“People learn to write in discipline-specific ways through a “dimly felt sense,” a complicated, lived, sensory, largely un-verbal and un-rational awareness of how things like this are supposed to sound and be presented and be shaped. This dimly felt sense helps generate the text, but it also generated by their ongoing attempt to create the text: it pushes their writing and is pushed by their experience of reading, talking, writing (and having feedback on their writing).”
                -Aviva Freedman, “Learning to Write Again: Discipline-Specific Writing at University” (p. 96)

                I find something soothing—and powerful—in Aviva Freedman’s language of learning through a dimly felt sense. Maybe that’s because I’m trying to learn a lot every day. Trying, in these last six months, to learn to be married—a wonderful, delightful learning, and something I’ve never done before. Trying to learn to work inside (or to resist, reimagine, remake) all of the flawed and broken systems through which my society organizes everything from education to healthcare to road maintenance. Trying to learn the dances of hope and horror.
                So many of the models I’ve been taught for learning are rational, verbal, directional, disembodied, abstract, simplified. In the face of all that Aviva Freedman goes back to the complicated, lived, sensory, un-verbal, un-rational, aware, and I would add, relational. We walk and rest in the ways we are learning, dimly, to walk and rest. In the ways we see and feel something like this done. Which leaves space for not knowing. For fumbling with it. Maybe more like this. Maybe less like this. Maybe here. Maybe not. And in the attempt we’re learning.