The Curriculum of Remembering: I Thought I Knew Why I Was Here

There was a time—not long ago—when I believed I knew why I was here.

I could feel it in my bones, in the way my heart lit up when I spoke about education, about possibility. I believed I was meant to help build something new—a system of learning that honored the soul of a child. That made space for joy, for grief, for sacred curiosity. I saw myself as one of many midwives to a more beautiful world for our children.

And it made sense. It gave shape to my gifts, to my longing, to my own experience of feeling unseen in classrooms that measured intelligence but not wisdom, performance but not presence.

But now…

Now I find myself sitting in the ruins of that clarity.

Not with despair, but with a quiet reverence.

Because I no longer know if my purpose is to build a new system.

And if I’m honest—I’m not sure I ever did.

What I do know is this:

The world our children are inheriting is not one that can be fixed with a better curriculum.

Not when the very soil beneath that curriculum is contaminated by centuries of forgetting.

I look at the institutions we were told would guide us—education, government, healthcare, business—and I feel the ache of something ancient cracking through. These systems were never made for all of us. They were made to manage us, to extract from us, to quiet the voices that remembered a different way.

And I see now that the map we were given doesn’t lead home.

It never did.

It leads to burnout, disconnection, performance, and pain. It teaches our children to survive in a world that is already collapsing—quietly, subtly, and sometimes violently.

And I can’t—won’t—keep preparing them for that.

So I’m laying the map down.

Not because I’ve given up. But because something in me is finally willing to listen.

To the territory itself.

To the whisper of the land.

To the dreams of the children.

To the memory in my blood and bones.

To the questions that have no standardized answers.

What Are We Really Teaching Our Children?

We teach them to obey, to sit still, to seek approval.

To be good at the game, even when the game is rigged.

We reward them for compliance and call it maturity.

We celebrate their performance and call it growth.

But we do not teach them to listen to their own knowing.

To grieve.

To question.

To say no.

To say yes to the parts of themselves that refuse to be tamed.

And so, what I once imagined as a new education system now feels like an echo of a deeper calling.

Not to create something new.

But to remember something true.

Not to reform the system.

But to reclaim the wisdom that existed long before it.

The Real Curriculum

What if the real curriculum lives in the rhythm of the drum, in the tending of the garden, in the stories that our great-grandmothers once told under starlit skies?

What if education is not a place, but a practice of presence?

What if we started each day not with roll call, but with ritual?

Not with the pledge of allegiance, but with the question: What does your spirit need to feel alive today?

What if our children learned math alongside the laws of reciprocity?

Science alongside reverence?

Literacy alongside the sacredness of their own voice?

What if we raised them not to inherit our systems—but to remember our songs?

I no longer feel the same fire to build a new institution.

I feel a deeper pull to the fire that burns in circle.

The one we sit around when the lights go out and all that’s left is truth and tenderness.

So here I am, palms open.

Not certain.

Not resigned.

But listening.

Listening to the Earth.

To the children.

To the parts of myself that no longer need to know to be at peace.

I don’t have a blueprint.

But I have the breath.

I have the questions.

I have the territory.

And maybe, just maybe, that’s where the real curriculum begins.