1. I love the handful of longtime connections I have with friends I made and students who were in my classes at Whitworth. My first day as a student at Whitworth was in Sept. of 1974 and my last day of employment at Whitworth was in May of 1984. (I left Spokane and was a grad student at the U of Oregon in this time period, too, from the fall of 1979-spring of 1982 and resumed my graduate work in the fall of 1984.)
One subject we Westminster Basementeers discussed on ZOOM on Sunday was how much we value the liberal arts education we dug into at Whitworth (Diane feels the same way about her studies at Pacific Lutheran University).
All of us are grateful that the emphasis of our studies at Whitworth was not career focused. Val was a history major, I double majored in history and English, and the rest of us Basementeers were English majors. (I think I got that right.)
The focus of our education was to learn to read and think critically and to ask questions. I have often thought about how my education at Whitworth, and later my approach to teaching, was fundamentally more interrogative than declarative. We learned to be open to a variety of world views, ways of thinking, perspectives, and possibilities.
So, when my friend since we met in 1974, Deborah, emailed me and said that after reading about Sunday's Basementeer ZOOM session, she was going to set her book of Rumi poems on her bedside table and read from it before going to sleep at night, it made me very happy.
It made me happy that while I don't think any of us read Rumi at Whitworth, the way our professors approached their work as Christian liberal arts educators inspired our curiosity to explore the wide world of ideas, art, music, ways of thinking, literature, and so much more.
I know I carried this inspiration forward in my work at Lane Community College. It moved me to teach my writing courses philosophically. I wanted to teach classes in which we could explore Rumi, the Tao, Buddhism, movies from Israel and Iran and other Middle East countries, and other writers and thinkers outside the Western tradition, as well as explore more traditional writers like Shakespeare and Homer.
The emphasis of our liberal arts education at Whitworth was to understand a wide range of ways of thinking about human experience and to assess these ways of thinking after we'd arrived at an understanding of what we'd read.
Right now, I'm reading about whales from an ecological perspective as I work my way through Fathoms by Rebecca Giggs.
It's not Shakespeare. It's not Rumi. It's not exactly a history book. In other words, I'm reading this book not because it's similar to other reading I've done over the past year, but because I committed my life to the value of liberal (broad) education and I'm curious about a wide range of things. I will always be grateful, first, to North Idaho College and then to Whitworth for setting me on this path -- not a career path, but a path of curiosity, learning, questioning, weighing, reading, listening, and discussing.
2. Thinking and reading was on my mind today and so was food.
This summer's heat has eroded my interest in cooking and, moreover, has diminished my interest in cooking meat. Today, I got out a couple of cookbooks that I first started cooking from 30-40 years ago. First, I thumbed through Laurel's Kitchen and then I read recipes from Moosewood Cookbook.
It helped me remember the ways I used to prepare food when I was in my thirties. Back then, much like how I'm thinking about food right now, I didn't eat meat at home, but enjoyed eating meat in restaurants and if I was a guest at someone else's table.
Right now, at home, I'm finding that meat sits heavily in my system and I'm wanting to eat lighter food.
My guess is that I'll be eating steamed vegetables and rice, tortillas with beans, rice, and cheese, pasta with butter and pepper, and other such things which not only taste better when it's hot, but feel better in my system.
3. When I went to Glacier National Park with Meagan and Patrick back in June, I was impressed with the number of bags of snack foods they carry when traveling. I'm disappointed that I don't remember the names of these products, but today at Yoke's, I bought three bags of snack food: lightly salted almonds, a bag of peanut butter and chocolate Snappers, and a bag of Wiley Wallaby black licorice.
I knew I'd enjoy the almonds and the licorice, but the Snappers were new to me.
Oh, my.
Chocolate, peanut butter, and a pretzel combined into a bite-sized snack.
I'm all in.
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