• The Arete West Story
  • Introduction
  • Curriculum
    • Prague
    • Switzerland
    • Florence
    • Greece
    • Turkey
  • Trips
    • 2017
    • 2015
    • 2013
    • 2011
    • 2009
    • 2007
    • 2005
    • 2003
    • 2001
    • 1999
    • 1997
    • 1995
    • 1993
    • 1991
    • 1989
    • 1987
    • 1985
    • 1983
    • 1981
    • 1979
  • Essays
    • Jane Elliot
    • Maya Normandie
    • Tracy Durnell
    • Callie Anderson
    • Jenny Marshall
    • Emma Fazio
    • Jason Kintzel
    • Christina Teply
    • Tim Adams
    • Ingrid Johnson
    • Rich Murphy
    • Ann Glenn
    • Andrew Hagen
    • Becca Novak
    • Kirsten Richardson
    • Denise Belanger
    • Dory Weston
    • Robin Pendoley
    • Parker Sims
    • Amy Glenn
    • Jen Ponig
    • Jenny LaPlante
  • Facebook
  • Books
    • Arete West Story
    • Igniting The Flame
    • Athenian Odyssey
  • Drake Track
AreteWest

Amy Glenn is a dynamic veteran of three Arete adventures (1993, 1995, 1997). She lives in Los Angeles today and says that she is "inspired by the classroom of city existence." Amy has earned an MBA in strategic leadership and a BA in marketing and mangement from Dominican College. Her career today falls under Stylist Costumer, Designer for Film, TV, Commercials, and Print. This photograph was taken in '93 when she read a Nietzsche quote that is included within her essay.

The classroom, 

An essay to be written of the lessons taught by the draught of imagination.

Where do we call home?

History can hydrate. Not for the pulpit, a constant sales pitch; the rear window opportunity.

Done, been, gone, and I smell the flavor
The after taste devoured by my senses.

I have felt like Telemachos in search of “father”, Or Penelope devoted to her heart of intuitive dire commitment, the blood pump fight of Odysseus’s journey in my journey of life.
Branded to the constancy of life’s questions.
Many years of war, decisions made not of material bulk, but for the quest.
The motivators may be unrecognizable until retrospect.

Where do we call home? “God,” the path, the visionary come to my rescue?

Gangs, I understand; a passage, a people that go together,
The initiation,
The slaughter.
The sacrificing, the herd.
Symbols, let them use you.

The beginning, a seed, incubation, family, the unit, parents, cubs,
Animal,
Immaculate conception, offence, defense.
How not to be the first to speak.
Listen to yourself from your mirror mirror on the wall.

Where do we call home?

The classroom inside ourselves, sit in the chair and watch the lessons be written,
Participate like the sirens calling.

The basics,
As a veteran, trinity, seasoned by this meal of travel and adventure
I hold the torch to my table daily;
Arête keeps the question of “life” warm.
Irrelevant of form alive in daily function, feeling the fullness I know the potency.
The lessons learned puncture moments unexpected. Lighting the question “life,”

Solace in solitary.

Arête acts as an unspoken visionary, another layer of skin. Inevitably we are alone.
In the shadows of illusion the darkness may be but a blinder to no other than ourselves.

Hearing the music, we are alone.

The clan, the team, the classroom we do need one another. As there are railroad tracks to transport Hitler’s bodies from one place to the next, adders to heaven above us in the Sistine chapel, embers to hell like the glow of the dome of the Rock, and the feathers we may find on the ground from our wings; we too are Jesus’ hands nailed to this cross of life. Stories, myths, and melodies it is this classroom that brings life to how we are connected to all.

Praise is she who investigates, whom reflects who listens with their eyes closed and mouth wide open.

I ask were you dead before you were born?

How thirsty are you?

When you get to the edge do you feel fear or excitement?

We walk the paths of killers and great saints, historical ground to be eaten alive as the simplicity of knowing their love of music and passion for painting is morphed into the mind.
An animal.

We are all animals.

The sandy trails instructed to be walked alone, to write alone.
The visceral legacy of this holy site within me,

Arête is a respectable conqueror.

  Where do we call home?

Arete,
Excellence.

“ Now I go alone, my disciples. You, too, go now, alone.
Thus I want it.
Go away from me and resist Zarathustra! Even better: be ashamed of him!
Perhaps he deceived you.
        The man of knowledge must not only love his enemies, he must
also
be able to hate his friends.
        One repays a teacher badly if one always remains nothing but a pupil. And why do you want to pluck at my wreath?
        You revere me; but what if your reverence tumbles one day?
Beware
lest a statue slay you.
        You say that you believe in Zarathustra? But what matters Zarathustra? You are my believers-but what matter all believers?
        You had not yet sought yourselves; and you found me. Thus do
all
believers: therefore all faith amounts to so little.
        Now I bid you lose me and find yourselves; and only when you
have
denied me will I return to you.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

Amy Glenn
May 2006
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