There is a definition in this chapter for Cultural Appropriation: pg. 13 the disrespectful and unacknowledged adoption of a part of culture of identity by members of another culture of identity.

This definition bothers me. We adapt we change, we learn from those we are forced among. I get that we shouldn't take from a culture we have no ties to, but some of us are watered down versions of our culture, and we have been transplanted into other cultures. We shouldn't be disrespectful but we may be unacknowledged in our adoption of parts of culture. We still hold in our hearts our ancestor's pasts even if we didn't walk it ourselves, and we have parts of our new culture thrust upon us. We adapt and adopt from both.

My very being is cultural appropriation for I no longer really belong to any culture. How do we know we belong to a culture.? How much of that culture needs to mark us, to get to own it as our own? I am not numbered or marked in any visible way. If I write about being white-I spit on my ancestors who walked and survived the Trail of Tears. (The Trail of Death mentioned in the book was the Potawatomi tribe primarily from Indiana to Kansas, the Trail of Tears is a broader term encompassing multiple tribes and often specifically refers to the Cherokee people). If I write about being native- I am not numbered for my forefathers are not one of the acknowledged "five", (Maybe they didn't communicate well enough to understand or sit at the "table" and sign paperwork. We were not "in the room where it happened". So, therefore are not acknowledged. Though I can prove the linage. ) and I was raised among the enemy. I have no rights to either group. The pigment of my distant Congo legacy is bleached our of my skin. my native ancestors skin looked like mine, and my Southern, Irish, and Swedish accents have alluded my tongue (probably educated out of my great grandparents tongues and all the descendants for generations. . I know it isn't like "Taming the Shrew" or a scene from "My Fair Lady" but most of my family has had elocution training of some sort and have had to practice enunciating our vowels and such. When did that start? How far back? Why can my mother pick up the phone and talk to a friend adopting the southern drawl from her childhood instantly. We moved so often I can pick up any number of accents. )

Which box should I check when filling out forms? I have heard the words, "Passing" for looking like another culture. It is a negative term, but it may be me and there is no box for it. I am an imposter, poser, "other". I have no claim to any one people or group and no-one group wants to claim me.

It is interesting that groups can accomplish great things with their number and by being larger, but the U.S. has created a system where some groups do not want to claim everyone.

So much of the few chapters of this book are things I have heard and know to be true, it is really interesting to read the origins and other parts of the stories or slightly different versions. (Like the telephone game things change when retold.) The giving of homemade gifts is strong in my family. And we often give away the "firsts" of a new project. If we don't give away the "First" we may never make another. We give thanks, differently and we leave places better than we found them.

Flourishing to me cannot happen without creativity or time to be creative, so I run programs in the community to help people flourish through art. My business Dragon Art is an educational art business. I don't believe in talent, I think that art is taught and I love to help others discover that they can do it. I started the Elements or Art Studio Tours and asked Jo from Beaux Arts to partner with me, because it would be a way to bring help our local artists and want to be artists get out there. I also run a Narrative Art show and Competition in June and encourage everyone to tell a story through pictures and participate. I find that people are more productive in all areas of their life when they take time to be creative.

Stories, especially when they are told from person to person can inform and inspire but also reveal hard truths. From these difficult stories, I think healing is possible, if we are willing to decenter ourselves and listen to them.

But that is only part of the story. 6 and 7 years ago I looped and taught this year's Junior Class. I had a student on my roster whose brother i taught in that group for two years. Looking at the big picture, I saw an opportunity to go back and tie this class to that and touch upon the same themes cyclically. Even more so though, I had the idea for my mural for the year. When I first started working here the was a bulletin board that was my favorite still to this day, the Cherokee Legend of the Two Wolves. I would constantly stop with my classes in front of it and use it as a teaching tool. The creator of said bulletin board is Rebecca, my better and wiser half. She has not worked here since Parker was born and the Indian Education Program dissolved over disagreements with the district. How can stories be medicine? I saw this as an opportunity to pay homage to her board and through the story infuse some Native Wisdom into our halls again.

But that is just after reading paragraph one, so expect me to be wordy with this it seems.

So far, it is hard for my mind to focus on this book with my ADHD, as through my family I am familiar with many of the topics covered, so my mind kept wandering to who do i know that can do this? How can I do this with my class? How would this look? The more I read, the more I began to think outside of the book. When knowledge is new, I can't get enough. When it is more familiar, my mind wanders to application.

I am sure there will be many new things in this that I will gravitate to, but I also see that in parts of this book, it will be hard to stay in the here and the now. And in a way, given the culture this book is from, that kinda fits...

When it comes to stories being medicine, I truly think that is true. Personally, I read a lot of sci-fi and fantasy books. These stories help me to recover from the day to day life of teaching and allow me to enter a world where I can be anything, like the daughter of a Greek God/Goddess or walk through a wardrobe and enter a magical world.

I can't wait to see what stories this book to share with us.

When I was in high school in Bandon, we had to have a certain amount of community service hours in order to graduate. To accomplish this, we had an annual community service day. Basically, each advisory class would think of a service they wanted to do. They could go spend time and play games with those at the senior center, pull weeds around the school, someone's yard or business, clean up the cemeteries, ect. With having so many options, if you didn't want to do what your class come up with, you had options to go else where. Plus, this wasn't just students, all staff at the high school participated in this day. I think this would be a great thing to bring here in Florence. I've talked with a of seniors in past and they struggle with community service hours for college. I did bring this up during a Night Hour last year and one student liked the idea but the others didn't seem to think that spending time in class thinking of a service was the best use of their time. I hope that we can do something like this. It was always so much fun. I remember all the fun I had with painting pumpkins at the senior center, cleaning up the playgrounds around town and even spending time on our own sports fields cleaning the bleachers or help maintenance keep our fields looking nice.

Even now as I sit here over at Siuslaw West, I see a class of students from the middle school walk over and help clean up the path that is between us and them. Warms my heart to see them so active and having fun and maybe not realizing that they are making a difference.

I read last fall that you shouldn't rake your leaves because natural decomposers can help them decompose back into the soil. So last year I didn't. This spring my yard was unrecognizable with how much it flourished! Lilys grew everywhere! The rose bushes grew to almost reach our back windows! Our apple tree produced more apples then I knew what to do with!

I guess what I am trying to say is I changed the way I took care of my garden and listened to what the plants needed. And now I know how I want to take care of it next year!

I compare this collaboration and knowledge of interconnectedness to the relationship between trees. We have a lot to learn from forests and how trees communicate.

Something else this made me think about is when I pray before my evening meal. I always thank the hands that made it possible for me to have this food but never the earth herself. After reading, I am going to start thanking the earth for providing all this wonderful things that I get to cook with and make food not just for me but for those I love as well.

As a child, I remember my mom telling me of the season of produce. I love berries and I remember asking for berries in the off season and mom telling me that it wasn't the right time of year for berries. My grandmother was the same. They taught me that food came in seasons and even though the grocery store might have something available right now, that it wouldn't be as good as when it was in season.

Last winter, our local grocery store had strawberries in the dead of winter and I succumbed. I bought them and brought them home ready to taste their sweetness. My mom and grandmother's season wisdom was brought to the forefront when I bit into the strawberry and found white flesh and an earthy taste. No juice, no sweetness. I could have predicted this, but I really WANTED them to be summery delicious. This experience that I have repeated on occasion had confirmed my understanding of the gifts of the season. Strawberries are the gift of the earth as spring turns into summer. I appreciate the mindset of "We could choose to live in a world made of gifts. Thinking of something as a gift changes your relationship with it." Strawberries are a gift of the earth. They are magical and to honor the gift, I do not buy them when they are not in season. I know its a small step of one consumer, but I always think, that if maybe enough consumers will consume less, then the demand will lower and the supply will only come when the earth is ready to give the gift. Our market economy is dreadful and wasteful and our connection with the earth strengthens as we consider the earth's bounty as a gift. I take my collective action by supporting local farmers, buying in season, wasting less, and appreciating more.

I love gardening and find tending to my garden as an act of sanity. Digging my hands in the dirt can literally lower my worries and calm my fears. I often enter my garden with stress and leave with hope. I love the colors of fall and spent years creating spaces for mums to bloom. Last year I read that mums are non-pollinating flowers, meaning the bees cannot draw pollen from them. They are annual flowers and bring nothing to the cycle of the season except colorful bounty. I learned that instead of mums, asters are the native, pollinating, bee-loving alternative. So, I scoured the nursery for asters and found three plants on clearance. I planted them and tended to them last fall. All three aster plants are now in full bloom and bringing a beautiful pop of color to the autumn canvas. Also, the bees are still active in the garden as now they have a new plant to feed from. I'm grateful for this opportunity to keep the garden alive as the earth starts to embrace more sleep in the fall and winter. I'd like to think that the bees are grateful for another source of pollen too.

As a kid, I struggled to make and keep friendships because I was always the new girl in school and then in a couple of years, we would move. I was envious of my peers who had been together in one town from kinder to high school. It was hard to be accepted into their social group, because they had so much history together. Even now, there is a great distinction amongst my colleagues as who was born and raised here, and who moved here to work and live. I think that is why I felt like I belonged most when I was an expat living overseas. All of my colleagues had a home country and were choosing to live and reside in a new country. All of my friends were like me, living away from the conveniences of home to work in a place in the work that needed educators. There was comfort in our shared life stories and experiences of being an expatriate.

I love my job and career and find utter joy in my everyday and I cannot have that experience alone. I need my colleagues to understand all sides of our students. I need my colleagues to teach me how to improve and share their experience with me. I thrive on a team with a collective responsibility for the student's success. On my own, I doubt my impact, get distracted with unimportant details, and get lost in the what ifs. On a team, I feel included in a system of education and a sense of belonging that I matter to my student's day and that I am making a difference in this place. So, I would say I need some help flourishing and I would be honored to offer the same support to anyone around me who is also in need.

Maybe they don’t have the support at home or maybe they really don’t care. I want to help by giving that support at school and showing that I care. I’ll try to keep helping them even when they try to push me away or not take any help. But maybe the thought that someone cares enough to make sure they pass, to make sure they graduate and help them to go off on their next journey is all they need. I may feel some days I’m not helping or it just gets too much but thinking about how plants need gardeners and sun light to help them grow, students need teachers and support around them to help them grow.

I then think about the students who don't do that and hear them talking about how they just stayed inside and did nothing with their free time but sleep and play on their phones. I think about many of these kids are growing up with phones and forgetting about the connection to everything around us. Do they not go outside and play aside from school? The kids around where I live, I don't really see them outside playing anymore.

This reading and question this week, made me think about how I don't really go out in nature anymore. Even just taking a walk somewhere outside my apartment. That's where I see the loneliness. Not everyone goes out anymore, especially since COVID. I want to go out more and just go for a walk, even if it's not through the woods or on a trail, I want to go out and just look at the trees that are changing color and falling as we leave summer behind and enter fall then winter.

I think sometimes we forget about the gifts or joys we have in lives when other things start to take over. This section reminded me that it is okay to take time and do things for you and to get back to what made you happy before.