In The Middle of Precious: A Reflection of The MACS Program at Goucher College

In The Middle of Precious:  Part I

As I am writing this reflection of my first 10-day Residency in the Masters in Cultural Sustainability Program (MACS) at Goucher College, I am rooted like an ancestral tree. Sitting in a villa, my eyes behold the Caribbean Ocean between the Gros and Petit Piton volcanic mountains in St. Lucia. I languish on a simple expression, “I am in the middle of precious.”


I can feel no different about the aspect of my life that began at Goucher College. The first reading of The Gift energized my being, as I shared part of Hyde’s message immediately. Our storytelling organization, Keepers of The Culture: Philadelphia’s Afrocentric Storytelling Group was preparing for GriotWorks: Stories in Service Day. Storytellers offered their talents free to the community in the form of workshops and performances. In my e-mail of preparation and gratitude to the tellers I was able to render this message derived from my course readings.

In many ethnic cultures and folktales 'to eat' is interpreted as consuming the gift.  Lewis Hyde writes, ''A gift is consumed when it moves from one hand to another with no assurance of anything in return. There is little difference, therefore between its consumption and its movement."

Your bounty of creative spirit, your labor, keeps the gift moving, as we pass on the African Oral Tradition in servitude. And, assuredly, the inner gift that is the product of your labor becomes the outer gift that becomes a vehicle for culture.

And indeed, we fed our community well on that day of service, as we addressed community issues through the stories, and called out the neighborhood names…the Bottom, Strawberry Mansion, Germantown, South, West and North Philly, and more.

The MACS experience had intensely touched my life even before the initial 10-day residency began. The fly-wheel had commenced and the rolling action picked up greater speed in our Cultural Sustainability Class with Professor Rory Turner.

In this new classroom community, there was more in depth and applicable discovery. I experienced the diversity of the gift, and the deep desire of others to labor in its manifestation. I found that I wanted to learn more about the Appalachian culture, witnessed the passion of a Wampanoag to sustain her heritage, embraced the joy of humanity in the smiles of the children of Guatemala and their teacher, beheld a manifest dream in restoring a historical home, shared the love of story with a keeper of ranch traditions, and asked myself how does food tell stories of modern day communities?

Although the magnitude of the readings was overwhelming, I found there was no platitude in their context. As we shared our passions, and groundwork project ideas in the Cultural Sustainability class, it was exhilarating to read text that related to different classmates’ initiatives. My highlighter began marking excerpts and beside them, I penned the names of my collegues.

The value of matriculating a distant learning master’s degree is inevitably beneficial in time management. The distinctiveness of the residency program at Goucher procures a deeper method of learning from others with the same intent of sustaining culture. I came to embrace the value of knowing from the unexpected.