Dear Cobscook Community, 

I write to you today as a Cobscook Institute Board Member of 7 years, a Washington County community resident living in Pembroke, a citizen of the Passamaquoddy tribe and a professor of linguistics. 

Our roles in life should not be viewed as separate from each other. Everything we do in our lives can be understood in a sense of relationship where each part makes up the whole. If you’ve ever been in a canoe on a river in the forest you understand; at a certain point your body and the canoe become one with the river and the forest is also part of you, cradling and even guiding you. 

This sense of relationship is mirrored in the seasons and cycles of life in Native American tradition. We all begin life as babies, needing care. We become caregivers before making the trip back to once again needing care ourselves. The beginning and end of each cycle is a ceremony. I know this from the traditional stories that were told and passed down through generations. Stories play a critical role in orienting us and guiding our actions forward. Stories and dreams of the inner world are essential to the organization of the outer world. Our actions in the outer world may at times seem insignificant – but they are not, they make meaning in the stories told for generations to come. 

The stories we make as we travel through life give sense to the world around us. I like to tell my students, “I don’t want you to believe anything I tell you in this class, I just want you to think about it and come to your own conclusions.” The more they can differentiate what is being told from what is to be known, from their own ways of seeing and knowing, the more their minds can be formed and go to work for all of us. 

Just like this, our vision for the future, for the possibility of Cobscook Institute, is only as strong as the relationships, dreams, visions and perspectives that we arrive at, and make possible. 

I am honored to welcome our visionary community members found here and other points global to weave a new dream with us now.  We find ourselves emerging from a summer that glorified everything the pandemic had kept hidden and we emerge changed, with the understanding that the lack of change would indicate death! So, we embrace the change with enthusiastic vigor! New forms of life and new arteries have grown this summer and we head into fall and like the natural world, we are inseparable from this process of life. We are fortified and ready to drop our leaves.

As the earth hardens and starts to freeze it tanks the energy for a great Spring. The dreams and stories we whisper and share now will be woven into that next emerging cycle. Though nature may drop its buds, it is far from dead. There are dreams that come as we rest, in the winter. You may not even remember these dreams but they allow you to get fully rested. 

I hope you will join us during this important moment at Cobscook Institute, to share the dreams we have for “Someday at Cobscook” to plant the seeds that will germinate in the Spring.