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Introduction
Quote of the Week
I am a High School Teacher, Minister, Writer, Photographer and Mead Maker
I am very proud to announce that I have been chosen to be the Teacher of the Year at my high school. There are many excellent teachers here and I am honored to have been chosen.
Along with this honor, I have to fill out an application for the county TotY. Faced with generic questions that can be answered many different ways and still sound the same, inspiration hit during class one day and here is my response to the first question. I could not quite make it the 200 words they preferred.
1. Describe your personal feelings and beliefs about teaching. Include your own ideas of what makes you an outstanding teacher.
We were studying plant anatomy and I thought the kids in the back were goofing off instead of paying attention, as they were talking and moving around restlessly. When I went back to straighten them out with a Big Scary Teacher Frown And Hiss, I noticed one student was standing straight and rigid. “Look, Ms. Thurston, I’m a twig.” His friend then proceeded to point out the node, internode, lenticels, lateral and terminal buds and leaf (including petiole and blade, as the first student held out his hand).
If I may misquote from a famous and highly honored philosopher of our time:
And the Teacher,
With her Teacher-fingers wrapped around a chalk,
Stood puzzling and puzzling, how could it be so?
Learning came without textbooks.
It came without grades.
It came without bubble tests, homework or notes.
And she puzzled and puzzled ‘till her puzzler was sore.
Then the Teacher thought of something she hadn’t before.
What if Learning, she thought, doesn’t come from curriculum guides.
What if Learning, perhaps, is done a little bit differently?
I search and work hard to find different ways of teaching what needs to be taught. Get students out of the text, out of the class, out of their own boxes, and encourage them to fly while still providing a firm foundation for them to depend on. Still idealistic after fourteen years of teaching? You bet!
Hi, there! Glad you found me. I'm a National Board Certified Agriculture Teacher in the mountains of West Virginia. These pages reflect my Personal growth and Professional life. Don't know where it will end yet, but the journey so far has been filled with blessings and wonders. Not that I haven't had my ups and downs, as is evidenced by some of these writings. But all in all, I'm happy with myself and my life and, above all else, I revel in the freedom to believe and practice as I wish. We live in a great country!
“It took me a long time to know my elbow from a hot rock…”
“Nobody throws me my own guns and tells me to leave. Nobody.”
~Steve McQueen and James Coburn, The Magnificent Seven
This is the only western ever made worth watching. Yes, yes, I have seen the movie it was based on, The Seven Samurai, all 12 hours of it (well, it seemed that long!), way back in college. But this movie is far superior. How can it not be with the likes of Yul Bryner, Robert Vaughn and one of my all time most favorite actors, Charles Bronson? But of course, if one is going to follow the trail that Samuri started, it has to end with the incredible Sci Fi movie, Battle Beyond the Stars, staring Richard Thomas. This movie was connected nicely with Magnificent in that it also has Robert Vaughn playing basically the very same character. Check it out!
It has become much more than a job for me, it is how I define a big part of who I am. It can make my heart sing one day and the next day it can break it in two. Sometimes at the end of an exhausting day I know that I have accomplished something good. I have made a positive difference in the life of a student—they might have developed more self confidence or a sense of self worth they did not have before or maybe just started to look at their world a different way. On these rare occasions I do not need to drive my car home—I can fly and my kids are the wind beneath my wings.
Other days I find myself frustrated, disappointed and wondering what in the heck I was thinking of when I decided to do this to myself. Did I decide just after falling down some stairs and getting a serious concussion? It would be so much easier to have a job where I go in at 8, leave at 5 and actually LEAVE. Instead, I find myself staying late for meetings and Fun Nights with my FFA students, working late to catch up on work I could not find time for during the day, spending weekends at the school or on field trips, laying awake at night worrying about a student, lesson plan or project.
But then a student tells me she is going to go to college so she can be an Agriculture Teacher, another student receives a community award and I get to go to the banquet, others are called up on stage to receive Federation and Region certificates and others draw a picture of me on the board and write “we love U, Ms. Thurston.”
Then I realize that I am the luckiest woman in existence to be privileged to be with these incredible young people. Here's a bit more about teaching.... What is it about horses?
In 2006 I became a legally ordained minister in an all-faiths church which is nondenominational. I believe we all have our own Path to follow. Many faces and names, one God. Being ordained allows me to legally carry out functions such as wedding and handfastings as well as memorial services and other transitional events. If you are wondering what the difference is between weddings and handfastings, check out Wedding or Handfasting.
Since moving to WV, I have been pretty much retired. There are only three Universal Unitarian Fellowships in WV, and the closest is hours away.
Most of my success, however, has been non-fiction, which actually accounts for the tiniest part of what I’ve produced. My columns have been published in a few widely scattered periodicals, so I’m a syndicated columnist.
At the back of my mind I’m always thinking of being a writer full time. I have a few novels I'm working on and I'm activly seeking an agent. I’ve been organizing all my personal stuff recently and am amazed at the sheer volume of things I’ve written. I’m very good at outlining a story or a novel and beginning it. I’m even fair at getting to the middle of it. It’s the ending that’s difficult. Maybe I just don’t want to place that last bookend and call it done… then again maybe I’m just lazy…
Maybe not a good one, and I certainly do not make any money from it, but it has fascinated me from my early teen years. My work has hung in galleries in Georgia and West Virginia, but only small time shows; nothing professional.
When I lived in Creedmoor, I went to many gatherings and get togethers and always brought a bottle or two of my mead as my contribution to the pot luck. Folks started to actually look for my tall green bottle. Since I’ve moved, I’ve been much less social and so have bottles of mead stacked up. I always have a recipe or a slight variation to try, so when I do (even if I just make a gallon), it just sits there looking at me. I don’t drink very much, hardly at all when I’m by myself, so there’s no ready source to drink and appreciate it. Right now I have a 3 gallon carboy waiting for its final racking, but what to do with it after it’s bottled? My mead making has slowed a lot.
What is it about horses that attract women? Almost any young girl you talk to wants a pony or a horse. Then we grow up, get jobs, homes, families, responsibilities and most of us no longer have the time, energy or money to think about sharing our lives with an equine companion.
But the desire is still there, maybe hidden deeply. I believe that for me horses represent freedom. Think about a horse, or a herd of them, running through a meadow, heads high, manes and tails whipped back by the wind… Is there a stronger image of freedom?
I started my relationship with horses very young, but it was only infrequent. My family and I went to riding stables a few times. It was only much later that I truly bonded with my first horse. And that relationship was short lived.
The one below right is the one that gave me the black eye. You never know what a horse will spook at. It can be the same stretch of woods you’ve ridden in for years and they might see a leaf falling, a shaft of sunlight or goodness knows what and they suddenly rear, buck or take off running. I never knew what it was that set her off this time, but before I knew what was happening, she reared up and I leaned forward to stay on. Luckily I was not wearing glasses yet, because, believe me, there is nothing harder than the skull of a horse! Had that shiner for a week, but I didn’t fall off and I got her under control again.
I am fortunate to call Sheryl one of my dearest friends. She is living the dream, owning, working with and loving two horses. She has always had horses, ever since I met her long ago and far away in Georgia. Because of her, I was able to experience the wonders and thrills and closeness of horse riding.
We both moved away from Georgia, but amazingly both ended up in the same city in North Carolina! We renewed our friendship and she began encouraging me to come with her to ride on Saturdays. So I started. She had a friend who had a horse named Reba that needed some exercise. And she was friendly, too.
She had such a great heart! Sheryl rode her horse, Shadow, who at 23 refused to be anything but first on the trails, no matter how fast were were going.
And fast we would go! There were jumps carefully set up through the wooded trails and we would FLY! The trees were blurs on either side of me and the wind loud in my ears as Reba grabbed the ground in front of her and threw it behind her. We would sail over the logs, splash through clear streams throwing rainbow crystals high into the air, and soar over the pastures. Nothing had ever sent my heart pounding like that before; nothing has since. She moved smoothly under me, never stumbling, never hesitating at any of the jumps.
She was such a good mount that I did not have to be a good rider. Which was good, because I am not a horsewoman. Never will be. But still, on some sunny afternoons when I feel the wind pick up and whistle past my ears, I feel her moving with me, see the blur, smell her sweat and mine…
In the early 2000's I spent one fantastic year living in a barn on a horse farm. The barn was an old dairy barn that had gone out of business when I-85 had cut through the pasture. No way to get the cows across the road to the milking barn. So the barn was renovated (barely—don’t even get me started talking about the winter in this place!) and rented. Soon after I rented it, the pasture surrounding it was rented by a fellow who raised horses. He had over 100 of them, not all of whom stayed in the pasture around the barn.
So I was privileged to share my space with many horses. Some times they would just herd up for no reason I could understand and run from the very top of the pasture far away down around the barn and into the lower pasture. Their hooves would pound faintly at first, and I would run outside. Then the first ones would appear over the brow of the hill and the sound would get louder. As they passed by and the wind from their passing hit me, the ground itself would be rumbling under my feet. Then they would get to the bottom pasture, trot, walk, then flick their tails, shake their heads and graze…
At night I would sleep with the door open from my bedroom onto the balcony that looked over the pasture. Often when it was warm enough I would just sleep outside in my sleeping bag. In the early hours they would call to each other and I might wake up and listen to them for a while before falling back into sleep under the caress of the moon.
In the spring there were babies with their mothers. Fragile tiny things, walking around shakily, then soon running and kicking up their hooves, laying down and rolling on the grass…
The past is with me. But so is the present.
The FFA has seen to that. My first year at Watauga HS (2003) the FFA really wanted to have a Horse Evaluation Team. Knowing VERY little about it, I said, “Sure. Horses have four legs—let’s go!!” and go we did. The State Level competition was held on the same weekend as a yearly Pagan gathering I had gone to for many years, Carolina Spirit Quest. I was scheduled to do two Workshops and be involved with the Rituals. I had to cancel my participation so I could go with the kids to the competition. We earned second in the Region and had the highest scoring individual in the State, so I guess it was worth it…
I no longer ride horses regularly; haven’t in years. In fact, it had been more than 8 years since I had been on a horse when the FFA members decided they wanted to do a trail ride in the fall of 2004. Looking forward to it and not looking forward to the days after, I was just as excited as they were.
The horses were not like Reba. This was a commercial stable that rented their horses out for trail rides. The horses walked under different people several times a day and were not spirited. Who could blame them? I wanted to buy the horse I rode, just to see her run with head held high and mane flying behind her.
But as soon as I got there and smelled the stable, I could feel the goose bumps on my arms rise. We did not fly through the woods like I had done with Reba. We walked, trotted a little, galloped once maybe. By the time we got back it was just after dusk. The trail leaders let us run in the pastures.
Now before I describe this, let me say that no horses were injured (or kids) and we ran on a flat level pasture. So; picture this. Dark pasture (this is a photo of the pasture before it got dark), so you could see very little. Then add high school students and an advisor running through the pasture from one end to the other and back. All of us felt the freedom and excitement and I heard them yelling, hooting, hollering and realized that one of the voice raised to the sky above the sound of the pounding hooves was my own!
For just a moment, I was flying with Reba, following Sheryl and Shadow through the blurred woods on a sunny Saturday. Then I was back in the dark, my students galloping around me as we pounded down the pasture just one more time.
We unsaddled and walked our horses, they were brushed and I had to say goodbye to Sierra. Before I left, I stroked her soft nose, scratched under her chin and pictured again her running through a meadow with others, head high and mane flowing…
I could not walk properly for the next three days and the kids laughed at me…
The way I and many others use the terms “wedding “and “handfasting” distinguishes commitment ceremonies that have a legal aspect (weddings) with those that do not (handfastings). Both celebrate two people who choose to join paths with the knowledge and support of their community. The best example of the need for handfastings is made beautifully clear in the case of Joan and Paul.
Well into their 60’s, they and their spouses had been fast friends for many years, their kids, then their grandkids, growing up together. When their partners died, they moved in together to share expenses and a deep romance based on a long friendship developed. Yet, they could not marry. Legally, she would lose medical benefits as well as other forms of financial income.
They contacted me and I was honored to perform their handfasting. Surrounded by family and friends, she wearing a white lace dress and he in a tux, they said vows they and written for each other and exchanged rings. Their vows were so different than the young and middle aged couples I have officiated for. When they looked back on their lives and then to the future together, their feelings and thoughts were so very wise and honest…
She took his hand and talked about a long life full of love and happiness, kids and family, then she looked at him and said, “But I choose to watch the sunset with you.” He took her other hand and spoke about his career and watching his kids grow and have families of their own, caring for his wife in the last years, then looked at her and said, “But I will enjoy the beauty of our sunset with you.”
Yeah… Try not crying in the middle of that ceremony. Was hard, but the minister is always supposed to be in control of herself. I cried later… a lot.
There are many reasons why a couple, who have a choice at all, may choose to be handfasted instead of legally married, this is only one.