2020 was a rough year that seemed to only get more challenging after trees lost their leaves, sunlight faded, and the cold seeped in deep. 

As we begin 2021, even though the hours of sunlight are finally lengthening, winter is just starting in earnest and nothing less than a global pandemic still has us firmly in its grip. 

We don’t just talk about resilience, we are surrounded by it. Just walk around our campus and you’ll see the ever-greens of hemlocks, pines, and firs. Tracks in the snow give away secrets of wildlife adapting and persevering. 

Bright red berries, conspicuously uneaten, might also catch your eye. The berries of the local viburnums (otherwise known as American Highbush-Cranberry) taste and smell so bad that even the hungriest creatures this time of year say “no thank you.” 

If you were to smush one between your fingertips and smell it you might say it smells acidic, sour, or musty. You might say it smells like a body part with a name similar to a distant neighboring planet. If you were a first grader you might say it smells like the seats on the bus. Lets just say it smells very unappetizing.  

However, after every freeze and thaw cycle this winter, its cell walls will break down along with its pungent mustiness, and its starches and sweetness will start to come out of hiding – refined and strengthened with every contracting and expanding state change. So that by late winter, when all the other food stores are depleted and before the new food stores of spring have arrived- these red berries will finally find themselves worked into something not only needed, but desired.  

Just as all students might struggle with the constrictions of the pandemic or the stretching of their intellectual and social comfort zones, at The Leelanau School, overcoming each obstacle is seen as a way to sweeten their confidence and abilities. Each state change from frustration to victory, from fear of failure to completed assignment will evaporate some of that stinky self-doubt. 

That’s why for this and so many other reasons, teaching here in the woods of Leelanau isn’t about rote lessons. It’s about discovering capacity and sparking a life-long hunger for wonder.