Books, Little Women & Fine Crops
In preparing to write my learning biography for the MA in Person-Centred Education, momentum is gaining to bring together key threads in the reflective process that’s been bubbling away over the last 6 months since I first discovered the course.
One of the key themes is books. I have learnt a great deal from books. I have spent hours and days and years of my life immersed in them. I have lain down in sunny fields, surrounded by daisies, reading until my stomach growled for attention. I have curled up in a waterproof, padded, canvas bag in torrential rain and hail stoms, reading to that last gripping chapter.
I have worn batteries and parents out with clandestine, late-night sessions under the doona.
In retrospect now, I think of the warmth of the womb as an incubation chamber towards human becoming, like cinema viewing (I like all the lights out). I see the desire to combine the natural world with the inner or intellectual world. The integration of a dual self.
I have had books handed down by my mother and my grandmother, recommended by friends. I initiated a chapter of the Puffin Club (Penguin Books) at my school, age 10 - with a letter from Muddlepup and the secret code book as treasured artifacts to prove it.
I wrote my first book, “The Mad Mad Mad Professor” at age 7 (is this still in Mum’s collection?) and have been writing ever since. Some examples of work published or broadcast are available here.
As a little woman growing up, I was in love with three books by Louisa May Alcott, (romantic that I am, problematic as they are).
Little Women grew in to Good Wives then on to Jo’s Boys.
The character I most identified with was Jo:
“The protagonist of the novel. Jo is a tomboy and the second-oldest sister. She is very outspoken and has a passion for writing. Her bold nature often gets her into trouble. She is especially close to her younger sister Beth (make that “Gra”), who helps her become a gentler person. Jo cuts off her long hair - “her one beauty,” as Amy calls it - and sells it to a wig shop to get money for her mother to visit their father, a wounded Civil War chaplain. She refuses the proposal of marriage from family friend Theodore Laurence (”Laurie”), despite many letters sent to Alcott to have them married, and later marries Professor Fritz Bhaer.” (From Wikipedia entry.)
I have highlighted the most resonant aspects.