By Diana d’Arc
Evergreen is a place that challenges us to think in ways that defy convention. We break down social constructions to better teach each other the unconventional wisdoms and truths that we have learned through our lived experiences. That could almost be cast as an insult. “Here are those Greeners with more of their unconventional wisdom.”
But conventional wisdoms often are those social constructions that further an unchanging Alexandrian milieu, this painful zeitgeist of potential energy in the face of global obstacles of climate change, wealth stratification, and identity-based social hierarchies.
Change has been and is created by those who exercise unconventional wisdom. Evergreen teaches us how to turn that potential energy into praxis. How to move against the seemingly immovable. How to contribute to our communities in ways that help us all push away the jackboots of tyranny that threaten to quash us under their norm after fascist norm. How to facilitate generative learning that values the voices of all members because we all have something to offer.
I think the world is lucky that I didn’t find this place when I was 18. Because I don’t know what I would have done with all the power this place would have gifted me with.
Because that is what Evergreen allows us to do: to stand in our power. Our power to create the world we want to see around us. Our power to understand the obstacles. Our power of self-affirmation and self-awareness mixed with discourse and community. Our power to articulate ourselves to a wider audience.
And after years of pushing and pushing to be better and better, Evergreen was the place that finally helped me feel like enough. And in that feeling of enough, I can finally see how that backbreaking pace to feel like I was worth anything of value, had somehow transformed me into something extraordinary.
I am an artist. I am a poet. I am a bard. I am a creator. An educator. I don’t teach normal classroom subjects. I teach life and belonging and self-awareness. I teach people how to communicate better and express boundaries and ask for consent. I teach people how to be more responsible and accountable to each other. I teach love. And this is what Evergreen has given me. Not so much the skills to do those things, which it has in part, but instead that it has allowed me the agency to claim those labels as mine and to recognize those skills, many of which came out of a need for self-preservation, as something I can offer to the world; that through my work, I can build a praxis of redefining the world that comes after me.
Albert Camus once wrote “In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.” And Evergreen has helped me change the seasons of my soul, so that I may enjoy my summer now, no matter which winter rages outside my windows.
Energy doesn’t go away, it is only converted. And so much of my energy has been converted here. It is left behind for you, calming and encompassing. When you need me most, reach into the places that surround you and remember my presence, because I am still there, waiting for you to find me.
I ask you in my absence to continue to remain to be dreamers, schemers, and menaces, to challenge the status quo, to lift up the unconventional wisdoms and truths that have helped you in your lives, to engage each other in community, love, and life, and to find the invincible parts of yourself that you can push back with to create the happiness that we all so heartily deserve and so that we all may grow.
