Earlier this week The Seattle School held its 2021 Instructional Team Orientation retreat, during which Dr. President Derek McNeil delivered an address.
He organized his talk around “Sankofa.” Which as you may know, is a word from the Akan Twi and Fante languages of Ghana, with translates as, “go back and get.”
Sankofa has come to be symbolized by a bird with its head turned backwards while its feet face forward, while carrying a precious egg carefully in its mouth.
In a context of an emerging new normal… a context in which so much has changed, inviting fresh imagination and courage what from one’s past does one need to “Go back and get”?
That was Dr. McNeil’s question to us as an instructional team:
“What’s the thing that I need to go back and get? …that WE need to go back and get?”
What’s the thing from your past, your culture(s), your story, your faith tradition, your family of origin, your memory that you need to go back and get to move forward in this time and this place?
This feels like a helpful question to sit with. One way or another we all will move into our shared future. How? What will we carry forward? How will discern what to select from life before to carry forward into life ahead?
We are all contributing to the co-creation of a new normal. Yet we don’t do so a blank slates or empty vessels. We do so as richly textured, storied, bodied, and located peoples… a bird can only carry so much in its mouth as it moves ahead.
So, what might you go back and get?
Peace, dwight
