Yesterday was Head’s Day. Like many traditions at Proctor, I do not know when it started or why it has survived, but the thing I knew for sure was not to mess it up. 

When I first moved to Proctor and to Andover, the question I most often received from folks was, “Are you excited?” Pausing, I would drink the question in for a while, just to get my bearings each time and to see if anything had changed for me. Each time, after carefully thinking it through, I would say, “Not really.” Or, I’d say, “Excitement is not really the word.” Or, finally, “It just feels ‘right.’” I was not trying to be cagey or obtuse, but I was simply trying to honor the question and the questioner. I am also a stickler for precision. To be more precise takes careful and nuanced answers. 

In the last two years, our country and our culture has been put to the test. Pushed to our limits, at least for some of us, it sometimes feels like “the center cannot hold.” Working with and holding hope for adults and teenagers through one of the rockiest periods in recent memory definitely has had its challenges. Even the most stalwart of folks strain to stay healthy while empathy, patience, and the ability to self-regulate too often feel in short supply.

Monday's MLK Day celebration combined the inspiring elements of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s life with that of another human rights movement icon, Dr. Wangari Mathai of Kenya. Dr. Maathai, the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize recipient, also helped lead a revolution for climate justice with other women in her nation to protect the land and forests after colonization and African patriarchal rule from the late 1970s until her death in 2011. We certainly know more about the powerful parts of Dr. King’s life, work, and legacy than we do of those who marched in his footsteps like Dr. Maathai, but the lesson that students came away with during our assembly and discussions afterwards was all about standing for what they feel is good, right, and just. 

When I think of the work that we adults do every day, I see the hidden genius parts of it. If you look closely, you will come to understand as I have that other people notice as well, AND we all have different ways of seeing. Seeing, when it is expressed, is called valuing.

Being in Northern New England at this time has been a revelation. For the one-hundred and thirty of us new to Proctor this year, the routines are still new, but thankfully not as much as they were in the fall when they were “shiny” new. As we head into winter, we find more of our rhythm in this second trimester. We ground ourselves to our obligations and the joys of our time together as a school community as we creep up on the longest evening of the year.

In Indigenous communities, strong medicine means that you are in the presence of something that morphs and changes the very core of who you are, or even a situation. For many indigenous communities, healing is in the land. It’s even in the rocks and air. Just about everything possesses some kind of medicine or teaching from which a person can learn. Powerful medicine transforms. It heals. 

Tonight marks the end of our first trimester. Our students feel like they have been through an important transformative time during these last few months. They came into the school masked and will leave having been “unmasked,” while deepening relationships with others and themselves.