Regardless of what particular holiday or ritual you have celebrated this season, most likely it involved the use of light as a sign and symbol representing warmth, communion, change, and an ode toward gratitude, healing, and renewal. Light remains our primordial source of direction for moving forward, honoring, hope, and so often, creativity too.
Ideas come to us as forms of light, ones that glimmer and emanate in a luminescence, outwardly and within, and in enough of a special vibrational consistency that we pay close attention to their meaning and possibility. Whether the vision is born from a need to resolve struggle and suffering, or the fortuitous occasion to freely ponder invention, our perspectives on the outcome of reality shifts -- ah, with creativity, reality has options. From the very arrival of the buoyant idea, something within us is lit anew, whether or not the idea is yet realized. We move towards a projection that the manifestation of this idea could result in the betterment of our lives, the extension of our experience into an easier or more advanced realm, and perhaps even to have the potential to lead others into heightened state of being or an accentuated state of joy. As we go on to actively imagine the fruition of our idea, we progress into a state that gleams with inspiration – we are inspired! To nourish our inspiration, we must remain not only creative, but also hopeful that what we envision is possible. We must sustain a state of creativity and hope in order to keep believing. There is no agent of hope more important than creativity, nor is there any fabric of creativity more important than hope.
In a 360 degree reflection, the foundation of the philosophy and approach to education for both Studio and Roberts Field was born of the idea and inspiration to enrich the lives of children and the community and teach about the world in a way that strengthens and builds our imaginative capacity – to ignite learning and creativity. Our creative output, and our positive outlook on the parts of it that may have gone wrong, which could eventually go even more right, can be a promethean lifelong tool and skillset. It can also stand as a practice and belief system that will bring forth the best actualities for oneself and the world. With interdisciplinary approaches to learning, and ongoing meditative practices that focus upon compassion, listening, sharing, and the embrace of the many different ways of living and believing, the Studio and Roberts Field missions nurture beams of light to the higher capacity of the individual learner, the community, and the world, ongoing and regardless of our conditions. Simply by being creative, we are being hopeful, confident that what we can imagine can also be. This is a main premise of commitment to how we create change.
We remember this, as we remember all that Studio and Roberts Field has traversed in great difficulty over the last 9 months of the pandemic, along with so many community members of our planet. As a school, our obstacles through this time have been tall ones, and yet, through the unyielding application of our mission, and with tenacious hope and belief in who we are and what we do, ideas and resolutions arose and shimmered. We steeped ourselves in a creative field that returned to us through landscape and infinite learning elements a lasting resolve and many variations of the manifestations of our vision.
We are settling into our new school building now, the Faros Building, that also appeared and arose from a lot of hard work, a lot of hope, and mounds of serendipity. Faros means “Lighthouse” in Greek. Studio and Roberts Field are indeed lighthouses, through our mission, through our teaching, and how we act and who we are in the ocean of the world’s experience. And, with the Faros name, there are few more appropriate monikers upon which to land in as a school home.
We will all meet 2021 with welcome, curiosity, and sure reserve – and I’m wishing you so much peace and rest as hardship eases, and we remain hopeful for a renewed time of well-being for all. As we walk towards this time, I also wish you the creativity, born of hope, and the hope that is the first host of creativity. It always reveals gift and endurance,
and a most seismic and unanticipated grace.
With this wish, I also promise that we will continue to educate, enrich, and nurture your children in this way, in a way that always reinforces their individual beauty, their specialness, and their unthwarted ability to hold light,
and to yield vision, compassion, and success from it.