large collection of stories, some joyful, some painful, some unfinished.
I am beginning to think that life is not a puzzle we eventually complete. It is a collection of pieces we continue turning over, discovering connections we had not noticed before. And sometimes, if we are fortunate, someone sits down beside us and helps us see how a few of those pieces fit together. Perhaps the greatest gift we give another person is not an answer, but the willingness to listen to their story. The deer did not appear this morning. The sun came up anyway. And there are still stories waiting to be told. Please keep all in harm’s way on your mind and in your heart. Namaste.
My friends, I do not say this lightly,
Mitakuye Oyasin
(We are all related)
bird
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