Anna Smith

And my heart, I’d say it was more like a donkey sunk in a mudhole, struggling and miring deeper. But listen to me: for one moment, quit being sad. Hear blessings dropping their blossoms around you. God.

very live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac . But at the same time we are also created. In the Koran, Allah asks, “The heaven and the earth and all in between, thinkest thou I made them in jest? ” It’s a good question. What do we think of the created universe, spanning an unthinkable void with an un-thinkable profusion of... See more

It is an exercise in what Wiesel’s friend and teacher, the great Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, spoke of as the religious calling to be maladjusted with positive moral force, neither indifferently conformed to the reality of evil and suffering, nor inured to wondrous and redemptive possibilities we can make real.

So I think about the valley. It is my leisure as well as my work, a game. It is a fierce game I have joined because it is being played anyway, a game of both skill and chance, played against an un-seen adversary—the conditions of time—in which the payoffs, which may suddenly arrive in a blast of light at any moment, might as well come to me as... See more

To reel it in enough to give it it’s due time then use the powerful force of my own discipline and also creativity to harness it and then give myself a subsequent superpower.

And so part of the question is, what do we need to bring to educational moments and encounters, beyond a student’s brain or beyond a teacher’s brain, and beyond the knowledge that they’ve acquired; and how do we do that? How do we bring our hearts and our hands and feet into the learning experience so that we can really encounter something that... See more