Featured
From the Musers to You, We Bid Adieu
Chantelle Caissie, Sarah Green, Colin Kutchyera, Alexandra Olsvik, and Nicholas Rickards
Dear Pauline,
You’ve weathered every line, and the prize we sought was won: we learned a lot from you. Though our thoughts extend beyond acknowledgment, words are all we have. Collectively, we’ve pieced our experiences together by drawing structural inspiration from your dissertation, specifically your elemental frameworks: Fire (transcendent awareness/self-dissolving), Water (primal awareness/self-preserving), Earth (passive awareness/self-locating), Wood (active awareness/self-serving), and Metal (subliminal awareness/self-defining). Each element guided us into deeper poetic explorations, allowing us to reflect vulnerably on our journey with you.
Poetry is our heartfelt entry point. With/in poetry, we are invited to experiment vulnerably, by curating a piece that exposes both the beauty and pain of living one’s scholarship. While such exposure may place us on tenuous ground, we have found refuge and resonance in your scholarship, mentorship, and friendship. Your creativity, imagination, and willingness to trouble the lines have allowed us to venture beyond the straight and narrow, towards a more curvaceous path that honours the human being, rather than the human doing. Using the poetic form of centos, we’ve stitched together lines and phrases directly from your publications and repurposed those lines as they appear from your original work.
We hope you find beauty in this small gesture of thanks.
Fire: Burning Season
(transcendent awareness/self-dissolving — stitched from Sameshima (2017b, 2020))
fire sweeps through the dense forest of self,
a burning season of purification and release,
illusions curl into smoke — old lies, old lives
rising as embers toward an endless throng of stars
among char and ash, new vision ignites:
all we know are flickering points of light
lining a vast unknown without beginning or end —
always more to know, always more to be known;
the forest’s chorus is silence and smoke,
yet from blackened soil, blooming identities take root —
green hope rises unbidden after the blaze,
imagination is the self and the world merging and emerging,
by this fire we see clearly, perhaps for the first time —
pain and memory melt into dawn, pale and whole,
boundaries burn away, opening a larger truth,
scars glow gold in the heat of transformation —
all illusions follow this and come to dust —
beginning to believe the impossible,
and the freedom to forget
Earth: White Orchid
(passive awareness/self-locating — stitched from Sameshima (2006a, 2010, 2017a, 2022))
I lean far out
feel the wind whipping
hear retreat calling
and yet here is where my heart
feels the thunder roar and
the downstroke of an insect’s wing
I feel her on our necks, cool jewels, radiance blurring
as natural as the earth, charms of the land
on the bridge between body and head
I hear her in me
tossing on the sound of sea
always moving
I will lie with you on the beach or on the grass or even in a snow cave
or anywhere that no one knows or wants to know what I want
and no one cares about my longing
just so I can peel the memories and the thoughts off your skin
I am a distraction
another piece of rubble
out of place and piling
on the smoothness
of exquisite love
Water: Aquifer
(primal awareness/self-preserving — stitched from Sameshima (2017b, 2020))
The world above cracks with thirst and thunder
but deep beneath, an ancient flow remembers peace —
a hidden wellspring of non-violence in the dark soil,
holding every fallen seed and spilled story safe —
as I press my ear to the dry ground, listening for ancestral reverberations,
somewhere below, water whispers through stone,
and I remain connected to the goodness of an underground aquifer,
pushing up through layers of clay and doubt,
cupping my hands around a trembling moment —
tender rescue in a bruised twilight
as if I’m gently putting a broken bird onto the ground,
preserving the last breath of daylight in quiet pools —
memory flows in this underground hush, self-preserving
against the scorch of a hurtful sun. Even as violence
storms the surface, below echoes a soft rush —
the pulse of earth keeping us alive with gentle insistence,
and when night comes we return, finally,
to shelter in a warm house that smells of vegetable soup and love.
Here, a primordial kindness survives every drought,
each drop of understanding saved beneath our feet.
Metal: What the Blade Remembers
(subliminal awareness/self-defining — stitched from Sameshima (2006b))
I have learned to carry sharpness
with softness.
To cut away the unnecessary
not in bitterness,
but in ceremony.
Metal remembers the forge.
Remembers how heat can clarify
and cold can define.
You once wrote that theories are stories,
and I have carried that knowing
in the small of my back
like a hidden blade,
not to wound,
but to shape.
Sometimes
we are the ones who are carved.
This is not a wound.
It is a wayfinding.
A quiet shimmer
on the edge of becoming.
I am not who I was.
And yet,
I am entirely myself.
Wood: In the Season of Sprouting
(active awareness/self-serving — stitched from Sameshima (2006b))
I have walked with a thousand questions
and still, the buds keep forming.
There is a thrum in the marrow
when the east wind rises.
My body knows before I do
that change is coming.
I remember the first time I reached for the page
not to prove anything,
but to feel everything.
That, too, was growth.
You taught us to curve toward the light,
to unspool from the safe
and let the wildness climb the trellis.
Wood bends
not because it is weak,
but because it remembers
that resilience is sacred.
So I stretch
like the sapling that does not ask permission.
To root deeper,
to take up space,
to grow into herself.
With love, always, and all ways,
Chantelle, Sarah, Colin, Alexandra, & Nicholas.
May 25, 2025
SENT
Pauline Sameshima served as the Editor-in-Chief for the Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies from 2015 to 2025. During her tenure, Pauline bolstered an initiative called JCACS Musings, a group dedicated to cultivating graduate student authorship. The “Musers,” as Pauline referred to them, were student-led and comprised of graduate students from various universities and disciplinary backgrounds who discussed and wrote on topics ranging from education and the academy to social issues and cultural politics. While JCACS Musings has seen dozens of Musers move through the collective, their work endures on the JCACS Musings’ Medium page. Pauline’s works can be found on her official webpage, solspiré.com.
References
Maarhuis, P., & Sameshima, P. (2016). “Materializing the punctum: A poetic study of the Washington State University clothesline project.” In K. Galvin & M. Prendergast (Eds.), Poetic Inquiry II — Seeing, Caring, Understanding (pp. 279–302). Sense.
Sameshima, P. (2006a). Household at the shore: A Marshall McLuhan metaphor. Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum and Studies, 4(1), 51–58. https://doi.org/10.25071/1916-4467.16995
Sameshima, P. (2006b). Seeing red: A pedagogy of parallax [Doctoral dissertation, The University of British Columbia]. UBC Theses and Dissertations.
Sameshima, P., & Leggo, C. (2010). The poet’s corpus in love: Passionate pedagogy. Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 26(1), 65–81.
Sameshima, P. (2017a). Enchanting “love-making”. In P. Sameshima, A. Fidyk, K. James, & C. Leggo (Eds.), Poetic inquiry: Enchantment of place. (pp. 147–150). Vernon Press.
Sameshima, P. (2017b). Foreword: Those blooming identities — who are we waiting for? In E. Lyle (Ed.), At the intersection of selves and subject: Exploring the curricular landscape of identity (pp. viii–xiii). SensePublishers.
Sameshima, P. (2020). Digging wells, divining a curriculum of hope in slipping fidelities. Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies, 17(2), 1–7.
Sameshima, P. (2022). Saving King Tut. [unpublished manuscript].
