On the Friday before fall classes start at Foothill College faculty and staff come together for “Opening Day” to prepare for the new academic year. This year a panel of student leaders became our teachers and offered us a two-hour training on equity, focusing on implicit bias, privilege, and racism in higher education, including at Foothill. For our last activity at the end of the session we were invited to write a poem in which each line begins with the words “I am” to help us see our diversity and our unity.
I was almost too heartbroken by the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg to share this poem, but the students who asked us to “Listen, Learn, and Level Up” inspire me to live up to RBG’s legacy and work for a just and democratic society. Please take ten minutes to write your own I Am poem and share it in the comments.
I Am
I am a woman with no children
learning to mother others.
I am a librarian
learning to read
myself and the world
in a new way.
I am a seeker
learning how to listen.
I am a human
learning how to be a better creature
on this planet.
I am grateful to be
on this clear and sunny morning
part of the Foothill family.
The Kingdom of Enough 
dear Mary…loved what you wrote …here is my ‘i am’…it kind of skipped out this morning exactly as is…love ,
i am a woman of this world who is aging
i am a wild child still simmering inside, traveled from external adventures to internal celebrations
i am witness, sometimes vigilante, to the beauty, pain and suffering of this world every single day
i am a privileged mother of my child, my adopted loves, and the earth that feeds me
i am always in process…..barbara weigel
LikeLike
Thank you for sharing this! I love getting to see the wild child shimmering inside.
LikeLike
Beautiful Mary, thank you. I love all the learning you (and so many of us) are in just now.
And I love that you are at a proactive institution. They are lucky to have you with them.
Such grief about Ruth Bader Ginsberg. It’s huge.
It will be so good to see you soon.
Carolyn
LikeLike
I’m looking forward to seeing you too. In the meantime, I started Corona Pandemic – what a terrific book!
LikeLike
I am an elder
I am tender of a few acres of Awaswas land in the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains
I am a thinker and a tinkerer
I am an accomplice of change
My identity is like the diverse crops of the orchard. It depends on so much outside of my identity.
LikeLike
Thank you, Kat, for being an accomplice of change and tending your acres.
LikeLike