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I've brought my tools home from ESSA and I will spend the coming week catching up on things, cleaning the shop and getting ready for my next class which will be in Connecticut beginning August 7. My students from the last week have gone home with a collection of small boxes they've made, and will share them along with stories from the week with family and friends.

The small boxes serve as evidence of learning, and evidence of relationship. The things we have made have a special quality and take a special place in our lives.

I have my own lovely boxes made during the week. My favorites are these tiny shaker boxes. It would be easy to make and finish more of them and perhaps to sell a few. On the other hand, the important thing is not to have stuff, or make stuff, but to exist in relationship with important concerns.

A useful term is symbiosis, meaning to live in direct mutually beneficial relationship with one's social, biological and economic milieu. How can one have meaning in one's own life without offering meaning to others? It is all a matter of identifying positive and negative space, and erasing boundaries that isolate us, and hold others in isolation.

Make, fix, create, and use the process to assist others in learning likewise.