Written Reflection
Week 3 of Cultivating Voice
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I learned a lot,
…but, that can’t be all I have to say.

I ate a lot too,
…but what did I eat? Why did I eat it? How is it important that I ate what and why?
Well truthfully, last night I ate way too much Thai food for my own good, and today I ate an egg-salad sandwich from Starbucks. But only half of it. The other half, I decided as I resealed the container, I wanted to give to a hungry woman on the side of the road. We had stopped on the off ramp and given her all the change in our pockets, which probably amounted to less than $3. So, I wanted to give her the rest of my sandwich too. But when we pulled up to get back on the freeway, there were four lanes of traffic between her and I.
That is no excuse. I could have run across; the lights were red, the cars were stopped, waiting for me to act upon my good will. But I didn’t.
Why? Conditioning (I will steal the term from Huxley), …running across the traffic was too dangerous. But, then again, it is dangerous also for her to be on the streets starving. Why is my life more important? Because I am a moving, working cog in the machine? Because I go to school? Because I am not starved of knowledge?
Neither is she.

But I ate, and she didn’t. I learned, and maybe --probably-- she learned something this week too. However, she most assuredly didn’t learn about “reader response literary theories” or sit on a hill and talk to a tutor about how she writes.
But maybe she laid on a rock in the woods, staring at the sky at dusk, and discovered something about herself --though it’s unlikely she wrote about the experience in her blog.

What I really mean to say encompasses all I have discovered this week about my thinking and learning, about my writing and myself.
When I look at a single session of listening or thinking, my reflection of that can be no more depth-ful than the flat plain of the mirror which I can reach out to touch, but go no further. As I take in a whole week, and account for the many different occurrences and influences, places and times of learning, my reflection gains depth and body --I am then looking through the mirror glass, at a re-creation of my multi-dimensional self. At this point the very act of reflecting becomes a learning process in its own right.


I feel I went on too much of a tangent this week. Maybe none of these ramblings have any sense of congruency to anyone but myself. As for a personal goal, I strive to be more able to express my true meaning; to better explain the synchronicity of ideas that I see in my head. And if I work and learn and reflect as much every week as I did this one, such improvements will come quickly.