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I'm grateful to you, Alice, for taking the time to continue this wandering conversation not just in your head, but among us....

I was feeling peculiarly discouraged by our conversation today, because what seemed such a clear-and-present tension in my head-and-life--between going "mind-wandering," and being asked to "attend" to things we might not choose to look @--just didn't seem an issue for (or even to make sense to) others.

I think you've nailed just where I was getting hung up: on the notion of a power gradiant, with the teacher as somehow above or apart from the process. Thanks for leveling the playing field. What I especially appreciate here is your reframing the question (rather: the answer!) as a kind of team-work. What I'm imagining now is something a little less structured than a soccer game: more of a collective wandering, in which we help one another along, calling one another's attention to things we otherwise may not notice. I'm also put in mind of the work of Lewis Hyde, who speaks so profoundly of how we might "prepare our students for the unintended and unexpected," and so "awaken the mind into right relationship with a happening world."