This book is a collection of philosophical, poetic and practical essays that question the dominant image of education we have all inherited, and provides encouragement, commiserations and examples of a more ecologically sound understanding of the living disciplines of knowledge entrusted to teachers and students in school.

David Jardine is a Full Professor Emeritus in the Faculty of Education, University of Calgary. His former employ involved supervising student-teachers in school classrooms and teaching graduate and undergraduate courses in pedagogy and curriculum. He is the author of 14 previous books, 130 articles in refereed journals and over 45 chapters in various book collections. He is now receiving a thorough early childhood education from his two grandsons, feeling tired and happy, and can hardly write fast enough to keep up.

Introduction: "Why Study for a Future we Won't Have?" - "Sacrificing Their Futures to Protect Ours" - Meanwhile Saints Graze on the Begonias - A Fragment from 2009, Just Before I'd First Read Fredrick Winslow Taylor - Sometimes It Takes, Sometimes It Doesn't - An Upwell Near Father's Day - To Know the World, We Have to Love It - "High Stakes": On the Trail of a Red Herring - A Pedagogical Journal Entry from 2010 on a Persistent Analogy - "Owning Up to Being an Animal": On the Ecological Virtues of Composure - The More Intense the Practice, the More Intense the Demons - Thoughts on The Return of Yesterday's War - I Hear Tell It's Happening Again, December 2023 and March 2022 - "A Hubris Hiding from its Nemesis": Why Does the Affirmation of Diversity Tend Toward the Proliferation of Multiple Identities, and to What Consequence? - "Please Spare Me" - Really Clear Politics: The Algorithms of Self-Reflection - "Poisoning the Blood of Our Country" - Meeting an Old Acquaintance - Beet Juice - I Am Not a Buddhist - Cautionary yet Hopeful Thoughts on "Mindfulness Practices" in Schools - On Bob Dylan's Murder and How Interpretation Takes Time - "We Arrive, As It Were, Too Late" - How to Love Black Snow - "It Will Startle You": Thoughts on a Pedagogical Conspiracy of Birds - "Come Fluttering off the Spine" - "Engage-Abandon" - What Should I Tell Them? - "The ... Readiness ... To Be 'All Ears' " - It Might Just be Ravens Writing in Mid-Air - I'm Gonna Shine Out in the Wild Kindness - "Asleep in My Sunshine Chair" - Quickening, Patience, Suffering - "Tears Run Down Heaven's Gaunt Face" - Baby's Blue. See Through - An Obituary at the Very Last Minute - Two Arced Fishes and a Raven's Eye: Thoughts on Selfies, Pandemics, and a Door, Ajar - Being at the Trembling - Sunflowers, Coyote, and Five Red Hens - "Things Reveal Themselves Passing Away" - Early Morning Blues - The Unfinished Work of "Getting Back to Normal" - To be Dying under Their Wings Is a Weird Miracle - You are Walking Near Your True Home - "A Dark Saying": On Temporarily Regaining a Measure of Well-Being - An Ode to 215 Babies Tossed Away Unmarked - An Early Childhood Education - How Shall You Be Called? - On Teaching Punctuation - "To Lend Ourselves to Its Life": On Early Childhood Literacy and Other Early Matters - "We Do Know What to Do" - From a Town by the Spring - "Nobody Understood Why I Should be Grieving" - As the Warming Chills - It's February. It Won't Last - Falling Silent -Curls and Tucks - "A Joyous and Frightening Shock" - "Grief is Not a Permanent State": The Last Six Chapters of Speaking with a Boneless Tongue (1992) - References.