‘Sometimes,’ I shared recently with followers on Twitter and Facebook, ‘the answers are in a book about lichens.’

Deep among the vivid pages of Lichens of North America, someplace between the descriptions of Cladina sterllaris and Cladonia cervicornis verticillata, I may have found the inspiration that I’d been seeking.  The glory of lichenate minutiae, the intricate interstices and curls of lace disappearing into fractal edges–It just isn’t possible to get close enough.

Somewhere among these images is what I am looking for.

To liberally paraphrase Karen Barad from her recent book, Meeting the Universe Halfway, the material conditions of much of our current postsecondary landscape “performatively produces” and reinscribes pedagogies and curricula that persist in sketching boundaries between learning and the world beyond the academy. Reminiscent of Tim Cresswell’s notion that we continually practice and re-inscribe ideologies through our daily practice (how do we know how to act in public spaces–how do we conversely recreate those places through our actions?), such reasoning etches parallel furrows in a granite landscape resolutely lichenate.

As educators, we follow, as a matter of course, such glacial scarring on a panoply of metaphoric stones, through or past, but rarely insinuated with the organic systems that surround us.

What would it be like, I asked students in my first-year Writing and Speaking to the Issues class recently, to jump these lines and devote all one’s life to a single passion and a single aim — and one that steps beyond the mere self-serving to change the ways that others think about the world.

If we choose, as I enjoined my students, to engage in dialogue with moments of the performative everyday, what I hope that may well emerge from the complexity of countless nodes and intersections–imbricated and involuted all–is a dynamic system that yields and demonstrates resilience.

So…how to begin?

I’ll see how the students answer that…tomorrow.